ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the socio-economic framework of intelligence and its disabilities. It deals briefly with the modern phenomenon, its premises and its immediate history since the birth of the formal discipline of psychology, as a prelude to examining in detail the complex relationships between intelligence and speed in earlier times. All psychology of intelligence and the emotions is a temporarily formalized manifestation of what the long anthropological and historical view reveals to be just gossip. Galton, like the modern psychology he helped create, did not start from something that was real in any empirical sense. Since the emergence of psychology as a formal discipline, the case for the fast model has seemed to need no justification. It is simply a part of a socio-economic machine that demands maximum yield from commodified ability-time: a machine in which psychology is a cog.
