“Embryo Selection For Intelligence § Societal Effects”, Gwern2016-01-22 (, , ; similar)⁠:

A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art

One category of effects considered by Shulman & Bostrom is the non-financial social & societal effects mentioned in their Table 3, where embryo selection can “perceptibly advantage a minority” or in an extreme case, “Selected dominate ranks of elite scientists, attorneys, physicians, engineers. Intellectual Renaissance?”

This is another point which is worth going into a little more; no specific calculations are mentioned by Shulman & Bostrom, and the thin-tail-effects of normal distributions are notoriously counterintuitive, with surprisingly large effects out on the tails from small-seeming changes in means or standard deviations—for example, the legendary levels of Western Jewish overperformance despite their tiny population sizes.

The effects of selection also compound over generations; for example, in the famous Tryon maze-bright/dull rat selective-breeding experiment, a large gap in mean performance had opened up by the 2nd generation, and by the 7th, the distributions were almost disjoint (see figure 4 in Tryon1940). Or consider the long-term Illinois corn/maize selection experiment (response to selection of the 2 lines, animated), or the Dusseldorf mice lines (Palma-Vera et al 2021).

Considering the order/tail effects for cutoffs/thresholds corresponding to admission to elite universities, for many possible combinations of embryo selection boosts/IVF uptakes/generation accumulations, embryo selection accounts for a majority or almost all of future elites.

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