Horatio Alger's IQ

One thing that always occurs to me when these race/IQ blowups occur is that this issue is kind of in the neighborhood of a different point that doesn't merely recapitulate the race science of yore, does seem to me to have real policy implications, and is really well-supported by the data. This is the fact that IQ test results are meaningfully predictive of various indicators of success in the United States and the main factors that influence how people score on these tests all happen in childhood or earlier (in the fetal environment, in the genes, etc.).

This then becomes one of several available lines of argument that the image of the United States as a magical place where hard work always pays off and the rewards go to those willing to put in the effort is wrong. What's more, the imagine of the United States as a fallen version of that magical place — a country that could become magical if we just improved urban high schools or adopted a better student loan system — is also wrong. Better high schools and better student loan systems are things worth doing on their own terms, but absolutely nothing one can do changes the fact that where people end up is substantially out of their hands.

I think people recognize this in unusual cases like sports. Obviously, NFL players and NBA players put in a lot of hard work and effort to get where they are. But at the same time, lots of people could never possibly make it no matter how hard they tried. Brendan Haywood is seven feet tall and you're not. Justine Henin joined Tennis Club Ciney when she was six years old — which is more-or-less necessary to become a huge pro tennis star. And though it's considerably more subtle than something like being an extreme outlier on the height distribution or having been in intense training since when you had baby teeth, the evidence suggests that a similar pattern holds up throughout the range of human activities. Effort and discipline matter a lot. But so do things you have no control over, from pure contingency to genetic attributes to childhood conditions.

The mass market version of the case for laissez faire (sophisticated libertarians know this is wrong, but have other also wrong justifications for the same conclusion) more-or-less involves efforts to blame the victims of economic inequality for their fate, but it's just not true. Adults need to be held accountable for their decisions, but a lot of the key determinants — physical, mental, and otherwise — are totally outside of people's control.

Comments

w00t. Yggles has been on fire lately.

Posted by JH | November 26, 2007 8:54 AM

Spoken like a true Rawlsian. (And I mean that as a compliment.) I teach Nozick and Rawls to kids at a fancy college and it's surprising to see how quickly they conclude that the primary difference between them and the down-and-out is that they've worked harder. They consequently see Rawls as trying to steal from the industrious and give to the lazy.

Posted by KW | November 26, 2007 9:02 AM

this issue...does seem to me to have real policy implications,

Early childhood education, not just for the nacent tennis star.

Posted by jonnybutter | November 26, 2007 9:31 AM

The choice of the realm in which to apply your talents, and whether to do so at all, is a free one. Society should ensure that the incentives are aligned to generate the maximum practical expression of such innate abilities. The best way to do this... is laissez-faire -- at least so far as economics is concerned.

Posted by Chris | November 26, 2007 9:41 AM

It seems to me that lots of young girls who aren't Justine Henin got tennis camp lessons early on and didn't become a Justine Henin. Lots of composers who weren't Mozart had early music lessons from excellent teachers. Etc.

Gray's "Elegy" laments (or merely notes) the numberless Miltons and Cromwells who died unknown because of their origins. And yet, at one point, Milton and Cromwell were also just sponge headed 5 year olds as indistinguishable as any young Beavis.

Just a long way around to saying that human development is mysterious, and we don't -- and probably can't -- really know what makes us tick.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 26, 2007 9:46 AM

Yep. You schould be able to build support for a strong welfare state on that diea.

But not in the United States.

Posted by Ikram | November 26, 2007 9:47 AM

I have long maintained that I have the exact same amount of basketball skill as Haywood (I was cut from my 7th grade team and never played organized ball again) and that the only difference between us is that he is 7 feet tall and I am not.

Posted by Jake | November 26, 2007 9:53 AM

JH is right. Matt's on a roll.

Posted by eris | November 26, 2007 10:16 AM

"The mass market version of the case for laissez faire (sophisticated libertarians know this is wrong, but have other also wrong justifications for the same conclusion) more-or-less involves efforts to blame the victims of economic inequality for their fate,"

I believe the libertarian perspective is, "It isn't necessarily their fault that poor people are poor, but we're all better off if we blame them for it."

Posted by Njorl | November 26, 2007 10:16 AM

My reading of the literature (somewhat dated) indicates that IQ is predictive of performance in school and those careers dependent on a high level of education - school again - while it is much less predictive of success in business. Of course those pushing IQ all did very well in school.

Taking IQ seriously as a measure of "intelligence" is an antiquated concept sorely in need of jettisoning.

Posted by Scott Ferguson | November 26, 2007 10:19 AM

Isn't this just the same "Life is unfair" line my parents used to tell me when I complained too much? They were right (and not just because eating 2 quarts of ice cream at a sitting is a bad idea) and so is Matt. Now what?

Laissez-faire won't fix inequality of talent, but neither will anything else (genetic engineering fantasies aside). The argument for l-f, and for capitalism in general, is that it will put those talents to their most productive use, or create a use for them if none exists now, not that it will make them equal.

The minimal welfare state of the US, or the more comprehensive version in European countries can then redistribute some of the resulting wealth, but the people need to create it first. When some other system proves better at generating wealth than capitalism, I'll gladly get on board, but until then, I'll stick with the least worst option.

Posted by heedless | November 26, 2007 10:21 AM

Don't worry, Horatio Algers is alive and well; unfortunately he's living either in Norway or Denmark.

According to this study done at the London School of Economics "A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK." (See here for a link to the pdf file of the report: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm).

Of course, the countries that actually have social mobility are the ones that invest in early childhood education and anti-poverty programs. If you want to live the American Dream, you had better to be born into a European social democracy. For all their talk about "equality of opportunity" anglo-saxon neo-liberal regimes are much more likely to create economic castes.

Posted by Jeet Heer | November 26, 2007 10:24 AM

"....but absolutely nothing one can do changes the fact that where people end up is substantially out of their hands."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Evidence supports this. For example, despite several limiting factors and bad behaviors George W. Bush was always going to become President.

Posted by steve duncan | November 26, 2007 10:29 AM

human development is mysterious, and we don't -- and probably can't -- really know what makes us tick.

No. We don't know comprehensively what 'makes us tick', but we know - both intuitively (AKA artistic vision) and scientifically - some things. We don't know how to select specifically for poetic or musical or scientific genius, but we do know how to raise the average, the standard, for everyone; it takes only about 90 seconds to figure out that our current method for selection (unusual wealth) is absurdly arbitrary. It's precisely that we *don't* know what the results of a general higher standard will be which argues for it.

Posted by jonnybutter | November 26, 2007 11:05 AM

Slate had a series by Saletin who basically said that it appears that there is a racial difference in IQ. Basically, East Asians and Jews had average IQ of over 110, whites had IQ of 106 and Hispanics had IQ of slightly less than 100 and Africans had IQ of about 90. (I can't get to the link right now but it was in Slate this week.)

The problem that I see is that one of three things are true:

1) IQ is partially determined by race
2) IQ is not partially determined by race
3) I don't have a clue what I am talking about.

However, it does seem to me that facts are facts and we would all be better off knowing what the facts are. Then we would be able to figure out the best course of action based on reasonable facts and not based on unreasonable guesses.

Posted by neil wilson | November 26, 2007 11:18 AM

I guess I'm missing the point of this post. Is it that some people believe laissez faire because they see it as providing some form of justice? That is, people should be rewarded or punished based on their work ethic?

And so, the point of this post is that people don't have equal abilities and so to reward or punish them based on circumstances beyond their control is unjust?

My problem with this whole argument is that its absurd to base social policy on a theory of justice. I mean, to extend this ridiculous thinking further, for every person who was lucky enough to be born, there were trillions of potential people who never even made it to the blastocyst stage due to birth control, or their fathering sperm not making it to the egg in time. How do we provide justice for them?

Forget about justice-based justifications. If laissez faire is the best system in a utilitarian sense, then I say we adopt it. If not (and I think its not), then don't.

Posted by Jim W | November 26, 2007 11:24 AM

neil,

Last week there was a post about the Saletan article, followed by about 240 comments. Let's not get started on that again.

Posted by Jim W | November 26, 2007 11:27 AM

You missed on this one. The Environment X Intelligence interaction term has a much greater effect than intelligence alone or environment alone. In your sports example, kids with above average capability go to elite environments (tennis club) and excel. However a 7 footer who has never heard of basketball will not be in the NBA and a 5 footer who lives at an elite basketball camp is unlikely to be and NBA star (a coach maybe but not a player). Environment matters a lot which is why the school quality matters a lot.

IQs today are higher than they were 20 years ago. This is due to improvements in education environment not genetic selection.

Posted by bakho | November 26, 2007 11:39 AM

its absurd to base social policy on a theory of justice.

The problem here is the meaning of the word 'justice'. What's absurd is to base social (or 'cultural') policy on something like a literal justice system, ie reward and (mostly) punishment; I notice that the ton of resentment behind these kinds of theories is underestimated at best. Any intelligent, honest and humane jurist will tell you that the Law is merely an attempt to administer actual justice, necesssarily flawed; there is no real alternative to a legal system, so we live with it and try to refine it, to make it more perfect (excepting Federalist Society-types, who have mostly already perfected the law).

The American Libertarian (and not only Libertarian) mistake is to yearn so much for an autonomous, judgement-free 'system', that the one we sort of have is insisted on whether it's adequate or not. (I know there is more to Lib-ism than this, I'm just drilling down). Humans want patterns, and they see them whether they are all-there or not. And it must be remembered that resentment is not a one-way 'beam', projecting outwards. It reflects the inner person (human nature is fixed and hopeless; humans are helpless to do or understand anything; humans will always fuck up anything they try to do in a collective way, etc.). If you have a resentment problem, I'm sorry about that, but it's your problem, not everybody else's.

Simple justice would patently demand that we select for intelligence, talent and achievement in a less arbitrary way than we traditionally have (unusual wealth). The argument is about how to do that, but there is nothing the least bit radical or hard to understand about this concept - unless you don't believe in Evolution/Biology at all.

Posted by jonnybutter | November 26, 2007 12:05 PM

This must be sweeps monthy at the Atlantic. Blogs must be rated by how many comments they receive. Mention race/IQ and you're guarenteed to get 8 million comments. Go Matt, go.

It's true that there is nothing a child can do to improve the situation they are born into, but there's plenty a parent or a community or a nation can do to improve a child's prospect. But those eintities have to decide that they want to spend the time and energy.

THere is a certain kind of conservative that doesn't wnat to spend the time or energy so they choose to believe that everything is predetermeined-by the markets, by genetics. It's a form of calvanisim, with the preterit and the elect. Derbyshire is one of these. They choose to believe this becasue it justifies their position. If there is nothing they can do to improve anyone prospects, they don't have to do anything. This kind of ideology is really attracted to the idea that IQ is genetically determined.

Posted by cw | November 26, 2007 12:22 PM

Why would the richest country reject the social safety nets of the 1st world to pattern itself on developing nations like India or Brazil? Perhaps if the laissez faire cheerleaders weren't so xenophobic they'd get out more. Then they'd see how begging children and favelas can spoil the view.

Posted by spoony | November 26, 2007 1:57 PM

"Isn't this just the same "Life is unfair" line my parents used to tell me when I complained too much? They were right (and not just because eating 2 quarts of ice cream at a sitting is a bad idea) and so is Matt. Now what?

Laissez-faire won't fix inequality of talent, but neither will anything else (genetic engineering fantasies aside). The argument for l-f, and for capitalism in general, is that it will put those talents to their most productive use, or create a use for them if none exists now, not that it will make them equal.

The minimal welfare state of the US, or the more comprehensive version in European countries can then redistribute some of the resulting wealth, but the people need to create it first. When some other system proves better at generating wealth than capitalism, I'll gladly get on board, but until then, I'll stick with the least worst option."

Great comment. This is the sort of thing an intelligent liberal who thinks critically would write.

Posted by Fred | November 26, 2007 1:57 PM

"Why would the richest country reject the social safety nets of the 1st world to pattern itself on developing nations like India or Brazil? Perhaps if the laissez faire cheerleaders weren't so xenophobic they'd get out more. Then they'd see how begging children and favelas can spoil the view."

I've been to Brazil a few times, and have done some research on the country. Brazil has a social safety net, including innovative welfare programs which require parents to send their kids to school. The existence of favelas in places like Rio de Janeiro isn't due to a lack of welfare but to a lack of effective government. The analogy would be if we had a bunch of drug dealing squatters take over Malibu. Who would argue that we need to raise welfare payments so they can build proper houses there?

The solution to the favelas on prime real estate such as the hillsides overlooking Rio would be for the government (at the state, local, or federal level -- where ever the responsibility lies in Brazil) to buy out the squatters. Sell the land to builders for development and then use a portion of the proceeds to offer generous relocation money to the favela dwellers, perhaps also building them real housing in a less scenic part of town where it would be harder for their well-fed kids to beg from tourists. There would be plenty of interested buyers for luxury condos on those hillsides once the favelas were cleared away, and the city would be safer with the natural habitat of drug gangs reduced. Instead of drug dealers you'd have execs from Petrobras, BG Group PLC, and Petroleos de Portugal on those hillsides.

Posted by Fred | November 26, 2007 2:23 PM

This is the sort of thing an intelligent liberal who thinks critically would write.

Yeah, it's also complete rubbish: talking about the US and Sweden in the same breath is just stupid, since the difference between the two is the point of contention: how do we redistribute the fruits of capitalism. Virtually nobody wants to abandon capitalism, not the Swedes, nor any of the European social democrats or so called socialists who have even the slightest bit of influence.

Posted by novakant | November 26, 2007 2:39 PM

This is the sort of thing an intelligent liberal who thinks critically would write.

No, that would be my comment above, Fred ; )

Laissez-faire won't fix inequality of talent, but neither will anything else (genetic engineering fantasies aside).

Straw man argument. Fixing inequality of talent is not the political issue at hand. Fixing inequality of access to the development of talent is.

The minimal welfare state of the US, or the more comprehensive version in European countries can then redistribute some of the resulting wealth, but the people need to create it first.

How is this germane to anything? Yes, wealth has to be created first. What is the objection to, for example, business friendly/strong safety net approaches like in Sweden? Does the US qualify as 'rich' yet, or do we still have to 'earn it first'?

When some other system proves better at generating wealth than capitalism, I'll gladly get on board, but until then, I'll stick with the least worst option."

More infuriating strawman crap. Who suggested abandoning capitalism? No liberals I know. Damn it you guys! If you really believe in your position, argue honestly. You guys retreat into fake and strawman arguments all the time. You don't have to agree with me - just cut the rhetorical bobbing and weaving, please. Sweden is a capitalist country, whether you care to think so or not. They have businesses (which are taxed very lightly) and those businesses make profits or losses. Capitalist. You don't like their form of capitalism, but you don't get to thereby define them out of the category.

The question is: can a country, via its politics, create a culture in which more people get the chance to develop the innate intelligence and talent they have regardless of the wealth of the family they were born into? If you think the answer is 'no', OK. I strongly disagree, but that is the larger question here, not whether or not to abandon capitalism.

Posted by jonnybutter | November 26, 2007 3:09 PM

I see Novakant beat me to it...

I'd also point out that, traditionally, 'Laissez-faire' has effectively meant: no government interference, as a matter of purest principle...except when capitalists like what the government does (legal and transportation infrastructure, subsidies, when the government is your biggest customer, etc.

Posted by jonnybutter | November 26, 2007 3:25 PM

I'm a liberal and I agree with jonnybutter, but for the sake of argument, there is something to be said for the following. To the degree the state holds children hostage to the choices made by their parents, then it does provide an extra incentive for the parents to try to make the right choices. For example, one of the main motivations for parents to make money is to buy a house in a good neighborhood so their kids can go to a good school.

To the extent that the state rectifies the situation for the kids sake, it also reduces incentives for the parents. The same kind of argument goes for college. If the state paid for all college education, that would take away a big incentive for parents to save money.

The best policy in my opinion is the one we think will work the best in the end, not the one we think is the most just from the children's perspective.

Posted by Jim W | November 26, 2007 3:32 PM

Jim W

I think there is a cerrtain subset of parents--amoung the poorest and most uneducated--who lack the knowedge or ability to help their kids. These are the kids that need the most help. So if the choice is between parents not doing anything or parents being disincitivezed, I think I'd take the second choice.

"Laissez-faire won't fix inequality of talent, but neither will anything else (genetic engineering fantasies aside)."

This is one of those conservatives that I was talking about. It's all about innate talent. The people on the top have more, the people on the bottom have less. It's ordained,

Posted by cw | November 26, 2007 4:13 PM

Well said.

In many ways, individuals have less initiative today. Let's extend your tennis analogy. Today, most pros were sent off to expensive tennis boarding academies as children, so the game is dominated by the upper middle class.

In contrast, the #1 player in the world in the later 1950s and early 1960s was Pancho Gonzales from East LA. The only time he was away from home growing up was when he was in Juvenile Hall or the Navy. His mom gave him a tennis racket at age 12, he wandered over to the public courts next to the LA Coliseum. He never took a lesson in his life, yet he remained a formidable pro star into the 1970s when he was in his 40s.

With golf, it's a little less extreme, but the decline of the caddy means there are fewer opportunities for poor kids like Snead, Hogan, Sarazen, and Trevino to become star golfers. That's one reason why there are fewer black players today on the PGA Tour than there 20 years ago.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 26, 2007 5:21 PM

What was that "well said" directed to? Incentives or the determinist quote and my critical reply? Note that I don't think that the poorest and least educated parents are that way because they are genetically inferior.

Posted by cw | November 26, 2007 5:36 PM

I was responding to Matt's original post, which I suspect was inspired by my article on high school football in the latest issue of The American Conservative:

"Each year roughly 1,200,000 boys play and 100,000 men coach high school football. It's one of those social phenomena that are so big that nobody thinks much about it. Yet, prep football -- by uneasily combining the norms of the middle of the last century, which seemed in the 1940s to be the Century of the Common Man, and of our own Century of the Superstar, in which many watch but only a chosen few perform -- offers a window into America's past and future. ...

High school football continues to be a repository of many of the authority-respecting and communal virtues of the WWII-winning Greatest Generation. On the high school football field, America's old struggle between nurture and nature -- between the faith that winners can be molded out of the common folk versus the ever-spreading sneaking suspicion that success is mostly in the genes and in private tutoring -- can still battle it out on relatively equal terms. ...

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 26, 2007 6:33 PM

Re: Brazil has a social safety net, including innovative welfare programs which require parents to send their kids to school.

That's an innovative welfare measure? Um, we implemented that here in the 19th century. Not bashing it, but I think it takes more than universal, mandatory public education.

Posted by Jonf | November 26, 2007 7:21 PM

JonF,

The innovation wasn't mandatory public education, but linking welfare payments to the kids actually showing up. Similar reforms along these lines have been mooted recently by the mayor of NYC.

Steve Sailer,

Playing high school football was an early revelation for me about limitations of heredity. I realized that even as a 16 year old in great shape, I wasn't be able to lower my pathetic 40-yard dash time down much from 5.6 seconds, no matter how hard I practiced. As a second-string inside linebacker, I could still compensate occasionally on the field, by using angles of pursuit, guessing the direction of the play and beating the blocker to the point of attack, etc., but speed is a merciless attribute in football, and other sports. If you don't have it, there's not much you can do to get it, and all things being equal, speed kills.

Posted by Fred | November 26, 2007 8:59 PM

Right, and the black advantage in speed is enormously obvious in high school football.

Still, football isn't quite as corrupted as basketball is by the emphasis on recruiting superstars. A good high school football coach can still make a bunch of random boys into a good team. He can't make them into a great team without getting some better than random talent, but the coaching vs. recruiting balance isn't quite as grotesque as in basketball these days.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 26, 2007 9:57 PM

"Right, and the black advantage in speed is enormously obvious in high school football."

That's true, but interestingly, the football teams of the couple of nearly-all black high schools near me tend not to do as well as the more integrated/whiter ones.

Posted by Fred | November 26, 2007 11:37 PM

Notice how the pure white liberals always retreat to talking about basketball or football when they start talking "genetics"?

Never martial arts. Or even tennis.

Interesting, eh?

Morons.

Any genetic difference is relevant only in the absence of competent training, and then only if everyone is trained in the exact same manner without taking into account individual differences.

In other words, this is irrelevant bullshit. What you have no control over is not important. What is important is what you do have control over.

No characteristic is intrinsically bad (assuming you are not actually crippled), but can be useful or not depending on circumstances. This is what martial arts teaches. You develop what you are naturally good at - and this will be sufficient if used intelligently.

There ARE objective differences. As a knife fighter once said, if a poor knife fighter with a well designed knife goes up against an expert knife fighter with a poorly designed knife, he will lose. But the good fighter will drop the poor knife and pick up the good one. But objective differences do not necessarily determine the outcome of a competition. There are higher order circumstances and differences that usually matter more.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 27, 2007 12:03 AM

jonnybutter,

Ouch! Somewhat deserved, but very harsh.

I think you're reading a broader argument into my post than I intended. (I'm still working on this whole 'clarity' thing) I consider both the US and Sweden to be successful capitalist (mostly) countries, and while I prefer to live in the US, that is a matter of taste rather than some sort of objective comparison. Also, I was born here.

In regards to more general political philosophy, I was attempting a short moral defense of laissez-faire, not an attack on liberal egalitarianism. Libertarians freely admit that we don't have a solution to the problem of inequality. We're just not convinced that anyone else does either. We do, on the other hand, have a solution to the problem of creating wealth, and we think it works pretty well.

Posted by heedless | November 27, 2007 11:22 AM

The Scandanavian countries are an interesting case study. But to the extent that they are more genetically homogenous than, say, the US, one would expect greater social mobility.

I haven't studied the matter, but that's the first question that comes to mind: How much of the difference in social mobility can be attributed to genetic homogeneity? What's the answer?

Posted by lewp | November 27, 2007 3:45 PM