Half my childhood I grew up in poor conditions. The stress of everything just drenches you. People traumatizing each other, young and old, in their stress and grief. The poor dull each other. Dulled minds are handed down. Poverty is not just economic fact, it is a state of mind.
How were your sleep patterns? I'm frankly amazed we don't consider that stress and sleep are two sides of the same physiological coin - the autonomic nervous system. Sleep is quite simply the recovery from stress and the damage caused.
I think that's an over simplification of sleep. I'm citing the large amount of scientific discussion on the nature of sleep and what happens as the source of my doubt.
Rest and recovery is by definition the parasympathetic nervous system and the work on the glymphatic system is showing the often studied views of sleep don't account for the common cause of garbage removal.
My sleep patterns back then were unregulated so I would regularly stay up late into the night, like every kid wants to, doing anything I wanted. Now my sleep 2/3AM to 10/11AM lol.
Yes. I remember in my high school there was some essay to describe the childhood. The writing was meant to be nostalgic and what not with happy memories. My writing was filled with stress, pain and anxiety. School shoes wearing out, how will I get new school shoes? Growing up, damn, how will I get new clothes?
Yes. I began working illegally at fifteen, I was lucky my boss didn’t bother to look at the age I wrote down on my application. I was able to buy clothes and food. At sixteen I got a second job and still went to high school. I was homeless and lived with my boyfriend, I did as much homework as I could and pulled C’s that year. My mother and her boyfriend bought a house and then decided they had enough room for me to live with them. My father was missing and presumed dead. I worked and spent my free time at the library and the gym. Being home meant subjecting myself to verbal abuse. I saved my money and moved to Silicon Valley right after my 21st birthday. I became a bioengineer and now I’m a stay at home mother and married a programmer. You can escape. Work, save, study and stay away from family members. Join a gym, use ear plugs. Live in your car/van in a nice town if you must. Do not stay around others in a poverty mindset. Get a cup of coffee in a cafe in a wealthy part of town, observe how they interact and emulate them. Go to free meet ups to be around people in a higher social class. You’re going to be working harder than anyone else around you for a while, that’s ok. Follow advice from early retirement blogs, take any shortcuts you can to success, don’t waste time getting a degree. Don’t do anything risky with your health or money. You can take risks in a few years. You can make it out. If there is anyone reading this in a terrible situation I can offer more advice.
Switched parents to the one that wasn't doing drugs and had good work and no mental health issues. The kids I remember from that time probably didn't see an escape route in their own lives. A lot of their parents were shits. Some of them were straight chaotic evil. Some, if you put their minds into their children's bodies, they could fit right in and assume their children's roles. Children raising children is a sure way to harm brain development. Also, beating them. Saw a bit of that. Makes me sad to think where those kids might be now.
The typical answers are: education, military, sports, entertainment. You either need to work hard in education or go join the military and survive or be naturally gifted in sports/music.
Almost all of the people I have seen called 'gifted' in music are ordinary people that were given the chance to develop in music, both through their parents, and through things like council-funded music/orchestral programs, etc.
All the people I know who have been successful in music worked their asses off at it. It takes a special kind of personality to practice by yourself for hours and hours in search for perfection while still having he ability to connect with other people emotionally.
Yes, similar to the other responses I found work wherever possible and moved away as soon as I was able to afford it. Having a safe place to then study and focus on school while working made a huge difference, as did eating properly and getting somewhat reasonable amounts of sleep. Its amazing how much other people can notice your mood drop when you haven’t slept or eaten properly and it just becomes another thing they can single you out over...
It’s also important not to be singled out as having money available, but I found this to be the case only around other people in poverty with a poverty mindset. It’s best for others in this environment to consider you out-group. If they consider you in-group they will sabotage and belittle your attempts to escape. It’s a delicate balance of seeming different but also poor. If other poor people find out you’ve been saving money they’ll try to take it. They have an odd view of what “having money” is. My mother is almost sixty and thinks if she has five hundred dollars then she has “a lot of money”.
An interesting question I've had recently, which isn't necessarily directly related to the subject of the article is, "how does access to technology affect brain development?"
When I was a kid, my family was dirt poor, in a fairly literal sense. That was the early to mid 80's and while I was reasonably bright as a student, access to technology really did hold me back.
I didn't get my hands on a computer until high school (in '90), and that was a broken C-64 that I had to fix myself. I didn't have a TV to connect it to. I had to earn enough to buy an old black and white TV at a garage sale before I could even get it working.
My whole life I felt that this is what held me back, and so when the time came, I endeavored to make sure my kids had access to technology if they were interested.
But now I see where tech has headed. They've had computers, but mostly pads and phones their entire lives. It seems almost like these platforms have DULLED their imagination to some extent.
I wonder in the coming generations, if we will see some sort of correlation with access to tech in one's formative years. Especially given the intentionally addictive nature of many of the apps that have become popular in recent years. Also as tech has become ubiquitous and cheap, access it not entirely defined by economics anymore either.
Success is far more than raw intelligence. I'll be interesting to see how all of that plays out in the next generation or two.
My understanding is that the strongest predictors of success that psychologists know about are:
1. Intelligence
2. Conscientiousness [1]
It's also my understanding that these factors usually are correlated under 40% as success predictors. Seems that a lot of it is just plain luck and/or environment. I don't see raw intelligence not being important towards success anytime soon but I don't doubt how as access to information/technology increases, that other factors will begin to dominate as differentiating factors.
I would absolutely agree with your hypothesis about the future. Kids these days don't have the kind of access to technology that you describe - the kind of access that inspires you to take something apart to see how it works, put it back together, explore what you can make it do - they have access to polished, streamlined advertisement-serving systems.
These systems (video streaming and children's games immediately come to mind) are designed to keep kids glued to the screen in order to maximize ad revenue. Any other goal is secondary, if considered at all. The genuine sense of discovery and creation which stems from having a blank & boring canvas to paint on has been replaced with stimuli-drenched dopamine-driven curated experiences. No room for imagination, no need for wonder.
The second best selling video game of all time is Minecraft, which was hugely popular among children and probably still is. That game is basically a blank and boring canvas to paint on.
Children with an interest in technology can purchase a raspberry pi for $5 today. They can learn javascript programming without leaving the web browser. It's not all doom and gloom because their iPads don't allow them every freedom that a Commodore 64 might.
Taking things apart and trying to understand their behavior is a natural behavior of children and always has been. Regardless of whether they have iPads or rocks, they will always find a way. I wouldn't be too worried about it.
Also, it's always worth considering that most children don't have much of an interest in programming. In the 80's most children weren't at home with a C64. Most of those kids turned out fine too.
It's totally different being pushed to be creative by being poor and having to fix a computer than buying a raspberry pi or enroll into a javascript course, these two things will only happen with tech parents, and only IF, there are thousands of tech parents that give ipads to their children
There's no reason a kid without tech parents can't find out about the raspberry pi themselves and ask their parents for one. Or purchase it themselves. Just like a poor kid without tech parents in the 80s could find out about the Commodore 64 and buy a broken one and fix it, except now the computer is so cheap that there is no point in buying a broken one.
Being forced to fix things is one way to learn but it not the only way to learn.
But we are in the golden age of SparkFun! There are so many great project kits and microcontrollers that I wish I could've found as a kid at RadioShack.
In your life, those years, it did not hold you back except when you compare yourself to a very small group of people who 1) had access 2) took advantage of said access. I'm imagining you probably compared yourself to the kid in War Games (1983) and wish you had the same access to hardware/modems/etc.
Truth is, at least anecdotally, most kids that had access back then didn't really dive into it. Hacking and programming in general was not something everyone was doing. Your interest alone gave you an edge even though access came later in life.
Present day, I think it's similar but different. Access is very high. Interest is still low, but definitely much higher than it was and increasing. The kids now who grow up consuming apps/social/etc are not helping themselves at all. Just like how getting cable TV "technology" in the 80s helped no one. The kids who regularly use a keyboard are the kids who have both access & interest to actually be a maker. And for most makers, the keyboard part still comes later like it did for you. What has increased is the support system for learning. Schools are getting involved, tons of startups revolve around learning to code, etc and of course the social stigma of being a nerd has flipped entirely. Not only have nerds become cool, or at least tolerable, computers do not necessarily equate to nerd like they used to.
That all said, in absolute terms there are more makers now than in the past and there will be more. Also, I feel, most of the low hanging fruit has been eaten. Which at some point means all these makers will need/want to solve bigger problems than we have to date and this is what's really interesting about the next couple of generations in tech.
I also grew up dirt poor, had a C-64, etc. I'm a little less than a decade younger than you.
I taught myself to program, but very poorly. I had a reasonably good education through high school, but nothing that helped developed my tech skills. I could not afford an education beyond that.
My older brother was a sys admin, so I got good at that. Started my tech career in support and languished for a decade or so of low (progressively higher) paying tech jobs.
It wasn't until I knew developers in my personal life that I was able to identify exactly what I was missing to turn my programming hobby professional. I filled in all of those gaps over about 3 years of brutally hard work. I quit working and ran through my savings + some debt just to study and build a portfolio. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I could change careers and do what I'd always wanted.
I would say understanding databases was the biggest gap. It was the thing was most easily fixed and produced the most payoff. Writing my own toy ORM as a learning tool was the thing that made all web frameworks more intuitive.
After that it was more about how to structure code and work with other peoples' code. I don't want to go as far as to say design patterns, but in my hobby days I would just start writing code and then have to do code gymnastics to work around the structure I built. Now I take much more time before I ever write anything to plan.
As a counter point, I've always felt that a main thing holding people back was desire & drive. You not having "it" lead to you cultivating a desire and a drive to acquire.
Child A
- Wealthy upbringing
- Always full on nutritious food
- Elite, private schooling
- Live in a stable, loving home
Child B
- Poor upbringing
- Almost always hungry, only able to eat cheap calorie dense foods
- Public, underfunded inner city school
- Shuffled around between foster homes
You think that the deciding factor for these examples would be their desire and drive? I don't, and I think the science out there agrees with me when I say poverty has numerous adverse effects on how a human turns out.
I would say Child B would be a lot more successful if he had drive than if he didn't. Same with Child A. I've known a lot of rich kids that didn't amount to squat. (I went to one of those elite private schools, but my dad was a teacher there, so we got steep discounts).
Sure, but we're not comparing the child to themselves with and without motivation holding all other factors constant. The question is, if two otherwise equivalent children are placed in living situations of vastly different quality how likely are differences in drive going to influence success?
The fact that some poor kids succeed and some rich kids fail isn't nearly as important as the what percentage of these groups succeed and fail.
You didn't understand my comment. I'm not saying that someone who has nothing is better off. I was entirely responding to a 1st-world experience.
I'm saying that the OP is probably better off for having to develop drive to get that computer working than he would have been having it handed to him.
Long after that computer, drive and self-modification is still serving him.
Wealth cannot replace desire and drive. If both kids had these the same, then yes, the wealthy one would be better off. As theī say, one man can bring a horse to the water, but even forty cannot make it drink if horse does not want to.
I disagree. Enough wealth can easily replace that, to where one would be moderately successful. You might not turn into Elon Musk without desire & drive, but you're also never really going to be wondering where your next meal is coming from.
Desire and drive are not independent of experience of what happens when you try and push limits, and if you think that things like race and wealth don't impact that in the real world we live in, you aren't paying much attention.
because that's easier than writing a long edit pointing out the specific context in which my comment was intended (a context that should have been obvious based on the parent comments).
And I'd take that bet, and quite likely your money, because study after study has shown that growing up in poverty is most likely to result in that person remaining in poverty.
There's a spectrum. It seems like the highest source of ambition external to genetics is growing up lower middle-class / poorer than many of your friends and neighbors, but with opportunity to succeed. Anecdotal, of course. My friends who grew up wealthy or upper middle class tend to dream much smaller, even if they are only first generation-wealthy / likely have some ambitious genes.
A lack of desire and drive makes it very easy to lose a lot of money. The inverse is not really true, though. You'll never be able to afford college if you're flipping burgers through high school. You'll never be a doctor if you aren't smart enough, no matter how much you want it.
I grew up poor or lower middle class. But later my parents' finances improved and my siblings grew up upper middle class.
I can tell you there is huge difference between my siblings especially youngest and I when it comes to finance and career.
1. They barely save any money, live pretty lavish lifestyle for what they earn. I pretty much focus on saving. Sometimes, I will skip important events, dinners, etc because I haven't met my savings goal. Before I got married, I lived in 33% of after tax income.
(My friends split in two groups after college, those who upgraded their lifestyle as they earned more money, and those who either kept college lifestyle as long as possible or did not earn a lot after college to upgrade their life style. I remained friend with later group only.)
2. My siblings don't take shit form their bosses, quit jobs without finding next one. I worry too much about my job, answer phone or emails after work etc.
3. My siblings will quit jobs and travel or find themselves or whatever. I have never ever voluntarily quit job without finding next job.
4. My siblings will risk significant amount of their savings in various ventures. I only invest in index funds.
5. They buy stuff on impulse. I will research best deals.
I can go on and on about difference in our mentality but main point is that somehow even with 6 figure income, I fear poverty more than I should. And they pretty much live as if money is unlimited resource.
This also causes issues with my wife though she lived in poverty a bit too, so she understands my fears.
My background mirrors yours, but I'm not the miser you seem to be. I've never made a six figure income and it took years to get to a comfortable income.
I also married and had children young. I've pretty much given up on saving and spend what I can to insure my kids have a brighter future.
Correlation is not causation, but most factors say yes. Moreover, the brain health of families is not generally a consideration in school systems. If kids are under toxic stress and not sleeping enough to recover, their brains won't develop to their full potential. That science is well-understood from animal models and glimpsed in human neuroimaging studies.
"If kids are under toxic stress and not sleeping enough to recover, their brains won't develop to their full potential. That science is well-understood from animal models and glimpsed in human neuroimaging studies."
I'm in education. I'd like to learn more about these statements. Can you recommend what/where I should search?
>Moreover, the brain health of families is not generally a consideration in school systems
Has anyone succeeded in making it a consideration and shown results?
>If kids are under toxic stress and not sleeping enough to recover, their brains won't develop to their full potential.
That begs more questions. Which child is using their brains to its full potential? What does 'full' mean here anyway? and how far away from 'full' are we talking about.
>That science is well-understood from animal models and glimpsed in human neuroimaging studies.
Poverty and limited financial resources aren't really the same thing. I get what you are saying, but it is something I have thought about a whole, whole lot. It's a distinction we don't make clear enough. We talk as if poverty is just about a low income. It's really not.
Let's posit two scenarios:
1. There are people with low incomes whose lives work reasonably well.
2. There are people whose lives don't work and one of the results of their lives not working is a low income.
I think poverty is really that second item, not that first. I think we conflate low income and poverty too much. There were lives that worked well and lives that lacked critical elements long before modern money made it convenient to assign a dollar value to our idea of what constituted poverty. In so assigning a dollar value, we risk boiling down a whole lot of qualities to a single number that doesn't necessary effectively capture what is going on.
In so assigning a dollar value, we risk boiling down a whole lot of qualities to a single number that doesn't necessary effectively capture what is going on.
I agree completely.
Obviously the evidence is compelling in cases where, for instance, the parents so destitute that they cannot afford proper nutrition for an infant during critical periods of neural development.
This article conflates things like that with kids who are stranded for a few hours at the bus depot because their mother couldn't leave work early to pick them up after taking the wrong bus home. That's ridiculous.
You're presumably answering the question posed by the post's title saying "yes", i.e., that it is causative, which would imply correlation. Why was that not a fair inference to draw?
There is a study often cited by Thomas Sowell, which is never, ever mentioned by those on the political left in the US and never mentioned by the far right in the US -- as it goes against the narrative of both those groups. The study found that the school aged children of African American servicemen in Germany had the same average IQ as their classmates.
Something we're doing to large numbers of urban children in the US is morally equivalent to putting lead in the water. It's largely been the political left in the US which has had control of large urban areas. The culture of the US in the 1st half of the 20th century wasn't harmful in this way. Poles and Italians were able to increase their average IQ's to parity with the US as a whole in that period. African Americans were also making progress in that period, but this stopped in the 1960's.
One of the historical patterns which comes across in Thomas Sowell's work is that of minority elites continuing the cultural isolation of their own group to maintain their own power. One of the chief tools of maintaining cultural isolation is identity politics.
Integration and fighting redlining are pretty "left" goals as are school lunch programs and their ilk that attempt to alleviate some of the stress at home. You won't hear "AA/POC have lower IQs" because of the soundbites, but you definitely hear "Everyone has the right to a safe and stable home life" / "Kids deserve equal opportunity in schools" - all attempts at preventing the damage being cited here (or rather, getting the outcomes seen in the study). It doesn't need to be talked about directly because there's actual work to be done about it.
You won't hear "AA/POC have lower IQs" because of the soundbites
You do read a lot of opposition to the validity of IQ testing. There are also attacks on the notion of objective truth and objective standards from the far left fringe as well. Most of my life, I have counted myself as a part of the left, and my Political Compass test came up as center-left when I took it. It's the Far Left I would object to.
you definitely hear "Everyone has the right to a safe and stable home life" / "Kids deserve equal opportunity in schools" - all attempts at preventing the damage being cited here (or rather, getting the outcomes seen in the study)
Because 'school choice' is a loaded political term for defunding the public school system these people depend on so that the money earmarked for these systems gets handed out to private or charter schools, thus leaving the public system in a worse place, especially when the public system must take the worst students while charters can dismiss them. In other words you're socializing your losses and privatizing your winnings.
Even then, the "opposition" is more like healthy skepticism. Even in liberal Chicago we have a charter school boom and thus far the results aren't impressive especially when you consider they benefit from the 'cream of the crop' issue defined above. They can dump the low performing students onto CPS while enjoying the test scores and metrics more motivated students or the students without learning disabilities or the students when more involved parents can produce.
But no, we're not going to defund CPS entirely overnight and hand out its budget in its entirety to charters. That's not "opposition" that's sane thinking. And yes, if charters can't deliver the goods and if they cannot deal with the worst students or improve them, then they have failed and shouldn't be subsidized by the taxpayer. My tax dollars shouldn't be an entitlement to those with experimental and untested educational theories who can fill out an application to create a school. You have to earn it by showing your methods produce results - with all the kids, not the cherry picked one. That's what they currently don't seem to be able to do. Even then we still give them money hoping they do someday or that the added competition creates a stronger educational dynamic.
That said, many charter schools are just a ploy to get taxpayers to fund weirdo religious schools. A lot of charters are extensions of churches/mosques/temples or ethnic groups (often with religiosity as the main motivator). That isn't exactly the education revolution you're looking for here in many cases.
Even in liberal Chicago we have a charter school boom and thus far the results aren't impressive especially when you consider they benefit from the 'cream of the crop' issue defined above.
The worst of the worst disruptive students have an outsized negative impact. If I were such a parent, I would want to have a choice of schools. You just want to sacrifice the choice of the economically disadvantaged for the sake of the existing school institution.
My tax dollars shouldn't be an entitlement to those with experimental and untested educational theories who can fill out an application to create a school.
Your tax dollars are already an entitlement. You're just restricting the degree of choice someone has about how it's spent -- especially economically disadvantaged people.
And yes, if charters can't deliver the goods and if they cannot deal with the worst students or improve them, then they have failed and shouldn't be subsidized by the taxpayer.
There should be schools that don't have to take all students. This puts market pressure on students to maintain a reputation which makes them eligible for charters, as well as market pressure on parents to influence their children to make them eligible for charters. If parents can get their kids into an environment away from disruptive students and more conducive to learning, and the parents are satisfied, then that should be enough.
There's a parallel here. If you aren't allowed to "fire" your politicians, then you can't expect good results from them. Likewise, if you aren't allowed to "fire" your educators, you can't expect good results from them either.
I can see how such a story is against the 'right/racist' narrative as they think race has a major influence on intelligence, but why doesn't it fit the 'left' narrative which seems to categorize humans based on their social class?
I can see how such a story is against the 'right/racist' narrative
It's not against the narrative of the right in general. The US political right likes the narrative of the early 20th century. It's only the Far Right extreme which doesn't like it for going against the idea that race has a major influence on intelligence.
why doesn't it fit the 'left' narrative which seems to categorize humans based on their social class?
Well, for one thing, to accept it is to give credence to IQ and intelligence testing. Once that is done, then you have to give credence to a lot of other inconvenient studies. Also, it's part of a larger picture that supports the idea of assimilation over cultural isolation. It's also pro-military.
> Well, for one thing, to accept it is to give credence to IQ and intelligence testing. Once that is done, then you have to give credence to a lot of other inconvenient studies. Also, it's part of a larger picture that supports the idea of assimilation over cultural isolation. It's also pro-military.
It doesn't really matter whether you give credence to IQ testing or not.
If you do: It's clear that african americans have been marginalized, seeing as the results are separate from ethnicity as proven by the earlier study.
If you don't: Square one of your given ideologies.
> It's not against the narrative of the right in general. The US political right likes the narrative of the early 20th century. It's only the Far Right extreme which doesn't like it for going against the idea that race has a major influence on intelligence.
It's against the narrative of the right as their platform is behind almost all of the marginalization of african americans.
It doesn't really matter whether you give credence to IQ testing or not.
Oh yes, it does. It points the finger at whose policies are to blame for the reversal of improving fortunes for certain communities in the US.
If you do: It's clear that african americans have been marginalized, seeing as the results are separate from ethnicity as proven by the earlier study.
If you study immigrant and ethnically/culturally separate communities all around the world and all across history, two clear patterns show through. 1) Often a minority group's leaders keep their group culturally isolated to keep their local power. 2) Economic success of a minority group is linked to the degree of assimilation and integration into economic and cultural life of the surrounding culture.
The pattern across history is often that groups marginalize themselves.
It's against the narrative of the right as their platform is behind almost all of the marginalization of african americans.
You could frame it as a class issue, but democrats have a much stronger hold over the African American voting population than the poor population. So it's better for democrats keep to framing conversations around race instead of class, to fire up their base.
I don't think the democratic party has a hold over the African American voting block in so much as it has been the only real choice for them for the last 40 or 50 years (unless you have Stockholm syndrome that is). Couple that with the increase in leadership roles and overall candidates and the democratic party is becoming more representative by the day. This results in more and better legislation targeting the issues of black Americans.
Contrast that with the republican party, how well are poor whites represented in the party (aside from near-constant lip service)?
The republican party platform combines the roughly orthogonal financial interests of the wealthy and moral interests of white evangelicals. Some of the key demands of poor whites are addressed within that latter category.
Because few social liberals would take the risk of coming out and saying “Black people in the US have lower IQ on average”, even though what it’s really saying is “Black people are often victims of a class divide, rooted in racism, that results in economic and everyday stress that causes lower intelligence”. It sounds racist to merely present the problem, going against the “all people are created equal” narrative because intelligence is viewed as innate, rather than something that can be developed (or harmed). So they fail to acknowledge the problem, which perpetuates the problem.
ETA: Unless, of course, you come at it from another angle that doesn’t acknowledge the race issues but tries to solve the resulting problems—“schools need funding”, “kids need school lunches”, “careless gentrification is harmful”, &c.
Talking about IQ among ethinicities is verboten on the left.
It’s also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children. The German study suggests that culture matters, which counters this axiom.
> Talking about IQ among ethinicities is verboten on the left.
No, it's not. In fact, both results of studies showing such differences and the factors likely producing them are frequent matters of discussion on the left.
> It’s also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children.
Also not true, though the left (unlike the right) is unlikely to limit it's consideration of “culture” to a narrow set of values that parents of certain ethnic backgrounds are presumed to have or not have, and consider the sources of culture influences much more broadly than the right does.
> The German study suggests that culture matters,
It is quite consistent with the idea that physical and broad social context matters, and that broad aspects of the physical context to which various groups are selectively subjected, as well as elements of the broad US social context, are particularly harmful to and preserve the disadvantage of various historically disadvantaged groups is actually more widely accepted as established fact on the left than the things you mislabel as axiomatic.
> Talking about IQ among ethinicities is verboten on the left.
That's because it's an irrelevant classification.
> It’s also axiomatic on the left that all cultures are equally effective at raising successful, healthy children. The German study suggests that culture matters, which counters this axiom.
Assume you would do these tests on Irish Americans in the mid-1900s, or Italian Americans in the late 1900s, and compare to other groupings of people. Assuming similar results:
Would you say the results say anything about Irish or Italian blood or Irish or Italian culture being less intelligent?
Or would you say that the results could be rooted in something closer to economic standing or housing area or a number of other factors?
I don't get the joke. The truth is probably that genetics do play a role (perhaps small though) in intelligence, as it does with other measures like height or bone marrow donor compatibility.
However, even the above can just be used to maintain the tinfoil conspiracy theory about jews running the world. So.... you cant get any useful conclusion with this data, even if you use the data as it is (i.e. to say "on average", and never use it to guess a certain person's intelligence based on ethnicity).
Also, the genes responsible for skin color,afaik, has nothing to do with the intelligence of that human. Otherwise, there would literally be a cap on iq for whiter or darker skinned humans. But there is not, any ethnicity can produce stupid individuals and geniuses as well.
I am not well read enough on the subject to have my own opinion. My summary of his words: The average score of an IQ test is defined as 100, so the raw intelligence each score represents changes over time as population intelligence changes over time. Some nations have seen an increase in average IQ of 20 points. There is a difference of IQ between African Americans and the rest of the US population, but that can be explained as being socially isolated, and the same difference can be found in other socially isolated populations.
*
Edit: I am embarrassed to have linked to such a publication, but will not modify my original words.
Edit: I am embarrassed to have linked to such a publication, but will not modify my original words.
No, don't be. Don't be swayed by guilt by association. That is a tool of oppressors. Evaluate information and arguments on their merits. You can't keep ideologies honest if you're not allowed to evaluate and possibly "fire" them and seek alternatives.
Are you wedded to the "flag" or "label" or to the principles represented by them?
I can't yet comment on the substance of Thomas Sowell's argument, but when I went to read his article I was struck by townhall.com's top 3 trending pieces.
• Why Science and Experience Command That You Buy an 'Assault Rifle'
• An Eagle Scout Explains the Fatal Folly of Taking the ‘Boy’ out of Boy Scouts
• Liberalism Must Be Destroyed
Draw your own conclusions on bias.
Edit: To those downvoting, why? If I'm in the wrong to point this out and let people draw their own conclusions please comment and let me know why.
I appreciate the point you're making, but I don't feel my comment was made to attack the website while ignoring the argument. I merely pointed out what they choose to display as their "trending articles".
Do you find context to be completely irrelevant when engaging in political discussion?
It's reasonable to evaluate a source before you trust what comes out of that source.
For example, I have ample experience being lied to by Donald Trump and therefore I feel comfortable ignoring most of what he says or assuming it's a lie.
There is too much information in the world today to not rely on filters like the reputation of and your experience with the source.
Townhall is a well-known conservative website. Are you surprised they are running articles arguing for conservative points? Or do you think those headlines are outside the bounds of reasonable discourse?
I'm not the parent commenter, but I decided to read the one about science compelling me to purchase an assault rifle.
It's mostly fear mongering under the pretext of "science" by using a medium article that attempts to estimate the likelihood of a group attempting to overthrow the US government based on the fact that two "overthrows" have been attempted (Revolutionary and Civil wars).
It also has a good amount of liberal bashing and partly through it we get to the real reason it was written which was to plug the authors book.
The summary on Amazon is as follows:
"America’s growing political and cultural divisions have finally split the United States apart. Now, as the former blue states begin to collapse under the dead weight of their politically correct tyranny, a lethal operative haunted by his violent past undertakes one last mission to infiltrate and take out his target in the nightmarish city of Los Angeles, deep in the heart of the People’s Republic of North America"
Basically the author is trying to scare me, justify those fears with "science", give me an enemy to focus my fear on, and then sell me a book which will both make the author money and give me the satisfaction of living out a fantasy scenario in which all of my fears were correct and I can feel like a good guy.
In summary, I would say that this article is far outside the bounds of reasonable discourse and should not be read by anybody.
This is my first encounter with Townhall. I am embarrassed to cite a publication with a blatant political agenda without specifically commenting on it's agenda. This is specifically true because I provided a summary which talks about race and intelligence, which is a socially taboo subject.
I didn't know that, and apparently neither did the poster of that link.
> Or do you think those headlines are outside the bounds of reasonable discourse?
My only intention was to point out potential bias. Now that you mention it though, no, I don't think a headline like "Liberalism Must Be Destroyed" is making a good faith effort to start a reasonable discourse. I think it's pandering to the kind of destructive tribal political think that has rendered productive political discourse basically nonexistent these days. And I would say the same if the title was "Conservatism Must Be Destroyed"
Edit: I read the articles. Those headlines might honestly be understating the level of bias. I don't event want to sully HN with that level of pathological tribal political nonsense. For example, regardless of your opinion on guns (I own one personally), to pretend like this is what healthy political discourse looks like is completely unacceptable.
> Ignore the liberals who want an America where you disarmed and defenseless against the tyranny they dream of imposing. Ignore the hateful teens MSNBCNN spotlight and the Hollywood virtue signalers who harangue you from behind armed guards. Ignore the blue falcon Democrat vets who think their tour in Iraq means they earned some sort of moral authority to dictate to you what guns you do and don’t need. If that’s how it works, I did 27 years, so doesn’t my guidance that you should totally buy an AR-15 count? No? Oh, right – their vetsplaining is just manipulative liberal baloney.
> Instead, be guided by science. The science, supported by experience, make clear what you need to do. Buy guns and ammunition. Get an AR-15.
Having "control" over cities does not mean being able to cancel out systemic racism and discrimination. That doesn't mean I give the left a pass, but it has been a constant fight to make progress of any kind, especially given that cities don't often have the resources to deal with systemic issues. Cities are on the front line of these issues doing symptom relief (affordable housing, homelessness etc). It often requires legislation to tackle systemic issues, like redlining[0].
To compound that, a lot of urban areas that are "controlled by the left" are at the mercy of their state governments for a lot of funding and the ability to make major changes. Some states are disallowing their cities from enforcing their own minimum wage increases while also enshrining discrimination as legal.
Expecting cities to be able to take on a national issue stemming from the enslavement of millions of people and the subsequent economic subjugation of said people is like expecting developers to be able to take on decades old technical debt while completing their day to day work.
> It's largely been the political left in the US which has had control of large urban areas.
Control of what, exactly? Inheriting a broken series of communities from the weight of the history of slavery? Let's remember the US's history of slavery and Jim Crow did to these communities and how hard the urban north fought against it while the south reveled in it.
Also let's remember northern urban African-Americans didn't live under the constant threat of lynching like their southern counterparts did, so the conservative handling of black communities was far worse historically and a lot of the northern urban systems were overwhelmed by southern migration to the north to escape these very social issues! Its like chasing jews out of your country than laughing at the jewish ghettos in the country next door.
>Poles and Italians were able to increase their average IQ's to parity with the US as a whole in that period.
People without a history of being slaves here and, of course, people with white skin. This isn't apples to apples.
I really think you're missing the forest for the trees here in some hamfisted attempt to blame everything on the bogeyman "of the left." You can't just dismiss racism and the legacy of the Jim Crow era as a non-existent factor in the lives of black communities.
As for progress peaking in the 60s lets remember how Republicans treated blacks during and after the civil rights movement. Its no coincidence.
Lee Atwater on using blacks as society's scapegoats to push for tax cuts and other unrelated policies by driving race hate as much possible in he GOP's Southern Strategy.
You start in 1954 by saying ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘Nigger.’ That hurts you. It backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff and you get so abstract. Now you talk about cutting taxes and these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that’s part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. Obviously sitting around saying we want to cut taxes and we want this, is a lot more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than nigger nigger. So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.
The book "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character" by Paul Tough is a nice primer on this topic. The book includes findings from the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study [1] that points at a link between adverse childhood experiences childhood trauma with health and social problems later in life.
Of course, growing up in poverty doesn't automatically mean you'll have a higher ACE level, nor does it mean you cannot change your outcomes, but it does tend to offer more traumatic experiences than children outside of poverty.
Growing up poor I think I had more stress then my peers but there was also an element of street smartness which I realised my friends simply lacked. As poor was pretty shameless asserting my needs or optimising for my benefit at the expense of others where as my rich friends seemed to not understand my selfish behaviour.
For example when I was offered a job I negotiated 200% more salary upfront. The HR person was shocked but later we settled on 140% more. Where my other friend made much much less.
Poverty is a state of mind but it had other benefits too in my case.
I think there are different kinds of poverty being assumed here.
On one had you have the innovation coming from the poverty of Cuba where they have adapted in amazing ways. But that's a society where poverty is the norm and things like family structure isn't much affected by it (I'm guessing).
On the other hand you have the poverty of the US where it's not the norm. The gulf between poor and rich (or just middle class) is overwhelming. The poor in the US are marginalized -- living in the least desirable areas, terrible access to education, jobs, grocery stores. High crime, broken families. Kids grow up with constant police sirens, sounds of domestic disputes, drugs, crumbling houses. That stress takes a toll. Focus on education is secondary to just surviving another day. Long term stress has been shown to cause a constellation of effects that are ruinous for our health -- mentally and physically.
Remember: it's not the absolute value that matters in poverty, it's the income inequality.
Cuba has a lot of inequality too. There's a massive gulf between those with family abroad and those who have to make do only with the income from the (broken) official system.
On the other hand, there is very little crime or drugs, and consequently few sirens.
So even though Cuba does have slums, there are elements that are better than a poor person in the US would experience. You also don't need a car or need expensive shelter, so there's less chance that everything will crumble if you hit a financial snag. My understanding is that is a major source of stress for US poor.
I don't have enough firsthand experience to know whether family structure is affected. But there are definite class differences you can note when talking to people.
Intelligence is mostly a result of environment: access to 1-1 tutors, high quality nutrition, supportive peers. None of these things exist in poor areas in the US as far as I can tell.
IQ tests are frequently biased. How biased will vary from test to test. Also, the data is can be misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with the tests procedures/results 1
70-80% comes from where? Nobody knows exactly what the "smart genes" are, and studies in twins show that variance between individuals in IQ is about 50%-60% genetic...or 40-50% environmental factors2A/2B
Even Haier has said that the fact that intelligence is in some way genetic just means that the factors that might influence those aspects of it would also need to be genetic. This can include things like nutrition and mental illness/stress, which are more prevalent among poorer communities.
Mostly from twin studies. This number (at least the ballpark figure) is essentially uncontested amongst researchers at this point (see e.g. [1]). However, this is the heritability of the variability of intelligence in adults. In children, that number is close to the one you cited. The rest of what you’ve said is essentially true: heritability is extremely complex and we’re only now getting the first few association studies in to ascertain which genomic loci are associated with changes [2].
Maybe (and it’s definitely relevant), although I’m not sure other studies agree.
But it is well established that parents’ wealth is an extremely good predictor of children’s wealth (see e.g. [1]). And I don’t think OP is matte_black is denying the role of intelligence. They’re merely noting that poverty, in itself, doesn’t necessarily correlate with ingenuity.
My stance is that GPs ingenuity of the poor is really the fact that some poor are clever. This makes it look like survivorship bias, (some poor succeed) but actually it's explained by the stronger causal relationship that it's better to be born smart than born wealthy. But of course, as ur link suggests, its even better to be born wealthy and smart as they are both positively correlated with success. But I think in this discussion it's worth highlighting that intelligence is a an important factor that applies to both sides of economic status, and perhaps it's more important.
But it’s not the relative importance of one thing vs the other which is most important.
What is most important in the context of this conversation, imho, is the case for the profound negative effects of poverty, United-States style, on an individuals growth and the (sometimes insurmountable) challenges it creates for that person.
And the reason that this matters is that poverty in a country such as the U.S. (and also many, if not most other countries) is the result of a series of political choices by people (social policy, etc) over time.
In over words, it’s a phenomenon which is, if not created entirely by, is definitely affected (increased or decreases) by human behavior.
But these facts mean we are already more meritocratic than aristocratic. The relative importance of these factors define where we are in that spectrum. Being meritocratic is what we want I think. Sure, we are still a bit wealth biased, but that might actually be due to intelligence being hereditary not wealth being causal.
It’s much easier to display your intelligence if you have proper nutrition, sleep and exercise. It’s likely harder when you are focused on more primal needs like food.
Assuming intelligence is the best predictor of wealth (not sure if true), and that intelligence is highly genetic as said elsewhere in this thread (not sure if true), then parent's wealth being a good predictor of children's wealth would already be explained by intelligence being genetic.
So just because parent's wealth predicts children's wealth doesn't in any way make it impossible that intelligence predicts wealth too or that they'd necessarily be in conflict.
Leaving mortality aside, survivorship doesn’t just apply to literal death; it usually (and importantly here) applies to sampling: Let’s assume for argument’s sake that poverty does indeed have a significant, detrimental effect on brain development. If a researcher now looks at poor people that beat the odds, they might well observe that these people used their (above-average) intelligence to surmount problems in their lives cause by poverty.
But it would be invalid to use that observation to extrapolate that all (or most) poor people possess this kind of ingenuity. No: it was only the ones that were very smart to begin with. This faulty generalisation would indeed be an instance of survivorship bias.
"Being richer was associated with living longer at every level of the income distribution. And the gap between the richest 1 percent and the bottom 1 percent in the nation was vast. At 40, the richest men could expect to live to 87 while the bottom 1 percent had a life expectancy of just above 72 – equal to the average in a developing country like Sudan"
That's a deeply reductionist way of looking at it.
> At the same time, the researchers are quick to point out that the findings cannot immediately be reduced to simple cause-and-effect explanations. For instance, as social scientists have long observed, it is very hard to say whether having wealth leads to better health — or if health, on aggregate, is a prerequisite for accumulating wealth. Most likely, the two interact in complex ways, something the study cannot resolve.
- https://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap...
In other words, this is a chicken-and-egg problem.
If you parse that question carefully, it is not asking if existing wealth can help confer health. The question is if health is needed to accumulate (more) wealth. Word in () added. And that seems like a silly question - of course people are going to have more difficulty accumulating wealth with sufficiently bad health..
I think there is a definite policy question of how exactly is it that wealth helps grant better health, and can we effectively increase our society's health by knowing in more detail... but to me the fundamental link doesn't have much more to prove with that data.
The other side of the coin (having grown up dirt poor, nearly starved to death as a child) is that by the time I hit 45 about half my high school class was already dead. Mostly alcohol and the sorts of accidents that come from working dangerous jobs.
Only a couple really made it out and thrived, of the ones that remain many are broken and on barbiturates or meth, still just trying to make it through the day somehow.
I work with a lot of people now who grew up wealthy on the east coast or in Orange County, and they often just don't believe me that people starved to death a couple states over while they were summering at the Hamptons. These venn diagrams just don't mix, ever.
The ability of a population to sometimes come up with incredible solutions does not negate the theory that growing up poor harms brain development.
You have structured your post as a criticism or denial of the point in the article, but your post is just a logical fallacy that makes no sense. Additionally, your post suggests that you think poverty is almost a desirable situation, you show no compassion or concern for the 40 million Americans living in poverty or how the system of American capitalism has left so many of them with likely brain development problems.
You dismiss leading science and modern culture for an attitude that certaintly doesn't belong in reasonable conversation online or anywhere. Your post is effectively 'F the poor, nothing is wrong with the situation, they are smart enough to get out of the whole we put them in, who cares about trying to help them or even understand what poverty is like'.
Could a contributing factor be the quality of food that easier to access when poor? I grew up in a slightly higher than poverty environment and had to cook when my mom was at work. I was probably an exception, all my friends would eat frozen prepared meals and fast food.
Calories certainly do not equal proper vitamins, enzymes and amino acids, required for a developing living being. Frozen meals and fast food have plenty of empty calories and can put the body in survival mode, storing more fat and leading to blood sugar issues, to say the least. Thoughts?
Nutrition is definitely a factor, but probably not the major one.
I think the number one factor is probably access to parental attention.
It's shocking how much better an elementary age student can do when there is a parent to remind them about a homework project that is due. Or be available to answer a question on basic math or the meaning of a word.
Even in two equally driven students, self learning gets stuck at home in ways parents can unblock if they have the time and energy to do it.
Being poor is not something you can tell someone, you need to live it to experience the horror, you are despised and disrespected for something you had no control over
I don't know about brain development but I think that it tends to encourage narrowmindedess.
When you only have a few options and choosing the wrong one is potentially devastating, you tend to zero in on the safe and sure choice. Iterate on this a million times and you have a person who will tend to stick to the status quo and dismiss other options.
In my experience, I have recognized cycles of trauma. My mom grew up in poverty with food insecurity and her dad was an abusive alcoholic- so much that when he passed away it was like good riddance. He was so abusive my grandmother refused to remarry.
I didn't grow up with food insecurity but I remember that a $1 ice cream sandwich or slice of pizza was a luxury until I got my first job.
My first relationship was with an abusive person. He tried to control what I eat, separate me from my friends and family, and almost destroyed me. It was only when a friend recommended me a book Why Does He Do That? that I recognized in horror that not only was he abusive, I saw the same red flags in another relationship, my parents...
Environment is so important, sometimes I see this cycle in others. I'm afraid when you come from an abusive environment sometimes you don't know any better. You don't know how you should or deserve to be treated.
I saw a documentary about two young girls that were the first in their families to graduate high school and go to college in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the USA [1]. It was a feel good documentary and then I looked up the students on Facebook. One student was now a teen mom and the other had dropped out of college and was working at McDonald's. She was publicly crying for help on her Facebook personal page on why her life was so miserable. I understand that feeling to feel cursed just for being alive.
I believe she may have been bullied by her wealthier classmates... Separated from her support network, bullied, and struggling to learn as well as go to school, I feel like her odds were heavily stacked against her to begin with. (And that's what Shanti Bhavan discovered too. You can't help them go to college and leave them hanging, you have to support them through college).
However, I've also seen incredible stories of strength from some of the poorest places on earth. Shanti Bhavan [2], Barefoot College [3], and SECMOL [4] have done and are doing incredible work!
My uneducated belief is that what all three of those places have in common is their deep love and unwavering belief for their students whether they are children or an illiterate grandmother training to be a solar engineer- as well as arming them with skills to work and provide for their families (probably the major key- that's how they gain their confidence).
Maybe that's one way to tackle poverty as a mental health issue. Help traumatized communities that might be in a cycle of trauma to break abusive mindsets. Teach needed skills, confidence, and financial literacy, so they can believe that they can be more than a teen mom or like my mom, locked in an abusive marriage or relationship from financial dependence.
I sincerely hope that poor American children today are not being treated worse than children from families who live with less than $1/day. In that sense, I believe instead of tackling poverty as neurological/biological, we should also investigate the environmental and behavioral.
As another movement says, violent communities don't need more police officers but mental health counselors.
As for anyone who says that the poor are lazy, please read about the salt farmers of India in Gujarat [5]. Watch My Name is Salt [6] to see how they farm salt for 8 months for almost nothing. You will never be able to call the poor lazy after seeing that.
everything is about the environment. If you have an under stimulating environment then even your health is affected.
Read about the WWII pregnant survivors of holocaust where their lack of food evolved into the fetus being stingy with proteins and sugars and now they are experiencing health problems because now their body stores more than it needs and weight gain and other health factors arose.
So yes, environment can be detrimental to not only brain, but full physiological development
The consensus amongst intelligence researchers is that adult intelligence is ~70-80% based on genetic factors. I refer you to The Neuroscience of Intelligence - Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology by Richard Haier and the many studies sited therein.
We should help poor and less intelligent people for moral reasons, but it is unlikely to improve intelligence in the poorer population and, if the aid is structured dysgenically, it will serve only to compound the problem.
That's incorrect; heritability is not reflective of environmental factors. The classic example is height: height is ~80% heritable, but has been increasing steadily for centuries due to environment.
Heritability only applies to the population studied, so unless you specifically look at poor vs wealthy people you don't see the impact of the environment. If you do that, up to 50% of the variance in IQ can be described by environmental factors[1]. This study[2] says: "Among lower income families, the proportions were in the reverse direction, 39% genetic and 45% shared environment." This one[3] says: " 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."
On top of that IQ and cultural influences are highly correlated[4].
> We should help poor and less intelligent people for moral reasons, but it is unlikely to improve intelligence in the poorer population and, if the aid is structured dysgenically, it will serve only to compound the problem.
Completely false- this study[5] found that for one group of adopted children averaged 19.5 IQ points higher when placed with wealthier families, compared to poorer families.
As you are saying, 20–30 per cent of the variability of intelligence is not heritable. In other words, it’s acquired. This contradicts your claim that “[helping them] is unlikely to improve intelligence in the poorer population”. If done correctly, it will improve intelligence.
I am saying that the evidence suggests that 70-80% of adult[1] intelligence is based on genetic factors (that is distinct from heritability, which is lower, ~60% iirc) leaving the remaining 20-30% as unknown environmental factors. Wealth intuitively does play a role in that, although I believe (with as strong of evidence any anyone else does in the matter of environmental outcomes) that a strong parental bond matters more than wealth.
Again, my concern is that if unstructured wealth transfer is treated as a panacea, it will end up having compounding dysgenic effects that outweigh whatever short term individual benefits come of it. This will, in the not very long run, make poverty worse.
It isn't saving me any karma since people can't be rational about this topic, but I'll stress again that I think we should help the poor for moral reasons.
[1] - It is important to specify adult intelligence, because interventions do appear to help childhood IQ, but this effect fades into adulthood and eventual life outcomes. This is why there was a lot of excitement around Head Start initially, but it has failed to produce the large changes in society that was hoped for.
> genetic factors (that is distinct from heritability, which is lower, ~60%
You’re confusing something. Genetic factors = heritability, by definition[^1]. The 60% number is simply the heritability at birth (actually it’s probably lower), whereas the 80% number is the heritability in adults.
I see how this may sound confusing (how can heritability change?!). The reason is simply that “heritability of X” is, strictly speaking, a shortcut for “heritability in the variability of X”. As children grow up, they are influenced by their environment, which accounts for part of their intellectual development. As adults, they are still influenced by their environment but since the majority of their intellectual development has already taken place, there’s less room for variation here.
In other words, between two toddlers there’s a lot room for variation in upbringing with influence on their IQ. But if you take two University graduates from the same school, with doctoral degrees in particle physics, they will have relatively little variability in their IQ that’s due to their upbringing. Instead, the difference in their respective IQs will be mostly due to genetics (80% of it).
> but [the effect of intervention] fades into adulthood and eventual life outcomes
No, that’s another misinterpretation. The effect does not fade, it’s sustained. It simply seems to fade since you are comparing a different population/peer group (see my example of the two PhDs above).
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[^1] I’m aware that there are other vague definitions of heritability and genetic factors flying around, just to confuse things. However, these aren’t rigorously defined. In genetics, heritability = genetic factors.
The remaining 20-30% is related to childhood nutrition, education, opportunities to play, learning from peer groups... all of which are heavily impacted by wealth/poverty. And 20-30% is A LOT. Luck plays as much of a role in wealth as intelligence, so to assume that wealthy are more intelligent from genetic reasons and therefore poor families will remain poor is myopic.
Unstructured wealth transfer will never happen (except in cryptocurrencies) so I don't think you need to worry about that. The current effort is to get hardheaded free-marketers to recognize that equal opportunity is a myth.
Basic income is arguably that, and there’s some hope that it will happen in the not so far future (or rather, there’s a reasonable fear that without it, and with the structural changes to the job market due to advanced automation, we’d be f#cked).
