Re: Less is more -- not!
".. you end up with even dumber people in the populace over time."
And the real joke is that each successive generation of 'smart' people is drawn from an increasingly dumb population.
This might explain some of the problem, but as is frequently demonstrated in both physics and biology, everything that persists is ultimately self limiting, and if it's not it doesn't persist, so maybe there's still hope for the future.