Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
Bostonian, I think that probably there is some truth to the notion that children born after 1975 in this country have been born in an era, at least, when such a thing is plausible.

The problem with that assumption, however, is that it relies heavily on one very flawed series of assumptions to begin with:

a) Ivy/Elite colleges have always admitted students upon purely meritocratic standards, and were certainly doing so from 1970 onwards in a way that perfectly captured the "brightest" students and sorted them out into elite schools in order of prestige.

This supposed assumption on the part of Bostonian has approximately nothing to do with the issue at hand, and is certainly not a requirement for his line of reasoning.

Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
b) that there is a perfect correlation between IQ (as measured by...? Oh, nevermind) and income. That's not really so, though the trend is certainly true that the highest paying 30% of occupations as a whole tend to draw from, perhaps the highest 40% of population IQ's. But that effect largely dissipates significantly when you look at individual occupations, or even at "what does the average person with IQ 140-145 have as an occupation?" Does that make sense?

It's curious to me that you can appreciate the trend, and thus understand that there is significant correlation, but in your mind anything less than a correlation of 1.0 makes the explanation unsatisfactory. Personally, I'm not bothered by the fact that statistics allows for variance and outliers.