Does a meritocracy inevitably create enclaves of "idiocracy"?

[SlackerInc]

I recently read a TIME magazine article about a new book by Charles Murray, who co-authored the infamous book The Bell Curve, which had a chapter about race and IQ. His new book is called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, and describes increasing levels of dysfunction* in many low income white neighbourhoods and towns.

What this got me to thinking about, though, had less to do with race per se than with potential reasons why–despite overall increased wealth and education in American society–the poorest areas of both white and black America seem to be getting more dire in their poverty and levels of what sociologists quite straightforwardly call “social problems”.

I’ve always believed that one of the most important steps forward for this country, or any other for that matter, is to shake off traditional class boundaries and become more and more meritocratic. That is, if someone is born into a poor, uneducated family, but goes to public school and their teachers discover they are “gifted or talented”, it should be our goal as a society to identify, nurture, and develop those gifts or talents to their full potential. And so whenever I heard of someone “getting out” of an urban slum or an Appalachian coal mining town, and becoming a scientist or writer or senator, I cheered that as a great sign of progress toward that meritocratic ideal. After all, not that long ago that would be almost unheard of: the occasional Horatio Alger rags-to-riches cases like the Andrews Jackson and Carnegie were really the exceptions that proved the rule.

While we’re still a long ways from becoming a true meritocracy, we have definitely made strides in that direction. Two of my best friends really illustrate that: they came from two Midwestern towns on the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. One friend grew up raised by a single mom who has been a diner waitress for decades (and still is); the other, by parents who worked various blue collar jobs and supplemented their meagre incomes by hunting and growing food on their land. Neither of them had any relatives with college degrees. But they both excelled on standardised tests, went on to a highly selective university (the same one–it’s where I met them), and “got out”.

But what did they leave behind? That’s the part I never thought about before. What happens when an increasingly meritocratic educational system plucks out the diamonds in the rough and relocates them elsewhere? Their genes (and social influence too, if you skew more toward the “nurture” side of the debate) are taken out of that gene pool. In earlier times, the cleverer members of a poor community would generally stay in that community (having no other real choice). They would then keep their genes circulating through that community. And even if they didn’t have “book learnin’”, they could apply their sharp wits toward solving problems for themselves and people around them, and culturally passing on that sparkle in the eye, so to speak: maybe being storytellers who united their communities, or who settled disputes and informally counselled those in need, and taught succeeding generations to do the same, by their example.

When you continue to pull the “best and brightest” out of these communities, don’t you metaphorically leave something like “exhausted soil” behind? For that matter, it occurs to me that the increasingly scientific methods of sports recruiting (which scour poor neighbourhoods for younger and younger prospects) may be siphoning the athletic genes out as well. After a few more generations, what will be left but obese dullards?

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*Some of which, however–like decreasing church attendance–I’d dispute whether “dysfunctional” is an accurate assessment. Still, there are plenty of other signs of social degradation that even an atheist like me can’t dispute.

[Der_Trihs]

@SlackerInc

What this got me to thinking about, though, had less to do with race per se than with potential reasons why–despite overall increased wealth and education in American society–the poorest areas of both white and black America seem to be getting more dire in their poverty and levels of what sociologists quite straightforwardly call “social problems”.

Stagnating wages, fewer jobs, more fees, a shifting of the tax burden from the rich to everyone else.

@SlackerInc

While we’re still a long ways from becoming a true meritocracy, we have definitely made strides in that direction.

Incorrect; America is one of the least economically mobile industrialized nations, and has been for at least decades.

@SlackerInc

When you continue to pull the “best and brightest” out of these communities, don’t you metaphorically leave something like “exhausted soil” behind? For that matter, it occurs to me that the increasingly scientific methods of sports recruiting (which scour poor neighbourhoods for younger and younger prospects) may be siphoning the athletic genes out as well. After a few more generations, what will be left but obese dullards?

Not enough time. Humans are long lived, slow breeding and interbreed a lot; a few generations isn’t long enough for any such genetic effect to take place.

[Blake]

@SlackerInc

What this got me to thinking about, though, had less to do with race per se than with potential reasons why–despite overall increased wealth and education in American society–the poorest areas of both white and black America seem to be getting more dire in their poverty and levels of what sociologists quite straightforwardly call “social problems”.

Excessive welfare, a victim mentality, lack of moral guidance, dismissal of traditional values and a shifting of responsibility from individuals to society.

When you continue to pull the “best and brightest” out of these communities, don’t you metaphorically leave something like “exhausted soil” behind?

Not really. It’s not that the soil is exhausted, that makes no sense when referring to humans.

Rather, what happens is that standards drop and examples disappear. This a phenomenon of class segregation that has been well studied and well is understood in Black communities, but doubtless it happens in poor White communities as well.

When Black communities were insular and integration was highly restricted, the best performers were forced to live in the same “ghettos” as the worst. That provided a constant supply of high quality role models for young people to follow. Roel models for practical tasks such as hard work as well as moral examples of religiosity, honesty and so forth. Come the 1960s and open integration and the richest people moved out of the ghettos for White neighbourhoods.

What was left behind was your “exhausted soil” and accompanied by not just a collapse in Blak progress, but an actual retrograde step with declining education, life expectancy, lawfulness and so forth. This wasn’t due to the removal of good genes. It ahppened in w period of less than 15 years. far, far to fast to make any genetic explanation even remotely plausible. It was simply caused by the removal of all positive role models. young people ahd nothing to model themselves on and no clear legal path to success beyond.

Just as importantly there was nobody to drag social standards up. Humans are social creatures and set their standards by comparison with others, so any community tends towards the average. And because it is an average a few high performing individual can drag the society up markedly. To consider a basic example: when even one person in a community has an immaculate yard and lawn, then even the worst members will make at least some attempt to keep their yard functionally clean and many people will try to compete with the best. But if that one person leaves, then the many who were trying to compete with them will no longer bother, and the worst will have “permission” to not bother to mow their lawn at all because doing so is no longer dramatically worse than the average. So the tone of the whole neighbourhood falls dramatically because just a few, or even one, person left. Now that is a trivial example, but it applies to every aspect of human life, from the way children are raised to work ethic to percieved potential occupations to lawfulness.

If you remove the top 1% performers from a community, the community standard will decline precipitously overnight. The effect is further amplified by socioeconomic factors. Left with a concentration of unemployed and low level blue-collar workers, any economic downturn will disproportionately effect that community and have a much lesser effect on other communities. That in turn reduces standards temporarily relative ot the rets of the country, but with a steady removal of the elite the standards never return to what they had been. Instead of the cyclical increase and decrease in living and social standards tied to economy seen in the nation as a whole, the segregated community is characterised by a series of declines during economic downturns and only and plateaus during upturns. With all the elite leaving as soon as they can, the community standards can never increase, they can only remain stable or fall. leading to the prolonged decline sen in Black neighbourhoods.
This doesn’t require a generational change, it will happen within a just few years. The most dramatic example was the precipitous decline in Black neighbourhods during the 70s recession and subsequent 80s boom. But just because this is best studied in Black communities, where the effect and the result was most dramatically illustrated I see no reason why it wouldn’t also apply to White communities. You would expect White communities to exhibit the effect on a less dramatic scale because there wasn’t the pulse of movement of the White elite the way there was with Blacks when segregation broke down. But the same basic principles apply.

When the best are able to leave, they do, and the community average falls as a result. Worse yet, with the best leaving constantly the community average can’t possibly rise over time because there is no intrinsic mechanism to allow it to do so.

There’s nothing genetic about any of this. The people remaining aren’t “exhausted soil”. They are just people who have no real life exposure to the way that 'normal" people live.

Some of which, however–like decreasing church attendance–I’d dispute whether “dysfunctional” is an accurate assessment. Still, there are plenty of other signs of social degradation that even an atheist like me can’t dispute.

Decreasing Church attendance is certainly a symptom. It’s an indication of a breakdown in social involvement and a decline in concern about public perception. There’s obviously no reason why someone couldn’t be involved in their community with a very strong sense of social appearance and an Atheist. The problem is that that isn’t what is happening. People give up on religion and it isn’t being *replaced *by anything. They aren’t making a decision that Atheism is a better belief system, they are simply disengaging form their community.

[willthekittensurvive]

Great post Blake

[SlackerInc]

Incorrect; America is one of the least economically mobile industrialized nations, and has been for at least decades.

First, I wasn’t talking in terms of now compared to a generation ago, although there was this from your link:

Still, the escalators of social mobility continue to move. Nearly a third of the freshmen at four-year colleges last fall said their parents hadn’t gone beyond high school.

But I meant more in terms of now compared to pre-WWII days and going back to the 19th century. Back then, elite universities’ student bodies were made up almost entirely of scions of prominent wealthy families. Today, Ivy League schools bend over backward to make their incoming freshmen a diverse lot, representing various socioeconomic strata and geographical origins.

Secondly, the U.S. falling behind other industrialised nations does not necessarily mean it has not made progress. It can just as easily mean that those nations have simply progressed faster.

Thirdly and perhaps most germane to my point, I feel you are comparing apples and oranges here. I don’t believe a society that was an absolute meritocracy would necessarily have a high level of class mobility. It would obviously have a higher level of mobility than one where social classes were strictly prescribed and no one moved out of his or her lane. But meritocracy requires merit. I know it’s terribly elitist of me to say, but I believe the average slum or trailer park would not be terribly likely to produce many Rhodes scholars, even if the local public school was as good as a school in an affluent suburb. And my point is that this is going to become less and less likely, as the cream of the crop is repeatedly skimmed off by the aforementioned Ivy League schools seeking diverse representation in their student populations.

[SlackerInc]

Decreasing Church attendance is certainly a symptom. It’s an indication of a breakdown in social involvement and a decline in concern about public perception.

I think it’s plausible that in some cases it’s a symptom. But to make the sweeping statement that it is “certainly” a symptom, and imply that this must be the case everywhere that church attendance declines, doesn’t follow. Compare Western Washington State with Mississippi or Alabama. The level of concern for public perception is much higher in the former (at least based on how few places look like Third World shantytowns), and social problems of all kinds much higher in the latter, yet Western Washington reports some of the lowest religiosity and church attendance in the U.S.

[Der_Trihs]

@SlackerInc

Thirdly and perhaps most germane to my point, I feel you are comparing apples and oranges here. I don’t believe a society that was an absolute meritocracy would necessarily have a high level of class mobility. It would obviously have a higher level of mobility than one where social classes were strictly prescribed and no one moved out of his or her lane. But meritocracy requires merit.

And being upper class doesn’t mean you have merit; quite often it means you are a corrupt incompetent who has been handed everything your entire life.

@SlackerInc

I know it’s terribly elitist of me to say, but I believe the average slum or trailer park would not be terribly likely to produce many Rhodes scholars, even if the local public school was as good as a school in an affluent suburb. And my point is that this is going to become less and less likely, as the cream of the crop is repeatedly skimmed off by the aforementioned Ivy League schools seeking diverse representation in their student populations.

You sound like you are dancing around saying that it’s mostly or all genetic; but there’s no reason to think that it is, or that that’s even a plausible idea. Nor are a significant number of people going to go from slums to Ivy League schools, if for no other reason than that there are far more people in slums than there are in Ivy League schools even if they kicked out everyone else to make room. You are trying to make something important out of something so rare that it’s unlikely that those trailer park dwellers would even know of such a person.

[SlackerInc]

I agree that going from trailer park to Ivy League school is rare (going from anywhere to Ivy is rare); going from trailer park to four year school is unusual but not vanishingly rare. I suspect though that it will not get any more common than it is now if those who are “college material” are culled from the population.

You sound like you are dancing around saying that it’s mostly or all genetic; but there’s no reason to think that it is, or that that’s even a plausible idea.

I’m not dancing around it, although I would dispute “mostly or all”. I’d say it’s roughly 50/50. What that means though is that an optimal social environment can only bring someone up to their max potential. If the potential is not there, it’s not there.

And you are mistaken about the evidence for the heritability of cognitive ability: there’s a lot of it.

There’s the Horn study:

Results supported the hypothesis that genetic variability is an important influence in the development of individual differences for intelligence. The most salient finding was that adopted children resemble their biological mothers more than they resemble the adoptive parents who reared them from birth.

Then there are studiesof identical vs. fraternal twins:

Genes have a very strong influence over how certain parts of our brains develop, scientists in the US and Finland have found. And the parts most influenced are those that govern our cognitive ability. In short, you inherit your IQ.

That’s a little too pat, clearly; someone in a very poor, non-stimulating environment will not achieve their potential. If the last sentence above said “you inherit your potential IQ”, I’d agree with it. This more in-depth article looks at twin studies and comes to essentially the conclusion I have.

[Der_Trihs]

@SlackerInc

And you are mistaken about the evidence for the heritability of cognitive ability: there’s a lot of it.

That’s not what I’m saying; what i’m saying is that there’s no reason to think that intelligence is higher in higher social strata. On the contrary; families tend towards genetic mediocrity over time. If you have a stupid family and a smart family and track their descendants a few generations, the descendants of the smart family will tend to have gotten dumber and the dumb family smarter; both will drift toward the average. Any little genetic differences are swamped in the sea of averageness around them over time.

[erislover]

It is hard to quote your whole post, Blake, but I disagree strongly with the premise that a few tend to elevate the many. You see this same sort of expectation in schools: why segregate the smart kids out, let them raise the weaker students up. It has not been my experience that this actually happens. The fact that people are leaving a community when they can should be impetus to fix it, but it hasn’t stopped bigoted and fundamentalist small towns, it never stopped the Amish, and there’s no reason at all to suppose it would work in any other venue. Diminished expectations and discouragement is not a one-way street. I have a high tech job and have over a decade of experience in my field but you can’t just drop me into the jungle to raise the standard of living. I’d probably just die or get killed.

Role models are important, there’s no question, and their locality definitely helps, but I don’t think any community lacks role models of the sort you mention. Pastors and priests, teachers, local businessmen… all these people exist in all communities. The question isn’t whether a community needs more of these people (if they indeed lack them, which I find questionable), but why they aren’t considered role models. People whose only hope is striking oil or gold tend not to respect social boundries. As true of gold rush minors as it is of the desperately poor.

[Blake]

@SlackerInc

I’m not dancing around it, although I would dispute “mostly or all”. I’d say it’s roughly 50/50. What that means though is that an optimal social environment can only bring someone up to their max potential. If the potential is not there, it’s not there.

Which is looking at the issue backwards. While an ideal social environment may indeed bring someone up to maximum 50% of the time, the real issue is that lack of an optimal environment will prevent someone coming up to potential 100% of the time. If a child is born to illiterate, drug addicted parents who may no effort to send the child to school, we can assume that the child will never qualify for admission to Harvard. If the environment isn’t there, the potential doesn’t count for squat.

To elaborate, let’s assume some nebulous “college intelligence” trait that is, as you suggest, 50% environment and 50% genetic. Let’s assign the trait a range of values 1 to 100. Let’s say the Ivy League schools will only take people with scores >90. That means that the people who can go to those schools require **both **a near perfect environmental endowment (>40) and a near perfect genetic endowment (>40). It also means that the lower the genetic endowment the higher the environmental endowment must be, and vice versa. A person who is genetically a 40 can still get into an Ivy League school if they have a perfect environment because (40 + 50 > 90). Likewise a person with a slightly suboptimal environment of 40 requires a perfect genetic intelligence to be accepted.

Now consider what that means in reality. A perfect environment consists not just of parents who send you to school every day with a good breakfast inside you, but who help you with homework, hire tutors and so on and so forth. Almost deviation at all from that will mean that even a child with a “perfect” genetic intelligence still won’t qualify for an Ivy League school. Now if we assume a normal distribution akin to IQ, children with perfect intelligence will be less than one in every hundred and children with genetic intelligences >40 will be less than one in 20.

Now ask yourself, how many trailers are perfect academic environments? One in ten thousand? Even less? How many are even “really good” academic environments where parents are highly literate, discuss academic topics amongst their friends, help the kids a lot with their schoolwork and so forth? One in a thousand? So even if intelligence is 50% genetic, we would expect less than five thousand trailer park kids to qualify for Ivy League admission.

In contrast, how many homes of Ivy League graduates are academically perfect? Maybe as high as 90%? Even if we allow just 50%, and if we allow that 1 in 20 Ivy Leaguer’s kids have genetic intelligences >40 that means that 1 in 40 Ivy Leaguer’s kids will qualify for an Ivy League school.

So the average Ivy League acceptance would be expected to include one kid from a trailer park for every *125 *kids from upper class homes. That’s just performance based acceptance list of course, That doesn’t take into account economic ability actually pay for that tuition, social conditioning against applying and so forth.

Note that this all occurs even if the genetic distribution of intelligence between trailer parks and Park Avenue are identical.

That is the point** Der Trihs** is trying to make. The issue isn’t whether upper class kids get into Ivy League schools in part because of superior genetics. That is indisputable, The issue is whether trailer park kids fail to get in because they are genetically inferior. That is your contention, and one for which there is no support. IOW while superior genetics are vital in obtaining Ivy League admission, failure to obtain Ivy League admission is not evidence of inferior genetics.

And you are mistaken about the evidence for the heritability of cognitive ability: there’s a lot of it.

Yes, but you misunderstand your own argument. The issue isn’t whether there is some genetic component to intelligence. That is beyond dispute.

The issue is your claim that removing the smartest individuals from a community can produce the sort of pronounced decline in social standards seen in Black communities, in just 15 years, due to genetic effects.

Those are two totally different issues. The evidence you presented supports the former, which nobody disputes. It does not support the latter, which is physically impossible.

[SlackerInc]

Der Trihs, I’m familiar with the notion of “regression to the mean”, but I think you are going too far with it. Do you really think that if we took all the babies born in the lowest income quintile, and all the babies born in the highest income quintile, and distributed them randomly to be raised by members of the other three quintiles but secretly kept track of who came from where, we’d find little or no evidence years later that the biological parents from the lowest quintile had biological offspring with lower IQs on average?

[erislover]

@erislover

As true of gold rush minors as it is of the desperately poor.

I hereby rule all homonyms as syntactically equal. Thank you for your attention and compliance in this matter. End transmission.

[Blake]

@erislover

It is hard to quote your whole post, Blake, but I disagree strongly with the premise that a few tend to elevate the many.

Well that’s fine of course, but the sociologists who have studied this strongly agree. This isn’t an idea that is original to me in any sense. It’s the near universally accepted theory on class segregation and social decline in Black communities in the US.

You have every right to disagree with it of course, but it would require some hard evidence for me to credit you over every sociologists that I have ever read on this subject.

You see this same sort of expectation in schools: why segregate the smart kids out, let them raise the weaker students up.

I have seen no evidence that this applies to schools and I can see no reason why it should apply. All else aside, a school isn’t an enclosed community. Children are far more affected by their parents than their peers, which is obviously not true of adults living in a neighborhood.

Perhaps you might start by asking these people why they think this applies to schools.

The fact that people are leaving a community when they can should be impetus to fix it, but it hasn’t stopped bigoted and fundamentalist small towns, it never stopped the Amish, and there’s no reason at all to suppose it would work in any other venue.

I honestly have no idea what you mean by this. Stopped what? Fix what?

Diminished expectations and discouragement is not a one-way street. I have a high tech job and have over a decade of experience in my field but you can’t just drop me into the jungle to raise the standard of living. I’d probably just die or get killed.

Again, not at all sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that people who lived in Black communities couldn’t survive there? That seems to run counter to the observation that they *did *survive there. I also don’t quite see how dropping you into a jungle would raise behavioural expectations since, as you note, you have no idea how to behave.

Role models are important, there’s no question, and their locality definitely helps, but I don’t think any community lacks role models of the sort you mention. Pastors and priests, teachers, local businessmen… all these people exist in all communities.

Having grown up in these communities. let me assure you, they don’t.

No boy wants to grow up to be a Pastor. No matter how much we might have respected the Pastors, they weren’t role models in any real sense. We didn’t want to be like them and they were quite clearly a class apart. We had to talk and act differently around them on pain of pain. In no sense were they a normal part of the community and thus they weren’t role models. Teachers were overwhelmingly from outside somewhere. In my entire school life I never had a teacher from my economic background that I knew of. Local businessmen were even more rare. Most of the local businessmen in my area weren’t even the same race as me. Hell, many of them didn’t even speak fluent English. They certainly weren’t role models.

The question isn’t whether a community needs more of these people (if they indeed lack them, which I find questionable), but why they aren’t considered role models.

I don’t think you an really dispute that the average project has a distinct lack of people who go to work at a white collar job every morning. And a distinct lack of people who live a comfortable and enviable life through simply gong through the motions. Those are the role models that are lacking.

People whose only hope is striking oil or gold tend not to respect social boundries. As true of gold rush minors as it is of the desperately poor.

Sorry, no idea what that means.

[SlackerInc]

The issue is your claim that removing the smartest individuals from a community can produce the sort of pronounced decline in social standards seen in Black communities, in just 15 years, due to genetic effects.

Blake, please don’t make out my argument to be a racial one, because it’s not. I’m talking about poor white communities as much as, or more than, black ones.

And your quantifying of the nature and nurture factors is much too simplistic. Most families in poor neighbourhoods are not headed by “illiterate, drug addicted parents who may no effort to send the child to school”. Those families are certainly more common in poor areas, but they are still a minority. And what I’m saying, that I know from personal experience, is that if a kid’s innate cognitive ability is up around 48 to 50 (using your metric), they don’t need their environment to also be above 40, they just need it to be above 10 or hopefully 20, and have access to libraries (including the Internet) and the resources of even a subpar public school. They can gather what they need from even that relatively sparse intellectual terrain.

Now I will agree that there are “hothouse flowers” raised in affluent educated homes that maybe have natural ability of 40 but parlay that combined with the perfect 50 environment into being able to achieve academically what the poor kid with natural ability of 45 will never manage to. But those kinds of people tend to hit an upper limit at some point, and never become anybody really impressive or memorable although they’ll make a comfortable living; whereas that poor kid with the natural 49 aptitude and the 15 environment can definitely become a world-class scholar, scientist, writer, etc. although it won’t be easy especially in the early going.

[Der_Trihs]

@SlackerInc

Der Trihs, I’m familiar with the notion of “regression to the mean”, but I think you are going too far with it. Do you really think that if we took all the babies born in the lowest income quintile, and all the babies born in the highest income quintile, and distributed them randomly to be raised by members of the other three quintiles but secretly kept track of who came from where, we’d find little or no evidence years later that the biological parents from the lowest quintile had biological offspring with lower IQs on average?

I doubt you’d see any difference at all.

[Blake]

@SlackerInc

Der Trihs, I’m familiar with the notion of “regression to the mean”, but I think you are going too far with it. Do you really think that if we took all the babies born in the lowest income quintile, and all the babies born in the highest income quintile, and distributed them randomly to be raised by members of the other three quintiles but secretly kept track of who came from where, we’d find little or no evidence years later that the biological parents from the lowest quintile had biological offspring with lower IQs on average?

There’s just no reason to believe it would be otherwise. There’s no evidence that rich people are genetically smarter than poor. It is your contention that it is the case, but you can hardly use the contention as evidence to support that conclusion.

[erislover]

@Blake

Well that’s fine of course, but the sociologists who have studied this strongly agree. This isn’t an idea that is original to me in any sense. It’s the near universally accepted theory on class segregation and social decline in Black communities in the US.

You have every right to disagree with it of course, but it would require some hard evidence for me to credit you over every sociologists that I have ever read on this subject.

Please find me one, then. I’m not so firm in my beliefs. My experience is simply that the diminished expectations apply to the bigger and brighter, and they give up. They don’t reach out to their peers to elevate them.

I honestly have no idea what you mean by this. Stopped what? Fix what?

The problems in the community you mentioned. You wrote a three page paper of a post and I didn’t think it would help to line-by-line it.

Having grown up in these communities. let me assure you, they don’t.

Yes. Now if only you realized the next sentence you quote was a key aspect of the entire bit of sentences.

No boy wants to grow up to be a Pastor. No matter how much we might have respected the Pastors, they weren’t role models in any real sense.

Yes: why? Why pro wrestlers and sports stars instead of Pastors and teachers? Why not their fathers or mothers? We don’t need homogeneity in our communities in order that everyone has a role model. Carl Sagan was a role model for a lot of people; there’s only one of him. My high school math teacher greatly inspired me (and I have no idea where he lived). We have no shortage of role models at all; only ones you want to count.

We didn’t want to be like them and they were quite clearly a class apart.

Yes, why? How would holding the best and brightest back change this?

We had to talk and act differently around them on pain of pain. In no sense were they a normal part of the community and thus they weren’t role models. Teachers were overwhelmingly from outside somewhere. In my entire school life I never had a teacher from my economic background that I knew of. Local businessmen were even more rare. Most of the local businessmen in my area weren’t even the same race as me. Hell, many of them didn’t even speak fluent English. They certainly weren’t role models.

No, they were. You just didn’t think so. Apparently you still don’t think so.

I don’t think you an really dispute that the average project has a distinct lack of people who go to work at a white collar job every morning. And a distinct lack of people who live a comfortable and enviable life through simply gong through the motions. Those are the role models that are lacking.

That’s nonsense. You don’t have to be a white collar worker to be a role model. I can’t even believe that you would suggest it.

[SlackerInc]

There’s no evidence that rich people are genetically smarter than poor.

Boy, you guys like to throw around this phrase “there’s no evidence for X”. Don’t you ever think, “Hmmm…maybe I’m not all-knowing, so I’d better just say ‘I haven’t seen evidence for X’”? Just a thought.

So, here’s some evidence. What I find interesting is that the NY Times writer tries to spin it in the same direction you’re trying to go, but if you look past the verbiage, the raw numbers are clear. Yes, environment matters (I have been saying that all along); but clearly, at least in France, the genetic potential for higher intelligence is more prevalent among the affluent:

Regardless of whether the adopting families were rich or poor, Capron and Duyme learned, children whose biological parents were well-off had I.Q. scores averaging 16 points higher than those from working-class parents. Yet what is really remarkable is how big a difference the adopting families’ backgrounds made all the same. The average I.Q. of children from well-to-do parents who were placed with families from the same social stratum was 119.6. But when such infants were adopted by poor families, their average I.Q. was 107.5 — 12 points lower. The same holds true for children born into impoverished families: youngsters adopted by parents of similarly modest means had average I.Q.’s of 92.4, while the I.Q.’s of those placed with well-off parents averaged 103.6. These studies confirm that environment matters — the only, and crucial, difference between these children is the lives they have led.

[SlackerInc]

Missed my five minute window, but wanted to add:

Note that, again despite the spin, having *biological *parents who were rich instead of poor made a 16 point difference, which this writer glosses over but which is a huge disparity, equivalent to the difference between someone who struggles to graduate high school vs. someone who easily acquires a four year degree and could perhaps even get a master’s degree if they worked at it.