Excellent post.

I would offer a thought from my own blog post on this subject.

Education makes the brain larger and more flexible. A larger and more flexible brain can learn faster, learn more varied things and learn for a much greater percentage of the person's life. Therefore education creates a shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and freedom to live the sort of life you want to live with the least possible cost in things you like to have.

But it goes beyond that. Education staves off the mental effects of ageing and gives you the means to stave off the physical effects as well. Just as poor education increases the odds of errors in life choices that could cost you potentially up to 40 years, good education increases the odds of genius in life choices that could give you potentially up to 40 years.

It is never an error to live the way you want, it is an error when you don't. However, genius is to know how to live the way the way you want in a way that works the best.

The issue of employment is, to me, nowhere near as significant as all that. Roughly 360,000 people in the United States have the same intelligence as Ruth Lawrence. Probably about the same number again have the same level of natural born talent as Alma Deutscher. Modern-day talents that would not look out of place on a list of geniuses throughout history - and would deserve very respectable placement on such lists. If America wanted to employ such people, it would be producing vast numbers of them. It isn't and that can only be taken as a conscious choice.

It's also putting the cart before the horse. 360,000 science/engineering/mathematics geniuses would completely re-invent the material side of the fabric of society. Annually. With or without getting "proper jobs". There would be no "proper jobs", there would be no more "average days", everyone would have adventures in the style of their choosing. It would be self-sustaining, because it has utility. It. Not the people, the dynamic.

Those without exceptional abilities become exceptional because they're on the outside. That's the most privileged viewpoint of all and that makes them valuable because they can trade in sanity. When your survival depends on knowing whether the Emperor has clothes or not, your ability to sanity-check and evaluate has greater value than those who can easily get caught up in their own cleverness.

You now have a complete, flourishing ecosystem based on getting not only education right but the purpose right.