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I don't find it too surprising that people who are smarter make more money.
by anonymoushn 2y ago
I don't find it too surprising that people who are smarter make more money.
- tyre 2y agoIt’s household income of the household they grew up in. Take 10k wealthy kids and swap them with 10k poor kids and you’ll see a massive difference compared to another 20k control
- frutiger 2y agoDid someone actually do this experiment? Maybe there’s some data from the London Blitz?
- 0_____0 2y agoShould be something in the form of natural experiments from adoptions, twin studies, etc.
- Auracle 2y agoThere absolutely have been twin studies that showed IQ (and therefore income) is largely heritable.
- felurx 2y agoWith all else being equal, I'm willing to believe that more intelligence would lead to greater income. But if you're claiming that IQ is the sole/main predictor for income that'd be a hard [citation needed] in my opinion.
- cycomanic 2y agoIn fact I recall a study (I saw on HN I believe) that showed that IQ is only correlated up to a certain value (not very high, I.e. Lower upper middle class IIRC) but then becomes quite uncorrelated. This certainly matches my anecdotal evidence that most of the rich kids during school were not very smart. The smart ones were typically the kids from academic middle class households.
- cycomanic 2y agoHere is a different study (I am certain I read a different one) with similar results https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/442975-do-you-make-much-more-money-than-others-because-you-re-smarter https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/442975-do-you-make-much-...
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoIndeed, twin studies form the strongest leg of Bryan Caplan's argument in support of the signalling hypothesis in his book The Case Against Education, which I highly recommend anyone trying to refute it read and try to debunk. If you want an itemized list of citations this is where I'd start.
- tremon 2y agoThe very title of the book makes it sound like a propaganda piece, it self-selects for readers who already want to believe it. I'll take a pass.
- falcor84 2y agoI for one like books which are willing to explicitly make a controversial point; it makes for much more interesting reading, even if I remain in disagreement throughout.
- konschubert 2y agoI would prefer books to make correct points, such as “education is really important, but some education is not really useful except for signalling”
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoHey, it's a free country. :) When I imagine other hypothetical books titled things like The Case Against Capitalism, The Case Against Monogamy, or The Case Against Atheism, though, I note that I don't get an "insider propaganda" vibe from any of them, even though I would probably strongly dislike what they have to say.
- konschubert 2y agoThe thing is that education is important. Some of it is signalling, but not all of it is useless. There was a time when most people couldn’t read or do basic algebra and you don’t want to go back to this. Even a dumb kid can understand compound interest and absolutely has to in order to thrive in our society.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- konschubert 2y agoChildren’s intelligence is strongly correlated with parental intelligence, probably due to both nature and nurture.
- sebastialonso 2y agoPlease supply sources for this outrageous claim.
- konschubert 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
- tptacek 2y agoProbably more accurate to say "genetics, shared environment, and non-shared environment". Modern evidence heavily weights (favors? leans towards?) the environments.
- owlstuffing 2y ago> I don't find it too surprising that people who are smarter make more money. Yeah, being smart definitely helps with making money, but honestly, that bar’s not as high as people think. There’s a bunch of other stuff that matters too, like being likable and humble. But if we're being real, you’ll probably get richer with cunning and greed. And history is pretty clear, the more opportunistic ones tend to stack higher piles. Money is cruel, man.
- ajkjk 2y agoish, yeah, but when you go work at a job it seems like half the people there are because they're smart and half are they're because they're upper-class/wealthy background, and some are there because they worked really hard, and a few are there by accident. at a daily experience level it's very clearly more complicated than smart=money; it's just one weight out of many.
- globalnode 2y agothose with success like the idea of meritocracy because it means they deserve it, makes it easier to deal with the injustices of the world. very very rarely will someone at the top of their field say "i was lucky"
- makeitdouble 2y agoNone of the parent comment is about being smarter, that's the core disconnect.