A Plan

The Long Way Home, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Poul Anderson keeps pushing against the limits and the ultimate purposes of a technological civilization. Here is the basic question yet again:

"'Do you think [the Commoners]'re fit to share administrative responsibilities? The average IQ of the Commons is about 90, the average for the Ministerial class is about 150... To be sure, by automatizing all operations, it would be possible for every man in the Solar System to quit work: all his needs would be supplied free. But what then is your IQ-90 Commoner going to do with himself? Play chess and write epic poems?'" (p. 152)

Do the Technon and the Ministers maintain a work economy simply because otherwise a large percentage of the population would have nothing to do? Nothing? Those who do not play chess can play popular sports or computer games. Those who do not write epics can read novels. But the Technon plans long term so let us see some of that long term thinking:

do something to counteract that IQ imbalance between social classes (how did it come to exist in the first place?);

involve the population in policy-making to the extent that that is possible;

in particular, by public consultation, ascertain which of the Commoners would prefer to continue working as they do now and which would instead be prepared to engage in a transition process that would involve training for a completely different way of life in which their daily activities would no longer be motivated by economic necessity or coercion;

accept that any social transition, particularly this one, has to involve upheavals, disappointments, changed expectations and new horizons;

understand (the Technon and the high-IQ Ministers must!) that later generations raised and educated in a completed different technological and social environment will have motivations, expectations, assumptions and values differing completely from those of their current low-IQ Commons.

Anderson's characters ask the right questions but do not answer them.