Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite"
8/5/09 10:30 PM
Grasping Reality with Both Hands The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: A Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and More than Two-Handed Look at the World J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.
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Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite" Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The "Cognitive Elite": Matthew Yglesias writes: TPMCafe || Holds Up Well?: For all I know, the uncontroversial parts of [Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve book] (which I understand to have been the clear majority of the text) hold up just find, but the controversial stuff about race and IQ doesn't hold up at all... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/hosted-from-archives-the-cognitive-elite.html
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Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite"
8/5/09 10:30 PM
Ummm... No. The "uncontroversial" parts of the book are a set of claims that: 1. Genetically-inherited intelligence is the really important driver of socioeconomic success or failure in America. 2. American society is or is about to become highly stratified by genetically-inherited intelligence. 3. An important consequence of this is that there is nothing we can do to prevent the children of the rich and powerful from being rich and powerful themselves. 4. Because the reason they are rich and powerful is because they are members of a genetic cognitive elite. These are all wrong too. As Bowles and Gintis report: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Michael Barone: Intellectual Garbage Scow Edition): If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ball park estimates) and the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income] would be 0.01, or roughly two percent [of] the observed intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income between parents and children]. Yes, America is an increasingly stratified society. Yes, a huge amount of inequality is inherited. No, differences in IQ--acting both directly on job performance and indirectly because higher IQ people get more education--is not a terribly important source of income inequality. No, inheritance of genetic factors shaping IQ is not more than a trivial source of the intergenerational transmission of income inequality. RECOMMENDED (4.91) by 6 people like you [How? ] You might like:
Paul Krugman Again Yet Again (@this site) Who Is Being Hit The Hardest?, Ctd. (@The Daily Dish) 2 more recommended posts Âť Brad DeLong on August 01, 2009 at 08:30 PM in Economics, Economics: Inequality, Science: Cognitive | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e551f08003883401156f2e2678970c Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite":
Comments You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post. How do they get from 0.5 and 0.2 to 0.01? Heritability and assortation are not statistically independent variables. Heritability in this context is not intergenerational. Heritability of eye color is 1.0, since eye color is perfectly determined by an individual's genes. But the eye color of individual children is not necessarily determined by the eye color of their parents. (See mendelian inheritance, recombination) Was all of this accounted for? The political interpretation of the debate is confusing on many levels. 1.) Heritability of inequality would justify, not delegitimize redistributionism. You can't choose your genes after all. Genes are environmental.
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Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite"
8/5/09 10:30 PM
2.) Why should intergenerational heritability of inequality matter? Living in a favela is just as bad, regardless of where you came from. 3.) Liberal utopia would increase heritability of IQ and assortation to 1.0, thus turning Charles Murrays assertions into reality. Charles Murray basically states that step 1 of liberal utopia (equal opportunity) has already been achieved. Step 2 would be to compensate for the unfairness of the gene lottery, which he wouldn't want. So we have a situation where liberals react negatively to the would be implications of their own programs and Charles Murray is shooting himself and conservatives in the foot. Posted by: dieter | August 01, 2009 at 10:02 PM Heritability and assortation are not statistically independent variables. Um, I retract that statement. Posted by: dieter | August 01, 2009 at 10:36 PM So I found the paper and the heritability estimate of 0.5 really does refer to parent - child correlation of IQ. So I retract my other concern as well. My political philosophy stuff still holds (I think). Posted by: dieter | August 01, 2009 at 10:42 PM Not to mention that we do not really understand what exactly "intelligence" is, how it works, whether it is unitary, modular, or something else. Further, IQ tests actually are fairly crude instruments for measuring what might be termed intelligence and are full of a variety of cultural biases which unsurprisingly favor rich white folks. We also know that however much capacity for intelligence we inherit, environmental factors play a determinant role in shaping actual intellectual ability. In particular things like intellectual stimulation in early childhood, diet and health at that time, exposure to environmental toxins (including in utero), stress levels during childhood, and many others. What is producing increasing inequality is not inherited ability, it is inherited privilege. Posted by: DrDick | August 01, 2009 at 10:47 PM I might also point out that, based on several studies, IQ is not a fixed quantity and can be, through educational enrichment, raised as much as 10-20 points. There is simply no part of the Bell Curve which is "uncontroversial." It is a sordid mess from cover to cover. Posted by: DrDick | August 01, 2009 at 10:54 PM On a personal note, my maternal grandfather was a hillbilly dirt farmer who dropped out of the 6th grade. He never had indoor plumbing or anything other than a fireplace and wood stove for heat and farmed 60 acres of flint rock and post oak with a horse team into the late 1960s. All of his children went to college and both of his sons got graduate degrees. One son (Ph.D in electrical engineering from Cal Tech) retired as senior vice president for Hughes Aircraft in charge of satelite communications (he also led the team that designed the instrumentation for the Surveyor soft lander). There is absolutely no correlation between intelligence and success in America (see, Bush, George W.). Posted by: DrDick | August 01, 2009 at 11:12 PM I still don't understand that paper. I fail to see, how Bowles and Gintis are justified to simply multiply the correlation of IQ and income times the correlation of parent IQ and child IQ times the correlation of IQ and income to get the correlation of parent income and child income as determined by heritability of IQ. Doesn't that necessitate that there is an underlying multivariate normal distribution? It is not obvious to me that that should be the case. Posted by: dieter | August 01, 2009 at 11:39 PM Okay, so here is my problem with the approach. The correlation of income and IQ is given as b=0.266. Suppose parent IQ and child IQ are always identical (y=1). corr(childIQ, childIncome) = corr(parentIQ, childIncome) = b = 0.266. But according to Bowles and Gintis: corr(childIQ, childIncome) = b²y = 0,070756. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/hosted-from-archives-the-cognitive-elite.html
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Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite"
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corr(childIQ, childIncome) = b²y = 0,070756. Posted by: dieter | August 02, 2009 at 12:43 AM Should have been: But according to Bowles and Gintis: corr(parentIQ, childIncome) = b²y = 0,070756. Posted by: dieter | August 02, 2009 at 12:47 AM Dieter, wouldn't b²y be the correlation between parentIncome and childIncome? Posted by: Blar | August 02, 2009 at 06:23 AM Their point exactly involves the low correlation of IQ and wealth. The wealthy are not much smarter than average, just better connected. As Bowles and Gintis note: "Note the conclusion that the contribution of genetic inheritance of IQ is negligible is not the result of any assumptions concerning assortative mating or the heritability of IQ: the IQ genotype of parents could be perfectly correlated and the heritability of IQ 100 per cent without appreciably changing the qualitative conclusions. The estimate results from the fact that IQ is just not an important enough determinant of economic success." Obtaining wealth requires having connections to wealthy people (not so much IQ). What better way to get connections than to be born with them? A wealthy legacy can be as dumb as a rock but still hire a smart money manager to increase the wealth. Posted by: bakho | August 02, 2009 at 07:39 AM " A wealthy legacy can be as dumb as a rock but still hire a smart money manager to increase the wealth." I would have thought 8 years of the cretin from Crawford, born with a silver coke spoon up his nose, would have laid to rest any doubts on that score. Posted by: DrDick | August 02, 2009 at 10:05 AM Gee, according to conservatives, aren't the cognitive elite liberals? Posted by: Min | August 02, 2009 at 12:43 PM
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Hosted from Archives: The "Cognitive Elite"
Paul Krugman Mark Thoma Cowen and Tabarrok Chinn and Hamilton Brad Setser
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