Originally Posted by JonLaw
Originally Posted by Dude
No, the patterns haven't changed much, because the society producing those patterns hasn't changed much. Predicting patterns is not the point of the book, though. It purports to give an analysis of why those patterns exist, and how they emerge.

Plus, being poor makes you stupid.

Because money.

Yep. From that same Reason.com article I linked above, bolding added:

Quote
The authors present evidence that IQ rises with age and with years of schooling completed. IQ may actually be a better measure of the environment facing children than the measure of environment used by Murray and Herrnstein. They use IQ to predict schooling, but schooling produces IQ. Hence, they are especially likely to find a strong measured effect of "IQ" on schooling.

But then, this becomes a "duh" sort of observation once you realize that the authors are using AFQT scores as a proxy for IQ, and that the individuals in their data set were tested between age 15-23. The AFQT is not an IQ measure, and was never designed to be one. Its purpose is to predict success in military trade schools, and like the SAT (which was also never designed as an IQ test, but to predict success in college), it mostly measures achievement. So, does academic achievement increase with age and schooling? Duh. Does that say anything about general intelligence? No. If we're truly measuring g, then the results should be stable across age groups, so that's an indicator that there's something wrong here.

Given that they started with a data set that does not measure what they purport it to measure, any conclusions are bound to be garbage, because garbage in equals garbage out. And that was only the first of their great many mistakes.