I’ve been reading about intelligence,
education and social behavior and some interesting things have been
proven. You probably suspected a lot of
this. All these stats are for white
people only, no racial component.
Remember those plots that show if you have
only a high school education you’ll likely make $30,000 a year, but if you have
a bachelor’s you’ll make $50K and advanced degrees = $90K? It turns out, while this is true, the distribution
for each education level is extremely broad. There are Phds on welfare. There
are CEOs who have 8th grade ed.
The correlation between education
level and earnings is about .3 (1.0 or 100% correlation is perfect; zero is
none whatsoever) IQ correlates at about
.6 so it is a better predictor of earnings.
The people who study intelligence were highly
persecuted in the 60s and 70s for their proofs that intelligence gives a lot of
advantage and it is somewhat inherited.
That was the era when people believed that environment caused
everything. (Well, why try to breed
smart sheepdogs? You could just make any old mutt a shepherd.) So the
researchers went underground by the way they stopped talking about test scores
and began talking about standard deviations away from the curve peaks. Apparently it worked. Media and many others couldn’t understand
what they were talking about. Then came
the 90s demand for education accountability and testing. Once again, intelligence measures became
important. A guy with 80 IQ doesn’t make
a very good elementary particle physicist.
The popular concept is that college education
skyrocketed after WW II. No, it actually
began growing rapidly about 1920. 1920—2% of population had a bachelors; 1940—8%;
1960—16%;2016—35%. That reflects the
fact that in 1950 the traditional 55% of top quartile of SAT scorers went to
college but by 1965 it was 80%. And it
was since about 1960 that the prestigious colleges began to compete for the top
HS grads. Why? College costs quadrupled from 1950 to 1960,
and a lot of middle class families could no longer afford it unless they had a
smart kid who could get scholarships.
The result is that people of a certain
intelligence and education often only associate with others of similar status,
especially in urban areas where many technical people are employed. The tech revolution has insulated many of the
best and brightest from the rest of the people.
This explains why so many of our best politicians come, not from
mega-metros but cities of 400,000 or smaller where everyone rubs elbows. The tech skills are accountants, architects,
engineers, professsors, dentists and physicians, mathematicians and scientists
and the like. These 8 jobs suck up 25%
of the top 10% in IQ. And as the federal regulations have grown by a factor of
six in the last 20 years, it takes a smart guy to start a successful business. Average
Joe finds it hard. Thus in 2014 for the
first time in 400 years, America’s number of newly closed businesses exceeded
the number of start-ups for the first time. 5-year running average) And
interestingly the Supreme Court has forbidden employers from giving
intelligence tests, yet these correlate better with successful job performance
than anything else—reference checks, interviews, education, or age. As kids are strongly encouraged to follow
education as far as they can make it go, education is now strongly tied to
intelligence. The upper technical fields
have seen a real salary increase of about 60% since 1963 while others are up
only about 10% in constant dollars. Hence the new success of Trump’s appeal to
lower middle class. And the nerds mate together just as they live
close, thereby producing smart kids. But
it’s a loose correlation. Ben Carson’s
mom will surely object.
Let’s talk social difficulties. Less intelligent women have most of the out-of-wedlock
babies. But of course there’s
debate. Some would say parent’s
socioeconomic status (SES) is the cause.
It turns out that intelligence is more fundamental but SES plays a role
too. A graph of Americans below the
poverty line is stunning. Poverty
decreased in a straight line from 1940 when 50% were “poor” to 1969 when the
curve flat-lined in the 12-15% range it has had ever since. The Great Society was supposed to reduce
this! Instead it halted the decline of
poverty. When a group goes from 50% to
15%, who is left behind? Those who lack
thrift, energy, determination and brains, it is likely.
The statistics about unwed mothers are
staggering. Married women of lowest 2%
of IQ are 18% likely to live in poverty.
Those in upper 2% are 1% likely.
But single moms of the lowest 2% IQ are 70% likely to live in
poverty. Upper 2% are still 15% likely. It
is as if marriage makes you rich. And the numbers cut across all reasons for
single motherhood—widowed, divorced, and never-married. This almost says, “If you want kids and means,
get married and stay married.” Why are women so adversely affected? I think it is because men are hard-pressed
and measured by career while women who have children will often compromise a
job if it adversely affects the children. Equal pay for equal work is the Law.
A HS education has become the norm. The dropout
rate doesn’t correlate very well with SES but does correlate strongly with
IQ. It figures. If you struggle with classes, you are more
likely to drop out. The number of disabled and collecting Social Security has
increased 50% during the Obama presidency, causing Bill O’Reilly to exclaim, “Has
America gotten more hazardous? That can’t
be!” No, but here’s what the stats tell
us. Low intelligence workers opportunistically
claim far more disability. There is a
slightly better safety behavior among the intelligent workers, but the real
story is that discouraged workers, finding it harder to keep and find a job,
find it more socially acceptable to claim disability and get a sympathetic doc
to approve it. And they won’t go crazy watching daytime TV and living leisurely. Employment of teens who aren’t in school has gone
from 85% in 1954 to 63% in 2009 to 51% today.
And when you study the SES of these workers, it suddenly gets
interesting. Unemployed teens drop in
unemployment rate as they go to higher IQ.
But it’s the other way around for SES.
The ones who have wealthy parents are more long-term unemployed. Living in the proverbial basement, I guess.
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