First point: I live in Scandinavia. Poor people are just as dumb here as in USA, but we take better care of them. USA assumes that poor people should be able to take care of themselves, which doesn't work. Taking care of them doesn't make them smarter, but it makes their lives better which is the point.
I'm also from Scandinavia and I just don't agree with you. What you're saying doesn't line up with my own experiences, nor with my understanding of the statistics.
In general, it seems like you are attributing all academic performance to some innate "intelligence" in the singular. This is just a bad assumption. There are many factors behind how well you do in school, and most of them are quite obviously social. That doesn't mean that your parents academic performance doesn't influence your, but there's no basis for claiming that it's genetic. We can help people do better, and we have done so. Of course, what we're doing now isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it.
That's not about smartness or dumbness, though. I don't think intelligence is correlated with poverty much, but poverty is additional difficulty, so they have to work harder for the same thing as someone who isn't poor.
One aspect is that there's at least partial causality the opposite way. While earnings are correlated with IQ, they are even more correlated with your family earnings/socioeconomic status (SES); and there are many aspects of how low SES screws up childhood development and education (on average, not necessarily for all individuals) that would result, among other things, in lower IQ test results. I.e. it's a reasonable hypothesis that the correlation implies that low intelligence makes it hard to be rich just as much as being poor prevents one from developing and applying their intelligence.
But that isn't an issue where I'm from. The lifestyle difference between people with degrees and working class is tiny since the wage gaps are so small, and then add all government aids paying for everything including school lunches, daycare, college, healthcare etc on top of that. But still people from working class households perform extremely poorly. Helping them isn't about making them smarter or unlocking new potential because that doesn't work, it is simply to make everyone live a decent life.
So your intelligence is based on how much money your parents made? Your intrinsic ability to be educated is a function of someone else's wallet? Something seems off in this statement. I wish your parents had money, then your statement would probably be coherent!
No, intelligence is mostly inherited. If your biological parents were smart then you will almost surely be smart and vice versa. And smart people end to earn more money, so intelligence is indirectly correlated with parental wealth. But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly. They do a bit better, but their biological parents still matters more.
If it was easy to produce smart kids then we would already do it, since smart people are so much more valuable to society the small amounts it requires to add that extra value would be nothing. But no country has managed to do this so far, its just a slow climb that follows the same trend in every western society no matter what policies they implemented.
It's not uncommon for smart people to be poor. You can be intelligent and have intelligent parents that came from poor countries, maybe parents that experienced a debilitating traumatic experience keeping them from working, or mental illnesses that don't inhibit intelligence, but do inhibit basic survival.
> But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly.
Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
> Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
What you've said is unfalsifiable voodoo mumbo-jumbo. Even if someone proved you wrong here and started the experiment with the poor child at newborn level, which is what people do when these bad faith criticisms are lobbed, you'd just claim that the DNA of the baby inherited generational trauma, which is what people with your bad faith criticism resort to once the criticism is inevitably proven wrong.
I don't see how this points at evidence of inter-generational trauma which to my knowledge is recognized as bullshit voodoo. Can you explain where it does so?
This doesn't hold up to the smallest amount of rational thought. Is everyone from a poor country less intelligent? How about a poorer city, they are stupider? This sounds like an argument made by a lucky person who wants to attribute that luck to some personal superiority.
Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions. Read “guns germs and steel” for why human development through the ages has a lot do with just being at the right place at the right time.
> Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions
This goes against all of the scientific literature we have. Intelligence is determined by genetics. It can be artificially lowered via poor socio-economic conditions, but it mostly cannot be lifted by higher socio economic conditions. In laymans terms, a traumatic life can make a child who was otherwise going to be smart not so smart, but a good life cannot make a child who was going to be dumb intelligent. Socioeconomic conditions can lower the intelligence determined by genetics, they cannot improve intelligence determined by genetics.
I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization of both the science and what I was saying. Genetic intelligence is not a min/maxed limit that we all have to work hard to reach. It is something that is fairly static and innate. It can be disrupted by trauma/nutrition but obviously for the vast majority of people that is absolutely not the case. We are born with, and live up to, our genetic intelligence. Very few of us in the first world were undernourished or subjected to extreme trauma at childhood.
Yes. The author of the comment seems not the understand simple concepts like averages and normal distributions. Additionally, he/her seems to assume a causal relationship where if you're poor it is because you're dumb, and not the other way around, or even a mix of those two things.
Yeah, on average, poor people score a few points low than the average for rich people. true. But this is not an absolute as the post's author seems to believe.
It doesn't mean all poor people are dumb, or that you are automatically smarter than someone who is poorer than you.
Picture mentally two bell curves with a lot of overlap and very long tails. Things are in reality way more nuanced than this dumb statement that poor == dumb.
On the aggregate, it is a useful datapoint, it means that probably as a society, you should reserve some more resources for education in poorer neighborhoods.
I can think of at least one society that formed in the 1930's for which this was an absolute mandate! But I don't recall reading much about them past about 1945, so perhaps you should do some further research.
Yeah and welfare programs and heavy redistribution programs were tried by a society that caused several times more deaths and suffering than the one you mentioned over way longer period which we don't hear from anymore either. What kind of argument is that, seriously.
Oh shit! Several times more?
Maybe you should actually read some actual data about Soviet Union. Saying that Soviet Union caused more suffering over longer period of time than Nazi Germany is way off.
And by the way - free healthcare and free higher education are actually very good things that worked like a charm.
How can you be so sure of that?
Intelligence is not something as clear-cut as eyes color. While there are some evidence of an inheritable component, it is probably the result of the expression of several genes, with complex and different phenotypic expressions. It is far from clear how much we can expect that the offspring of smart people will be also smart, once you account for all the other variables associated with nurturing.
Meanwhile we DO KNOW that nurturing have a strong effect. This is a fact.
And then you have the problem of how to ensure that smart people have more kids. Are you going to force smart people to have kids? raise their taxes? prison? What about lower intelligence people? what do you propose? compulsory sterilization and abortion? As you can see, even if we knew for sure that smart people having relatively more offspring would actually work, The policy changes to enact that are a complete minefield of ethical and practical problems. So, at least in our society, this is clearly not a solution.
But, on the other side we do know that we can have interventions on nutrition, education and other such stuff that do have a demonstrable effect on increasing a series of variables that we collectively call intelligence.
You have, right now, for kids that already living, not some hypothetical future Einstein's offspring, tools to raise their intelligence and to make the most of their genetic potential, even if on average, their potential is a bit smaller (and always remember, intelligence is normally distributed, outliers abound, and the difference between the average of both groups is not that big to start, meaning there is a lot of overlap in relative terms, and considering we have for more poor people than rich people, is very likely that by virtude of the sheer numbers, you have more genius individuals, in absolute quantity, than on the upper classes, even if the average tends in favor of the upper classes.
And as intelligence is normally distributed, by giving poor kids a chance, you will even be able to identify among them some high potential individuals and give them the nurturing they need to reach what they are innately able to if given the chance.
So, what is your policy choice? Chase a pipe dream, while increasing inequality, something that historically always led to violence, or do something that is feasible, doable, ethical and fair?
I agree, it is so much better to say things that sounds good but doesn't help anyone. What I said doesn't benefit me at all, but spouting platitudes would.
Not all poor people are dumb, but most are. And since we are talking about statistical level effects poor people being dumb will greatly influence them.
So instead of asking "why are poor people fat, we should fix that!" you can also ask "why are dumb people fat, we should fix that!". The second gives a lot of different angles and can help find solutions the first question wont find.
This is one of the many drawbacks of socialism, even the "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" that everyone seems to be obsessed with lately in the U.S. It assumes government paper-pushers are the smartest people around with the highest I.Q. ever, and everyone else is just a dumb lightweight. It's all about that soft bigotry of low expectations.
I don't get it. People form societies because we are better off collectively. We run into problems where some people manage to rig society in a way that some people are consistently worse off and others are consistently better off.
Society as a whole is better off => every single member is better of.
There is no such relationship. However, since every individual directly contributes to the total productivity of society, we want every member to reach their maximum potential and one way to achieve that is to introduce welfare so that people at the bottom don't have to be homeless or starve because we want them to have a second chance at life.
