How much exactly? Do you have an estimate?
A good rule of thumb for dismissing bad arguments is asking yourself: "would the same have been argued in the opposite circumstance?" Improving conditions for people in need is a moral imperative. If it were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that this won't actually maximize economic growth or pace of progress, would you say "oh well" and abandon them? I'd wager you would not. This is one cause to suspect you are not arguing in good faith when you shoehorn their plight into this discussion.
Based of what we know about conditions in modern advanced economies, intelligence as measured by standardized tests is both a good proxy for scientific achievement potential, without any signs of plateauing in the upper ranges [1] and overwhelmingly genetic in origin, with a large number of specific associated polymorphisms already known [2] and parents and children getting closer in the trait rather than diverging with age due to random effects [3]; crucially, with little to no effect of social stratification on heredity [4]. This all but rules out any significant impact of your laundry list of plausible harms – which are, nevertheless, issues that must be addressed for purely humanitarian reasons. (Purported evidence for significant impact is usually invalidated by genetic confounding). What this means, however, is that there is very little or perhaps no low-hanging fruit left (it having been picked by Flynn effect over the last century), and we are unlikely to directly accelerate progress by any popular progressive policy, as it would not increase our labor pool for cognitively demanding work. And the hardest, highest-impact problems remain dependent on uniquely capable individuals – not lone geniuses but entire teams and organizations of them, sure, and only more scarce for it. People who have wrestled with available evidence seriously tend to arrive at the idea that we need to institute a program of voluntary genetic improvement and ensure its availability to all. The tech is already here; the price can be driven almost arbitrarily low at scale. Whether we become a society of geniuses or one stratified by genetic enhancement [5] is a matter of policy – and willingness to look truth in the eye.
1. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101....
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23919982/
4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1708491114
5. https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/america-in-2072-a-society-s...