A longitudinal study on 7,403 persons run from 1979 until 2004 has failed to correlate intelligence to wealth, although it confirmed a correlation to income found in a variety of other studies (e.g. Brown and Reynolds, “A Model of IQ, Occupation and Earnings,” The American Economic Review, Vol. 65, No. 5, Dec., 1975, pp. 1002-1007, and many others).
The sample population for this study came from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth managed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the US Department of Labor. The measure of wealth had to do with a variety of personal financial indicators such total wealth, income, and hardships such as credit card debt. The measure of intelligence was the Armed Forces Qualification Test.
All three of these parameters have come under considerable scrutiny, in particular after the release of the very contentious Libertarian book, Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which at best served as a warning as to how poor statistics could be used in a non-peer-reviewed forum to mislead a large audience because their logic can be reduced nicely into a media-sized logical-sounding soundbite. (Other examples of this sort include The Population Bomb by Paul Erlich, as well as books like The Silent Spring or, in all likelihood, An Inconvenient Truth; all examples of well-meaning authors reporting second-hand poor science to make an otherwise important point. Too bad the poor science has often misled humanity into solutions that end up causing more human suffering than the problem at hand.)
But all those caveats aside, I do not find this latest result at all surprising, although by its small sample size it does not cover the extremely wealthy nor extremely intelligent. Of the very wealthy self-made people I find above average intelligence, but if I were to sweep in a lot of n-th generation wealth, this would drop toward the mean. Contrary to Murray (Bell Curve) I tend to see wealth as far more heritable a property than intelligence. Conversely I see many highly intelligent persons who do not focus on wealth, seeing instead other areas that merit their considerable attentions from which their intellects receive generous non-financial rewards. Those who do focus on wealth seem to do reasonably well, but this is always adjusted against fortune and opportunity which are unpredictable. Much like the tricky statistical observation that you have to look at the probabilities that people do not share a birthday when measuring the likelihood that two people in a group do share a birthday, proper statistics must measure what leaks out of the closed population.
You just cannot discount luck away from any hoard of vast wealth. Remember I am talking about the extremes here.
This reminds of me of any number of examples of “hanging out” with the super-intelligent crowd and having to conceal wealth so as not to create a knee-jerk negative social reaction, or likewise with the super-wealthy and the need to conceal intelligence. Weird how those barriers can arise.
Oops, sorry, was that arrogant? ;-)
In the more normative case there is good reason to pursue education and knowledge; these are not the same as intelligence and have a strong correlation to improved success when compared to the alternatives. But beware of linearly extrapolating to the very ends of the bell curve.
The other night at a cancer fund raiser there was spirited discussion about recent results linking vaginal and oral sex partners to increased incidences of esophogal cancers, lending credence to the HPV infection route for such cancers. I continue to find it amazing how much the media, in its benign desire to simplify messages for their audience, ends up distorting the public view of statistical results. Even the press coverage on the HPV vaccination contraversies is full of statistical misunderstandings.
Could these memes be part of a new evolutionary IQ test that will push us to the next stage of evolution?
Or more importantly, how this will affect the oral sex availability in the provider market?
;-)
3 comments:
You might be interested in Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, if you don't already know about it. It's a beautiful book on the ways in which graphs can either obfuscate or elucidate. He finds bar graphs particularly offensive.
- Sophia
Many very intelligent people choose professions which make little money. Perhaps higher IQ correlates with less attachment to material goods in favor of that which is truly valuable (insert smile).
Ask almost anyone what multi-variate analysis is or how to draw a best line through data and you'll get a blank. That's understandable. The people who work with these numbers do a hideous job of making their work understandable by phrasing things in terms of p-values and other learned jargon instead of simple words. They write for each other and, as with most academic work, making things sound complicated makes your work sound more meaningful (and you sound more intelligent). I doubt most science journalists have more than a very basic understanding of statistics but, even so, most papers are written to hide their flaws (duh) so parsing out the problems often requires a lot of work. And then humans are, it seems, extremely limited in their ability to understand relative risk.
Tufte's work was a landmark at the time; a coffee table quality book on the visual presentation of information. The map of Napoleon's campaign will never leave my mind.
On the other hand, it also includes many examples of garbage in-garbage out (as you say), which underscores my point: most of those we trust to present mislead those who choose not to learn enough to understand what is presented.
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