How Does IQ Impact Social Mobility?

[Evo]

I'm glad you liked it. I often have problems expressing what I mean and therefore creating the wrong impression.

Yes, I thought he did an excellent job overall.

 

[Nachtwolf]

I often have problems expressing what I mean and therefore creating the wrong impression.

It's quite common for anyone involved in Physics to have disproportionally high visuospatial ability for their verbal ability. Thus while they have good mathimatical and reasoning skills which give us a good understanding of the world we live in, we tend to have trouble expressing what we know.

Physics majors are also more Field Independent, thus proving beyond any shadow of doubt that we are cooler than Humanities majors.

--Mark

 

[Carlos Hernandez]

Originally posted by Nachtwolf
Physics majors are also more Field Independent

--Mark

What does that mean?

 

[Nachtwolf]

It means read this:

http://www.childrenofmillennium.org/eugenics.htm --> Psychometrics --> Field Dependence

 

[selfAdjoint]

The text that Evo linked to, a couple of posts up in this thread, says that although the lower IQ people have more children per individual, fewer of them tend to have children at all, which keeps the position in rough balance.

The Clinton era welfare reform, the centerpiece of which was jobs for the very poor, even at the cost of subsidy, was found to have greatly reduced the rate of illegitimate births among the poorest women.

 

[Nachtwolf]

although the lower IQ people have more children per individual, fewer of them tend to have children at all, which keeps the position in rough balance

I wish.

While it's true that fertility tends to be somewhat worse in the very lowest IQs than among the generally low IQ, this is a slight difference which doesn't balance anything out. In his book Dysgenics, Richard Lynn reports that there is an inverse correlation of .3 between IQ and fertility which includes all IQ levels.

To give you a better idea of what's going on, I'll give you a table from Jensen's book, The g Factor:



Fertility of American Whites
IQ... Fertility
<71... 1.59
71-85... 1.68
86-100... 1.76
101-115.. 1.44
116-130.. 1.15
>131... 0.92

So while the <71 and 71-85 groups are slightly lower than the 86-100 group, they are both still higher than any group above 100 and far above the >131 group. Every group with an IQ below 100 has better fertility than any every group above 100 IQ, and the inevitable result is a dysgenic decline to IQ. (The situation is even more stark for blacks.)

Moreover, estimates of the rate of dysgenics using such methods understate the problem because they only look at differential fertility. The Bell Curve states that "the IQ of people born abroad is .4 standard deviation lower than the mean of those born in the United States;" in other words, the average IQ of immigrants is six points below the national average. Since our own fertility rates are low, immigrants represent an important and growing demographic, and their assimilation into America results in a decrease to America's average IQ which only exacerbates the dysgenic threat.

--Mark

 

[Nachtwolf]

in the middle of the 20th century,Higgins,Reed,and Reed (1962)demonstrated a slightly positive fitness effect for IQ —just the opposite of “dysgenesis.”

Ah, yes - it is well known that during the middle of the 20th century the trends were briefly reversed. This is because the intelligent are more responsive to economic trends; when the economy is good, high IQ individuals have more children, and when the economy is bad, they have fewer. But the above circumstance is the exception to a well established long term trend.

--Mark