Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Kindergarten

And notice how quickly the goalposts have moved. We're no longer talking about giftedness and the wealthy, we're now talking about the white-collar middle-class.

It's probably worth pointing out at this juncture that IT and engineering managers require strong social skills, and in fact those ranks are more often those with higher social skills, with technical skills that are lower than average among their peers.

This is partly because management roles self-select for the lesser performers, because the really great technical people would consider a middle-management role to be like death from a thousand paper cuts.

That's because college is essentially high school now.

And we're not building the entire economy around a fantasy.

We're generating a massive amount of debt that we're never, ever going to actually pay back in non-inflated dollars. All the pollution has been outsourced to China. Knowledge working is clean. Manufacturing iPad's isn't.

And the underpaid college grads are never going to actually pay back their loans, either, because they can't.

So, it's more like fraud than fantasy. Although the college students are kind of like marks.

Actually, there are a lot of paths these kids (the low achieving ones) could be encourage to take that are better than the current 'everyone should go to college!' one. They could be trained in HVAC repair, welding, plumbing, electrician, etc. There is a very, very serious shortage of properly trained, competent folks in those professions. A certified welder with a little bit of experience can easily earn $40k a year. The problem is that we, as a society, look down on these 'blue collar' jobs and no longer offer this path to our students. So now they are left with one 'acceptable' solution, even though it's probably in appropriate for a large number of them.

Yes, I agree completely with you on this.

Suppose it takes an IQ of about 115 to study at the college level for a B.A., so that only 15% of the population qualifies.
The careers you suggested are reasonable for people with IQ of say 100-115, but they DO require smarts that not everyone has. Do you think someone with IQ of 85 can become an electrician? After people stop pretending that everyone is smart enough to go to college, the next step is to stop pretending that everyone is smart enough for the skilled trades. Many people cannot be trained to find jobs paying much above the minimum wage.

Suppose it takes an IQ of 95 or so to be a plumber or a welder. Roughly 2/3 of the population would be able to do a job like these.

Your claim that most people can't be trained to do better than minimum-wage jobs is false. Waiters and waitresses earn more than minimum wage. Factory jobs (mailing rooms, manufacturing, etc.) pay more than minimum wage. But we've outsourced many of these jobs. The other side of the education/jobs coin in the United States is that we think it's a good idea for corporations to put too much emphasis on profits and too little emphasis on the people who help them make those profits.

Your facts do not match your assertion, because the Times graphic indicates that the US has less mobility than other OECD countries, and that mobility has been on the decline. Moreover, the latest update on mobility they show measures it from the 80s to 90s, and we know from other sources that mobility has been on a sharp decline since the end of the 90s.

Furthermore, the Times graphic was published in 2005, shortly before a major economic event that ripped the guts out of the middle class.

I'm going to jump in with some thoughts about EQ.


How much does "EQ" depend on the IQs of the people who are interacting? I've read that communication (especially work-related communication) can be very difficult between people with cognitive gaps of ~30 IQ points or more. My interpretation of what I've read is that the smarter person is seeing things in a much more complex way and that he may come across negatively as a result. By "negative," I mean rude, pushy, arrogant, difficult, or any other similar attribute.

People with DYS kids (and the DITD itself) frequently say that one benefit of the DITD programs is to allow people of very high cognitive ability to interact with others like them. Organizations like the Prometheus Society exist in part so that members can meet people who think like they do (read this article to see what I mean).

Part of me wonders if a large part of the high-IQ-social-skills-problem is simply a natural result of extreme differences in cognitive ability. If a bunch of people with IQs between 140 and 170 (and clustering in the 150s) were tossed into a room, I wonder how many would feel socially awkward and have trouble communicating.

And I wonder, if a few people with IQs around 100-110 were tossed into a company with >200 people whose IQs were in the 70-80 range, how well would the former group fit in? Let us assume that only one or two of the higher-IQ group is in a leadership role, and that the CEO is in the lower-IQ group.

This article explains why mobility may be declining. Reducing legal and and illegal immigration of the unskilled would result in less inequality within the U.S. One reason gifted programs are being gutted in California is that so many resources are being devoted to closing the "achievement gap", to little avail.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_california-demographics.html

HEATHER MAC DONALD
California’s Demographic Revolution:
If the upward mobility of the impending Hispanic majority doesn’t improve, the state’s economic future is in peril.
City Journal
Winter 2012

California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind.

The scale and speed of the Golden State’s ethnic transformation are unprecedented. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the most Anglo-Saxon of the nation’s ten largest cities; today, Latinos make up nearly half of the county’s residents and one-third of its voting-age population. A full 55 percent of Los Angeles County’s child population has immigrant parents. California’s schools have the nation’s largest concentration of “English learners,” students from homes where a language other than English is regularly spoken. From 2000 to 2010, the state’s Hispanic population grew 28 percent, to reach 37.6 percent of all residents, almost equal to the shrinking white population’s 40 percent. Nearly half of all California births today are Hispanic. The signs of the change are everywhere—from the commercial strips throughout the state catering to Spanish-speaking customers, to the flea markets and illegal vendors in such areas as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, to the growing reach of the Spanish-language media.

The poor Mexican immigrants who have fueled the transformation—84 percent of the state’s Hispanics have Mexican origins—bring an admirable work ethic and a respect for authority too often lacking in America’s native-born population. Many of their children and grandchildren have started thriving businesses and assumed positions of civic and economic leadership. But a sizable portion of Mexican, as well as Central American, immigrants, however hardworking, lack the social capital to inoculate their children reliably against America’s contagious underclass culture. The resulting dysfunction is holding them back and may hold California back as well.