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I’m concerned that something that gets lost in these discussions is that there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.
Just because you’re intelligent doesn’t mean you’re a high-quality individual. One criticism you can’t make of the people who run the current western political establishment is that they’re not intelligent enough. There are many intelligent people who are actively malicious, or they’re lazy, they leech off society, or what have you; conversely, some of the people I admire the most are not very intelligent at all.
A eugenics program that optimized for intelligence above all else would be short-sighted.
There's also the obvious issue that a generalised program of eugenics might have negative effects on the already poor fertility rate, since if you're using negative eugenics methods you're excluding a large proportion of people of reproductive age from having children.
I'll be controversial and play transhumanist for a second. Maybe all of this is more evidence in favour of research into genetic modification. With genetic modification there is no such issue, and you're given a very fine level of control over the traits you want. You could attempt to optimise for a constellation of pro-social traits, and to the extent that there are tradeoffs a desirable balance between them could be struck (of course there's some risk of catastrophic failure in the near term due to a lack of knowledge of the potential downstream effects of any gene edit, but over the long run it is a net good, and an inevitability).
A common fear I see expressed is that it would lead to a class divide between those who can afford modification and those who can't, thus exacerbating intergenerational poverty, but I see no reason why the cost of such a program wouldn't be subsidised by the state. It's obviously a net benefit to have every member of your society as functional as possible, and due to continuing developments in biotechnology the next generation would be more productive than the last (creating exponential growth and possibly resulting in an intelligence "explosion" of sorts). Arms races between different states might also fuel such an explosion.
There's a question if what would come out of the other end would be particularly human, of course. On one hand, the idea inspires a very instinctual disgust in many people. On the other, I can't imagine an outcome where humans remain the same indefinitely - it's not as if evolution has suddenly stopped applying to humans in the absence of modification. I say shaping ourselves directly is a better outcome than simply being acted upon by the impartial forces of natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow, and using modification just to keep us exactly where we are now is inherently unstable due to the fact that you can't universally enforce a rule that prevents your competition from "elevating" themselves relative to you. Any society that tries to keep themselves baseline would be assimilated into one that embraced transhumanism.
I don't see a net benefit to give your janitors, for example, high-end mental enhancements (other than pruning "boredom" and "ambition" nodes). My worry is that there will be a class divide between those who get the upper-class mods and those who get the service-class ones.
I'd say that retoolability counts as a benefit. Operating off a strict genetic caste system based on assigned social roles is unsustainable since it requires you to somehow be able to reliably forecast your future needs (like what ratio of janitors:scientists you would need in X amount of years). If and when skilled roles unexpectedly open up that need to be filled, it'll be very difficult for anyone else to fill them.
The only way this remotely works is if it's possible for forms of mental enhancement (genetic or mechanical/technological) to be applied to service-class mods later in life so they can operate at the same level as those modified as embryos, allowing a society to react to circumstances as they arise. But even if that can happen, radically changing someone at a later stage of development would likely inherently be more difficult and time-consuming than embryo editing and introduces a huge amount of unnecessary lag and unwieldiness into the system. The simpler and more optimal solution would be to make it so that people can pliably adapt to a range of jobs from the outset.
Also, there's automation (which likely would develop in tandem with other technologies like genetic modification), and that would make a lot of "janitor"-type jobs irrelevant in the first place.
EDIT: added more
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