The New York Times presents us with a chart today showing that rich kids are far more likely to get high SAT scores than poor kids:
What's the cause of this huge inequality?
Children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest.... private schools, summers traveling the world.... test prep.... tutors.... neighborhoods of concentrated poverty or affluence.... time and connections.... volunteering in classrooms, lobbying on behalf of the school and raising money through school foundations.... friendships.... segregated neighborhoods.... what children do in the evenings and on summer breaks, their parents’ vocabularies, and the level of stress in their home lives.... private extracurriculars, counseling, tutoring, coaching, therapy, health management.... high-quality preschools.... intensive parenting.... bedtime reading, museum visits and science summer camps.
There's truth to all this. But out of 2,000 words, there is only one passing suggestion that there's any other cause of this disparity in SAT scores:
Although the heritability of cognitive ability appears to play some role on an individual level....
"Some" role. Research suggests that by first grade there's an IQ difference of 11 points between children of affluent and poor families. That's a lot! This might very well be partially explained by home life and neighborhoods, but it's long before private schools, world travel, and test prep classes have any impact.
There's nothing controversial about how this happens, either. Smart people tend to make lots of money; marry other smart people ("associative mating"); and then produce smart babies who go on to get high SAT scores. Some of this is indeed due to environment, but most of it is up to heritability and genes. We're all just afraid to say so for fear of accidentally brushing up against forbidden race-IQ topics.
In any case, the most interesting aspect of the chart isn't the SAT differences between rich and poor. It's the difference between the top 1% and the top 0.1%. No one thinks there's any cognitive difference between these two groups, but then again, there's probably not much difference in preschools and test prep either. These are both very wealthy cohorts. So what causes the difference? Further empirical research on this score might be illuminating.
A recurrent comment here is that supposedly smart people like Sam Bankman-Fried make mistakes, so intelligence is not so important (or something). Keep in mind that if smart people get into high and important positions the mistakes that they do make are likely to be widely damaging and come to public attention. Somebody who has low intelligence will not get into critical jobs requiring complex thinking, and their mistakes will not be so important, although they may be more frequent.
Most important advances in human knowledge have been made by exceptionally intelligent people with good judgement. Whether that kind of intelligence correlates with SAT scores is another (important) question.
"Somebody who has low intelligence will not get into critical jobs requiring complex thinking,"
Counterpoint: Trump.
Kevin refers to a study that says "by first grade there's an IQ difference of 11 points between children of affluent and poor families" and somehow he thinks this is a confirmation that native intelligence is dominant. The study shows that the IQ gap of 6 points at 2 years had tripled by age 16. Taken at face value this indicates a very large environmental effect on whatever is being measured. Of course the validity of IQ testing over this range of ages may be questionable, and it would be helpful to know the variance within each income group. But whatever the uncertainties the result is not a demonstration that there is some fixed native intelligence (IQ) that is different between the groups.
This!
My IQ was measured to be 122 when I was in second grade. When I was 40, and had completed a PhD and published numerous scholarly articles, I took a test again and came out at 145.
I guess my genetics changed.
An IQ test for a toddler is VASTLY different from the Stanford-Binet, which comes loaded with "cutural biases". That toddler is tested for pattern recognition, identification of simple relationships and ability to follow directions. Only the last is "acquired". One either has the ability to identify patterns and relationships or one doesn't. Remedial training can certainly help, but folks who can't innately make those connections will always be at a huge disadvantage in any cognitive effort to those who "get it" by themselves.
Never trust a graph without error bars or that indiscriminately changes the scale of the x-axis. So does the top 20% include the 1%, and the 0.1%? Does the top 1% include the 0.1%? And where does our intrepid reporter fall on this scale?
Most rich people aren't very smart at all. It's just that most poor people are incredibly dumb.
You yourself said otherwise here: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the-black-white-iq-gap-is-almost-certainly-environmental/
I found that post very persuasive, indeed it is one of the most memorable things you've ever posted. Marginalization itself makes kids dumb. When a group's social status changes for the better, its kids get smarter; when it changes for the worse, they get dumber. And this happens way too fast for genetics to be a factor. I am shocked that you forgot your own work like this.
It's not trips to London and Paris, but there's a reason Dems support universal pre-K.
Early childhood brain development is crucial and irreplaceable. Stimulation of the child's brain, which could range across reading or drawing or music or sports strategy or lots of other things does wonders.
We support that as a social equalizer, and it works.