More cohorts of people are entering the so-called "lower" classes and with this likely comes factors that affect mental aptitude such as decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed and unchallenging jobs.
This would agree with the study, which shows that families' IQs are getting lower with each generation.
This is due almost fully to immigration [0]. In the IQ study, immigrants were excluded. So no, that hypothesis does not make sense.
Norway has been able to (due to oil revenues) avoid the (non-imported) increased inequality that has affected most other western countries over the last decades.
Why would IQ be explained by wealth inequality? I thought the literature was pretty conclusive - there's a benefit to rising above poverty but beyond that wealth doesn't buy much IQ. Poverty rates are falling, I'm not sure we would expect a person whose nutritional needs are met to be more or less smart because someone else is fabulously wealthy.
IQ, flawed as it may be as a measure, is sometimes touted as one of the best predictors of success in life. It's just conjecture, but maybe there's a feedback loop there.
Zip code is also a very good predictor of success in life. IQ could be a great predictor, but that still doesn't mean it's measuring what we think it's measuring.
IQ works just as well within families as it does between them, meaning that it predicts difference in success even between children in the same family.
I'm not going to claim that IQ quantitatively describes some useful aspect of individuals. I'm not trying to justify a natural aristocracy. Moreso if we actually did identify this relationship between long term success and high IQ scores then maybe we can identify paths to success through other measures.
Again more conjecture, but maybe IQ has more to do with concentration and abstract thinking. If there were a relationship between wealth and childhood trauma/stress that could impair abstract thinking, it would make a good case for policies designed to prevent childhood trauma, in particular those brought on by poverty.
So you think it "very unlikely" that someone more intelligent would make better decisions, and those decisions have better outcomes enabling someone to live in a pricier neighborhood?
Well first, we're talking about the zip code one is raised in not the zip code one ends up in later in life. Second, we're discussing the efficacy of IQ as an actual measure of intelligence. You're assuming IQ is a good measure of intelligence in order to prove IQ is a good measure of intelligence. Sure, zip codes are a proxy for IQ if we accept that IQs test something other than just intelligence.
Finally, the causal relationship you have set up between intelligence and quality of living situation, while undoubtedly true to _some_ extent, ignores everything we know about system racism, system sexism, our horrific healthcare system and a host of other factors that complicate this idea - at least in the US.
You need to be a specialist to be worth a high salary. The dumbest doctor is a smart guy. The worst MLB player was the superstar of his Little League. Many people with high incomes are not wealthy at all -- they have no money.
To be wealthy, you just need to have assets and not do dumb things. Wealthy people either inherited it or had a liquidity event. Nobody gets rich via income. There is some intelligence involved in the liquidity part, but also alot of luck. If you have inherited property in NYC in the last 40 years and didn't sell it, you are wealthy. If you operate a McDonald's franchise, you are wealthy, and probably are of average intelligence.
From page 8, only 1 in 5 is retired. Even so, claiming that retirement savings do not count as wealth seems rather odd.
You can choose to read the book and determine how it is done, and what you can choose to do to become a millionaire yourself, or you can choose to remain a victim of fate. Your choice.
wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people. I know it's a lot to ask nowadays but please be informed enough about economics to at least know the very basics if you are going to bring it up.
The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less, in Western Europe of all places, is absolutely ridicolous. If anything the opposite is the case. As regards jobs we also have the opposite problem: too few simple jobs.
> wealth inequality doesn't mean more poor people.
Wealth, inequality, and poor are not well-defined.
Using the typical measures:
poor being near the poverty line for an area
wealthy being access to capital (be it over 100x the poverty wealth line or double the average) and inequality, the gap in absolute terms from top to average. The pareto principle will always illustrate how greater inequality defines that there are more poor people, even when the poverty line changes. Abstract equations, notwithstanding.
> The idea that the food availabe to people is getting worse or less
Ironically, the beef industry may be kept on life support due to the ongoing climate change. New grazelands will appear from beneath the tundra across the world offering another few generations of opportunity. Buy your land in the US Dakotas for your grandchildren. It's a golden opportunity.
it's a fun game: define poverty in terms of wealth inequality and presto if inequality goes up, poverty does too. But here is the thing that we forgot in the west because we essentialy abolished it: poverty is about material depreviation and that happens to be the one thing about it that would actually stunt IQ. We don't have material deprivation, not in Norway nor anywhere else in Western Europe, certainly not at an increasing rate. We have access to all the calories we want and at prices and qualities unequaled in human history. We also have endless free books btw.
> bananas
It should be obvious that Europeans don't need bananas for proper development. In addition that has nothing to do with poverty.
Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour with anything at all you get people
that scour the internet for even the tiniest scrap of evidence for you.
> Yours isn't any more valid than theirs, so what did you add to the discussion?
At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid. There has never been a time or place where everyone was better off materially and if you are not aware you and OP should start reading some of those books.
> In addition that has nothing to do with poverty.
Given these are orthogonal situations, I don't know why you think I said they are connected. I was speaking to the valid perspective of change in the food chain.
> At least I know some economics and history so of course my perspective is more valid
Appealing to your own authority? What about everyone else? Not compelling.
> Also, fascinating that if you haphazardly connect the hand wringing topic du-jour
Bringing something to the table should be the defacto approach. Bring something to support your views, other than rhetoric. You'll be a more effective poster (and speaker) if there's something there to talk about. Good luck with whatever.
Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.
> I wonder if the drop in IQ is related to the increase in wealth inequality in these past 50 years as well.
Not sure what mechanism you think would enable that.
Thinking that the richest people in society are, in relative terms, more rich than you than before has no obvious effect on anything related to IQ.
Average and median PPP wealth and income continue to grow.
> Far as I can tell, this is the opposite of the trend, in the U.S. and Canada.
We've got an obesity epidemic. The average American is clearly not eating healthy. Maybe you misinterpreted the OP's statement? "Decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed" is awkward, but the intent is clear from context.
Well, a decrease from when? As far as I can tell, OP meant that the cited decrease is still under way, and hence contributing to an ongoing decline in average IQ.
We have about 75 years of testing on that, don’t we? Communist states such as China, USSR, and were a living laboratory. You could meet wide swathes of society with essentially the same income, but there was still the same kind of range in IQ you see in wealthier societies. I recall no studies showing different IQs vs. the free market (and hence more unequal) cohorts.
I think it's because intelligence doesn't help when it comes to earning money. The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.
I also do think that wealth inequality correlates with lower average IQ.
Rich people want to keep the majority of people dumb; breed them like cattle, hook them up to machines and milk them.
An idiot with capital will, relatively quickly, lose all of his capital through wasteful spending. You see this all the time with lottery jackpot winners, those who receive a large inheritance, etc.
The point is one might luck into getting rich. Staying rich requires some intelligence, or you're going to make poor decisions. This is even true of dynastic wealth.
Not so. The reality is that his family banker will invest the money in an index fund like S&P500 for him and then he will see it compound a predictable 10% or so every year, becoming increasingly wealthy without ever having to lift a finger or exercise a single neuron.
More likely the banker will invest it in low performing actively managed mutual funds and slowly drain 1-2% in additional "management fees" out of him...
> I think it's because intelligence doesn't help when it comes to earning money.
What evidence is there of that?
> The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.
People tend to make their own luck. For example, if you sit home and watch TV 6 hours a day, you are highly unlikely to get lucky. If you're out swinging the bat, you're far more likely to get a hit.
I see no reason that brain makeup would be any more a choice than eye color or height.
But even if it is, that just pushes the question back another stage. People make choices for reasons, based on their experience and predictions. Lucky to be someone who had the appropriate experiences and made appropriate predictions to choose drive and motivation. There should be no reason to doubt this unless you believe in some kind of external soul or intervening deity - a child who is hit every time they speak or move without being told to, will make different choices about "drive and motivation" as a child who is encouraged and praised when they do things of their own accord. It can't be otherwise, to suggest that people do things /without/ their environment affecting them at all is so absurd as to be instantly dismissible. The idea that infants might know what "drive and motivation" even are, without being taught, that everyone must learn that they are effective and valuable, independent of all experiences, doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
Put simply, if what you say was true, /everyone would choose that/.
People are all born with different characteristics, sure. But this does not predestine them. You, with your brain, can choose your path. You can choose to take advantages of your inborn advantages, and train to overcome your inborn deficits. It's why you HAVE a brain.
You can CHOOSE. People do it every day.
To claim to be fated to be a victim of circumstance is choosing to be a loser. You'll not be what you could be.
Free will implies that if you make a decision (after a long process of deliberating) then roll back the universe to before the start of that process and run it again, you can make a different decision even though exactly nothing changed.
In deterministic universe, everything will run right on the same tracks, and your cognitive process influenced by its internal structure, its accumulated experience and current inputs, will arrive to the same conclusion. No free will here.
In non-deterministic universe, something will randomly happen differently and you will arrive to a different conclusion, but that is still not your doing. You don't control that atom decaying or not decaying and flipping your neuron or something. So no free will here either.
In dualistic universe, your "soul" will influence the decision differently, but that is merely moving the problem into soul realm. Depending on how much decision making your theology places into the brain and how much into the soul, the soul acts as a generator of randomness (it is is not influenced by materialistic inputs and experiences) or as a whole processing unit (if all thinking is done there). You don't control that either.
You can get up and go jogging and improve our health. Or you can turn on the TV. It's your choice. Just like you chose to write "What evidence is there of that?". You weren't fated to write that.
More cohorts of people are entering the so-called "lower" classes and with this likely comes factors that affect mental aptitude such as decrease in quantity of healthy food consumed and unchallenging jobs.
This would agree with the study, which shows that families' IQs are getting lower with each generation.