Poverty and Intelligence

Great Debates
61

It distracts from their achievements. How could it clearly be seen otherwise? Attributing success, whether its getting out of poverty or writing the Origin of Species, to “luck” and then saying - “oh and they worked hard too” - does exactly that. Focusing on the circumstance of birth for example does not tell the full story in any way except to indicate there is a something there that set that individual apart. A lot of these what-ifs are what I would classify as the “obvious”. Because these what-if comparisons are so superficial they do not indicate what that something is, they leave us with vague terms and vague arguments: luck and hard-work. I admit I am doing the same exact thing but I’d prefer to discuss poor people and what it is about being poor that prevents people from living a life we might except for somebody who is intelligent and hard-working.

I gave up on the thread a while back, but I posted a reply to you because your synopsis of Darwin’s life was incorrect. We cannot all be Bill Gates and here’s another what-if: If Bill Gates was reborn on the exact same date he probably would not be the Bill Gates that ran Microsoft. It is instructive to look at these people’s lives and understand what they did in response to the environment they were in. The goal is not to emulate their massive success. The goal is to gain success for yourself even though it is likely to fall short of your imaginings.

Something interesting about that article I linked to in post#18. A hypothesis was developed from observations on “self-control and decision making”, it was tested, and at the end of the article economists manipulated this observation to get poor people to save more money.

Ignore luck, ignore misfortune, ignore hard work, ignore empty statements in general; just understand human responses to their environment and add in a variable - the result: poor people saving money where you wouldn’t think it possible. This is the benefit of understanding “secrets to success”. It’d be interesting to see how and what kinds of acquaintances may lead to different outcomes for poor people since we do not behave in a vacuum. On the other hand, what-ifs get us nothing. They make fun fiction and can be interesting to think about but they don’t address the question at all.

Your post was off, don’t minimize it. The description lacked fact throughout (I posted to correct it and now I am arguing this thing). It’s what happens when you focus on the obvious, such as “typically well-off people practice science” while paying lip service to Darwin’s traits.

Here’s yours:
“Born into the leisure class, married to a woman even more well-off than he was, he had beaucoups of time to think, explore, travel, and synthesize. He also wasn’t the first to come up with his hypothesis. He just happened to receive a manuscript to review that pitched the very same idea as his, then conveniently “forgot” about it, and equally conveniently pushed out his own work before that guy could get credit for it. No one remembers that other guy. If we can concede that THAT was unlucky for him, then the reverse is that we have to admit that Darwin was lucky. But stating this does not mean that Darwin was not a smart guy or that he didn’t put in all those hours of hard work. It just means that you can’t attribute his success solely to those things.”

Here’s mine:
“Darwin was born into a family that had a keen interest in education and service to the public through science, religion and medicine. He ended up as a naturalist through a little trial and error and his enthusiasm attracted others to help him out; e.g. the recommendation to get aboard the Beagle. Over the 25 years in which Darwin collected data and prepared his synthesis, his sincere love of what he did made it easier for other naturalists of the time to share their findings. Lyell and Wallace were among these and through independent contributionsof their own, they influenced Darwin to allow his work to be presented along with Wallace. The world presented a lot of challenges and bonuses to Darwin but his love for his work and family allowed him to clearly choose among these, resulting in the inevitable publication of On the Origin of Species”

So what I am trying to say with that, is because Darwin wasn’t a dick, Wallace trusted him.

62

No it doesn’t. It merely puts achievement into a greater social context, and makes it easier to understand the factors behind success in general.

Why do rich people tend to beget more rich people? Why do poor people tend to beget more poor people? Why are whites in American society better off than non-whites? Why are so many successful law firms headed by men of the Jewish persuasion? Looking at the big picture–including the things you consider so obvious that they need not be discussed–provides the answers to those questions.

By ignoring the interaction between luck, environment, opportunity, and innate talent, it is all too easy to conclude that rich people are rich because of innate factors, and so on and so forth. And therein lies the road to classism, racism, and other prejudices. Certain segments of the society start getting big heads, thinking that the reason the world looks the way it does is because they deserve success more than others. Then you get politicians who take this mindset and try to work it into public policy. Nice. Next thing you know, you have a country held at hostage over whether or not to raise taxes on the rich, because so many people believe that those at the bottom of society got that way purely due to laziness and stupidity.

I actually think by crediting the role that luck and the environment has on success, stories like Gates and others become more inspirational to the average person. Although Gates et al. accomplished impressive things, they as people are not so unique and exceptional that no one else on the planet could have accomplished the same things if given the same opportunities and social network. When you see it in that light, you see that their success becomes a collective triumph, not just a triumph for a gifted individual.

63

Perhaps it’s that confidence that gets them a head. Believing that you deserve a raise or a promotion goes a long way to having the ability to go in and ask for it.

If two people with equal luck but differing confidence walk into a job interview, the one with confidence gets the job.

If two people with equal luck but differing confidence get offered a job, the one with confidence gets negotiates a higher starting salary.

If two people with equal luck but differing confidence a working the same job, the one with confidence gets the promotion.

Unless now we want to say that confidence is the result of luck.

This was covered in *Outliers *as well. Long story short, being a lawyer in a top law firm in the 1950s was pretty exclusive to [lucky] white men. The remaining jobs were primarily acquisitions and mergers that were considered too good for WASPs so it was done by [unlucky] Jewish men.

But in the 1970s things changed and suddenly there was a ton of money in acquisitions and mergers, and a handful of [now lucky] Jewish layers born in the 1930s controlled the market. The WASP firms previously wouldn’t touch the stuff. Some how a group of extremely unlucky people became extremely lucky.

A question for the crowd: Tiger Woods is a naturally gifted golfer, who was pushed into it by his father. Would you consider that event lucky?

64

No, demographic associations with outcome only allow us to predict how large groups of people will do. They are not factors of success, they are factors of being part of a social class that one is unlikely to be removed from given minimal effort.

No, it only shows that generally speaking, people who have advantages due to their birth will probably continue to maintain those advantages. From this we learn nothing of how a Bill Gates becomes the guy who uses his wealth to run a massive charity. We learn nothing of how a Joe Schmoe might overcome the abusiveness, alcoholism, and poor education that all of his family fell victim to in order to run a $35,000 net profit/year computer business (hypothetical but I would bet there exists somebody like this someplace). We also learn absolutely nothing about the subjects of this thread: what happens so that people generally do stay in the same socioeconomic status if intelligence does not explain everything?

Interaction is an active, present process. Therefore it can be studied and understood. To simply say it without understanding how these things work leaves all the “-isms” more room to flourish. Its not convincing enough to say that “Poor people are not lazy and stupid, they are hard-working and intelligent, but they are born poor and will die poor”. People don’t believe that and they shouldn’t. Not accepting the luck explanations leads to inquiry and discovery of how these patterns keep re-emerging.

The point of my Darwin story above was to demonstrate the idea that the role of luck and environment is irrelevant without the individual taking advantage of the luck and them interacting with what their environment has to offer.

If you want to predict that people generally stick with established patterns of social behavior, then look to the demographics. If you want to understand how this actually happens then you need to look at individuals and how their behavior is adapted (I mean learning not selection btw) to their environment. If you want to learn how the individuals from every social group manage to be exceptional, then study those people. There are three separate questions, addressed by different data, but all are conflated and useless because of a focus on luck or hard-work or intelligence.

65

Nah. Couldn’t happen.

Regarding the “inspirational” nature of emphasizing luck - I very much disagree.

The more that an individual, whatever place in society they were born to, believes that their future is up to luck more than within their own hands, the less likely they are to take advantage of what luck comes their way, the less likely they are to improve their position in life. Fatalism is no recipe for success.

The issue is referred to in the psychology literature as “locus of control”. Those who believe that they are in control over what happens to them (rather than external factors, like “luck”) are, less likely to be depressed from childhood into old age. Having a strong internalized locus of control not only helps one achieve, it makes one happier with oneself at whatever income level one is at, and kids with a high internalized locus of control are less likely to end up as unhealthy adults.

The world is not a just place. Idiots get good breaks and many smart people wither for lack of opportunities to develop their gifts. We get born into different cultures that teach us different worldviews. We have different sets of challenges each and every one of us, some more substantial than others. But given two people with the same “intelligence”, born to the same circumstances, one who believes that his or her future is more one of luck than under his or her control, and one who views circumstances as challenging obstacles to try to overcome, who do you think is more likely to succeed and be more happy at even the same levels of success?

The world is not a just place. But it is neither a completely unjust place. Those who are deluded that it is a completely just world may indeed believe that the rich all earned it and the poor all deserve it. But those who believe it is completely unjust are equally deluded and just as harmfully so, in a different way.

66

These are words to read. And then re-read.

67

Single most important thing said in this thread.

68

Actually you can, if you understand what “luck” really means.

A rich person, raised from birth in an environent of affluence, where deprivation (if it even exists) is mild and short-lived, surrounded by the benefit of the doubt at every turn, will become more confident than his poor, more disadvantaged counterpart. Rich kids, for one thing, are given more opportunities to make decisions from an early age–from the mundane (“What would you like for dinner, little Timmy?”) to the not-so mundane (“What kind of car do you want?”) When their decisions are frequently validated as right in both their own eyes and others (“Oh lasagna was an excellent choice, Timmy; you’re so smart!”), they gain more trust in their own abilities. Less affluent kids won’t have those opportunities to cultivate confidence and self-trust, because the world doesn’t cater to them the same way. They are expected to go with the flow and accept what authority tells them to do.

(For the record, I see this all the time with white men, irrespective of class. People will readily defer to the white guy in the group, even if he’s not the natural leader of the pack.)

The poor kid did nothing to be born in the set of conditions that impedes him from developing confidence, so yeah this is bad “luck”. It’s no difficult than a kid being born with a major heart defect or a facial deformity.

I read the book, just so you know. And yes, that’s exactly right. In this way, it’s no different from the relationship between Sickle Cell Anemia (SCA) and malaria. Possessing the SCA gene is a hindrance in general, but when you’re living in a malaria-ridden environment, having that gene could be the difference between life and death. Put a person with an “unlucky trait” in a new environment and suddenly that trait can work to his advantage. It’s luck because luck decides who has that trait.

Someone who ignores the role of luck and timing and environment would conclude that Jewish law firms enjoy disproportionate success because they employ smarter people who work harder than everyone else. Or, they’d say that Jewish folks work within their community in a way that WASPs don’t. Or, (if they wanted to go there) they’d say it’s because Jews play dirtier than others in the game and lack the moral fortitude of their Christ-minded WASP counterparts. And these conclusions would be just as incorrect or incomplete as someone concluding SCA carriers acquire malaria less frequently because they are better at dodging mosquitos.

I consider it lucky that Tiger was born to a guy that was into the same sport he excelled in. If Tiger was born to a physician, teacher, or a bus driver, how likely is it that his natural talents would have been even been recognized, let alone cultivated like they were?

For other examples of black superstars that are lucky in the same way that Tiger was you need look no farther than the William’s sisters, Michael Jackson, and Beyonce. What’s more interesting to me than the fact that all had fathers who heavily influenced their success is the fact that none of their fathers achieved superstar success on their own. Earl Woods et al. were talents in their own rights and worked obsessively hard in crafts; who knows what they could have achieved had the right opportunities crossed their paths. It wasn’t until their kids came along that all that hard work and talent could translate into accomplishment. And why? Probably because they were born in the wrong eras.

69

There’s a big difference between saying

  1. “Everything is decided by luck, everything is out of my control, so why should we even bother.”

and saying…

  1. “An individual’s achievement results from the confluence of multiple determinants, including intelligence, hard work, a nurturing environment, timing, and social factors that are beyond the individual’s control (e.g. luck).”

I hope it is obvious to you what the difference is.

If we can’t dissect the role of luck (how ever you want to define it), the environment, and social factors in a thread like this one, where in the hell can you? If we’re talking about individuals, yes I agree, it probably makes more sense to focus on what people have direct control over, like hard work. But if we’re talking about huge swaths of people? Talking in a sociological way? Sorry, but we’d be remiss not to talk about how one advantage builds upon another, and how a lot of those advantages have nothing to do with individual merit but more to do with the differential impact that “luck” has on people. Hence you get poor people for the most part staying poor.

Call me crazy, but this is how I look at my own life when I attempt to compare it to others around me. I’m quite successful and proud of my life accomplishments, but it takes nothing away from me to have it acknowledged that me having a middle-class, two-parent household upbringing and a twin sister who put positive peer pressure on my development helped me become who I am today.

And interestingly, how do we even know that having a stable, two-parent childhood is associated with success later in life? Probably because scientists don’t focus on individual determinants of achievement but rather look at social ones, environmental factors. Factors we colloquially call luck because they aren’t based on merit.

I don’t even get what the controversy could possibly be here. This is like sociology 101 stuff.

70

I have not read Gladwell’s book, and declined from responding to that Jewish lawyer hypothesis initially, but I cannot restrain myself from responding to its repetition, at least as represented here. Jewish lawyers were just passively in the right place at the right time, pure luck. Wotta crock. More would be a very big hijack and perhaps better merged into the Why are so many high level scientists Jewish? thread.

As far as Tiger Woods goes … I don’t know. I don’t know him. Is he a happy person right now? Could he have ended up happier as a doctor who golfs? As a politician? Could he have been a golfing star who was still married and content if he had a father who did not push him so hard and instead just encouraged him to follow his passion whatever that passion was? Truth be told neither of us knows if he is unlucky or lucky. But as far as his success in life goes, one can reasonably posit that whatever he chose to do, if he applied himself with the same dedication he did to golf he’d have very likely done well - to superstar level, maybe not - but well enough.

Strong father figures are a good thing? I won’t argue there. Of course some have said that neither Bill Clinton or Barak Obama would be the people they are, would have become Presidents, if they their fathers had been bigger present factors. Are they “lucky” that they were not?

On preview I see your post. The post I responded to was not about whether or not luck plays a role, but your claim that “crediting the role that luck and the environment has on success” is “more inspirational to the average person”. I dispute that. And disputing that has nothing at all to do with how much circumstances, including culture, family support, SES, educational opportunities, stereotypes applied to us by others and by ourselves, and happenstance, all have to do with what our outcomes are. It is a response to your claim about what is more “inspirational”, nothing more. Is that difference obvious to you?

71

Of course it can be. you with the face illustrated how, but I’ll go further with a personal anecdote that the two of us share (and I hope she doesn’t mind).

When we were toddlers, our older siblings loved to race us. In everything. Putting on pajamas. Going up the stairs. Going down the stairs. Running across the backyard. Putting on our shoes. Like I said, everything was a damn race. I guess that’s what older siblings do when there’s nothing’s good on TV.

Even though we were twins and looked very similar (we aren’t identical…except for our faces and voices :)), we were not similar physicality-wise. I was the runt between the two of us. Not only that, but I was so pigeon-toed, probably due to how I was positioned in the womb, that I had to wear braces and orthopedic shoes. Even when we were newborns, you could distinguish the two of us in photographs. Not based on our faces (which, as I said earlier, were basically the same), but because my sister’s head was always erect while mine was always tilted to the right (and still has a tendency to stay cocked to this day). So while I was probably within the norm for reaching my developmental milestones, I was always behind my sister growing up. And everyone knew it.

So flash forward to the Toddler Games. Guess who always won? And guess who always lost? I guess my siblings started feeling sorry for me, or maybe they just liked sadistic fun, but eventually they started stacking the games in my favor so that I could win. They’d set us off to race and then grab my twin sister so that I’d have a head start. We were three, maybe four years old at the time. She didn’t have a clue why they were doing what they were doing, and I didn’t either (full disclosure: I don’t even remember all this foolishness. This is a second-hand account based on interviews of my older siblings and my twin, who does remember).

This is a silly story, of course, and I don’t even want to play armchair psychologist. But I do wonder what kind of effect being held “back” had on my sister, and what kind of effect always losing had on me. I look back on our childhoods and see one twin who brimmed with confidence (got a book published in the school’s library in the first grade, petitioned her own teacher, on her own volition, to be placed in a more advanced reading group; student body president in the fifth grade, always played Mary in the church Christmas pageants) and one twin who stayed behind the scenes, trying to weasel out of “spotlight” moments with passive-aggression and lies, non-ambitious though hard-working, quick to cry and bug out for totally bizarre reasons, strange and aloof with peers. Then I look at the patterns that emerged in adolescence…then later in adulthood. I have to wonder how our early development affected our outcomes and outlooks on life. Or if our early development was just a mere predictor…a harbinger of what was going to happen anyway, regardless of how many times our siblings tried to make us “equal”.

I think personality traits can be shaped by our environments. So in this way, yes, confidence can be the product of luck. To go back to Bill Gates, if he had been raised from early in life to view himself as mentally inferior and to believe that learning for the sake of it is a waste of time, then I cannot imagine him having the confidence to sneak out of the house to practice programming at a college computer lab. Or dropping out of college to pursue his dreams. I can see my sister doing these things, but not me. And as surely as I say this, I don’t think she’s any smarter nor more hard-working than I am. She just has always had more self-confidence and goal-directedness.

FWIW, I agree with you with the face about the role of stochastic forces on success not being the awful, tainting thing some people are making it out to be. The word I would choose to describe it wouldn’t be “inspirational”. It would be more like “humbling.” I choose to think of myself as a success even though I don’t make a lot of money or enjoy a lot of clout. I have worked hard my entire life (sometimes too hard for what I have gotten out of it). But if I look at how things have turned out for me as being the luck of a draw combined with some innate strengths, that keeps me from pounding my chest too hard or being too judgmental about other people’s failures. Or, on the other hand, dick-riding someone who’s achieved more than I have. It keeps me grounded in reality. So while I wouldn’t use the same word that you does, I see what’s she’s saying.

But of course I would. We read each other’s minds, being twinsies and all. :slight_smile:

72

Michael Jackson was a naturally gifted musician, who was pushed into it by his father. Would you consider him lucky too?

73

“Unless now we want to say that confidence is the result of luck.”

This has gone well beyond the ridiculous. How do you not realize you’re using “luck” to mean anything that leads to success?

An athlete that works his ass off is “lucky” because as some point he was given a strong work ethic by a homely, yet wise, janitor.

An engineer that goes to school and gets a degree is “lucky” because his brain allowed him to process math.

Even the story about twins. It doesn’t matter how you tell it, you ended up with different lives because of varying factors growing up. For one of you it worked in your favour, for the other it didn’t.

What your older siblings did your your twin could have been really bad luck and kept her from being successful in one way. Or it might have been the best thing for her, by keeping her from a mistake. She might have used that confidence over you to be a total bitch, that turns into a slut, that gets knocked up, and has a miserable marriage right out of highschool.

Obviously factors throughout a person’s life impact their success. Calling all of that luck, and then using that to pity the poor is rather self serving. As an example:

That has nothing to do with rich vs poor, and even less to do with actual income/wealth. We might as well go with stereotypes and say, “he was lucky to be born Chinese because they’re good at math.”

If we conclude that giving a kid choices at dinner time leads to success, wouldn’t the correct conclusion be that parents should do that? It’s not luck, it’s just shitty parenting, which isn’t a rich vs poor distinction. There is no reason why a poor parent has to be a shitty parent, unless you’d like that to be the message you’re trying to convey here.

The only conclusion I can draw is that some kids are unlucky and have shitty parents. If you are rich and have a shitty parent you make a sex tape and spend most of your life in rehab. If you are poor and have a shitty parent you make porn and spend most of your life on crack.

74

I hate when people can’t get on the same page when it comes to very basic, non-controversial, non-earth-shaking ideas.

It makes me question the whole idea of “common sense”. Is it a myth? I’m kinda thinking it is.

75

But how is this considered [good] luck? I happened that it worked in his favour. But if we found a guy that it didn’t work for, we could just as easily blame it all on being poor.

*Alter-Bill Gates lacked discipline and would sneak out at night to play computer games. It got to be such a problem he dropped out of school to pursue some pipe dream, living in his parent’s garage and never making anything of himself. Had his parents been better he would have stayed in school and become a lawyer like his father wanted." *

The things you are describing aren’t luck, they’re just situations that influenced his life.

76

Weird, I was just about to write this and thought it was kind of petty. Guess we’re on the same page about some things.

77

Okay, one last question: What is the difference between saying luck and “God’s divine plan?”

Bill Gates is successful because God spoke to him through code.

Tiger Woods is successful because God wanted him to be a great golfer.

Perhaps none of this is in any of our control, but simply the work of a fatherly figure in the sky that loves us by making some people obscenely rich and others dirt poor. Seems God likes rich people more, which is why they should make more tax deductible donations to the church.

78

Well, at some point we have to define “luck” I guess. Do you go back to what position you had in the womb that led to your positional deformities as being luck? Why stop there? The exact combination of genes you have are luck too, both the ones that give you your strongest features and your weakest ones … Gosh, we can bring this into one of the mind numbing “Does Free Will Exist?” debates!

But instead let’s try to bring this back around to the original subject some. There is, I believe, an inertia to stay roughly within the same SES you were born into, moving maybe a little up, or, hopefully a bit less commonly, a bit down. An exception to that principle may be for those at the extremes: the children of the very wealthiest or brightest or most powerful ar likely to not be quite as whichever of those than their parents were - a regression to the mean to some degree, and the very poorest are more likely to move up slightly than to stay at the very bottom for the same reason. But overall it would take an individual below average (or of intention to get off the SES track) to move down more than one level, and an individual who is above average to move up more than one.

That SES inertia exists for multiple reasons, most of which we are all already aware of (and call that “luck” if you want), and results in some stickiness keeping some less “intelligent” in a higher class, and providing a certain amount of resistance to upward mobility for the brightest of the lower SES. Not insurmountable resistance … those with money do mange to lose it all and/or self destruct in many other ways, or do not achieve much, and as montro’s mentor’s kids, drop down a level of two compared to their folks, and some of those without money and advantages manage to work hard and leverage the luck that their way falls into significant successes. But significant resistance. We have opportunity but not fully equal opportunity. Nothing controversial here I think.

Just to be clear, I do not at all disagree with you monstro, especially with the word humbling. Birth order, which friends you happen to fall in with, what neutron hit which bit just as some methylation was about to occur … as you know I am a big fan of Chaos Theory as model for our development and who knows which pebble happened to make the boulder that is each of our minds end up on one side of the valley or the other? But who knows whether or not the big rock in the way or made the boulder take a different path to settle at the same lowest point it was going to get to one way or the other? You, for example, did not ask for the genes that made you as smart as you are, or that gave you the temperament you’ve got (or the experiences that molded it), or that gave you the problems that you have to deal with either. You can merely take responsibility for doing the best you can with the gifts you got and using them to hopefully leave the world a bit better than you found it. But it is fair for each of us to be proud of ourselves when we can honestly say that we have done that, with whatever we’ve achieved in so doing. Having done that is not luck.

Funny thing is that I usually see the hardest working most dedicated people very grateful for how lucky they are when things go well and very much blaming themselves when things fail. Those who don’t work so hard tend to do the opposite, claim success as based on their skill, and failures as due to poor luck.

Not sure how that informs this debate though and sorry for rambling …

79

. . . unless they are intelligent, in which case the studies show that they tend to not remain poor. The reason that the poor tend to have kids that remain poor is that the kids tend to also remain unintelligent.

Indeed.

80

So, after going back and forth a few times on the specifics, can we get back to the general for a second? Monstro, you with the face, Der Trihs, and others who in this thread have emphasized luck so much, what is your point? What do you think you are offering to the world with your long posts on the impact of luck on people’s outcomes? If everyone had the same appreciation for luck that you do, how do you think society would be different?