IQ ("Intelligence Quotient") is a hotly debated topic. Some (usually of left-wing/progressive ideology) maintain it's a chimera, a meaningless assessment. Others (including myself) regard it as a valid predictor of academic capability and likely future prosperity.
I've written about IQ and the developing world (specifically Africa) in years past, including these two articles:
IQ, countries, and coping skills
In the first of those articles, I reproduced this graphic. Click the image for a larger view.
I ended it by saying:
There are many who decry such statistics as meaningless, racist, discriminatory, and all the rest. Trouble is, for those of us who've been "on the ground" all over the world, in many of those countries, the IQ statistics are a very accurate predictor of how much we'll be able to do in a given location, and how well the locals will be able to assimilate what we do with them, and take control of their own destinies once we're no longer there to hold their hands. The correlation, in my experience, is as close to 100% as makes no difference.
Last week we looked at an article from HMS Defiant, in which he posed the question:
What do you do in a modern society with an entire underclass of useless people that can't read, won't work, aren't qualified temperamentally to behave like civilized beings and actively harm/destroy civilization wherever they run into it?
We talked about that in the context of education, and agreed that "public schools are the breeding-ground, and their "graduates" are the cannon fodder, for the "underclass of useless people" identified by HMS Defiant . . . yet we, the taxpayers of America, continue to sit back and accept the situation. That applies to all taxpayers everywhere, by the way; left-wing and right-wing taxpayers are equally deficient in not acting to correct matters. It's not a political thing, it's a complacency thing (particularly because most of us wouldn't even dream of sending our children to such schools - we'd ensure they had better options)."
IQ definitely plays into that conclusion. If one examines the academic record of success of every school in America, and correlates that with the average IQ of the students in each of those schools, the correlation appears to be very high indeed. High average IQ = good record of success. Low average IQ = poor record of success. Of course, it's politically incorrect to conduct such studies these days, more's the pity. Truth appears to be less important than "woke" ideology to the powers that be.
In his most recent article, John Wilder examines "IQ, Lies, and National Wealth". Among other things, he points out:
On a societal level ... we’re busy sending people off to college that have no real business being there. The result is a large number of people in society today who think that they have all the tools necessary to be exceptionally successful at intellectual pursuits and it’s just not so. This creates a society-wide level of bitterness. It’s especially bad when those college kids with no intellectual prospects get worthless degrees (if it ends in “studies” it’s a worthless degree) and are then saddled with huge amounts of student loan debt.
. . .
Society has a very, very particular relationship with the concept of the heritability of intelligence so much so that this is a huge hot button issue. Certain incentives in our current system encourage mothers of lesser intelligence to have even more not-so-bright babies. This is, of course, as featured in the documentary movie Idiocracy. Since this idea has such significant implications, not the least of which is the fate of nations: smart nations do better than, um, less bright ones. Here’s the data:
The data is from the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, so it dates back to before the year 2000, as far as I can tell. That really shouldn’t matter much, since the relationship is so strong. Smarter countries are richer – a lot richer.
We’re entering a period of time where resources will be far more constrained than at any point in my lifetime. We’re entering a time where we will have no choice but to stop lying to ourselves about IQ and its impact.
There's more at the link. It's worth reading his entire article in full. Recommended.
It bears saying again, and repeating, that our typical inner-city society is screwed up to the point of absurdity. As a pastor and chaplain, I soon lost count of the number of kids (both "on the street" and in our prisons) who aspired to be basketball stars or rap "musicians". They didn't have the athletic ability to be the first, and completely lacked the talent to be the second (not that much "talent" is involved in that field), but they didn't stop to consider that at all. If they wanted it, it's what they were going to get - practicality be damned. Any failure to do so wasn't their fault, but because "the system" or "the Man" or "racism" or whatever was against them. That was the compass of their world view, and nothing and nobody would shake them out of it. Reality was irrelevant.
Yet, as John Wilder points out, people like that are doomed to disappointment:
If anyone told Zeke he was five inches taller than he was, he would have laughed. But people told him he was smart, and he believed that.
I can understand how that might seem to the compassionate thing to do – to tell someone that they’re smart. The downside of that is simple – if Zeke feels like he’s smart because everyone told him he was just as smart as anyone else, what happens when he doesn’t have the success that other people have?
He becomes resentful. He sees others succeeding because of things he can’t fathom happening around him. What, then, must be the reason that other people are successful? They must have some sort of system that is rigged against Zeke.
That's the problem, right there. People like that can't accept the fact that each and every one of us has a certain potential. Some few of us work so hard, and are so motivated, as to exceed that potential, but most of us don't. We should aspire to succeed to the fullest extent of our potential, but we shouldn't be surprised to find that we have limits. Unfortunately, nobody is telling our kids that they have limits. Instead, they're encouraging them to believe they can achieve anything they want to. When life stops them dead in their tracks, they don't learn from that - instead, they grow resentful and angry, because they know they can do anything. They've been told that almost from birth. How can we expect them believe anything else?
That's the problem with our country right now, too. Too many people like that are running things. They believe that because this is the USA, with its track record of success, this country can do anything it wants. Government has only to decree something, and it will happen. That's how they see our society, and the world as a whole. They ignore the fact that our economy is vastly less capable and flexible than it was even a generation ago, and our workers are on average a lot less smart and less capable than they were then. Therefore, they're pushing our nation into an untenable situation, where they're gleefully seeking to remake everything without the resources and skills needed to make that work.
We're all going to pay the price for that insouciance.
Peter
27 comments:
"Iodine deficiency is the leading cause of preventable mental retardation in the world today." nber.org/papers/w19233
"Certain areas of the world, due to natural deficiency and unavailability of iodine, are severely affected by iodine deficiency, which affects approximately two billion people worldwide. It is particularly common in the Western Pacific, South-East Asia and Africa." wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency
Another chronic cause of multi-generational mental retardation is consanguinity (cousin marriage) resulting in genetic inbreeding.
Consanguinity is highly prevalent in Islamic cultures. As of 2003, an average of 45% of married couples were related in the Arab world. wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middle_East
Don in Oregon
"...without the resources and skills needed to make that work."
If there is ever any doubt about that consider how few cashiers can figure change in their head - and do it correctly. Now put that type of person in some sort of supervisory or management position.
You'll want to stand back, well out of schrapnel range.
The delusions start with the school districts. I once was in the Long Beach USD main office and they proudly declared their goal that 80% of their students go to college. Not the ~15-20% that could actually benefit, but all the way down to the "Up-Hill Battle" range (the majority of their student body) should go to college to get into deep student debt.
The average American IQ is falling below that needed to sustain representative Government. There is a short story from many years ago called The Marching Morons by C M Kornbluth that is quite prophetic.
An ex-girlfriend had a son that spent ten years trying to become a professional basket ball player, though he never was able to be a starter for the various small colleges he attended. Lives with no sense of reality.
I don't know how much IQ really makes a difference. I'm one of those "UHIQ" folks and for the most part I find that yes, I tend to learn things faster than most people do, and I tend to make decisions a lot faster also. Perhaps I can extrapolate a bit better from limited information than "normal," but I can (and do) make bad decisions just like anyone else. Maybe a bit fewer than "average" or whatever, but I still can be boneheaded, stubborn, and flat-out wrong. In short, I'm human just like everyone else, and emotions can override intellect for me just as much as anyone as well.
As I've aged, I have noticed a definite drop in my cognition. I never took notes as a child and young adult -- I simply never needed to, but boy howdy do I need to now, except I never really learned how since I never needed to, so that's become a detriment to me anymore.
Still and all, I work in IT and make pretty decent money. My wife has been "SAH" for 15 years, so by that measure I suppose I'm "successful," but not nearly as much as these charts would suggest I could (should?) be. But I also have interests and aptitude and I followed my heart to find my niche.
I'm happy where I'm at, so to me that's far more a "successful life" than might be measured by financial success or a some "high status" job.
Considering that chart of IQ, capability and suitable jobs, I considered the jobs at the IQ 80 to 95 range.
Food service jobs can't be moved to another country, but they can be replaced by automation to some extent. Nurse's aid can't be moved or automated. There is only so many of them that are needed.
But the "assembler" factory jobs are easily out competed by people in China, India or possibly even Africa, working in little better than slave labor conditions.
All of these jobs also get competition pressure from illegal aliens, teenagers and people who need a temporary job before they go on to something else. High supply, relatively constant or declining demand mean necessarily lower wages. Combined with a minimum wage law, that means there are a lot of people that are (legally) unemployable because the value of their labor is less than the legal minimum to work. There are families of people with Down Syndrome and other developmental disabilities that fight for sub-minimum wage because without that, their relative is unemployable. Illegal labor, of course, works at whatever the market will bear with the associated legal risks.
The High IQ jobs in the "information economy" are competing world-wide for their jobs, but you can't have much sympathy there, as they can compete for their job in other countries, too.
So, what do you do when you have a portion of the population that could work, but there are no jobs for them because jobs they could do are being done in China? The problem is not just the bottom 5%, or the portion of the population that is "useless" as HMS Defiant has stated. The entire bottom 25% in the USA is challenged and there is not much they can do about it.
If we had to fight WW2 again today, we couldn't do it. We don't have the industrial base, with its jobs suited for the lower 20% from the graph. In WW2, we had the industrial base that couldn't be touched by the Axis, and we buried them in materiel. Additionally, the federal government is deficit-spending like WW2, but not producing much, if anything, for it but bread and circuses.
The GDP vs/ IQ chart does not show a linear increase. It is relatively flat below 80 (can't make less than nothing), a very modest increase between 80 and 95, then a massive jump between 95 and 100.
The average IQ in America has been dropping by a measurable amount for years. When you subsidize low IQ cultures and punish those with higher IQ the results are predictable. We are reaching the point were modern civilization can no longer function because we don't have enough people who are bright enough to keep it going. The collapse is accelerating. An the final episode will be sudden and very ugly.
I will fully agree that IQ is a good predictor of how well someone will do in school
in life it gets far less accurate. There are lower IQ hard workers who don't do glamorous things, but do the things that need to get done and raise their families. There are very high IQ people who can't hold a job.
I don't buy that there isn't work to do, it's not glamorous work, but we are importing workers to pick crops for example, but the insistence that a minimum-wage job should be sufficient to support a family is killing jobs where people could contribute and ear, and raising taxes on everyone else to support them to boot.
I've met far too many folks that give me no reason to doubt this study. Only I'd say it goes far beyond "a particular domain" and applies to all aspects of their lives.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%e2%80%93Kruger_effect
The big advantage of a higher IQ isn't the ability to make decisions quickly but to predict the second, third, and fourth-order affects of the original decision. A case in point is CA's decisions to make shoplifting less than $950 a misdemeanor. First order affect is Liberal's feel good they are reducing the number of shoplifters who are prosecuted. "I feel good" is the end of their reasoning. First affect is shoplifting goes up. Second effect is stores try to lock down their goods. Third order is stores start closing, creating "Food Deserts" or "Drug store Deserts". Forth order is crime skyrockets in previously quiet neighborhoods as the professional criminals fan out to continue their business of stripping stores and selling the goods over the Internet.
All that is easy to see and predict if you are HIQ or UHIQ. But it comes as a complete surprise if you are below average.
@Don-- throw in things like lead exposure and malnutrition in childhood, and there's a lot of room for improvement just about everywhere. Here stateside, I wonder if we are shooting everybody in the developmental foot by subsidizing daycare and making excuses for kids being raised by screens. That's got to have some negative effects. If we were really serious about this, subsidized school breakfasts would be steak and eggs, not froot loops and lowfat milk.
Not sure how *much* improvement, but from what I understand, most of the possible gains are in raising the lower boundary, so the highest payoff per investment dollar is in preventing retardation, brain damage, and developmental delay. Possibly the one thing the WIC program gets unambiguously right is anemia screenings.
@McChuck: Yes, that. I have no idea why they drew a straight line on that chart, when it's clearly a big step from one plateau to another. I think 85 is the lowest IQ you can have, where the military still thinks you can be useful (driving trucks, say). Below that... I mean, dang if even the military can't find a job for you, your life really sucks and your prospects aren't good. Above that? There's stuff you can do. That's what this chart is showing.
@Unknown: Definitely. I learned in school that I could sleep through classes, never turn in homework, never put in any effort... and still get good grades. I'm super great at tests. Adulthood was a pretty nasty wakeup call.
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Overall: gotta circle back to: There's no correlation between virtue and intelligence, and it's easy to get completely hung up on intelligence as the ONE thing that matters. It isn't. A culture/polis can withstand quite a lot of intellectual deficit, with the backstop of deeply ingrained, universally accepted virtues. As those decline, so does the capacity to absorb, care for, and respectfully integrate, intellectually damaged people.
This reminds me of the early-mid 70s in Hawaii, when over 50% of the 'graduates' of HS were functionally illiterate... sigh...
The graph is linear. Understandable because most folks don't understand log scales. But it is suboptimal for three reasons:
1) GDP by definition won't ever be less than zero.
2) Losing $100 per person matters more when you start at $500 per person compared to $10,000 per person, but it looks the same on a linear graph. The linear graph appears to show everything below 80 stinks, but below 70 is new fresh hell 10X poorer than 80 when you zoom in on that region.
3) Ability (or the lack of it) can snowball resulting in an exponential outcome. In that case, if 2x 'smarter' can result in 10X additional productivity then 3X 'smarter" isn't adding another 10X. In the exponential case, it's multiplying by another 10X resulting in a 100X higher productivity.
In cases of exponential systems which can't go less than zero, it is recommended to display the data on a log-linear scale. Googling the "IQ vs GDP raw data" results in images from papers that plot it this manner. About 2/3 down this post is an image that shows the data in a log-linear form.
https://humanvarieties.org/2016/01/31/iq-and-permanent-income-sizing-up-the-iq-paradox/
Decent correlation
KEY POINT:
The graph shows things get exponentially better as IQ increases.
And exponentially worse as it drops.
@Rick T
The "good" news is that Long Beach School District is funneling a lot of their students into Cal State Long Beach and nearby Cal State Dominguez Hills, with a LOT of grants, so the students aren't going to end up massively in debt. I am curious how they game the system to get their students such subsidies.
What they probably don't advertise is how many graduate.
The discussion on this topic is fascinating and reveals to me that the readers and commenters may well be significantly higher on the IQ scale than they think they are...good show, everyone!
Problem solving is a crucial skill as is the ability to foresee problems and avoid them or mitigate their effects (1st, 2nd, & 3rd order effects above).
There is a second variable involved with the IQ vs. per capita GDP. I would posit it has to do with the amount of honesty/trust of the society. Ambition also plays a key. My brother is smarter than me but never aspired to a lot other than not being poor. You could argue I'm more successful, but it depends on your values. I'm beginning to suspect he had it right again. In any event this is for population as a whole, not individuals. Plenty of smart people still make mistakes. In any event, IQ is the significant contributor.
As far as telling most people they can succeed at anything, you often favors when you discourage people. For a musician to make it they will spend years working crap venues and living hand to mouth. If someone can be discourage by a few words they don't have the drive to make it. I tend to be encouraging while teaching as most people doubt their abilities so I'm not saying you continuously discourage. We've taken this you can do anything attitude to extremes.
A high IQ without the will to use it and to work is worthless.
When I joined the U.S. Navy in 1956, I told them I wanted to become an ET, an Electronic Technician. I had chosen the navy for this because I was told it had far better schools for the critical ratings. The reason for this was simple - a ship at sea did not carry an endless supply of replacement units for equipment that failed - an ET had to repair a failed unit by finding the individual component that had failed. Why? There was not enough room on a ship to carry mountains of replacement items.
That meant you had to fully understand how the unit did its job, what each component was supposed to do and how it did it. That meant you needed to know electronic theory and math, be able to read very complex schematics and understand them. You had to be able to troubleshoot any unit you were responsible for maintaining, using the available tools, such as multimeters, oscilloscopes, signal generators, function generators and others, in order to find the one component that had failed and then replace that one item, be it a resistor, or capacitor(often the usual suspect), coil, transformer, choke, rectifier or vacuum tube (a partial list of the myriad things that could go up in smoke).
So, ET school was where one learned all these things. It was long and difficult, requiring hours of study every night, generally at least two hours every weeknight and at least four hours every weekend. If you didn't study - hit the books - you would fail the morning test, called the Blitz, which was one third of your total grade. That meant you washed out.
There was the "A" school that covered basic math and theory, several months long, five days a week, nine to four, including a lunch break, "B" school for more advanced studies (also months long), and "C" schools, which covered specific stuff like new and more modern equipment, usually a couple of weeks long. (we considered them as mini-vacations)
So. When I informed the "career counselor" I wanted to be an ET, A very critical rating that guaranteed almost automatic advance in rating (if you passed the required tests), he responded with raised eyebrows, a questioning look, and the comment that I'd need to be tested first.
Why?
Because the Navy needed to know I would be able to absorb and understand the complex information the schools would deliver and then be able to act on that information. Several of our "Magna Cum Laude" graduates, amazing geniuses on theory, couldn't repair a can opener. Thus, the ability to apply all that knowledge in a practical manner was critical.
Why all this babble? Because the most important test was the IQ test. Period. If you scored below 100, your chances of getting to ET school was close to zero. I scored high enough to quality for MENSA. Whoopee.
My class had 67 starters of which only seven graduated on schedule, four more graduating some weeks later in following classes, due to family emergencies or some such. Why such a huge dropout rate? Of tested and qualified candidates? Simple. San Francisco. They would hit the beach instead of studying.
I was the bottom of the original class, graduate number seven. But I can always say I was seventh out of a class of sixty-seven.
It is my opinion that many, many of todays college graduates would have never made it through the front door of any of those schools. (Maybe thru the back door... as janitors)
Peter, succinct and presents the point very well. Well indeed!
I have one disagreement; we all are not going to pay for it. We already are, and have been, paying for it. I reckon this issue represents a significant drain on the economy.
'The world needs ditch diggers too.' How often had I heard that when growing up. We must bring that type of thinking back into fashion.
Otherwise, the future is stupid.
15 seconds...either way is beyond their conception.
For what this is worth,
3400 Palestinians were tested for IQ
the average was 68,
I thought it was typographical error, that they meant 98 or 88 but nope ! it is 68.
or that it was not a real article,
but it is real, very real,
https://www.amren.com/news/2023/10/palestinians-in-your-country-what-to-expect/
Our host and readership are quite astute. What I noticed is nobody is asking what are the secondary, tertiary, quaternary effects?
Idiocracy offers us some clues, but what happens next?
I don't have hard cold factual numbers to use here, but what happens to the workforce? What happens to government? Does anyone fly anymore, or do we look to see what the captain looks like before we get on the plane?
I for one have a dour viewpoint of our nation's future as a result of this kind of thing. Some forces of nature I am able to resist against, demographics is beyond me. Are we witnessing part of this problem now in little ways like our retail and fast food experiences? Who can deny the staff at big-box stores and burger-joints has become WORSE than it was just 5 years ago? Comparing pre- and post- kung-flu shopping alone is quite the exercise. What does this mean for civil services like the water department? Will the electric utility company be immune?
As individuals what can we do to insulate ourselves from the stupidity that surrounds us? Can we gain an edge at this time? What career paths are likely to be more in-need in the future (hey, I got kids)?
I've no doubt at all about 2 things:
1- our nation is crumbling (how far, what form, when, can it be saved, dunno, but the trajectory undeniable).
2- there will be massive amounts of death never before seen (starvation, violence, dunno, prolly both, but we're gonna need trenches and dozers to deal with it).
"Idiocracy offers us some clues, but what happens next?"
Read "The Marching Morons" for an SF-nal extrapolation. Note that we DO have cars that supplement the actual vehicle noises with sound effects (see the BMW M5 for one).
Wasn't that when Barack Obama was there?
FWIW, socioeconomic status is right up there with IQ as being the greatest predictor of students' academic performance... Some even suggest that IQ and SES are effectively the same for American education metrics.
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