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IQ and what it means in adulthood



 
 
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  #31  
Old November 12th 07, 07:23 PM posted to misc.kids
Beliavsky
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Posts: 453
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

On Nov 10, 4:02 pm, Sarah Vaughan wrote:
Does anyone know of any good articles/studies on how well IQ scores in
childhood correlate with success in adulthood, given all the inherent
inaccuracies of the tests? I realise this is a pretty broad topic, but
I know there are some well-informed people here, and the subject has
come up for discussion on someone's blog so I'm interested in finding
out more.


Linda Gottfredson has studied how IQ predicts health and longevity and
academic and career success, and her papers are available online at
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...nts/index.html .

Here is an article discussing how IQ differences between siblings
predict future income, illegitimate births, and divorce. Looking at
siblings is a simple way to control for socioeconomic status of the
parents.

http://www.eugenics.net/papers/murray.html
IQ Will Put You In Your Place
By Charles Murray

From the Sunday Times, UK, May 25 1997.


A longer version of this article appears in the summer issue of The
Public Interest.

Imagine several hundred families which face few of the usual problems
that plague modern society. Unemployment is zero. Illegitimacy is
zero. Divorce is rare and occurs only after the children's most
formative years. Poverty is absent - indeed, none of the families is
anywhere near the poverty level. Many are affluent and all have enough
income to live in decent neighbourhoods with good schools and a low
crime rate. If you have the good fortune to come from such a
background, you will expect a bright future for your children. You
will certainly have provided them with all the advantages society has
to offer. But suppose we follow the children of these families into
adulthood. How will they actually fare?

A few years ago the late Richard Herrnstein and I published a
controversial book about IQ, The Bell Curve, in which we said that
much would depend on IQ. On average, the bright children from such
families will do well in life - and the dull children will do poorly.
Unemployment, poverty and illegitimacy will be almost as great among
the children from even these fortunate families as they are in society
at large - not quite as great, because a positive family background
does have some good effect, but almost, because IQ is such an
important factor.

"Nonsense!" said the critics. "Have the good luck to be born to the
privileged and the doors of life will open to you - including doors
that will let you get a good score in an IQ test. Have the bad luck to
be born to a single mother struggling on the dole and you will be held
down in many ways - including your IQ test score." The Bell Curve's
purported relationships between IQ and success are spurious, they
insisted: nurture trumps nature; environment matters more than
upbringing.

An arcane debate about statistical methods ensued. Then several
American academics began using a powerful, simple way of testing who
was right: instead of comparing individual children from different
households, they compared sibling pairs with different IQs. How would
brothers and sisters who were nurtured by the same parents, grew up in
the same household and lived in the same neighbourhood, but had
markedly different IQs, get on in life?

The research bears out what parents of children with unequal abilities
already know - that try as they might to make Johnny as bright as
Sarah, it is difficult, and even impossible, to close the gap between
them.

A very large database in the United States contains information about
several thousand sibling pairs who have been followed since 1979. To
make the analysis as unambiguous as possible, I have limited my sample
to brothers and sisters whose parents are in the top 75 per cent of
American earners, with a family income in 1978 averaging £40,000 (in
today's money).

Families living in poverty, or even close to it, have been excluded.
The parents in my sample also stayed together for at least the first
seven years of the younger sibling's life.

Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of
90-110 ,a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this
group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either
higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the
bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the
dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs.

How much difference did IQ make? Earned income is a good place to
begin. In 1993, when we took our most recent look at them, members of
the sample were aged 28-36. That year, the bright siblings earned
almost double the average of the dull: £22,400 compared to £11,800.
The normals were in the middle, averaging £16,800.

These differences are sizeable in themselves. They translate into even
more drastic differences at the extremes. Suppose we take a salary of
£50,000 or more as a sign that someone is an economic success. A
bright sibling was six-and-a-half times more likely to have reached
that level than one of the dull. Or we may turn to the other extreme,
poverty: the dull sibling was five times more likely to fall below the
American poverty line than one of the bright. Equality of opportunity
did not result in anything like equality of outcome. Another poverty
statistic should also give egalitarians food for thought: despite
being blessed by an abundance of opportunity, 16.3% of the dull
siblings were below the poverty line in 1993. This was slightly higher
than America's national poverty rate of 15.1%.

Opportunity, clearly, isn't everything. In modern America, and also, I
suspect, in modern Britain, it is better to be born smart and poor
than rich and stupid. Another way of making this point is to look at
education. It is often taken for granted that parents with money can
make sure their children get a college education. The young people in
our selected sample came from families that were overwhelmingly likely
to support college enthusiastically and have the financial means to
help. Yet while 56% of the bright obtained university degrees, this
was achieved by only 21% of the normals and a minuscule 2% of the
dulls. Parents will have been uniformly supportive, but children are
not uniformly able.

The higher prevalence of college degrees partly explains why the
bright siblings made so much more money, but education is only part of
the story. Even when the analysis is restricted to siblings who left
school without going to college, the brights ended up in the more
lucrative occupations that do not require a degree, becoming
technicians, skilled craftsmen, or starting their own small
businesses. The dull siblings were concentrated in menial jobs.

The differences among the siblings go far beyond income. Marriage and
children offer the most vivid example. Similar proportions of siblings
married, whether normal, bright or dull - but the divorce rate was
markedly higher among the dull than among the normal or bright, even
after taking length of marriage into account. Demographers will find
it gloomily interesting that the average age at which women had their
first birth was almost four years younger for the dull siblings than
for the bright ones, while the number of children born to dull women
averaged 1.9, half a child more than for either the normal or the
bright. Most striking of all were the different illegitimacy rates. Of
all the first-born children of the normals, 21% were born out of
wedlock , about a third lower than the figure for the United States as
a whole, presumably reflecting the advantaged backgrounds from which
the sibling sample was drawn. Their bright siblings were much lower
still, with less than 10% of their babies born illegitimate.
Meanwhile, 45% of the first-born of the dull siblings were born
outside of marriage.

The inequalities among siblings that I have described are from 1993
and are going to become much wider in the years ahead. The income
trajectory for low-skill occupations usually peaks in a worker's
twenties or thirties. The income trajectory for managers and
professionals usually peaks in their fifties. The snapshot I have
given you was taken for an age group of 28-36 when many of the brights
are still near the bottom of a steep rise into wealth and almost all
the dulls' incomes are stagnant or even falling. . . .

The inequalities I have presented are the kind you are used to seeing
in articles that compare inner-city children with suburban ones, black
with white, children of single parents with those from intact
families. Yet they refer to the children of a population more
advantaged in jobs, income and marital stability than even the most
starry-eyed social reformer can hope to achieve.

You may be wondering whether the race, age or education of siblings
affects my figures. More extended analyses exist, but the short answer
is that the phenomena I have described survive such questions.
Siblings who differ in IQ also differ widely in important social
outcomes, no matter how anyone tries to explain away the results.
Ambitious parents may be dismayed by this conclusion, but it is none
the less true for all that.

A final thought: I have outlined the inequalities that result from
siblings with different IQs. Add in a few other personal qualities:
industry, persistence, charm, and the differences among people will
inevitably produce a society of high inequalities, no matter how level
the playing field has been made. Indeed, the more level the playing
field, and the less that accidents of birth enter into it, the more
influence personal qualities will have. I make this point as an
antidote to glib thinking on both sides of the Atlantic and from both
sides of the political spectrum. Inequality is too often seen as
something that results from defects in society that can be fixed by a
more robust economy, more active social programmes, or better schools.
It is just not so.

The effects of inequality cannot be significantly reduced, let alone
quelled, unless the government embarks on a compulsory redistribution
of wealth that raises taxes astronomically and strictly controls
personal enterprise. Some will call this social justice. Others will
call it tyranny. I side with the latter, but whichever position one
takes, it is time to stop pretending that, without such massive
compulsion, human beings in a fair and prosperous society will ever be
much more equal than they are now.

  #32  
Old November 12th 07, 07:30 PM posted to misc.kids
Beliavsky
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Posts: 453
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

On Nov 12, 10:06 am, toto wrote:
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:09:36 -0800, Beliavsky
wrote:

The book "The Bell Curve" (1994) by Herrnstein and Murray


The book and it's statistical analyses are flawed. Hernstein and
Murray start with a theory, then *lie* with statistics to support
their theory.

http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v4n20.html


"Lie" is a strong word, and unless you can show that Herrnstein and
Murray did not believe what they were writing, you should not have
used it.

Looking at Table 1 at the link you provided, using the critic's
revised measure of socioeconomic status (SES) still leaves IQ with a
larger t-stat than SES in predicting whether an adult will live in
poverty.

  #33  
Old November 12th 07, 08:52 PM posted to misc.kids
[email protected]
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Posts: 125
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

On Nov 11, 2:35?am, Chookie wrote:
In article ,
"Donna Metler" wrote:

My totally uninformed guess is that you'll probably find more "successes" in
the second band of IQ-the high achievers for whom things were easy in
school, but who weren't "out there" to the point of being misfits.


Leta Hollingworth defined the IQ band 125-155 as "socially optimal
intelligence" back in 1926!

However, the IQ scores she was talking about aren't directly
comparable to today's scores, and there is no simple way to convert
them to today's scores (as in those days ratio scores changed with
one's age). If I were going to figure out what figures Leta
Hollingworth would use today, I'd have to see what age most of the
children she was working with were tested at, and find out what the
standard deviation was for the scores for that age.

Just to take a wild guess, I'd say socially optimum intelligence these
days would be roughly one to two-and-a-half standard deviations from
the mean, or 115 to 137. But I suspect that "socially optimal
intelligence" varies a great deal by circumstance -- a severely
unintellectual environment being hard on persons of almost any level
who actually care about learning.

I agree with Ericka about the difference in average IQ levels between
breastfed/formula-fed populations not being the real concern. To me,
it's a question of whether something, who knows what, is happening
that affects brain development adversely in formula-fed children. The
other thing that always bothers me is that you can't tell from an
*average* difference how large the *maximum* effect might be. I mean,
obviously in this case it's not possible that 9 out of 10 are
unaffected and the 10th takes a hit of 70 points, but there's nothing
in the *numbers* that eliminates that possibility.

Incidentally, 7 points sounds high -- I thought once confounding
factors were out of the question, and when you weren't talking about
premature babies, it got down to more like 3 points? But there are of
course a bunch of different studies around.

--Helen

  #35  
Old November 13th 07, 12:23 PM posted to misc.kids
Chookie
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Posts: 1,085
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

In article . com,
Beliavsky wrote:

Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of
90-110 ,a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this
group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either
higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the
bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the
dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs.


Actually, I have a problem with these definitions. For most of the research
I've seen, gifted means either the top 10% for IQ or (more frequently) IQ130,
which is the top 5%. THe definition of 'bright' is rather too broad here, and
I wonder how the stats would look if the authors had used a better-accepted
definition.

Secondly, giftedness is strongly heritable, with a gifted child's siblings,
parents and grandparents usually of a similar intelligence (within 5-10 points
-- see http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/we_have_learned.htm). I don't know if
*IQ* is as strongly heritable in the entire population, but if it is, there is
a good chance of these 710 pairs being aberrant.

My 2c.

Lastly, of course, we haven't seen any definition of 'success' yet.

Here's my 'success' story: A good friend of mine discovered that one of his
workmates had known me at high school. She naturally enquired as to what I
was doing these days, and when he said I was a librarian, looked rather
surprised. "I thought she was smarter than that!"

So there you are -- librarianship is intrinsically Unsuccessful!

--
Chookie -- Sydney, Australia
(Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)

http://chookiesbackyard.blogspot.com/
  #36  
Old November 13th 07, 01:34 PM posted to misc.kids
Welches
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 849
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood


"Chookie" wrote in message
news:ehrebeniuk-C905B0.22233513112007@news...
In article . com,
Beliavsky wrote:

Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of
90-110 ,a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this
group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either
higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the
bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the
dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs.


Actually, I have a problem with these definitions. For most of the
research
I've seen, gifted means either the top 10% for IQ or (more frequently)
IQ130,
which is the top 5%. THe definition of 'bright' is rather too broad here,
and
I wonder how the stats would look if the authors had used a
better-accepted
definition.

Secondly, giftedness is strongly heritable, with a gifted child's
siblings,
parents and grandparents usually of a similar intelligence (within 5-10
points
-- see http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/we_have_learned.htm). I don't know if
*IQ* is as strongly heritable in the entire population, but if it is,
there is
a good chance of these 710 pairs being aberrant.

That might be a difficult one to show as I suspect that generally if one
child is breastfed there's a good chance that siblings are breastfed to a
greater or lesser extent. You've also got the argument of nurture as well,
as if a parent did well at school, they probably have more resources to call
on to help their children/want to help their children.
I think there was some research done to show that ability maths is a
recessive gene, which means that my children don't have any chance of not
being mathematical without mutation, but my dad's mathematical ability came
out of nowhere.

My 2c.

Lastly, of course, we haven't seen any definition of 'success' yet.

Here's my 'success' story: A good friend of mine discovered that one of
his
workmates had known me at high school. She naturally enquired as to what
I
was doing these days, and when he said I was a librarian, looked rather
surprised. "I thought she was smarter than that!"

So there you are -- librarianship is intrinsically Unsuccessful!

So you're the library Dragon are you? :-)
Debbie


  #37  
Old November 13th 07, 01:57 PM posted to misc.kids
enigma
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 447
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

"Welches" wrote in
:

That might be a difficult one to show as I suspect that
generally if one child is breastfed there's a good chance
that siblings are breastfed to a greater or lesser extent.


that's not a good assumption to make. my older brother was
breastfed until 5 months or so, when he bit mom. neither i nor
my younger brother ever got a chance to breastfeed after
that...

You've also got the argument of nurture as well, as if a
parent did well at school, they probably have more
resources to call on to help their children/want to help
their children. I think there was some research done to
show that ability maths is a recessive gene, which means
that my children don't have any chance of not being
mathematical without mutation, but my dad's mathematical
ability came out of nowhere.


now that's interesting. i had some difficulties with math, but
mostly with how it was being taught, not the actual math (once
explained *properly*, the light dawned & i was good at it). my
father's father, father & brothers are very good at math. my
SO is good at math. did i just miss the recessive math gene?
am i a 'carrier', so my son will get the gene (since his dad
has the math gene)? hmmm.

Lastly, of course, we haven't seen any definition of
'success' yet.


heh. i have an IQ of 137. i'm a farmer.
i dated a guy at MIT who was pretty close to my IQ. he had a
dual major in math & philosophy. my dad asked him at dinner
once what he planned to do with that dual major. BFs reply was
a thoughtful "Well, there's really only two things i *could*
do with a dual in math & philosophy. I can either teach, or
become a farmer..."
i wonder which he did...
lee
  #38  
Old November 13th 07, 02:22 PM posted to misc.kids
Ericka Kammerer
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Posts: 2,293
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

Beliavsky wrote:

http://www.eugenics.net/papers/murray.html
IQ Will Put You In Your Place
By Charles Murray

From the Sunday Times, UK, May 25 1997.


An arcane debate about statistical methods ensued.


Ummm, that was not an "arcane" debate. That was
Methodology 101.

Then several
American academics began using a powerful, simple way of testing who
was right: instead of comparing individual children from different
households, they compared sibling pairs with different IQs. How would
brothers and sisters who were nurtured by the same parents, grew up in
the same household and lived in the same neighbourhood, but had
markedly different IQs, get on in life?


This throws up red flags right away. Siblings tend
to have similar IQs. When there are marked IQ differences
among siblings, right away it raises the issue of whether
there was something else going on along with the IQ differences.

A very large database in the United States contains information about
several thousand sibling pairs who have been followed since 1979. To
make the analysis as unambiguous as possible, I have limited my sample
to brothers and sisters whose parents are in the top 75 per cent of
American earners, with a family income in 1978 averaging £40,000 (in
today's money).


? First of all, this commits a major methodological
flaw of assuming your conclusion in drawing your sample. Bad,
bad researcher!

Families living in poverty, or even close to it, have been excluded.
The parents in my sample also stayed together for at least the first
seven years of the younger sibling's life.


Again, skewing the sample based on assuming the
anticipated results hold true. You're supposed to *test*
these things, not build them into your research design..

Each pair consists of one sibling with an IQ in the normal range of
90-110 ,a range that includes 50% of the population. I will call this
group the normals. The second sibling in each pair had an IQ either
higher than 110, putting him in the top quartile of intelligence (the
bright) or lower than 90, putting him in the bottom quartile (the
dull). These constraints produced a sample of 710 pairs.


It would be very interesting to see the profile of
the groups, at this point. I suspect we'd see some interesting
anomalies.

How much difference did IQ make? Earned income is a good place to
begin. In 1993, when we took our most recent look at them, members of
the sample were aged 28-36. That year, the bright siblings earned
almost double the average of the dull: £22,400 compared to £11,800.
The normals were in the middle, averaging £16,800.


And did they take birth order into effect? Quite a
few studies now seem to show sizeable birth order effects
on earnings, type of occupation, and risk tolerance (along
with small IQ differences). Clearly a confound, and one
that might explain a decent chunk of the results independently
of IQ.
Put together birth order issues and the odds that
a child with normal or above IQ parents and siblings would
have low IQ without any other disability that might also
affect earnings or success, and you've got some holes you
could drive a truck through.

Best wishes,
Ericka
  #39  
Old November 13th 07, 03:01 PM posted to misc.kids
Beliavsky
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 453
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

On Nov 13, 7:57 am, enigma wrote:

heh. i have an IQ of 137. i'm a farmer.
i dated a guy at MIT who was pretty close to my IQ. he had a
dual major in math & philosophy. my dad asked him at dinner
once what he planned to do with that dual major. BFs reply was
a thoughtful "Well, there's really only two things i *could*
do with a dual in math & philosophy. I can either teach, or
become a farmer..."


Today there are more options. Many math majors from MIT have the
aptitudes to make a lot of money on Wall Street as quants or (even
better) traders. I got a PhD in physics and took the former route.
Math skills are more valued on Wall Street than they were say 30 years
ago.
Some mathematicians have done very well managing money themselves, for
example James Simons:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/5GZ7.html
Age: 68
Fortune: self made
Source: Hedge funds
Net Worth: 2.6
Country Of Citizenship: United States
Residence: East Setauket, New York, United States, North America
Industry: Investments
Marital Status: married, 3 children
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bachelor of Arts / Science
University of California Berkeley, Doctorate
Degree from MIT; taught at Harvard. Worked as code breaker for
Department of Defense during Vietnam. Founded Renaissance Technologies
hedge fund firm 1982. Flagship Medallion fund averaging 34% annual
returns since 1988. Most expensive fees in the business: 44% of
profits, 5% of assets. Hires Ph.D.s instead of M.B.A.s; employees use
computer modeling to find market inefficiencies. Launching fund for
institutional investors that could handle $100 billion. Chairs Math
for America; group donated $25 million last year to train 180 New York
City math teachers.

Consulting companies are also looking for generally smart people.

A significant fraction of people from elite universities that I know
of are teaching at test preparation companies such as Kaplan. I think
such companies require high test scores from applicants.

  #40  
Old November 13th 07, 07:27 PM posted to misc.kids
Beliavsky
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 453
Default IQ and what it means in adulthood

On Nov 10, 7:02 pm, Sarah Vaughan wrote:

Anyway, it would probably help if I gave the context here - the debate
was about the studies showing a correlation between breastfeeding and
increased IQ, and - if that association is real and not due to a
confounder - what it means in practice. I must say I was never terribly
impressed by the kind of numbers I was hearing - in the studies being
discussed, the average difference was seven IQ points, which just didn't
really sound like that much in practice to me. But the question came
up, and it got me wondering whether I was right about that or not.


A recent article in the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1001271_3.html
said

"A recent study by Scottish researchers asked whether the higher IQs
seen in breast-fed children are the result of the breast milk they got
or some other factor. By comparing the IQs of sibling pairs in which
one was breast-fed and the other not, it found that breast milk is
irrelevant to IQ and that the mother's IQ explains both the decision
to breast-feed and her children's IQ."

I don't what study is being referred to. A finding that breast milk is
irrelevant to IQ certainly contradicts conventional wisdom.

 




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