It's funny that people cite Idiocracy despite its explicitly eugenicist premise.

We still have another 480 years of this to go.

Our problems are caused by like 5 guys owning everything, not because stupid people have more kids than smart people. So no, Idiocracy did not predict all of this.

It really didn’t, and the entire premise of “Idiocracy as predictor” is a genuinely nasty thing. As it stands birth rate doesn’t seem to primarily correlate with intelligence, but socioeconomic status and education. Painting poor people as stupid breeders who will outcompete the genteel intelligentsia isn’t some new and prophetic idea.

It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.

There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method.

What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.

You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.

If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."

I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.

Idiocracy, just like Seth MacFarlane's American Dad, was about something very, very specific: the political and cultural landscape of post-9/11 America during the George W. Bush administration. Stop trying to retrofit it as a prediction of the present moment. It's not that.

No, "Marching Morons" [0] from 1951 "predicted all of this". The original short story (which, while I have not been able to find any explicit confirmation, I just can't believe was not a direct inspiration for the movie), doesn't get nearly enough credit in my opinion. I originally encountered as part of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. II, which additionally included "Who Goes there" (Inspiration for "The Thing") and "With Folded Hands" (not the inspiration for anything so far as I know, but really good nonetheless)

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).

A lot of what seemed wildly absurdist at the time, seems a lot more realistic these days.

Doesn't even mention crocs

I think if Idiocracy were re-released today about the only thing it would change would be that misinformation would be the major driver at the start. Pretty much everything else holds, including predicting the rise of Crocks.

The source of the problem was misdiagnosed, though. Idiocracy predicted that idiots would eventually outnumber smart people because the latter are supposedly much more ambivalent about having kids. I don’t think that’s actually true—the “smart” aren’t necessarily having fewer kids than the “idiots.” The real problem is idiots have disproportionate political representation simply because of where they live. That’s especially relevant in the United States, where states with tiny populations have the same number of Senators as states with tens of millions of people.

Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].

[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...