Right. The implication, in my mind at least, is that fighting poverty should be one of the key goals of society. Being in poverty effectively hides gifts as poverty will dominate "natural" ability.
Reply to scott_s: In that article, note that the study addressed the effect of pre-school on strongly disadvantaged children: "Only disadvantaged children living in adverse circumstances who had low IQ scores and a low index of family socioeconomic status were eligible to participate in the Perry program."
Right, it's not an experiment for the conditions under discussion. It is, however, an experiment which demonstrates the importance of early childhood environment.
That's a pretty huge assumption, that micro-nutrients are a significant part of any difference.
You've assumed, first, that it's poverty that causes the lowered IQ, rather than that both poverty and lower-IQ are both effects of a common cause.
Second, even if there really is a causal chain, why in the world would you assume that the difference is related to nutrition? Why not, for example, cultural differences in the way that poor parents interact with children compared with the way that non-poor parents do?
If poverty doesn't cause lowered IQ how would explain children adopted into non-improrished households having higher IQs? I don't have good evidence that nutrition is the primary factor here, but there is a lot of research saying that nutrition is important with respect to IQ.
I come from a reasonably well off family. Ma parents did not think they could have children, so they adopted a boy and a girl. Then I came along.
I look like my parents, think like my parents and in many ways, behave like my parents. However, I have outright rejected their religious beliefs (so there are some differences, but these could be the lack on indoctrination or maybe circumstance.
My sister met her biological mother for the first time when my sister was 23. They both smoked, wore similar clothes, had similar musical tastes, similar social past times - in just about every way, they were very alike. More importantly, my sister is almost nothing like me, despite the very similar nurture/environment.
My brother was a very similar story, always in trouble with the law.
My parents had a strict policy, if one got something, we all got it. However, they recognized strengths and nurtured those.
So we have a family whose genetics have driven our looks, personalities, interests, careers (if you consider crime a career for my brother) and in my view, intelligence was also varied.
Adoption did not influence my siblings as far as I can see (by comparison with biological parents). All I have ever seen in my life in nature, nature, nature.
To add to this, we all have kids, and guess what? Our kids are all similar to their parents too. Looks/behavior and again, I'd argue intelligence.
Having said all of that, we are all intelligent in our own ways. As an example, my brother is very street wise- he's a great manipulator, a player. He can handle himself in many situations.
I fundamentally reject any urgument that nature plays no part in any aspect of what makes a person, including intelligence. Do you think the similarities end with looks?
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the classic logical fallacies[1]. You persist in the assumption that poverty causes lower IQ, rather than the possibility that both poverty and lower IQ are correlated because they share a common cause.
The way you do a controlled experiment in science is that you have a number of subjects, you subject only some of them to some new condition, and then you look for statistically significant differences between the group subject to the condition and the one that wasn't.
That was what happened in the study I mentioned.
Now, you can say that this wasn't absolute proof and you'd be right, because science doesn't provide any absolute proof. But if you're going to throw out this evidence you're going to have to throw out the rest of modern medicine too.
The problem is that often there will be several factors linked together. Richer households will have better nutrition, but they'll also behave differently, have more books, associate more with other richer families, etc. It's really hard to unlink these factors, even when trying to control studies statistically.
Nutrition is a really low hanging fruit, and you have to be pretty poor for it to have any effect.
you can say that this wasn't absolute proof and you'd be right, ... But if you're going to throw out this evidence you're going to have to throw out the rest of modern medicine too.
No, what needs to be thrown out is armchair scientists who don't properly understand the scientific method. Just because you've shown a statistically-significant correlation between two phenomenon, there really is very little reason to expect that shoring up one of those phenomenon will actually have an effect on the other.
Let's look at the question at hand, the correlation between (low) IQ and childhood poverty. Observing that the poor are more likely to be undernourished and at the same time, children in poverty show fewer signs of inherited high intelligence, there is very little (one might even say zero) reason to believe that giving poor kids food will improve their intelligence.
People seem to nod their heads and say "yeah, whatever" when challenged on the difference between causation and correlation, but in fact there's a world of difference.
Here's an alternative speculation about the real causation of the observation. Being a single-parent household causes poverty because a smaller income must be spread across the same fixed expenses (rent, etc.) and nearly the same variable expenses (say, 3/4 the food, medical care, etc.), and thus the money "runs out" sooner. Being a single-parent household also causes lower IQ, because there is less parental involvement available to the child (helping with homework and the like), because a single parent must be consuming at least as much time working, more (per family member) doing necessary household chores, and thus less remains for the kid.
Through this chain of causation, throwing food at the problem may fix the malnutrition, but that's not the identified cause of the lower IQ, so if our goal is to improve IQs, then the investment was entirely wasted. We've still got as many single-parent households who can't invest as much time interacting with the child, and since the actual cause is still out there, there will be just as many lower-IQ kids. Your un-scientific jump to conclusions about the causation has wasted what you've invested to fix it, and worse, because you believed you were fixing it, you've actually blocked more legitimate efforts to fix the real cause.
Really: seeing a correlation is no reason to believe that there's causation in effect. This is true in philosophy, but just as true in science!
Malnutrition can be one such limit of opportunity, if it harms development in childhood. It's also one of the easiest things to fix; giving children nutritional supplements and subsidized school lunches is pretty cheap and straightforward, compared to just about any other method of ameliorating poverty.
>Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves.
What's your point? Ownership of an arbitrary appliance doesn't mean you're able to put food on the table or afford tuition for your children. You don't need to eat a TV every night to survive nor can you fill up your gas tank on microwaves. Besides, in the developed world, TVs and microwaves are a dime a dozen and are regularly discarded because their abundance makes them worth so little.
He asked a good question. To what level does the bar need to rise to eliminate poverty as something that holds someone back? Is easy access to food and education that level?
My gut feeling that wealth disparity is a bigger issue than absolute wealth. If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential.
>If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential.
It's not about absolute material equity, it's about comfortably meeting one's needs such that second order concerns (like studying or tinkering with a mobile SDK) become viable pursuits. Living in a mansion means you can likely afford food, rent, transportation, insurance, healthcare, tuition, and all the other expenses that leave the poor with little room for "achieving true potential".
It's still cheaper (or at least perceived as being cheaper due to clever marketing by food companies) to gorge oneself on junk calories than to half-starve on fresh, healthy food.
A microwave costs a couple of days of labor in the U.S. and then lasts for a couple of years. It's a pretty basic item these days.
For evaluating the impact on life outcomes, why not define poverty as the state where (lack of) financial resources frequently limit the choices available to an individual?
I don't think poverty is fully explained by external factors, but I think that unexpected events do tend to have a larger impact on people with limited resources, often exacerbating their problems.
Your reply captures the sentiment very well - ownership of a microwave really isn't a good indicator of poverty. It IS a good indicator of the kind of systemic poverty that exists. Simply by luck of being born within the US, I'm privileged with higher wages which gives me the opportunity to purchase one, and easier access to buy such appliances. I can purchase one at any time (24/7) for an hour's wage, if not less.
For evaluating the impact on life outcomes, why not define poverty as the state where (lack of) financial resources frequently limit the choices available to an individual?
I like your definition for poverty. I'm well acquainted with our (US) social services that provide food, shelter, clothing, transportation, basic phone and internet service, and education funding to any parent, woman, or child, and some single men. By this definition, I'm led to believe that poverty doesn't exist within the US, even though myself and most of my friends and family fall below the "poverty line".
