I think very few people equate intelligence with getting any job or making any money at all. Can you point me to someone who has? (Okay, I guess a more general form of 'intelligence' suggests it would be impossible for a slug to apply for and get any job on the market.) Similarly I don't think people equate intelligence with getting a good, high-paying job, but there is a good correlation showing more intelligence matches with higher income, and if you use that correlation in your predictions they will be more accurate.

I watched "Dirty Jobs", great show. I agree a lot of jobs don't require much in terms of IQ, creativity, or rationality, but as you move up the scale of which jobs pay the most, you'll find they do start to require such things that commonly go into 'intelligence' definitions. You'll find counter-examples (like programmers that shouldn't be let anywhere near a computer, or CEOs who don't know a thing about their own business), but fewer and fewer. Bringing this comment back momentarily to the predictive power of intelligence, I would bet that a high IQ compilers programmer can learn to competently do any construction work job (many of such jobs use tools and methods that required high IQ people to come up with...) while a mid or low IQ construction worker couldn't learn to competently do compilers programming. In other words, having higher intelligence makes it a lot easier to change job fields, not just find and work at any job at all. (If you can find me someone with an IQ less than 110 who can understand this and create their own reference implementation without referencing the existing one http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/labor-of-division-episo... I'd be interested in meeting them! It's possible they could change my view on a lot of things.)

I'd rather less people learn to do trades, because trades are the target of two big factors for job displacement: the first is from humans who will do the same work (maybe less quality, maybe not) for less (immigrants, foreigners, starving students, people who just got fired and were living check-to-check so will do anything...), the second is from automation when even the cheap workers are too expensive. http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a... is a nice comment on the question of whether and how much automation is hurting the jobs market. I would like more companies to get back into the role of educating their workforce and being more willing to accept people with little or no real experience, but I can only see them doing that if either they can get guarantees of working there for X years with the option to fire them at any time, or if the universities are producing so few people capable of working that the companies are forced to educate or otherwise not have anyone to do the (presently expensive to automate) work.

I also don't think we have nearly enough "smart" people already. There are other benefits besides wealth that a more rather than less intelligent average populace receives. So it's worthwhile on those grounds as well to improve a nation's average IQ. Other forms of intelligence enhancement include wiring up computers with internet directly to the brain to allow for even easier access and processing of human knowledge. I'm currently reading What the Dormouse Said, one of the first interesting bits of info was how Doug Engelbart was motivated to augment human intelligence with technology while John McCarthy wanted to retire human intelligence with better AI. I like both approaches but ultimately I'm in the McCarthy camp, though I think a stepping stone may involve R&D of intelligence enhancement through DNA changes. Humans are roughly 4% different genetically from chimps, is there some sort of super-human that could be made that's some small % different to humans yet confers the same breadth of intelligence capabilities over humans that humans have over chimps?

Edit: One other thing I kind of wanted to bring up, is that I do see a lack of empathy among better-off folks for the lesser-off folks. I don't feel much empathy for a lot of lesser-off folks myself, especially ones that consistently make poor decisions in addition to being poor. (There is a question of how much is really "their fault" if you suppose that making good decisions is impossible without a certain level of intelligence...) But I think a lot of it is simply "no one likes a whiner" and a perception that it's the poor people whining when the well-off social justice warriors complain 'on behalf' of the poor. "Dirty Jobs" is a good show if only just to see how those people are just like other people, just like yourself perhaps in some ways, and in fact aren't whining all day about "I have to clean this and I'm being paid this little? How will I feed my family? Gosh life is so hard and privileged people suck."