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The point is actually more subtle than that though. What they're saying is that holding social class constant, genetic difference is more important for the weal

The point is actually more subtle than that though. What they're saying is that holding social class constant, genetic difference is more important for the wealthy than the poor. For example, kid A and kid B are both wealthy and have significant genetic differences related to factors affecting intelligence. In this case kid A and kid B are likely to have significantly different intelligence from each other. Conversely, kids C and D are both poor and have similar genetic differences to A and B. They will show much less difference in intelligence from each other. That fact is certainly not obvious, but it is fascinating.

kenjackson 14y ago
Right. The implication, in my mind at least, is that fighting poverty should be one of the key goals of society. Being in poverty effectively hides gifts as poverty will dominate "natural" ability.
- scott_s 14y ago
  Perhaps related, "Preschool: The Best Job-Training Program": http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/12/139583385/preschool-the-best-job-training-program http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/12/139583385/preschoo...
- jessriedel 14y ago
  Reply to scott_s: In that article, note that the study addressed the effect of pre-school on strongly disadvantaged children: "Only disadvantaged children living in adverse circumstances who had low IQ scores and a low index of family socioeconomic status were eligible to participate in the Perry program."
  - scott_s 14y ago
    Right, it's not an experiment for the conditions under discussion. It is, however, an experiment which demonstrates the importance of early childhood environment.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  How do you define "poverty"? Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves.
  - vectorpush 14y ago
    >Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves. What's your point? Ownership of an arbitrary appliance doesn't mean you're able to put food on the table or afford tuition for your children. You don't need to eat a TV every night to survive nor can you fill up your gas tank on microwaves. Besides, in the developed world, TVs and microwaves are a dime a dozen and are regularly discarded because their abundance makes them worth so little. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/zip?query=tv+&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk= http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/zip?query=tv+&srchTyp...
    - randomdata 14y ago
      He asked a good question. To what level does the bar need to rise to eliminate poverty as something that holds someone back? Is easy access to food and education that level? My gut feeling that wealth disparity is a bigger issue than absolute wealth. If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential.
      - vectorpush 14y ago
        >If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential. It's not about absolute material equity, it's about comfortably meeting one's needs such that second order concerns (like studying or tinkering with a mobile SDK) become viable pursuits. Living in a mansion means you can likely afford food, rent, transportation, insurance, healthcare, tuition, and all the other expenses that leave the poor with little room for "achieving true potential".
- Symmetry 14y ago
  Or at least we should be pushing micro-nutrient supplements. And encouraging school lunch programs.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    Not that that isn't a great thing to do, but how does that help anyone overcome the limits on opportunity that poverty places on them?
    - pjscott 14y ago
      Malnutrition can be one such limit of opportunity, if it harms development in childhood. It's also one of the easiest things to fix; giving children nutritional supplements and subsidized school lunches is pretty cheap and straightforward, compared to just about any other method of ameliorating poverty.
      - nollidge 14y ago
        Ah, OK, I see what you're saying.
  - CWuestefeld 14y ago
    That's a pretty huge assumption, that micro-nutrients are a significant part of any difference. You've assumed, first, that it's poverty that causes the lowered IQ, rather than that both poverty and lower-IQ are both effects of a common cause. Second, even if there really is a causal chain, why in the world would you assume that the difference is related to nutrition? Why not, for example, cultural differences in the way that poor parents interact with children compared with the way that non-poor parents do?
    - Symmetry 14y ago
      If poverty doesn't cause lowered IQ how would explain children adopted into non-improrished households having higher IQs? I don't have good evidence that nutrition is the primary factor here, but there is a lot of research saying that nutrition is important with respect to IQ.
Symmetry 14y ago
The mental model I'm using here is that IQ is the result of something like (Genetic g) * diminishing_returns(nutrition). And that nutrition is something like K1*(social_factor) + K2 + noise(). So noise is going to result in smaller deviations when the social_factor is higher. Before reading that website I would have expected that variations in the first term for nutrition would be small compared to the second term, so I wouldn't have necessarily expected this to show up between affluent and poor kids in the US. But between affluent kids in the US and kids from sub-Saharan Africa I certainly would have. EDIT: In fact, I would have guessed the working-class/middle-class IQ differences were an order of magnitude lower.
brittohalloran 14y ago
I think it implies that if you're wealthy, you are able to fully meet your intellectual potential, thus the greater spread for wealthy children.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  And conversely, if you are poor, you are hard pressed to gather the resources needed to improve your cognitive faculties, and may appear indistinguishable from someone who doesn't even want to gather intellectually enriching resources.
jfoutz 14y ago
Feel free to ignore me, i've got nothing to hold up as any kind of authority on the subject, but i'm curious if my thinking is irrational. I'd thought genetics only mattered for the elite. I'd always used the olympics as an example of this. Take a few hundred people with the best drive, nutrition, and training from all over the world. What's left to set them apart? genetics. If you're not elite, who cares? you can just eat better, work harder, train smarter, whatever. To put it another way, how often is genetics the limiting factor? If you've really done all you can do to improve, then you can blame stuff you can't actually do anything about, like genetics.

kenjackson 14y ago

Right. The implication, in my mind at least, is that fighting poverty should be one of the key goals of society. Being in poverty effectively hides gifts as poverty will dominate "natural" ability.

scott_s 14y ago
Perhaps related, "Preschool: The Best Job-Training Program": http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/12/139583385/preschool-the-best-job-training-program http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/12/139583385/preschoo...
jessriedel 14y ago
Reply to scott_s: In that article, note that the study addressed the effect of pre-school on strongly disadvantaged children: "Only disadvantaged children living in adverse circumstances who had low IQ scores and a low index of family socioeconomic status were eligible to participate in the Perry program."
- scott_s 14y ago
  Right, it's not an experiment for the conditions under discussion. It is, however, an experiment which demonstrates the importance of early childhood environment.
stephengillie 14y ago
How do you define "poverty"? Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves.
- vectorpush 14y ago
  >Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves. What's your point? Ownership of an arbitrary appliance doesn't mean you're able to put food on the table or afford tuition for your children. You don't need to eat a TV every night to survive nor can you fill up your gas tank on microwaves. Besides, in the developed world, TVs and microwaves are a dime a dozen and are regularly discarded because their abundance makes them worth so little. http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/zip?query=tv+&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk= http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/zip?query=tv+&srchTyp...
  - randomdata 14y ago
    He asked a good question. To what level does the bar need to rise to eliminate poverty as something that holds someone back? Is easy access to food and education that level? My gut feeling that wealth disparity is a bigger issue than absolute wealth. If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential.
    - vectorpush 14y ago
      >If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential. It's not about absolute material equity, it's about comfortably meeting one's needs such that second order concerns (like studying or tinkering with a mobile SDK) become viable pursuits. Living in a mansion means you can likely afford food, rent, transportation, insurance, healthcare, tuition, and all the other expenses that leave the poor with little room for "achieving true potential".
Symmetry 14y ago
Or at least we should be pushing micro-nutrient supplements. And encouraging school lunch programs.
- nollidge 14y ago
  Not that that isn't a great thing to do, but how does that help anyone overcome the limits on opportunity that poverty places on them?
  - pjscott 14y ago
    Malnutrition can be one such limit of opportunity, if it harms development in childhood. It's also one of the easiest things to fix; giving children nutritional supplements and subsidized school lunches is pretty cheap and straightforward, compared to just about any other method of ameliorating poverty.
    - nollidge 14y ago
      Ah, OK, I see what you're saying.
- CWuestefeld 14y ago
  That's a pretty huge assumption, that micro-nutrients are a significant part of any difference. You've assumed, first, that it's poverty that causes the lowered IQ, rather than that both poverty and lower-IQ are both effects of a common cause. Second, even if there really is a causal chain, why in the world would you assume that the difference is related to nutrition? Why not, for example, cultural differences in the way that poor parents interact with children compared with the way that non-poor parents do?
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    If poverty doesn't cause lowered IQ how would explain children adopted into non-improrished households having higher IQs? I don't have good evidence that nutrition is the primary factor here, but there is a lot of research saying that nutrition is important with respect to IQ.

Symmetry 14y ago

The mental model I'm using here is that IQ is the result of something like (Genetic g) * diminishing_returns(nutrition). And that nutrition is something like K1*(social_factor) + K2 + noise(). So noise is going to result in smaller deviations when the social_factor is higher. Before reading that website I would have expected that variations in the first term for nutrition would be small compared to the second term, so I wouldn't have necessarily expected this to show up between affluent and poor kids in the US. But between affluent kids in the US and kids from sub-Saharan Africa I certainly would have. EDIT: In fact, I would have guessed the working-class/middle-class IQ differences were an order of magnitude lower.

brittohalloran 14y ago

I think it implies that if you're wealthy, you are able to fully meet your intellectual potential, thus the greater spread for wealthy children.

sageikosa 14y ago
And conversely, if you are poor, you are hard pressed to gather the resources needed to improve your cognitive faculties, and may appear indistinguishable from someone who doesn't even want to gather intellectually enriching resources.

jfoutz 14y ago

Feel free to ignore me, i've got nothing to hold up as any kind of authority on the subject, but i'm curious if my thinking is irrational. I'd thought genetics only mattered for the elite. I'd always used the olympics as an example of this. Take a few hundred people with the best drive, nutrition, and training from all over the world. What's left to set them apart? genetics. If you're not elite, who cares? you can just eat better, work harder, train smarter, whatever. To put it another way, how often is genetics the limiting factor? If you've really done all you can do to improve, then you can blame stuff you can't actually do anything about, like genetics.