Poor people aren't necessarily genetically less academically able. They generally have a weaker academic nurturing at home and often in school, which leads to lower developed ability. This is not controversial. What's controversial is how much and what kind of support they deserve from society to overcome the disadvantage in environment.

> What's controversial is how much and what kind of support they deserve from society to overcome the disadvantage in environment.

I think calling that controversial is taking a side. We're talking about educating children, who are innocent, and greatly increasing the welfare and productivity of society.

Observing that there are sides is not taking one. They weren't even saying both sides have valid arguments, merely that people will argue about it.

It's more complicated than that: One side's claim is that it's controversial.

How do we handle that? Perhaps we require them to present a strong argument for why it's controversial.

If people argue over it, then it's controvercial. It doesn't matter if you think it should be or not. It doesn't matter how valid you think any of the arguments are.

That's one side's argument. You can argue with anything, and then it's 'controversial'. Round Earth vs flat? Controversial! Climate change? Controversial! Basic economics? Human rights? Freedom?

If there are two big sides arguing then that is the definition of controversial. Uncontroversial means there is no big opposition to it.

> You can argue with anything, and then it's 'controversial'.

Yes, that is the definition of the word. I am not sure why you try to define it as something else, something being controversial just means people don't agree about it.

Taking a side? I live in Portland. We passed a tax to make preschool free for all children. Rich people fought it tooth and fucking nail. This one thing that can have such a huge positive outcome was wildly controversial. It passed but man they are still fighting to repeal it. So calling it taking is side is wildly ignorant of the facts. And this is in bright blue Portland, not some red state educational desert.

Out of curiosity, why do they fight ? Is it because they don’t want to pay for it, and will put their kids in non free pre schools anyway ? ( I’m from Europe so the idea of fighting against free pre school for everyone sounds a bit odd )

They don’t want to pay another 1.5% tax. I guess if you’re kinda rich but not super rich you can’t avoid taxes the way super rich do. So this just pisses them off because they are just upset with taxes. I dunno if I made that much money seems like it wouldn’t be that big of a deal but I’ll never know. lol. It is just one city doing it and for just that city. I can see their point and maybe if the tax was smaller and applied to everyone we could all contribute but with the cost of living so high and how helpful preschool is for working families … people just don’t seem to like to help strangers that are worse off in America. It’s Everyman for themselves and their immediate family.

We'd have to find surveys to know that. One possibility is that it's reactionary politics: they are against liberals and attack them in every way possible. For example, being against car electrificiation, climate change as a fact, Covid vaccines, wearing masks, DEI, etc. It is the fundamental ideology of the right wing, it seems.

There's some evidence that preschool improves children's educational outcomes in the short to medium term, but actually is negligible or even harmful in the long term.

A study of Tennessee's pre-k program showed that students who went to pre-k outperformed students who didn't in first grade, but by sixth grade, they performed worse.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn2141

This article says more research is necessary and I cannot read their methods so it is a bit disinegous to cite this as some kind of proof. Especially when the article says early education programs vary in content. Tennessee has one of the worst school systems in the US, #41:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho...

And in terms of content, Tennessee bans the teaching of slavery, so I’d be suspicious of any study related to education done there:

https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2021/10/05/how-tenn...

Tennessee was the most stark example, but not the only one. And the fact that education is often sub-standard isn't a good case for more of it.

The point: it isn't blindly obvious that devoting even more of our children's lives to an education institution is necessarily best for them, in all cases.

In a society that leans more towards merit, where the highest compensated jobs correlate with higher IQ and analytical reasoning ability, then incomes and SAT scores will correlate.

That said there are some total dumb fuck rich kids, and absolute genius poor kids. Just because there is correlation shouldn’t imply anyone is destined anywhere.

> the highest compensated jobs correlate with higher IQ and analytical reasoning ability

Is there evidence of that?

There is evidence that it correlates with family wealth. Just consider legacy admissions into high-status schools, jobs, etc.

But we're distinctly not in a society that leans more towards merit.

From what I can see, the highest compensated jobs go to morally and ethically bankrupt raging narcisists, successfully masking psychopaths, and spineless puppets for the previous two categories.

There's a lot of it about.

(And IQ is not a particularly useful metric of overally intelligence. It's a useful metric of measuring how people perform on a common set of problems).

I don't find it too surprising that people who are smarter make more money.

It’s household income of the household they grew up in. Take 10k wealthy kids and swap them with 10k poor kids and you’ll see a massive difference compared to another 20k control

Did someone actually do this experiment? Maybe there’s some data from the London Blitz?

Should be something in the form of natural experiments from adoptions, twin studies, etc.

There absolutely have been twin studies that showed IQ (and therefore income) is largely heritable.

With all else being equal, I'm willing to believe that more intelligence would lead to greater income. But if you're claiming that IQ is the sole/main predictor for income that'd be a hard [citation needed] in my opinion.

In fact I recall a study (I saw on HN I believe) that showed that IQ is only correlated up to a certain value (not very high, I.e. Lower upper middle class IIRC) but then becomes quite uncorrelated. This certainly matches my anecdotal evidence that most of the rich kids during school were not very smart. The smart ones were typically the kids from academic middle class households.

Here is a different study (I am certain I read a different one) with similar results https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/442975-do-you-make-much-...

Indeed, twin studies form the strongest leg of Bryan Caplan's argument in support of the signalling hypothesis in his book The Case Against Education, which I highly recommend anyone trying to refute it read and try to debunk. If you want an itemized list of citations this is where I'd start.

The very title of the book makes it sound like a propaganda piece, it self-selects for readers who already want to believe it. I'll take a pass.

Hey, it's a free country. :) When I imagine other hypothetical books titled things like The Case Against Capitalism, The Case Against Monogamy, or The Case Against Atheism, though, I note that I don't get an "insider propaganda" vibe from any of them, even though I would probably strongly dislike what they have to say.

The thing is that education is important. Some of it is signalling, but not all of it is useless.

There was a time when most people couldn’t read or do basic algebra and you don’t want to go back to this.

Even a dumb kid can understand compound interest and absolutely has to in order to thrive in our society.

Dr. Caplan in fact does cover this point in TCAE, of course. He comes to conclude that only about 70-80% of the effect of education is attributable to signalling. A solid 20-30% still looks like good old fashioned human capital improvement, and it is largely concentrated around the basic primary education skills of reading and arithmetic. (He even has the spreadsheets where he calculated all this out online, and he has talked before about how sad he is nobody has ever tried to fiddle with the actual numbers.)

Probably not actual "2a+4=12, how much is a?" style basic algebra, though. In the United States, which is about lower-middle of the pack on PISA, about 1 in 3 adults would struggle with that level of algebra according to the PIIAC, to say nothing of e.g. the actual compound interest equation, even if the rough idea makes sense.

That's not "most people", but it's definitely "a plurality" of people. And yet life is pretty great!

To your last point: I think that the current threat to American democracy is partially caused by a lack of education.

There is no reason that anti-wokeism had to come with totalitarian tendencies.

My last point is that life in America is pretty great. You don't deny this, to your credit. But I don't see why that would link to "American democracy is threatened". If anything I would expect the opposite to be true.

"There's a threat to American democracy" seems like a strong claim to me by itself, let alone "There's a threat to American democracy partially because of its education quality." But, I'm an American myself, and I don't want to play inside baseball with how likely that actually seems to me.

Let's instead take Germany, where you yourself seem to be located. Germany has PISA scores quite close to the US's own, maybe slightly above or below depending on which recent year you look at.

If poor education leads to collapse, and if the two countries are about equal in their poor education, you should then be willing to accept, say, a 1 to 20 bet that German democracy will itself self-immolate in, say, 15 years. But, if poor education doesn't justify even a 5% risk of this happening in Germany, then I don't see why I would think it's a relevant factor in predicting the collapse of democracy in another country with a much longer uninterrupted democratic tradition.

(You could of course argue "No, comparisons based on PISA scores are misleading, actually there's robust pro-totalitarian brainwashing happening in US high schools that doesn't happen in German gymnasiums", or something, but (a) that's a much more precise claim than merely "US education is bad", (b) that seems really unlikely to me given I've never actually met or had an openly pro-fascist teacher at any level, and (c) even if it was true, the signalling hypothesis would still suggest any attempts at this just wouldn't matter very much by the time these kids are 25 or so.)

> say, a 1 to 20 bet that German democracy will itself self-immolate in, say, 15 years.

I don’t see why it matters where I am located, but if we must talk about Germany then yes, I would say the odds are higher than that actually.

Fascinating. I'll check back in with this HN account in 2040 then just for kicks.

I like HN because you can have interesting discussions, and because people usually argue their points.

I think this is the first time that someone has responded to me in such a mean-spirited way, while providing no substantive response.

I would prefer if you left this forum.

There's nothing mean-spirited about asking people to put rough numbers to their beliefs, even approximately. But I do think most people would be genuinely surprised to hear you think there's over a 5% chance Germany the Western democracy won't exist in a generation. If it does happen I need to remember to revisit a lot of things about how I myself understand the world.

I for one like books which are willing to explicitly make a controversial point; it makes for much more interesting reading, even if I remain in disagreement throughout.

I would prefer books to make correct points, such as “education is really important, but some education is not really useful except for signalling”

Children’s intelligence is strongly correlated with parental intelligence, probably due to both nature and nurture.

Please supply sources for this outrageous claim.

Probably more accurate to say "genetics, shared environment, and non-shared environment". Modern evidence heavily weights (favors? leans towards?) the environments.

> I don't find it too surprising that people who are smarter make more money.

Yeah, being smart definitely helps with making money, but honestly, that bar’s not as high as people think. There’s a bunch of other stuff that matters too, like being likable and humble. But if we're being real, you’ll probably get richer with cunning and greed. And history is pretty clear, the more opportunistic ones tend to stack higher piles. Money is cruel, man.

ish, yeah, but when you go work at a job it seems like half the people there are because they're smart and half are they're because they're upper-class/wealthy background, and some are there because they worked really hard, and a few are there by accident. at a daily experience level it's very clearly more complicated than smart=money; it's just one weight out of many.

those with success like the idea of meritocracy because it means they deserve it, makes it easier to deal with the injustices of the world. very very rarely will someone at the top of their field say "i was lucky"

None of the parent comment is about being smarter, that's the core disconnect.

> The thing that correlates highest with SAT score is household income.

This doesn't even come close to being true.

There are plenty of stories of people of modest means who found opportunities through standardized tests. I'll call out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb

who was a Marine Officer, Journalist, Novelist and U.S. Senator. This article points out that wealthier people do better on the SAT

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/11/new-study-fin...

and also points out that wealthier people also do better on everything else. Standardized tests get talked about because they're visible, but there are all sorts of things that aren't visible such as many forms of opportunity hoarding (wealthy parents will push harder to get their kids into gifted programs, can afford to get kids out of toxic environments where they get bullied, can put use the carrot and stick on teachers to get boost their kids GPAs) etc. For example there is a low level of awareness that certain sports like Polo or Lacrosse at the Ivy League privilege rich kids because they are more likely to play that sport in school.

Thing is, everybody knows the SATs are important, but there are 100x extracurricular things you can do that wealthy people know about and poor people don't that get only a small amount of criticism because they're invisible.

You’ll need to cite your sources because this has been studied and it seems to be!

Come on. There are no sources that would report this. It makes as much sense as claiming that "as everyone knows, the greatest contributor to tidal pull is the odor of the moon as its cheese rots, which attracts plankton on the ocean's surface". And it has as much scientific backing. Where in the heck are you getting your "facts" from?

Here, from a book chapter subtitled "The case for eliminating the SAT and ACT at the University of California":

    Table 1.1. Correlation of socioeconomic factors with SAT/ACT scores and High School GPA
    +--------------------+---------------+------------------------------------------------+
    |                    | Family Income | Parents' Education | Underrepresented Minority |
    +--------------------+---------------+------------------------------------------------+
    |    SAT/ACT scores  |      0.36     |        0.45        |          -0.38            |
    +--------------------+---------------+------------------------------------------------+

Of the three factors they bothered to look at, family income had the lowest correlation, just below a poor approximation of race and very far below parental education.

( https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/geiser_chapter... )

I looked at that table and immediately thought, "Those are pretty solid correlation values", so I was confused by the point you were making.

I also read the page in the PDF you linked that was the source of the table and became more confused, because it very clearly writes out that:

>What this means is that 40% of the variation in students’ SAT/ACT scores is attributable to differences in socioeconomic circumstance.

I think you are either:

1. Misunderstanding correlation coefficients. Correlation coefficients range from -1 to +1, implying a 100% negative or positive correlation. 0.4 and -0.4 are moderately positive and negative correlation values. That table is saying that if you are an underrepresented minority, you are expected to do 40% worse on the SAT/ACT.

2. Quibbling over the "thing that correlates highest with SAT score" claim, because you feel like 0.4 is not high enough of a number. The only factors with higher correlation values than 0.4 in SAT/ACT scores would be stuff like "Was the student currently injured?" or "Did the student make it to the testing center?"

> I looked at that table and immediately thought, "Those are pretty solid correlation values", so I was confused by the point you were making.

They said "highest", not "solid". Family income isn't the highest factor there.

Of course if having a brain would be on the table there would be no contest. Being the highest correlation in a rather arbitrary list is not a valid qualifier for being a good correlation.

> Of course if having a brain would be on the table there would be no contest.

Is that really what you think? In reality, the possession of a brain can't have any correlation with SAT scores at all, because there is zero variance in the trait.

> That table is saying that if you are an underrepresented minority, you are expected to do 40% worse on the SAT/ACT.

This is separate from the main point, but "underrepresented" minorities are defined by their lower performance on the SAT, so 0.4 isn't impressive at all for that cell.

Also, you've made a gross mathematical error; "you are expected to do 40% worse on the test" is a statement about the effect size, not the correlation.

And parental education, race, and household income are also all correlated with one another... And the paper you cited makes the point that the correlation between socioeconomic background and test scores has increased substantially since 1995. This is not the gotcha that you think it is.

> And parental education, race, and household income are also all correlated with one another...

That's true.

> This is not the gotcha that you think it is.

But your point makes the guy I'm responding to look much worse. After controlling for parental education, the effect of parental income is radically diminished. Most of that 0.36 correlation is just confounding. Parental education isn't even a great indicator itself; it's a proxy for intelligence. It's just a much better proxy than parental income is.

> The thing that correlates highest with SAT score is household income.

Something like 25% of students at Harvard had a learning disability, one of the highest rates in any school in the nation. Do you think that's real disabilities, or their parents know doctors to give the diagnosis, admissions coaches to tell them to get one, etc. With the learning disability the student gets unlimited time on the SAT and can plug and chug all the math answers instead of having to use heuristics of eliminating etc. On the reading comprehension they can read the passage five times over. On writing they can turn in their 8th draft.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleges-bend-the-rules-for-mor...

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/h...

I grew up in one of those small hometowns that sends a lot of people to the close by Ivy League school.

It was an open secret that getting a learning disabilities diagnosis is a great SAT booster. Also makes you eligible for more time on regular school exams and you can use it to later get more on the LSATs (not sure about other grad level exams, but I am sure it’s similar)

You missed the 3rd option which is that (most) of the disabilities are real but the accommodations we have massively overcorrect and opens up new strategies that weren't possible when you're given intentionally less time than you need. So you get students who come from an environment outside the "normal" gifted path of private college prep schools who come out of nowhere and score amazingly well. That combo sounds like catnip to an admissions office.

I scored really well on my tests, a fact I credit mostly to my adhd (I did not have accommodations, brain goes burr under time crunch), so I have every incentive defend the current system but looking back I genuinely don't understand what we're actually testing for. Perform! Under pressure! In a completely different environment than you're used to, while proctors watch you like a hawk. Your whole future rides on this! is not how I would describe a wholistic assessment.

> In a completely different environment than you're used to, while proctors watch you like a hawk. Your whole future rides on this! is not how I would describe a wholistic assessment.

I would wager that a large portion of Harvard admitted students did not in fact have this as an unfamiliar environment for the first time, but had like a whole year of test prep and simulated tests and took the tests multiple times if they weren't going to get in with their initial result, which could be a money barrier for others.

> Unless you are a social Darwinist who believe the poor are genetically worse…

This is guaranteed to be a strong factor, there's plenty of evidence on IQ heritability and correlation with income.

Just because it doesn't predict the outcome fully doesn't mean it's insignificant.

I will guarantee that you came from a rich family, I have plenty of evidence. Your attitude is strongly correlated with the arrogance of generational wealth.

Please don’t ask me to cite sources, I know exactly what I’m talking about.

If you feel that I’m arguing in bad faith, please consider not responding and instead reflecting on why you feel the way that you do about this topic.

“Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. Financial distress, such as problems paying bills, going bankrupt or reaching credit card limits, is related to IQ scores not linearly but instead in a quadratic relationship. This means higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

Notice how I cited a source, that’s intelligence. Not just decided I was wealthy and therefore inherently smarter. That’s ignorance.

Your own source says

>Previous research, discussed below, has investigated the relationship between intelligence and income and found individuals with higher IQ test scores have higher income.

and my comment says

>there's plenty of evidence on IQ heritability and correlation with income.

>Notice how I cited a source, that’s intelligence. Not just decided I was wealthy and therefore inherently smarter. That’s ignorance.

Huh?

Heritability doesn't mean "genetically determined". This is probably the most common message board misconceptions about IQ. The number of fingers on your hands has low heritability; whether or not you wear lipstick has high heritability.

You have to understand what the metric means in order to deploy it in an argument.

It's also significantly genetically determined (twin studies) so in this case I meant genetic heritability.

Also for some reason people seem to think I'm making a comment about high IQ and elitism.

I think low IQ is far more important for poverty discussion. Like sub 80 IQ is a significant percentage of population while being close to or having a mental disability. Sub 100 kind of makes it hard to have a well paying job in today's economy.

And not only is genetic factor big here but also having low IQ/poor parents means your environment will likely have a negative impact on your cognitive development.

No, that's not how this works. You can't just say "twin study" and dispel the environment(s), and, in fact, GWAS is pushing things in the opposite direction (people will argue by how much, but the direction is clear).

Split twins strongly backs genetic component, and heritability is also significant. There's nothing to dispell, environment does seem to be a factor in negative direction, so that's undoubtedly a big factor as well. But low IQ people having low IQ children is going to explain a lot of it - no need to be a "social darwinists" to believe that.

Split twins does the opposite: separated twins IQ-test outcomes track the SES of the families they go to. But "twin studies" is science at the level of "The Bell Curve", which is 30 years old.

At this point, you kind of have to want IQ to be genetically determined (in any meaningful amount) to believe it is.

> Split twins does the opposite: separated twins IQ-test outcomes track the SES of the families they go to.

Consider me convinced if you can source this - I'm not finding anything but opposite - that they strongly correlate the older they get (IQ test).

Read Turkheimer.

Something more specific ? Couldn't find anything directly saying what you're claiming here.

I was interested if my info was out of date so I found this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188692... which basically again confirms genetic IQ factor in adults is major. Separated twins correlate, siblings corelate less and virtual twins (same age unrelated siblings) corelate way less.

Anyway I'm no expert on this, but I've heard this view from multiple credible sources and the more I dig in the more it seems supported.

What were those credible sources?

First one that comes to mind is The Blank Slate from Pinker, but I have read that like 15 years ago. But it did shape my view on the subject and I have seen this topic come up many times since.

I don't remember anyone disputing strong genetic component of IQ, other than people uncomfortable with implications. And I am not even that interested in the social implications, but more practical issues like IQ improvement (basically 0 impact from what I have seen other than being physically fit/exercising), implications on parenting (you cant imprint your desired outcomes on your children and need to play to their innate interests and strengths/weaknesses), etc.

I'm sorry, but this is a persistent myth about this space. Lots of research is done every year on the genetic components of behavior and cognition. The field doesn't see it as a yes/no question; there are questions about how far you can get with classic twin studies vs large-scale GWAS, questions about the malleability of intelligence, questions about the validity of IQ tests (see things like test-test reliability), questions about the meaningfulness of psychometric "g", all actively studied.

Again you can just go read Turkheimer's Vox piece for an refutation of your "basically zero impact" thing.

My big thing here though isn't to convince you that you're wrong about your belief that intelligence is innate and fixed. Rather, it's that you opened this thread with a citation to heritability research, and your usage of "heritability" was broken and misleading. With that cleared up, I don't think we need to drag this out.

Just a reminder about GP's original comment:

> This is guaranteed to be a strong factor, there's plenty of evidence on IQ heritability and correlation with income.

> Just because it doesn't predict the outcome fully doesn't mean it's insignificant.

I'm just trying to figure out what your argument was, since it looks like you're trying to convince GP of what they already believed. Income isn't genetic after all.

You've clipped out the question that comment replies to, which was about the genetic determinism of IQ.

Turkenheimer: https://web.archive.org/web/20191231135901/http://pdfs.seman...

> Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.

[....]

> In the low-SES group, the intraclass correlation was .63 for DZ twins and .68 for MZ twins, consistent with h2 of .10 and c2 of .58; for the high-SES group, the DZ twin correlation was .51 and the MZ twin correlation was .87, consistent with h2 of .72 and c2 of .15.

[...]

> In the fractious history of scientific investigations of the heritability of intelligence, the effects of poverty, and the relations between them, there has been only one contention with which everyone could agree: Additive models of linear and independent contributions of genes and environment to variation in intelligence cannot do justice to the complexity of the development of intelligence in children. Only recently have statistical models and computational capacity advanced to the point that less simplistic models can actually be fit. Although there is much that remains to be understood, our study and the ones that have preceded it have begun to converge on the hypothesis that the developmental forces at work in poor environments are qualitatively different from those at work in adequate ones. Clarification of the nature of these differences promises to be a fascinating, and hopefully unifying, subject for future investigation.

The Bell Curve is a great book that is unfortunately maligned by people that dislike what it says but all too often have no actual arguments against what it says.

Separated twin studies show conclusively that IQ is (partially) genetically determined as does, yknow, all common experience and intuition.

Can you name three people who practice in this field (Turkheimer, who I named upthread, is a harsh critic of the book and a giant in this field) who agree with your take here?

> whether or not you wear lipstick has high heritability.

Think about this example. The genetic factor here is massive, much higher than anyone is claiming for IQ. Can you imagine how hopelessly lost you would be if your analysis of lipstick distribution in the population focused on its heritability and link to genetics?

An even bigger issue you immediately run into in these conversations: someone will say "I don't mean heritability that way, I mean genetic heritability". Which, whatever, except: now you've discarded all the science. The papers you'd draw these numbers from are referring to heritability in its technical sense, not in some message board sense.

Yes. I mean, either you're talking about statistical properties of a population or you're talking about something else. These discussions usually devolve into "something else" almost immediately.

I mean I still fail to see how comparing these three scenarios

- genetic twins separated at birth

- genetic siblings raised in same household

- genetically unrelated same age siblings adopted in the same household

are teasing out anything but an underlying genetic component and reproducing in studies

You can have intuitions about any of these issues, but you can't use heritability research as evidence for them without understanding the technical meaning of "heritability". That's all that's being said here.

How is anything you just wrote a counterargument to the idea that higher education is about signaling more than about learning?

Signaling that you came from a wealthy family is still signaling. And household income itself may very well be correlated with economically valuable skills developed through childhood that would benefit from signaling in higher ed—that wouldn't make income inequality morally just, but it would make it a positive feedback loop, which is pretty much what we observe.

If anything the idea that higher ed is more about signaling than learning is supported by the idea that the benchmarks we use are correlated more strongly with pre-higher-ed socioeconomic background than with the school you go to. If higher ed were effective at teaching the skills in question we'd see more of a leveling effect than we do.

Perhaps there are different groups of wealthy people with different views on these things?

In my experience wealthy families where the parents are doctors, university professors, and in technology tend to want to transmit a genuine love of learning to their children, as they feel learning and education has done well for them.

On the other hand - my friends are merely millionaires, preparing their children to work for a living. Perhaps there are higher levels of wealth where your kids will never need to work, and the ultimate flex is your kid taking a degree in art history and dropping out half way through because daddy won't mind.

> The thing that correlates highest with SAT score is household income.

1. Smart person makes lots of money

2. Smart person has children

3. Smart person's children are likely to be smarter, and guaranteed to have more money

Sounds about right to me

What is 'smart'?

“likely to be smarter”

If you are one of them, clearly not

The argument that schooling is signalling wasn't as true in the past as it is now. In the past (think mid-20th century USA), everyone did not have ubiquitous, instantaneous, essentially-free, 24/7 access to more or less all human knowledge ever recorded, from more or less anywhere on the planet, using a rectangle that fits inside your pocket. Back then, information was comparatively scarce, so stockpiles of information had (again, compared to today) much more value to someone who was strictly interested in the information.

These days, people who want an education strictly for the information don't have to put up with any of the crap higher educational institutions drag their victims through in order to procure that information.

Anecdata: me. Last year I had a gross individual income that placed me within the top 1% of US income earners. After a little under a decade at a MAG7 company, my side project, starting a quantitative hedge fund, has progressed to the point of providing me with more income than my MAG7 employer was. All of my tech and finance skills were obtained for free online.

This is the same me who did not even take the SAT, who dropped out of a public community college, who's highschool GPA was likely in the low 2's, but even that was inflated.

I'm also debt-free and financially independent before 30. I went to school with some kids who made it into ivy leagues. Most of them are earning high five or low six figures, many still have student loan debt.

Also, make no mistake - the loudest proponents of higher education feel the same way about the uneducated as the social darwinists do about the poor, as well as talking to and treating the uneducated about as well as social darwinists do the poor. There's no moral superiority here, they're both priests of delusional, artificially constructed social hierarchies designed for the belittling, ostracization, and exclusion of others.

Correlation does not prove causation, let alone the direction of causation.

Also, one might get the impression from your reasoning that you find that having money makes you smarter.