Intelligent people tend to be slightly more happy:
How are people supposed to answer the OP without talking about the experiences regarding the OP?
You can perform at the top level of job performance all you want – but if you’re in a low-paying job you’ll still be making less money than a mediocre performer in a high-paying job.
Having theoretical job prospects is many light-years away from having realistic chances of actually fulfilling those prospects.
Many (although not all) high-paying jobs require at least a bachelors degree. I don’t have a bachelors degree, because I simply could not afford to get one. It took me 5.5 years to get my associates degree, simply and solely because of financial issues.
On top of that, my career trajectory was VERY severely damaged by the Great Recession.
There are many, many outside forces beyond a person’s control that affect whether or not certain things happen. A very high IQ won’t do diddly squat if you’re just plain unlucky.
Add to that the fact that many high-IQ people are either introverts, or else just plain have trouble relating to other people, and you wind up in a world where an outgoing, gregarious person with an IQ of 100 very easily might have better job prospects than a person with an IQ of 140.
Read the rest of the article.
Basically, smart people tend to get better jobs and do better at them. People with good jobs, and people who do well at their jobs, tend to be noticeably happier. But smart people–smart adults, specifically-- are only a little happier, less than their jobs ought to make them. If you control for all other factors, it seems, a particular person living a particular life will probably be a little happier if you knock them down from genius to average.
This is highly relevant when we’re talking about gifted children, who don’t get paid more for being smart, and sometimes don’t even have gifted classes available to challenge them. The onus then falls on the parents to give them the intellectual opportunities they need.
Even “just” bright ones have ideas which are off the rails.
Hi, honey!
You are just one data point.
For there to be no correlation between IQ and income, there would have to be a large number of “little brains” who somehow slipped through the rigorous academic and professional weeding out process to land high paying jobs as doctors, lawyers, Wall Street bankers, engineers, tech workers and corporate management types. Or there would have to be a disproportionate number of geniuses and gifted types toiling away as fast food workers and retail clerks.
Which is not to say that doesn’t happen. And where it does get a bit fuzzy is where there are plenty of jobs that just sort of pay “ok” like scientists and professors while there are other jobs like sales that have more of a focus on interpersonal skills than pure brainpower.
But it seems counter-intuitive to me that there would not be some correlation between income and IQ, given that salary tends to be highly correlated to jobs that require strong academic backgrounds.
When I was younger, I thought I had some weird learning disability where it sounded like everyone was talking very slowly and what they were saying sounded like incomprehensible nonsense. Turns out I was diagnosed as “gifted”.
If you are constantly told you are “so smart”, eventually it soon dawns on you that everyone else must therefore be “so stupid”.
I think the main challenge is that highly gifted people have to deal with both the expectations for “living up to their potential” and the pressure to “fit in and get along”. Most “little brains” are taught the “middle of the bell curve” path to success. Study hard, get good grades, get a good education, get some job in some big company or companies and work your way up the later by doing a good job over the next 40 years until you retire. And one can have a relatively successful, if boring, career taking this track. But a lot of gifted people find this sort of career path mind-numbingly boring. So I think a lot of gifted people run into trouble because they get bored with the rote routine BS valued by the middle managers who influence their career.
The second part is the high expectations. Even in my 40s, I encounter this with a lot of my jobs. Yes, I realize my spotty 20+ year history of working for some of the top management consulting firms, tech companies and investment banks is “impressive”, but that doesn’t mean you can dump me into a middle of your client projects and just expect me to successfully run them with no training or orientation to my new job, the company and our products. Ok…just because I actually CAN do this a few times, doesn’t mean I STILL don’t need some form of training and orientation. And if I have to design my new role for “boss”, why is this person my boss and not the other way around?
Eprise Me, you said, “I’ve always suspected there’s at least a weak inverse correlation between intelligence and happiness.” That’s wrong, and that’s all I’m saying. The point you’re making in post #42 is that there is more to say about intelligence and happiness. Fine, but that point doesn’t show that intelligent people are less happy; rather, it shows that there is a specific reason why it’s true.
I can still remember not being allowed to check out a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories from the library when I was ten (ironic because I went to work at that library in high school and continued working there through college and that particular aide was not especially bright). But my dad had a copy of the book at home, and I read it cover to cover and loved it.
I was always called a “brain” all through school (you should have seen some of the comments in my yearbooks). I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t active bullying so it wasn’t completely awful. Although I used to (actually still do) hesitate sometimes when I’m talking to someone and about to use a word that I think they might not know and have to do some quick mental juggling to come up with a synonym that’s not so “fancy.” Because I’ve learned I’d get ragged on about it.
As for getting a “better” job, I remember telling a friend ages ago that I was pretty confident that I could do just about any job that only required brain power – and I had sufficient training – and be at least mediocre at it. I’m retired now, but I worked as a computer programmer for decades, and I was good at it (especially what used to be called “maintenance” programming…finding bugs, fixing programs that other people wrote badly…I enjoyed that). I didn’t have what I’d consider a talent for it, but it paid well. My job was not my passion. I had other outlets for that. Work was just work.
AIG-certified teacher here, with some observations.
It’s complicated.
A lot of gifted kids are well-adjusted and hard workers. They can put in effort, they delight at challenges, they pursue their areas of interest, they do awesome things.
But others run into difficulties. They experience success without effort so often that they think effort is a sign of stupidity.
I’ll never forget the kid who came to the first day of third grade reading The Hunger Games. I assigned him later a complex character task (“You’re near the end of this Percy Jackson book. I remember the centaur in the book has changed from the beginning of the book to the end. We’ve been talking about character traits. How has he changed? Look for some evidence of what he was like near the beginning, and what he’s like here at the end.”) I checked back with him a half-hour later, and his reading journal page was completely blank. I asked him why, and he said, “I’m just not good at that kind of thing,” as though he were expecting me to say, “That’s cool, sorry I asked you to do it.”
Others, confronted with struggle, beat themselves up, figuratively or even literally. Reminding them to capitalize names in their otherwise gorgeous writing can make them burst into tears. When they hit a math concept that’s confusing, they might punch themselves on the forehead in anger at their “stupidity.”
They may equate academic adroitness with being a good person, and they may sneer at their peers, or lord their intelligence over their peers. A combination of humor, verbal skill, and a cruel streak can cause tremendous drama in a classroom.
Parents introduce their own problems. If you parent a gifted child and others think you’re sneak bragging, that’s because a shitload of parents of gifted kids sneak brag. In many social circles it’s a great status marker to have kids in the gifted program. Some parents can undercut sincere teacher efforts to keep their kids engaged by talking trash about the school. This can synergize with a gifted kid who sees effort as a sign of weakness: if their parent says that the school is not serving them well, the kid can rationalize away their lack of effort at challenging tasks by acting like the tasks are beneath them. That gets really tricky to untangle.
Finally, there are parents whose kids aren’t gifted but who want the status of having a gifted kid. They unrealistically talk up their kid’s academic prowess, and when the kid realizes it’s bullshit, the kid is devastated. Then the parents are likely as not to go on a tirade about how gifted education is an elitist scam.
Again, #notallgiftedkids. Again, plenty are well-adjusted and great at engaging with challenges either self-generated or school-generated. But there’s less to say about them than about the others :).
There is some correlation between intelligence and income, although not a huge amount. There is very little correlation between intelligence and wealth, because a great deal of wealth comes from inheritance (and other ways that money is passed between generations). One study shows only a .27 correlation between intelligence and income. Correlation between intelligence and wealth is thus less than this.
I don’t think it’s easy to raise any child, these days. You have to find the appropriate zone between independence and over-involvement, balancing respect and esteem with humility, teaching how to value education but also social skills and judgement, limiting unproductive distractions but not so much self-limiting isn’t learned, offering challenges and opportunities for growth without coercion or too much pressure, raising resilience and work ethic more than expectations.
Intelligent kids are different, but not that different. Better at some things, but not better than other people. It’s probably hard to accomplish great things and stay humble. It’s hard to encourage productive differences and the skills to defend against the bullies and jealousy that this may attract. It is important to let all kids be kids, and to offer encouragement and opportunity without too much pressure or zealous prescription.
A well-rounded person values education and self-improvement, physical fitness, enjoys some social activity, can make their work meaningful and has friends better at some things than they are. Similarly, all children should be taught learning is enjoyable, keeping active at any activity one likes is important, humility is important and there is a healthy balance between work and play. There is value in travel, volunteering, sacrifice and developing a myriad of skills without feeling the need to always put them on tawdry display.
I know for my mother, it was tough seeing her daughters perform as if they were gifted while not being recognized as gifted by the school. There might have been some status-envy motivating her (lots of people want their kid to be treated “special”), but I think she honestly felt like we were losing out on opportunities for bullshit reasons.
I know it was tough for me watching kids who seemed no brighter than I was getting whisked away on field trips and special events that I would have loved to have participated in but was excluded from since I fell just short of an arbitrary threshold. My favorite and best subject was science, and for a while I was totally geeked out about space and being an astronaut. So I was crushed when only the kids in the gifted program got to meet with a real-live astronaut and ask him questions. I was crushed that I wasn’t allowed to do a science project or get to go to the science museum. So I don’t blame people for thinking gifted programs are “rewards program” for the elite, at least in in the early grades. It would have been one thing if the gifted kids had been given more advanced coursework with stepped-up homework assignments and held to higher performance standards. But at least in my elementary school, these students were just given an hour of intellectually stimulated play time. Let’s learn basic French while we make crepes! Let’s learn about the ancient Egyptians and build pyramids out of paper mache! Let’s build a volcano and learn about chemistry and geology all at the same time! Meanwhile, high-achieving kids such as myself were expected to be good sports about not being included in all the fun stuff happening in the room across the hall. (I was fortunate to have a 5th grade teacher who found some ways to circumvent the system so that I too could have some intellectually stimulating “fun time”, so it wasn’t all bad. But she was the only teacher I had who cared enough to do this).
The kids who teased me the most when I was coming up were the kids for whom the gifted label had gone right to their heads. I wasn’t really smart, you see. I was just a goody-two-shoes perpetrating like a smarty pants. I’d love to see where those kids are now so I can find out if any of that “gifted” stuff made a difference in our trajectories in life.
Yep 100% fucking genius right here:rolleyes:
Oof. If you don’t mind my asking, do you think there was racism involved in your lack of identification?
I know that racial bias in identification is a HUGE problem in the field. In our district, the AIG program population has traditionally been lily-white, and while staff are appalled at that, nobody’s entirely sure what the best solution is.
One idea has been to make identification be based purely on standardized test scores, to avoid having teacher bias come into play. But this gets really tricky in districts (like mine) with a big racial achievement gap. Putting this policy in place a few years back did nothing to fix the racial disproportion of the program. Another approach has been to supplement standardized test identification with the possibility of teacher recommendation. But this depends on teachers being aware of bias in identification and looking for kids that really should be identified; it also can be a backdoor route for wealthy status-seeking parents to badger to get their slightly-above-average children identified. Despite those pitfalls, it’s been moderately successful in diversifying the program.
Our district is getting ready to have a secondary identification pathway: after the top 10% of students across the district are identified, the top 10% of each subgroup are also checked. If they’re included in the global identification, great; if they’re not, they’re also identified as gifted. We’ll see whether that works.
This gets at another identification bias issue. The idea that giftedness means a lack of effort, as stupid as it sounds when I put it this way, can infect teachers as well. Kids who are smart by virtue of working their asses off ironically sometimes don’t get identified. And since those kids are more commonly girls than boys, you end up with a gender bias in addition to a racial bias. It fuckin sucks.
LHoD, I honestly can’t say for sure. I mean, I suspect racism played in a role in the racial disparities in the gift program (the gifted teacher in my elementary school was real “old school”, if you know what I mean.) But I don’t know if racism explains why I personally wasn’t labeled gifted. And to be fair, I was not the most even test-taker. Even today I don’t know whether I’m truly smart or just fooling everyone. 
But I do know I was smart-ish and geeky and talented in art. Again, I remember feeling REAL salty when the gifted kids got to go to the arts museum every year. Yeah, yeah, let the math wiz skip the long division stuff and go right to algebra. I have no problem with that. But if you are taking all the gifted kids to the arts museum while leaving behind all the actual artists in the class, well, I just can’t see how this is a fair or constructive allocation of resources. Either take all the kids to the arts museum or make it something reserved just for the kids who have demonstrated proficiency in or passion for art. Saving the experience just for kids who once scored high on a narrowly-defined test doesn’t make any sense to me, and yeah, it smells like an elitist scam.
I get that parents of gifted kids want to know they are being nurtured and given proper stimulation. But it is hard for me to not think that a lot of them just want to know their kids will be treated special over other kids. Making crepes while learning French nursery rhymes isn’t all that challenging or intellectually stimulating, IMHO. But it’s the kind of special experience that parents believe will be appreciated only by their cultured, intelligent, well-rounded children and their likeminded friends. The drooling morons they imagine reside in “genpop” wouldn’t even know what to do with a crepe, so why waste it on them?
My brother and his wife raised an unusually intelligent child (he is now 26) and it was very difficult. The most challenging aspect, from my vantage point, was that he never had friends. He desperately wanted friends, and was aware how easily friendships came to his peers, but he really had nothing in common with other kids and they couldn’t relate to him. That broke their hearts as parents.
I totally agree. Our AIG teacher at our school (I’m certified but not the main AIG teacher) has started doing her “enrichment” classes as a whole-class thing. So instead of just taking the academically advanced kids to her room once a week to study marine debris and create PSAs about it, she does this with everyone from the kid scoring in the 99th percentile to the kid with serious autism to the kid who can’t read at all. It’s great.
Of course, she does have other groups, but they’re focused on specific skills. The math group is creating a fantasy park, but they’re figuring out questions of area and perimeter and mapping it out and spending from a budget by researching playground equipment costs online. Another group is doing a book study–and for this group, a student with serious dyslexia is participating, using an audiobook, based on teacher recommendations and support from the EC teacher.
I think our program is doing a pretty good job, with room to grow. But when it’s used as a break time for the “smart” kids, that’s some bullshit. And too many programs treat it that way.
Yeah, it seems like as a gifted person, there’s a lot of pressure to achieve to “your potential”, whatever that is, without you even knowing what that potential is.
And you’re absolutely right; the biggest challenge as a gifted person is boredom. Not because everything’s so trivially easy, but rather because there’s a HUGE amount of stuff out there that’s tedious, annoying and time consuming to do, that you don’t learn from, and that isn’t challenging.
A good example would be that most gifted people I know draw a real hard distinction between the concepts of being bored at work because you don’t have enough work to do, and being bored at work because what you’re doing is boring, regardless of the quantity. Most non-gifted managers seem not to understand this, and if you go to them and say that you’re bored, or you want more challenge in your career, they pile on more boring bullshit and think they’ve done you a service. In reality, you want something assigned that makes you stretch and flex your mental muscles and breaks you out of your mental rut. But most companies reserve that sort of thinking for certain job titles and certain levels of the organization, and if you’re not there, they’re not going to assign you that work, and nor will they listen to you if you suggest stuff like that.