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>Perhaps wealth comes from intelligence? That seems reasonable, does it not? Trivially disprovable by looking at children adopted into wealthy families. Spoile

>Perhaps wealth comes from intelligence? That seems reasonable, does it not? Trivially disprovable by looking at children adopted into wealthy families. Spoilers: they stay wealthy.

fastball 7y ago
I'm talking about wealth at a societal level. You seem to be talking about the fact that in many societies, inheritance and an ossified hierarchy exist. This is obviously true, but not really a trivial disproof of the above. The wealth of the family had to be generated from somewhere. Are you saying that the progenitor of this wealth was just as likely to be unintelligent as intelligent?
fvdessen 7y ago
> Spoilers: they stay wealthy. But not as much as their non-adopted siblings. Correlation of 0.23 vs 0.33 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-people-raise-kids-family-wealth/399809/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-pe...
- ajross 7y ago
  That's not a finding about race, though. It's saying IQ is highly heritable, which everyone accepts. The question is whether whole "races" (which are populations with vastly higher genetic diversity than a nuclear family!) actually correlate like that, not whether smart people tend to have smart kids.
brabel 7y ago
More intelligent people by definition are able to make better decisions - you wouldn't be considered intelligent if your decisions were more often than not poor. So, to say that "wealth comes from intelligence" is false implies that, whatever it is that allows one to get wealthy, making better decisions is not the decisive factor... which I may agree with in many cases, but not as a general rule... and when measuring the wealth of a whole country, the general rule would certainly tend to dominate. Geography and resources availability also play a big role, of course, but as we can see easily, many countries that are quite unlucky with regards to those things still manage to score very highly on the wealth rankings - and perhaps not coincidentally, have high average IQ.

>Perhaps wealth comes from intelligence? That seems reasonable, does it not? Trivially disprovable by looking at children adopted into wealthy families. Spoilers: they stay wealthy.

fastball 7y ago

I'm talking about wealth at a societal level. You seem to be talking about the fact that in many societies, inheritance and an ossified hierarchy exist. This is obviously true, but not really a trivial disproof of the above. The wealth of the family had to be generated from somewhere. Are you saying that the progenitor of this wealth was just as likely to be unintelligent as intelligent?

fvdessen 7y ago

> Spoilers: they stay wealthy. But not as much as their non-adopted siblings. Correlation of 0.23 vs 0.33 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-people-raise-kids-family-wealth/399809/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-pe...

ajross 7y ago
That's not a finding about race, though. It's saying IQ is highly heritable, which everyone accepts. The question is whether whole "races" (which are populations with vastly higher genetic diversity than a nuclear family!) actually correlate like that, not whether smart people tend to have smart kids.

brabel 7y ago

More intelligent people by definition are able to make better decisions - you wouldn't be considered intelligent if your decisions were more often than not poor. So, to say that "wealth comes from intelligence" is false implies that, whatever it is that allows one to get wealthy, making better decisions is not the decisive factor... which I may agree with in many cases, but not as a general rule... and when measuring the wealth of a whole country, the general rule would certainly tend to dominate. Geography and resources availability also play a big role, of course, but as we can see easily, many countries that are quite unlucky with regards to those things still manage to score very highly on the wealth rankings - and perhaps not coincidentally, have high average IQ.