Does It Matter If IQ Matters?

Spencer,
Your income is obviously below average.

Forbes reports (p302 of Oct 10, 2005 issue) that at least 273 members of this years Forbes 400 richest people in America have a college degree. I agree that IQ does matter.

Another type of socialist reaction to the role of IQ would be something like Nobel prize winnder Jan Tinbergen’s reported proposal for a tax on intelligence (I am not sure if he was entirely serious, of even if this isn’t apocryphal, though).

That said, I would conjecture social skills (i.e. brown-nosing) plays a greater role than raw IQ.

Bryan is right that the do-nothing policy has its rational, but on the other hand, its adoption would signal that IQ is destiny. That would be unacceptable to the majority of the population. Therefore, a fake hope has to be maintained, and visible investment in the education of the morons is a social necessity.

Unknown Prof! Good explanation! IQ and education should be highly correlated. If they weren’t, the coefficient of education wouldn’t change when you added IQ. What causes IQ? According to “The Bell Curve,” it’s about half genetic and have cultural. On the cultural end, having two parents who value education tends to be the driving factor. The children from these families will do well without government help. Children raised by poor single moms rarely do well. The only solution seems to be early childhood intervention, but even then, the values children catch from home tend to overwhelm those taught at preschool.

A real quick question. It seems fairly unlikely that IQ exiswts as a purely random variable, as some of the comments here imply. If that’s so, a straight multivariate regression seems like it might misrepresent IQ, as well. Specifically wouldn’t you have to specify a system of simultaneous equations wherein IQ is the dependent variable? Sorry for getting a little geeky here, just a technical issue.

Dear Bryan:

You’ve been doing some tremendous, courageous blogging lately.

The funny thing is, most economists, especially most labor economists, are “liberal” in the American sense. They believe all people are fundamentally the same, just with different endowments of wealth and opportunity. But…grad school at selective universities all have significant g-loaded hurdles, be they GRE scores, or first year exams that mainly assess analytical cleverness, often explicitly mathematical. So, sure, IQ doesn’t matter to economists (as long as its above 130).

The heritability of IQ goes up with age, and is something 0.80 by midlife. And the non-genetic factors that matter are mostly within-family, not between-family.

The more IQ matters, the more likely it becomes that existing government policies are a waste of money – and that you would get a bigger payoff by doing less – or maybe nothing at all.

So is Econlog suggesting that the state legalize crack cocaine? That would be laisse-faire with a vengenance. I wonder how some low-IQ members of the underclass might cope with that new freedom?

A problem with libertarians is that they assume the free market solves social problems best. But sometimes it only makes them worse, particularly for those who are not especially good at “rational calculation”. This is one reason why authoritarian institutions, like Churches and Armies, can sometimes provide a better institutional framework for the less-gifted.

Of course some kinds of IQ-ignorant government intervention have been especially counter-productive to marginalised or struggling members of the community. Subsisiding illegitimacy and unconditional welfare did not help.

The claim that a laisse-faire policy is “best of all” also seems to be inconsistent with the Flynn-Dickens theory, that IQ-related differences in individual performance can be very sensitive to changes in social multipliers. Any kind of government action that encourages social integration would help the more wayward members of the community.

There are plenty of government carrots that would help a great deal. Improved nutrition and more practical tuition would certainly help underclass children make the most of their talents, whether innate or acquired.

Also, the government can wield its stick to worthwhile effect. More paternalistic policies targetted at the LHS of the Bell Curve – such as mutual obligation income support, zero tolerance of drugs, tougher border control and more correctional policies – are hardly examples of “doing nothing at all”.

Sometimes the issue is not more or less kinds of intervention, but what kind of intervention is best. The problems associated with the underclass behaviour in the sixties through eighties were as much caused by unwise extensions in personal autonomy and the interventions of political authority.

I found this blog via Steve Sailer’s isteve.com blog and I think is the best blog he has ever referred to his readers.

Anyways, investment in education was brought up and had some questions, or things I wonder about, and want to know your thoughts.
As a brand new homeschooler who has been around many homeschooled children and read about them, I notice that the more child-paced the schooling environment, the more you see i.q. take on strength. In other words, in families that let the children go at their own pace, the academic performance of the child seems to increase exponentially with i.q. The dull or average child may graduate on time or a year or two early, the gifted child may be starting college barely a teenager.
(Not all homeschools are “Montessori” schools, but such merit based grade placement is ultra rare in other settings unless it seems the child is a genius.)
So, in a very wide open way, I wonder about educational investment, not just primary school for kids, and what we get back per i.q. point or standard deviation? (I also recall a recent post by Sailer, whenever I think of this, commenting we hadn’t gotten back a lot for our decades long and huge investment in the underclass.)

Thanks for letting this woman think out loud and not hurry to a point.

“The most important book published in this decade for the economics profession has also been the most ignored: Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s “IQ and the Wealth of Nations.” ”

Lynn & Vanhanen’s book was embarassingly bad and was full of elementary statistical errors. Volcken blows them out of the water just by applying the most basic undergrad level growth theory. This was nice of him since no economics journal is likely to have enough interest in the book to publish his refutation. Lynn and Vanhanen’s research wouldn’t have passed review at any major econ journal for quality reasons; to say that such a poorly done book is the most important book of the decade in economics shows that you know little about social science research (and in Steve Sailer’s case, are a monomaniac about IQ).

A couple of points about the original post:

1) The NLSY is not a great data set for looking at the effect of IQ since the AFQT was given to the subjects in their mid teens to early 20s. So even when controlling for years of education it picks up part of the unmeasured education quality effect. The controls for family background also aren’t that great and results are can be quite sensitive to how you combine them and adjust for measurement error.

If you use AFQT and education alone as in the regression referenced in the initial posting the AFQT measure in the NLSY will be a mix of IQ, unmeasured education quality, and family background.

2) It is pretty common to try to adjust for ability scores in figuring out the return to education, this is not unusual in the literature. So implying that labor economists don’t do it in education research is a canard.

3) Education always has big effects even after controlling for IQ, showing that purely social interventions have big impacts on life outcomes. The same seems to be true of parental SES, education, and family structure (although it is still hard to find data sets with really good measures of both parental wealth, IQ, and adult income).

4) Research that tries to show IQ has an “overwhelming” effect on life outcomes typically leaves out other controls that are highly correlated with IQ, especially education but also initial wealth and so forth. This is true of the Lynn & Vanhanen piece referred to above, and also of the Bell Curve, which IMO is not a very good book but still better than Lynn & Vanhanen. This happens often enough to make me suspect bad faith.

Basically the research seems to show that IQ has a statistically significant but not very large effect on life outcomes once other stuff is controlled for, which should not surprise anyone who has lived long enough to meet a lot of smart underachievers.

Basically the research seems to show that IQ has a statistically significant but not very large effect on life outcomes once other stuff is controlled for, which should not surprise anyone who has lived long enough to meet a lot of smart underachievers.

Mr. Sailer has the perfect analogy for your squid ink (paraphrasing): you can make the height difference between Japanese and Swedes disappear by “controlling” for the inseam of the pants hanging in their closets.

Squid…ink. “Controlling” for IQ proxies like parental investment and SES fools only those praying to be fooled.

Jack:

You cite China’s economic performance, but that is the best single country example of the usefulness of Lynn & Vanhanen’s approach. In 1968, China had a Communist economy run by a charismatic megalomaniac. After 1978, it has been run by non-madmen. But lots of countries have been run by madmen at some point, but most have not recovered as fast as China.

China’s big advantage: It had the world’s largest gap between average national IQ (2 points higher than America’s, according to L&V) and average wage (a tiny fraction of America’s) So, the world has poured of hundreds of billions of dollars of physical investment into China, and the Chinese have responded with huge increases in productivity. In contrast, investments in countries with lower national average IQs, even ones with good leadership, have produced lower increases in productivity.

As for Volken, I believe I had an email discussion with him several years ago and pointed out the fallacy in his critique. He’s the guy who claims that the difference in income is driven by % of high school graduates, right? Not surprisingly, IQ and high school graduation rates are correlated. I proposed several tests to him to help distinguish which was more the cause and which the effect, all of which pointed to IQ as the greater driver of the two. I don’t recall him having an effective reply.

If you can’t figure out the flaws in Volken’s approach yourselves, I could dig up my email to him, but it would take me some time.

Nobody doubts that things like improved nutrition, healthcare, education, lessening of cousin marriage, etc. can improve IQ somewhat, but that doesn’t mean the economics profession can afford to wish away the huge differences that currently exist in average national IQ, with northeast Asian countries at least two standard deviations above the bottom ranking countries in the world.

And, of course, you’ll recognize the chicken or egg problem inherent in countries with very low IQs trying to bring about environmental change to boost IQs. For example, Thailand (only a half standard deviation below the US) has recently started a what appears to be a well-designed, sensible national program to boost average IQ by fortification of staple foods with iodine and other essential micronutrients in order to prevent IQ-lowering medical syndromes like the medical condition known as cretinism, which is caused by lack of iodine (the US instititued fortification of all salt with iodine back before WWII to eliminate cretinism). Over the decades, this should succeed in raising national average IQ in Thailand, as it probably did in the U.S. long ago. However, in deeply disorganized impoverished countries with average IQs much lower than Thailand’s, it can be hard to get effective programs organized. (That’s why I’ve long been advocating Unicef’s Micronutrient Initiative, but the rest of the Western media has given it almost no attention, because they are terrified about repeating Unicef’s statistics on the toll that low IQs take on 3rd World countries).

The existing national average IQs have been fairly stable for about a half century at least (with Northeast Asia apparently improving a little versus the rest of the world over that time, but other major regions not showing much relative change). You can see all the studies over the decades here: http://www.isteve.com/IQ_Table.htm (best viewed in MS IE rather than Firefox).

I don’t know what changes we will see in the long run, but in the long run, it has been noted, we are all dead. Judging from history, L&V’s data provides an important new roadmap to global development in the medium term, which the economics profession can hardly afford to ignore.

The hilarious thing is the only two times The Economist magazine has mentioned the book “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” in the 3.5 years it’s been published is as the source of a table of average IQs by state (e.g., Connecticut 113, Utah 87) showing that blue states have radically higher IQs than red states — and then a week later when The Economist admitted it had been hoaxed by a prankster who made up the claim that his bogus table was in Lynn & Vanhanen’s book.

See http://www.iSteve.com/iqhoax.htm

Great post Steve. I think the most effort should be researching ways to increase IQ as much as possible. The nutrition, including I have read what the pregnant mother eats. Like a diet rich in fats that the growing brain needs.

I am usually against all government intervention but the US government laws mandating iodine in salt really was brilliant. I have to wonder how many people who weren’t outright cretins, were helped increase their IQ growing up. As we can see from IQ and the wealth of nations, even a few points can make a tremendous difference.

And beyond just using it to help third world countries, especially ones with big potential like India.. Using it ourselves. Providing vitamins and some omega fatty acids at public schools for example could grab you a few points.

Michael what you say makes sense, the colour gaps would be politically intolerable.

But I was thinking about which nations in the western world are the most diverse racially. And I’d have to say the US is the most mixed at least compared with the European nations.

Yet it has been able to maintain substantially less government as a percentage of gdp. Its at 32% of gdp, while west Europe is around 50%.

I should add the problem with socialism isn’t so much helping the poor. For example in Canada if our healthcare was only to help the bottom 10% of Canadians I wouldn’t mind it. Same with welfare itself, its like 5% of total government expenditures.

Steve Sailer Posted October 3, 2005 01:12 AM writes:

[Volken’s] the guy who claims that the difference in income is driven by % of high school graduates, right? Not surprisingly, IQ and high school graduation rates are correlated. I proposed several tests to him to help distinguish which was more the cause and which the effect, all of which pointed to IQ as the greater driver of the two.
…
And, of course, you’ll recognize the chicken or egg problem inherent in countries with very low IQs trying to bring about environmental change to boost IQs.

Obviously a person, or nation, endowed with a high native IQ is going to be easier to get through high-school and college than otherwise. To that extent Volken’s approach is fallacious.

However, even a fairly low IQ person, or nation, might be able to overcome the retarding effects of their modest endowments by getting everyone, the duffers included, to knuckle down and master some kind of skill, turn up for work, avoid the drug trade etc. This seems to be the approach taken by Mahatihir towards the MALAYs.

It seems to have worked out fairly well, with the ethnic Malays enjoying a fairly high standard of living despite the fact that they express a relatively low IQ, roughly ~85, going by the ethnicly familiarINDON’s.

Of course the MALAYs have been the beneficiaries of INDIAN and CHINESE immigrants high IQ managerial and intellectual skills. Not to mentions fairly generous affirmative action programs organised by Mahathir.

Still the data shows that it is possible for a low IQ population to get to a middling standard of living by good political organization, hard study, good work habits etc. Whether it all goes pear-shaped the moment Mahatihir quits the scene remains to be seen.

I am persuaded by Steve Sailer that the recent achievements of the PRC show that, under conditions of normality, a high native IQ can work its inexorable economic magic. Come to think of it, the intellectual and industrial achievements of the Orient long predate those of the Occident, which would indicate that Chinese mental endowments have been helping them along the whole time.

I tend to think that there is a kind of assmetry in the relationship bw intellectual endowments and sociological environment (with major effects on industrial embodiments).

A population with a high value native IQ might be able to overcome the difficulties thrown at it by a bad social system (eg Jews in Medieveal Europe). But a bad social system might well “throw a spanner into the works” of a population with a low value native IQ (eg Arabs in modern Mesopotamia). With the right leaders and organization these peoples might nonetheless be capable of significant social progress towards a knowledge-based Open Society.

So we must not give up hope for progress on the part of low IQ nations. But neither can we afford to ignore that aspect of their performance.

Sorry, meant to say some 90% of whites and 90% of blacks overlap. Hardest thing in the world is to edit your own writing.

correction: distribution
The argument is what iq means, not its racial distribution which doesn’t change much from continent to continent.

Anyone ever looked at research on the effects of changes in compulsory schooling laws on wages? If so, perhaps you noticed that they find a quite large effect, suggesting these policies at least had fairly high returns (not necessarily social, but the original post didn’t seem to distinguish between private and social so I won’t either). And the most obvious way there could be such a large effect is if the people who would have dropped out – in the interpretation of many commentators here, those of low IQ – had a really big increase in their wages precisely because they were forced to stay in school longer.

Go look have a look and tell me that it’s all just about correlations between IQ and selection into different levels of education, and that government education policy is a waste of time. (A couple of names to google if you care to look at the research: Josh Angrist and Alan Krueger; Phil Oreopoulos)

Tell me, does anyone have any arguments to offer against forced wealth-transfer between groups (such as races)? Can anyone explain why, in a manner that doesn’t require immoral practices and non-representative government, a successful group should be forced to carry an unsuccessful one?

Doesn’t anyone find the reasoning behind forced integration and the abrogation of freedom of association totally undermined by the IQ gap?

Can anyone explain the advantages incurred by the successful groups in egalitarian democracy (i.e., wealth transfer and affirmitive action regimes) without resorting to the threat of aggression by unsuccessful ones?

How much do parents matter?

Bernard Yomtov writes:
“Parental income is highly correlated with the IQ of the parents, some of which the children inherit, so we’re chasing our [tails] there.”

======—————
It’s easy to find out if parental income matters all by itself, independent of genetics. Our society randomly assigns children to families all the time, (almost) independently of genetics: It’s called adoption.

So, do adopted kids end up more like their adoptive parents or their biological parents? No contest:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/nature_nurture_.html

Biological parents, all the way. There are a large number of studies on this question of how adoption changes life chances, and they all point in the same direction: Birth parents generally matter more than adoptive parents.

That’s the great thing about good social science: It can keep us from chasing our tails.

from mstanley

But I for one would rather be a white male with a genetic IQ endowment of 95, born to a wealthy suburban family in a good school district, than a black male with a 125 IQ genetic endowment born within a poor broken home in a ghetto. That may be the difference most relevant for social policy, and those differences are pretty darn observable.

But now we are back to Caplan’s original point: How expensive is it to change those differences so they matter?

I am not so sure which of the two I’d rather be, but here’s a more telling example. Children of black households earning more than $70,000 a year end up with lower average SAT scores than Asian-American kids from households earning less than $20,000. Since those numbers don’t correct for other variables but it’s unlikely that families earning over $70,000 a year don’t have other nice advantages — i.e. they’re unlikely to be living in the poorest sections of South Chicago — it puts limits on what realistic interventions can accomplish.

I don’t see why a reasonable hypothesis that says the following isn’t true — aside from micro-nutrients and minimial medical care, it’s unlikely that most of the standard interventions undertaken at great cost (including busing, remedial learning, smaller class size, better paid teachers, affirmative action, esteem-enhancing programs ) will do much to close the performance gap on standardized tests of groups (not races, mind you) with widely differing, measured iq. Perhaps, if we correct for everything, I wouldn’t be suprised if it would cost as much as $25,000 per pupil or more per annum to make improvements of as little as 3 or 4 iq points over their lifetimes.

Assuming for the sake of argument that is true, what further room is there for intervention?

Do we have any strong evidence that this is not the case [by correcting the biases in studies that completely ignore iq]? That is surely another way of putting Bryan’s challenge.

“But I for one would rather be a white male with a genetic IQ endowment of 95, born to a wealthy suburban family in a good school district, than a black male with a 125 IQ genetic endowment born within a poor broken home in a ghetto.”
Point taken, however the stakes in this argument do not center on the individual, but on the group. The fact is, 125 iq is far more rare among blacks than among non-blacks, in any socio/economic/student group, even in universities; and if you believe the “racist” genetic argument, this is not going to change. Many believe that it is somebody’s fault if the average black IQ is below the white average, or it is due to laziness or cultural attitudes. The genetic argument maintains it is no one’s fault, it is just a biological fact. Do you really think this is easily discussed among polite people? Would you feel comfortable bringing in up in a school meeting? Or anywhere? Unless you are eager for a law suit, you’d better be careful.
Black FedEx employees are now suing because too few of them pass the test to be become higher level managers, this despite the commitment of FedEx to diversity. If anything, blacks and Hispanics, 40% of the employees, are over-represented. The lawyer taking the case has actually said, “They [FedEx] know few blacks and Hispanics pass they test, but they haven’t changed the test.”
Like I said–the stakes are high.
It’s stuff like that that make you know IQ is still taboo.

The genetic argument maintains it is no one’s fault, it is just a biological fact.

It is no one’s fault… until we are able to directly change genetics to significantly enhance IQ. At that point, things become a lot murkier. If, at that point, we allow social forces similar to that which has hampered Europe’s adoption of genetically modified foods get in the way of providing everyone access to voluntary genetic engineering, despite knowing how to counter such social forces, we may deserve some blame for perpetuating inequality.

It’s hard to accurately predict when we will reach that point, of course; I suspect it will be within the next 30 years, but I recognize Steven Pinker is a lot more knowledgeable than me and he’s on the record as saying he’d be very surprised to see it within his lifetime (then again, that was before Gregory Cochran’s and Bruce Lahn’s papers identifying strong candidates for racially unequally distributed intelligence-enhancing genes were published). I believe it’s important that we discuss what we should do when that day does arrive, however.

The real problem is the threat of ostracism or lawsuit.

The fact that Larry Summers can be pilloried for making relatively modest comments (that may or may not prove to be correct) that are well within range of existing science is testimony to how sick the current state of debate is.

I suspect that with respect to testing, the problems of iq are made worse by single mothers, poor socialization, and an anti-intellectual culture in the underclass.

But until discussion becomes more open, all polite research must tiptoe around iq or mention it ONLY in contexts where it can be shown to be minor.

To take only one example: Can anyone doubt if Leavitt of Freakonomics had a study where ONLY iq explained differences in income or achievement, he would be pilloried for it even if no other result were viable? That this is an unlikely research outcome is unimportant. What is relevant is that researchers know that certain findings are more likely to be attacked no matter how carefully done and that this leads to self-censorship on a massive scale.

Isn’t there a sort of “reverse free rider” effect here? Government interventions that improve general health or offer better or cheaper schooling (assuming govts ever really do that!) would seem to help high-IQ kids more than those with lower IQs. So perhaps Head Start, for example, if it did have a positive effect, would increase the “IQ gap”, not decrease it. Same for nutrition and “cultural enrichment” programs. You can spend all the money you want on free libraries but you won’t help kids who are too cognitively deprived to be able to read. Murray and Herrnstein’s major point in The Bell Curve was that as society becomes more and more complex and technical, innate IQ differences will create more and more stratification even if you leave race out of the analysis. Uh oh. I’m starting to sound like Sailer!

Steve,

Read your article. Interesting and thought provoking. But I’ve got to ask one question.

You say you want to help the left half of the bell curve – to what end?

The increasing prosperity of the right half folks is not hurting those on the left, it is helping them. Their standard of living is getting better, not worse. Their numbers and lifespans are increasing. If something is wrong, it is that their pride is taking a hit from the expanding difference between their standard of living and that of those on the right.

So does making someone a beggar in addition to being a “leftie” improve that person’s pride? And if for the sake of argument that you say it does, why mess with a system that works to improve everyone’s standard of living, to bolster the pride of lefties, at risk of ending up with a system that no longer improves everyone’s standard of living?

Your points are well made. But I think we are nonetheless, back at square one.

Just to comment on a few themes here:

1) A few people here have suggested that education can increase IQ. It can, but only temporarily. This is an important prediction of the Dickens-Flynn model, and it is quite consistent with the evidence: heritability of IQ increases with age. The IQ improvements due to education decay into adulthood. Dickens-Flynn basically says there is no magic bullet for increasing IQ over its heritable component. cognitive skills, once increased, must be maintained. Taking a college math class may increase IQ temporarily, but it would have a minimal effect on average IQ over adult populations. More education and higher spending on education do not explain the Flynn effect. There’s no clear rationale for “early intervention” as an effective instrument for increasing IQ.

2) Nutrition may be an exception to the above observation, but maybe not. Nutrition may also have to be maintained to prevent its IQ effects from decaying.

3) Controlling for a variety of Socio-Economic variables doesn’t markedly reduce coefficients on either education or IQ measures when it comes to their effect on income, civic behavior, or scientific beleifs — at least not in the General Social Survey. The effects of both education and IQ on a variety of variables is pretty darn robust.

Spencer and Terry
Black and white normals substantially overlap. Most smart people are white, not that most white people are smart.
Utro
An asian family with a high IQ kid and a low income is an English As A Second Language family, where the income is low because they do not speak English well enough to get a good job. Their income in the old country in Asia was almost certainly upper middle class, $70,000 or equivalent.
My grandfather was only a chauffer but his father back in Austria-Hungary was the owner of a cobbler shop and the mayor of his village. He took a whopping social status reduction to come to America for his children’s sake, and it was the right decision. Mom went to Radcliffe, where she met Dad when he was at Harvard.

mstanley says:

“But I for one would rather be a white male with a genetic IQ endowment of 95, born to a wealthy suburban family in a good school district, than a black male with a 125 IQ genetic endowment born within a poor broken home in a ghetto.”

You’re kidding – I’d take the higher IQ in a heartbeat. Then I could go to college AND get laid.

so what enviromental changes have suggested a IQ incease.

and other reasons why IQ seems to be increaseing by each generation.

why is IQ increasing by each generation?