Because (on average) privilege kids eventually become soft, entitled, no-good jerks quite soon as generations pass. And even their education can (and often is) paid for. So much for merit. Many have had the "privilege" to witness the "intellectual capacity" of kids of the privileged classes in action...
To quote an article I've read:
The Chinese have a saying: “Wealth does not pass three
generations.” But it’s not unique to China; the same
sentiment is expressed across multiple cultures, from
Japan (“rice paddies to rice paddies in three
generations”), to Scotland (“the father buys, the son
builds, the grandchild begs”) to even here in the U.S.
(“shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”).We don't know where brilliance will come from. We do know that high stress levels early in life are detrimental to achieving it, though. By not offering high quality, low stress education to all children, we are probably leaving a lot of creativity and innovation on the table.
A good example of such a phenomenon that succeeded would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan, however, there are far more examples of brilliance rising from blue collar/impovershed beginnings.
If we instead just leave education to the whims of wealth access, then it should be pretty obvious that while education would be better for people who are wealthy, it wouldn't guarantee that it would be effective for generating the most competent people possible, since the input was limited by wealth.
This is a question of whether or not circumstances and culture in upbringing can have an effect on merit. If they do, and you are operating a business with the goal of maximizing success, then rationally it is valid to use culture as a proxy for merit.
That being said, it's been my impression for a while that IQ scores at least are mostly irrelevant, and not well correlated with economic performance. Is that a mistaken impression? I fully agree with the rest of the factors you bring up as positive influences, it's just the connection to IQ that I have a concern with.
I would argue, also, that the "equal competence" premise could be better stated as "that we all have an approximately equal potential for competence". I'm curious if you think this alternate premise would also be bad for business and society?
Thanks for prompting me to challenge my own assumptions and biases, btw
100 would be an IQ of an average person.
130 is a rather smart person. Remember that guy in your class who could solve the problem in his head before it was written on the blackboard? That's probably him.
IQ of 85 is the lower limits for getting into the US army.
IQ of 70 is the official definition of being mentally retarded.
Does being smart correlate with economic success? Yes, up to some extent. Being too smart? Well, there's a chance most people around simply won't understand you, which is rarely good for career advancement.
> each point increase in IQ test scores raises income by between $234 and $616 per year after holding a variety of factors constant
From: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028960...
I appreciate the information!
No one wants to hear it, and with good reason, but there is simply no proof of this, and substantial evidence to the contrary. We know intelligence is strongly heritable, for example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Life is unfair. But our modern academic institutions are beating around this bush, I think because on a base level, empathetic people are fearful of the consequences of scientific research that may effectively justify certain racist ideas. But that makes for bad science and, possibly, bad policy, if different people require different solutions to different problems. It also makes it hard for me to trust academia, because the bias is so entrenched.
I think you can boil it down to both IQ and culture as being the main drivers of economic success. Culture can be split further into ethnic cultural modifiers and socio-economic cultural modifiers/multipliers. You can do pretty well if you have positive points in 1 of 3 of these areas. We all start relatively equal but having one of these three modifiers can propel you to the top, with few exceptions.
I can't find a reference right this moment. Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot so it should be in 1 of his videos on Youtube.
It’s easy to imagine that people at the highest end simply weren’t available to be selected for the study.
If I'm summarizing correctly, the Terman survey includes a group of 856 boys and 672 girls born around 1910 and selected in 1921-1922 who were followed until 1991.
Chances of someone from this thousand people being among the highest end are indeed pretty small.
A few counterpoints to this:
* I don't dispute that markers of privilege are positively correlated with intelligence (as measured by IQ or whatever other metric). But there are other factors worth selecting for, like worth ethic, for which I could just as easily see the correlation going the opposite direction.
* My impression is that elitist selection processes select for culture first and foremost, and intelligence only incidentally. I bet the dumbest student at an Ivy League school is more likely to get an elite job than the smartest student at an unselective state school, even though the latter is smarter. (To some extent, this is a marker of efficiency on those employers' part, since it doesn't make sense to send recruiters to schools where only a tiny fraction of students are qualified. But I bet this would still be true if, for example, both students applied online.)
* Your claims are based on (and likely accurate for) averages within populations, but that's not the most relevant comparison for real-world selection processes. If you only consider people with bachelor's degrees, for example, you're comparing the top, say, 10% (based on some combination of intelligence and work ethic) of people from lower-class backgrounds to the top, say, 90% of people from privileged backgrounds. I don't think it's at all obvious that the latter population is more qualified than the former, but they're far more likely to get hired.
None of the studies I've seen have even considered whether a privileged background does translate to higher than average merit. And why wouldn't it? We already know household income is correlated with IQ, and growing up having access to better schools, better extracurriculars, less influence from crime, etc is likely, or at least possibly going to build a more competent child.
This field is hopelessly biased. These soft "scientists" start with the premise, that we are all equally competent and set out to prove that cultural factors simply get in the way of perception of merit. The irony is that these same people harp about workplace culture, with claims that "good" [PC] culture has positive effect on business outcomes - doesn't it follow that different home cultures will similarly effect adult outcomes? Why won't anyone with academic clout admit that the culture of your childhood effects how much you're likely to learn, how disciplined you're likely to be and, ultimately, how well you're going to function in a professional environment?
It's a conflation between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Frankly, is bad for business and bad for society.