It’s also very useful for picking up dyslexia, and was used to diagnose mine.

Look I think anything can happen between a range of say 90 to 120 IQ. And this is where the real problem lies. People try to grope around trying make that range seem exact when it isnt. The stark difference is above and below.

To a certain extent, that makes sense, but Stephen Jay Gould (a smarter bloke than either of us) said this:

the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groupsraces, classes, or sexesare innately inferior and deserve their status. (pp. 2425)

, from The Mismeasure of Man.

You can’t take a persons existing status and categorically state they “deserve” it. I have no problem with IQ tests being a diagnostic, I have a serious problem with them being used as a determination of your future worth. That is just plain old prejudice, dressed up as science, and Saunders is on shaky (if not outright fraudulent) ground.

However, Peter Saunders advocates relatively low social security payments and I dont think he should be described as a supporter of high, as distinct from moderate, public expenditure on health care for the less genetically fortunate. Furthermore, Dr Saunders wants stringent obligations placed on working-age social security recipients (with the exception of some such as the more severely disabled and sole parents with pre-school children). He even advocates forcing the long term unemployed to work full-time in return for unemployment benefits of around $250 per week, thereby effectively slashing the minimum wage.

It seems unlikely that such stringent obligations generally benefit those they are imposed upon. More obligations means that some will get a job sooner, but even if getting a job sooner is a benefit in many cases it isnt a benefit in all cases. Some who are ill-suited to the work they are obliged to take, and some who struggle to combine work with child-rearing or coping with health problems, will be worse off. And the lower low net wages are, the more people will fall into this category. Also, if the extra coercion is a negative for those who are subjected to it and do people really enjoy filling out a dole diary and applying for more jobs for which they are rejected? – the costs here may exceed any benefit from getting a job sooner (when this is a benefit and when this occurs).

Greater obligations means more people being penalised and loss of income isnt good for these people who were already on relatively low incomes. There is also an equity issue here because disadvantaged groups such as Aboriginals and people with mental health problems are disproportionately likely to be penalised for non-compliance. Of course Dr Saunders also argues that the stringent obligations he recommends are just, but I dont find it plausible that without such stringent obligations the relevant social security recipients will generally be overly privileged and hence owe a debt to other members of society, including high-income people who contribute significant amounts of net tax. The life of someone on social security is generally significantly worse than that of the average person who is not on social security and I dont think there is any basis for deeming social security recipients as a group to be less deserving than others.

Look I think anything can happen between a range of say 90 to 120 IQ. And this is where the real problem lies. People try to grope around trying make that range seem exact when it isn’t. The stark difference is above and below.

Theres no way to stop firms from using IQs yet some do and some dont. Macquarie uses such a method and so does Microsoft and Google although they call them something else because the US places limitations on their use (unlike us).

Perhaps things have changed at Macbank, but the test I did there wasn’t an IQ test, it was a personality profile that included a few things to judge your ability with figures. It’s fundamentally different to IQ – they want to know whether you’ll fit within a Myers-Briggs coloured view of particular roles. Yes, you get Aspergers central among quants, but the good ones (who can do the maths AND know the business) generally aren’t like that (although they rarely stay quants, either).

The basic beef with IQ is that while it’s repeatable and consistent, nobody really knows what it is supposed to represent. It’s too broad to give us any measure of mental agility, memory, the ability to learn or apply complex patterns to new situations (which I would have thought constituted a large proportion of intelligence). I assume Brendan Nelson (for example) has a high IQ and an aptitude for academic performance, but he’s a hell of a slow learner when it comes to Malcolm Turnbull. It would be a mistake to dismiss him just on those grounds though, wouldn’t it?

Sure, my parents pretty much ensured that Ill never run the 100 metres in less than 15 seconds, but that doesnt mean I cant learn how to sell a used car, memorise the right passages out of a law book or produce a credible thesis on string theory given enough time and resources.

A 15 second 100 meter dash isn’t that fast, Dave. 8 seconds is (is it 8 seconds now). I bet you would never have reached anywhere close to that level.

Brains are plastic and the difference in performance of your brain simply isnt limited in the way that your physical characteristics are.

But what you assume to do for one brain, you ought to be doing for another in order to analyze this correctly. You can increase say IQ by 10 points through better food intake and decent education/committed parents etc. for someone with an IQ of a 90 start rate. But why assume some of that benefit won’t accrue to one with an IQ of 120 using the same methods.

I’ll give you an example. I once saw an interview of Chopper Read on Denton. The striking thing about the oaf was his obviously strong command of the language, which pointed that he MAY have a very high IQ. What would his potential have been instead of being a self confessed wholesale killer. Not he was pretty good at his chosen profession.

To condemn classes of people to types of jobs by stratifying them with IQ tests makes no sense (unless youre hankering for a class based society and are looking for specious evidence to back it up).

It doesn’t work that way. There’s no way to stop firms from using IQs yet some do and some don’t. Macquarie uses such a method and so does Microsoft and Google although they call them something else because the US places limitations on their use (unlike us). It doesn’t stop other people from getting to the top. But to be perfectly honest, you kind of have to be pretty smart of your going to buy Yahoo say and make it work.

Look the smartest people I ever worked with were the geeky quants, or at least they appeared that way. There were quite a few Russian immigrants in this category especially after the war came down. There was no way any of those dudes was ever, ever going to make it to dept. head or CEO. Nearly all had the personality of a cold brick and you just fed them through the crack underneath the door each lunch time. There was one of these dudes and I cant tell you how many times he asked me and others which way the toilet was. It was Aspergers Central.

Genetics is intricately linked with evolution. To believe in evolution but to avoid one part uncomfortable part genetics in the evolution of humanity is as close to creationism as it comes.

I dunno JC – my brane ain’t 100% aw nuffink but youse lost me. I’m not ignoring the idea that cognitive abilities aren’t influenced by genetics, I’m saying that it’s far less important for performance than is the case for physical abilities due to the brains inherent ability to learn. Some might be faster, some slower, some not particularly interested, but don’t mistake that for missing potential.

What’s it got to do with creationism, if anything?

Genetics is intricately linked with evolution. To believe in evolution but to avoid one part uncomfortable part genetics in the evolution of humanity is as close to creationism as it comes.

Are there overlapping circles when it comes to human intelligence? Sure. However it doesn’t mean there isn’t a strong link. We are our genes and the children of evolution.

At present the world seems to suit the geeky types. At some other time the geeky types could eventually be not so valued. Let’s not always assume things run in a straight line or that we don’t suffer some cataclysm that makes the few Kalahari Bushman the new kings.

The attempt to relate income inequalities to skill differentials goes back to Adam Smith, who has an excellent discussion of it …

James – After reading your comment I went back to the Wealth of Nations and read this:

… the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise of that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.

Gary Becker makes an interesting comment about Smith’s approach to human capital. Becker distinguishes between ‘egalitarian’ and ‘elite’ approaches. The ‘egalitarian; approach assumes that most people are able to benefit from higher education but that some are held back by poverty, prejudice etc. The ‘elite’ approach, on the other hand, assumes that people differ in their ability to benefit from education and that income inequality is not the result of structural causes but from differences in individual ability.

Becker classifies Smith’s approach as ‘egalitarian’. Smith writes:

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education.

So I take your point. This is a very old argument. As for the technological change vs globalisation argument, that probably deserves an entire post of its own. I’ve noticed it’s a hot topic in the US at the moment.

I suspect that you might be better qualified to sift through rival explanations for rising earnings inequality than I am.

Andrew, while I know you weren’t talking about breeding, it’s almost impossible to invoke the genetics genie without it. Sure, my parents pretty much ensured that I’ll never run the 100 metres in less than 15 seconds, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn how to sell a used car, memorise the right passages out of a law book or produce a credible thesis on string theory given enough time and resources. Brains are plastic and the difference in performance of your brain simply isn’t limited in the way that your physical characteristics are. To condemn classes of people to types of jobs by stratifying them with IQ tests makes no sense (unless you’re hankering for a class based society and are looking for specious evidence to back it up). That twins generally end up at similar levels in society when separated may be a simple reflection of their color or personalities, not their potential.

The Saunders study is basically broken from the get-go. What’s the point of taking an existing set of results (a product of the current system), then positing that particular people end up in professions based on that system? It’s asking a question you already know the (incorrect) answer to.

If the system was changed, the breakdown of participants in professions could change too.

JC:
You missed my point: genetics are best considered as potential (in the case of physical characteristics) but intelligence isn’t easily measured like scanning the back of a sheep for eye muscle depth. The statistics behind classical genetics require simple traits and known percentage heritabilities. We know neither of these in the case of intelligence and anyone who tells you that is wrong. IQ is repeatable (one of the requirements) but you can’t directly correlate it with (say) earning potential in the same way you can count the number of tasty chops in a sheep by it’s eye muscle depth.

Now, I know what you’re trying to get at (anecdotes suggest that human intellectual performance could be heritable, because sons follow fathers into professions) but that might be telling you about their environment, not their potential. We just don’t know what’s heritable in human behaviour and a lot of it might simply be learned behaviour.

I know very little about genetics. But does genetic specialization induced by evolution stop at the neck or is the 6,000 year earth theory still a plausible scenario in earth history:-)

but I dont think social scientists believe in determinants of anything – just varying degrees of correlation, which when reasonably high and backed by a plausible causal theory give rise to social science generalisations.

I guess this means we can remove Mr Saunders from the list of social scientists, given he demonstrates no plausible causal theory for his prejudice. Aside from the usual easily debunked IQ correlations that Gummo pointed out, bringing up a confusion (as Andrew does) of what genetics is and what it isn’t doesn’t help. Genetics is not mechanistic as Andrew seems to intimate:

I think the research is clear that both intelligence and personality have a strong genetic component, but that developmental factors can influence both.

as if “Genetics” were some kind of computer program that just need the right data (what you inherit) and the right inputs (your environment). It’d be hard to back this assertion up.

That’s a simplistic view that is now widely understood to be incorrect. From what we know of animal genetics, it’s clear that we can influence a population in particular directions for a small number of easily measured things (physical attributes), but complex things requiring many genes and environmental interactions are far harder to influence. The important thing to remember is that you can statistically influence a population, but you cannot guarantee results for a particular individual – some really poor rams have been responsible for some stunning offspring, and some very poor lambs have occasionally grown up to be effective sires, but pre-judging them by their lineage is a guarantee of failure. It’s performance that counts, and is generally reflected in population statistics.

While it’s tempting to think there might be a “social gene” or a “dumb gene” in the same way we’ve found Double Muscling, a lot of the genetics guys here think that the easy stuff is finished and the harder stuff will be orders of magnitude harder to decode in much the same way that particles are harder to find in Physics. It’d be best if social scientists stayed out of it if they didn’t want to appear foolish, like new-age healers co-opting the terminology of quantum physics.

In fact, if you wanted to be seriously wonkish about social policies and genetics, you’d be promoting social mobility and racial blending as a way of finding the best genetics, but I’d guess Saunders wouldn’t be too interested in that.

In law, it means “average” students have to work harder at uni to master the more complex and subtle areas, and once they graduate they probably wouldn’t thrive in very complex areas (e.g. as top QCs) but that leaves plenty of scope. In most areas of law, hard work, good organisational and interpersonal skills are actually much more valuable than raw intellect. Quite a few of CDU’s more academically “plodding” undergraduates that I’ve taught have gone on to very successful careers as lawyers.

I’m pretty confident that this would also be the case in most other disciplines, except ones like (say) philosophy, nuclear physics, pure mathematics etc where sheer intellectual analytical power is a critical attribute. In other words, Saunders is full of the proverbial.

But I wonder if Gummos point is just rehashing the debate we had a decade or so ago about trades, TAFEs and yr 12/uni. IIRC that debate was resolved pro-trades anti-uni (for those so inclined/suited) but with a preference for even would-be tradies to complete

I hope not, Patrick. The immediate issue is the idea (imported from the US, where so many bad ideas in the social sciences come from) that IQ is the dominant determinant of social standing. The converse of which (since it seems the point has to be laboured) is that if people are in janitorial jobs, it’s because they’re not intelligent enough to do better.

And let’s be clear on this (another point that needs to be laboured, it seems): Saunders is quite definitely arguing that view in his analysis of the (very weak) correlation between the median IQ found in various occupations and the total range of IQs around those medians. With other questionable evidence, from questionable sources.

Now it’s time for me to be off, before I blow even the least semblance of civility. [exit stage left, snarling]

While I am surprised that high-level professionals get below average IQ scores, there are plenty of reasons why people with jobs that dont require high intelligence might nevertheless have it

I would have to go all lefty here and say that high-level professionals are often more highly socially apt than they are necessarily intelligent. Social ease and the ability to communicate will get someone of modest intelligence very far indeed. Assuming a minimum amount of intellectual reserves in the firm, there would often be a greater benefit to hiring an extra socially gifted person at the expense of an extra intellectually gifted person.

But I wonder if Gummo’s point is just rehashing the debate we had a decade or so ago about trades, TAFEs and yr 12/uni. IIRC that debate was resolved pro-trades anti-uni (for those so inclined/suited) but with a preference for even would-be tradies to complete yr 12.

There would appear to be a completely separate argument about whether schools should teach people more skills directly useful in life, such as working out interest, mortgage repayments or a post-tax salary, or reading a PDS, etc.

The basic hypothesis that at some point there are diminishing returns from education seems to me to highly plausible, as does the idea that there are bell curves of ability. That some people might be sensitive about where they are on the bell curve is something to take into account, but not a reason to force them to pursue education that may not do them much if any good.

In my last comment I’m stating something very simple – Saunders’ evidence that intelligence as measured on an IQ scale is a determinant of occupation and hence social status and income is seriously deficient – the plot of occupations ranked by IQ against IQ ranges in occupations is at bottom, a plot of IQ against IQ. The fact that there are significant degrees of overlap in the IQ ranges for occupations (for example, the bottom 50 percent of social scientists – fifth from the right – which presumably including economists, sociologists and policy wonks) overlaps to a large extent with the top end of janitors and sextons – the occupational group with the lowest median IQ. So what makes the difference between a smart janitor and a dumb social scientist? Since its not IQ, some other factor must be in play. Saunders analysis ignores the large areas of overlap, in favour of a simple reduction of the question to ’some jobs require smarter people than others’.

Since Binet first devised his ‘IQ’ test as a diagnostic test, to identify students who were likely to fall behind curriculum requirements, a whole pseudo-science of IQ measurement and IQ determinism has unfortunately grown up, mostly in the US. Saunders’ use of IQ studies to prop up his arguments on the subject of ‘low ability’ workers is in that long, and dishonourable, intellectual tradition.

There’s no doubt that people differ in particular cognitive abilities and that this shows in childhood development – some kids learn to play the violin quickly, others turn out more or less tone deaf. And so on. It’s one thing to recognise these differences in aptitude and interest and foster them, for the benefit of the child (and the adult she will become). It’s quite another to argue, on the basis of a spurious measure of general intelligence, that some people should just be written off as too dumb to educate and streamed out of the education system as quickly as possible into dumb-worthy menial jobs where all that’s required is to turn up for work on time with nicely polished shoes and a tug of the forelock. I find the latter pretty noxious. YMMV, as gilmae might say.

DR – I did not mean permanently removed, just during the day for childcare/pre-school.

So, this is an argument advocating compulsory education? I thought that kind of thinking was restricted to leftists?

As evidence that ‘different kinds of jobs require different kinds of intelligence’ Saunders cites a US study by Robert Hauser, and reproduces a graph which plots IQ ranges according to occupation, with occupations ranked by the median IQ of workers in that job. You can view it here.

I’ve added red lines at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile divisions and the top of the bar for “janitors and sextons” at the left of the graph, to show how many of these low median IQ workers could be working in higher status, better paid occupations.

At the top end of the IQ range, some of those janitors and sextons could even be doctors it seems. Or maybe those people at the bottom end of the doctor range should be struck off, as they’re no more intelligent than the most intelligent janitors and therefore a hazard to their patients’ health.

Youve implied, without explicitly saying so, that weve recently entered an age of human capital. Certainly the concept is relatively new, but that doesnt mean that its application is any more useful now than in earlier phases of capitalism. The attempt to relate income inequalities to skill differentials goes back to Adam Smith, who has an excellent discussion of it, and earlier. The problem is that, in order to establish that skills affect wages in some systematic way, you need to quantify the skills independently of their capacity to capacity earning. The obvious way to do this is in terms of some measure of the quantity of education the worker has undertaken. Once you do this, you can model household education decisions in the same way you model decisions to invest in physical capital, whereby households are guided by the rate of return on their outlay (in terms of fees and income foregone while studying). At the macroeconomic level, you can investigate to what extent educational attainments can account for per capita income disparities between countries disparities that cant be explained, as it happens, by differences in physical capital. Thats what human capital theory is about.

If it turns out that wage inequality has widened in the last few decades, the question of course is what is driving that development. Is it technological change, altering the proportion of people capable of acquiring the high-earning skills (in the jargon, education has a higher cost for some individuals than others)? Or is it globalisation, which has radically undercut the cost of basic, unskilled labour? But my point and it may not be a very exciting one is that these are fundamentally the same questions Adam Smith was trying to answer. Human capital theory just happens to provide a useful apparatus for answering them.