Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Innumeracy in Gifted Education Advocacy

I agree and disagree here.First, the original point was "as IQ goes up, so does average income." The paper we were talking shows that and lists a lot of studies also making that point. The new thing about this paper is that the author also looked at accumulated wealth and financial difficulties and IQ. He used some weird regression analyses to make his corrections, and I haven't figured out what he did yet. But I was right about the summary article having cheated: true, ("uncorrected") accumulated wealth in the IQ 105 group was ~$84K compared to ~$71K in the IQ 110 group. BUT, wealth jumped to $95K in the IQ 115 group and $133K in the IQ 125+ group. So the journalist in New Scientist made really, really misleading statement. (PM me if you want a copy of the paper.)


I disagree with the idea that professions like engineering, medicine, and research don't select for high intelligence. Of course they do! Your IQ has to be higher than average if you're going to get through a degree or two and succeed in these fields. Sure, there are exceptions on both sides. Unmotivated smart people fail and highly motivated average people don't. But the less intelligent people will always be at a disadvantage in these professions.

And the main point is that average IQ is higher and so are average wages.

Yes, there is probably an optimal IQ for a lot of professions. Yes, there are wealthy people with lowish IQs and very smart people working low wage jobs. But those fact are different from that fact that, on average, income and IQ rise together.

Exactly!

And, welcome back HK.

As a follow-on to Dude's point, I will just add that homeschooling is potentially the *most* expensive education option for parents, even for affluent families. My husband and I joke about how valuable my 1.5 year old son's brain is already because I'm at home with him. (I mean this in the sense of revealed preference through the opportunity cost of my time.)

If I return to working full time in my profession once my son is school-aged, taking even 5 hours a week to after school my son would be a career limiting move because of the time intensity of the work. To achieve comparable quality of instruction, we'd need a tutor or specialized instruction, which would hit $30k+ in our area...for ONE KINDERGARTENER. It's absurd.

There are lots of mothers with demanding full-time jobs (includng my wife, a physician) who spend this much time or more either teaching their children themselves after school or chauffering them to lessons. The Tiger Mother herself is a Yale law professor.

The original post that started this line of discussion was this:


So yes, you are correct on your main point. But... context. This was said in direct response to a comment about the correlation of SES and giftedness. So while yes, I agree that higher average intelligence equates to higher average income, the point is we're talking about outliers here... and a group that is poorly studied, IMO.

From your example, for instance:


The highest IQ group represented here is 125 and up, but most people put the threshold for gifted at 130 (assuming 15 SD scale), and the range for "optimal intelligence" at around 120-145 on the same scale. These numbers would mostly represent the optimal intelligence group, including many members below what we would term "gifted." So these numbers aren't really useful for our purposes.

For illustration purposes, 125 IQ occurs 1 time in 17, and 130 occurs 1 time in 33. Statistically, then, this suggests that nearly half of the group would not be considered gifted under the standard 130+ definition of the term.

Amy Chua is not a good example to use.

In fact, generally law professors are not good examples to use.

Doctors are much better examples.

Find me one with a 90-hour work week who is ever home when her child is awake and I'll shake her hand.

And my assertion is, similarly, not exactly identical to this rebuttal's meaning (I think, anyway).

That is, the professor teaching that med student calculus probably has a higher IQ, on average, than those med students s/he is teaching.

But the professor is likely to have a lower income in spite of that.

It's a Venn diagram, not a flow-chart; I guess that is what I mean.

There is definitely a 'sweet spot' where you still relate well to others and have no trouble fitting yourself into their expectations. THAT is what makes money-- often lots of money, assuming that you've had the SES to recognize opportunity when it knocks, and know what to do about it in a social-emotional sense.

But (and again, anecdote) when you examine a group that should select for higher IQ's-- such as the professoriate, or M.D.'s, for example, you do find interesting disparities that reveal what I've suggested here.

Highest IQ medical specialities tend to be those with lowest patient-interaction.

Highest IQ research/field specialties in the professoriate tend to be in theoretical math/physics, and those are definitely not the most lucrative positions-- those are often in engineering disciplines, or biotech.


So there is definitely a general trend, but I'm not sure that the correlation here is directly relatable to the same causative mechanism.

I think that smart people like to live as well as they can. Standard of living dictates making life decisions on the basis of status, but more critically, on earning power.

VERY smart people, however, often make decisions on a paradoxically emotional level-- what "lights their fire" so to speak, which tends to be more esoteric, more demanding, more difficult, more consuming. They gravitate to where they fit in. That may (my own hypothesis) seem MORE important to that group (as IQ rises) than even remuneration does.

But "more cognitive demand" =/= "better remuneration" so it isn't a perfect correlation as you move toward the group that are true outliers. Back to Terman's observations about the wiggly tail.

Actually, I think that they dumbed down the SAT, LSAT and AFQT to specifically eliminate the correlation with IQ. I do not believe that the scores NOW, at least, have anything like the correlation with IQ that they did in the 70's.

My understanding of the SAT is that they eliminated the g-loaded analogy section, and introduced a subjectively-graded essay section, and this led to increased deviation between SAT scores and IQ.

The AFQT has never correlated well to IQ for takers who don't test right out of high school, because it's normed for that population, for obvious reasons. If the same person took the test 10 years later, their score would go down, regardless of any changes in ability.

The way the AFQT is calculated has changed over time as the test has evolved, so you can't compare historical AFQT scores against each other. However, I'm not aware of any changes to the test that make it less likely to parallel IQ scores for its target audience.