[bittired]

Damn lies and statistics, though. Being poor does not cause lower IQ, nor does lower IQ cause you to be poor. However, you'll find a lot of lower IQ people at poverty level. You can't guarantee that any college candidate that is poor is not going to excel, so poverty, sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, should have absolutely nothing to do with acceptance into any organization, assuming that everything else is equal, which it isn't. Unfortunately clothing, shared experience and knowledge, language, etc. significantly influence testing and decisions.

[Symmetry]

No, there's actually a good amount of evidence that poverty does in fact cause low IQs. For instance the divergence between the IQs of East Germans and West Germans during the partition, and the way they converged again after the Cold War.

It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the children of poor people.

EDIT: Here's a rather in depth article on the topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-... There's tons of evidence that at a population level wealth is the main driver of IQ differences, though genetics does play a large role at the individual level.

[qznc]

Be careful about causality and correlation. Poverty probably does not "cause" low-IQ, but poverty is a good indicator for low-IQ due to correlation.

[Symmetry]

Correlation between A and B does not imply causation from A to B, but it does imply causation there is some causation somewhere, from A to B or B to A or something more complicated. In those cases we have to step down a level and look at the particular mechanisms.

We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that?

Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities?

There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.

[qznc]

Personally, I believe (!) in a causal chain like this: Poor people dream smaller (hopelessness,knowledge) -> less ambition (in school, career, wealth) -> less motivation (e.g. in IQ tests) -> envy -> aggression against wealthy people

Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or something like that. Then we will never eliminate poverty, anyways.

To "solve" poverty I believe the big question is how to inspire people that it is possible to improve their situation? How to provide hope to poor people? In Germany I think it is intellectually realistic that anybody can improve, but people do not believe it. Essentially, (in the wealthy western world) poverty is not a technical problem, but rather an emotional one.

I do not care about IQ much. I do not know my own IQ. Since I am currently pursuing a PhD I am probably above average, but who really cares? Studies show that IQ predicts academic success, so it means something for high-education jobs. For creative tasks it's useless. Effectively, the IQ of a child only provides a hint about future career choices, but not about success or wealth.

[Symmetry]

First, it is indeed true that modern Germany has a fairly generous social welfare system and you could certainly argue that nobody in Germany is really poor today. But as you might know, during the Cold War Germany was partitioned into two separate countries, and while welfare programs were present back then did exist they didn't actually transfer money between the two countries. And since West Germany was much richer than East Germany, this meant that everyone in East Germany was relatively poor. Back when West Germany was much wealthier than East Germany the inhabitants had higher IQs than East Germans, but nowadays this is no longer true. Hence, evidence that wealth causes IQ differences.

Now, it might be that communism was crushing the hope of East Germans or something. That could also explain this particular difference. But we can measure social mobility and people's beliefs in social mobility across countries and see if it makes a difference. And as far as I can tell it doesn't, since social mobility and believe in social mobility are lower in most places today than they were in 1960, but the Flynn effect[1] continues to march on.

Having beliefs is nice and complex beliefs like those put us humans way above the vast majority of the lifeforms on this planet. But as someone pursing a PhD I would hope that you would examine the implications of your beliefs and test those implications against reality.

And IQ does have predictive power with respect to income[2], though not as strongly as other factors.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income

[rayiner]

So the kids in the study were selected because their parents were poor, and the average IQ of the kids in the study was around 80. That certainly signals a correlation, and since these are kids and don't have agency over their economic situation, it suggests a direction of causation too.

[dllthomas]

Surely, they should have picked themselves up by their bootstraps by age 3.

[bittired]

Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity (e.g. see my other argument about taking the money away and giving it to someone else).

In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.

[dragonwriter]

> Logically money should have no direct affect on intellectual capacity

If intellectual capacity was purely genetic, this would make some sense. You can't buy better genes for yourself or your children. [1] However, intellectual capacity is demonstrably affected by a variety of environmental factors, including early nutrition, that themselves are strongly influenced by wealth, so we've got pretty good ideas of some of the mechanisms by which wealth influences intellectual capacity.

> In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.

I think you are confusing "rationality" with fit to your preferred, non-evidence-based, model of the way the world should work.

[1] Well, except that wealth affects mate selection opportunities, so, even with purely genetic intellectual capacity, wealth could plausibly have some influence.

[JshWright]

How could it not have an impact on intellectual capacity?

Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. This things are all much easier to access when you have more money.

[bittired]

> Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development.

But not so important that they would have a 40 point IQ difference. If it is, show me the studies confirming that.

[btilly]

Where do you pull "40 point IQ difference" from? The gap between these impoverished kids and normal is only 20 points. And that is easily explainable with nutrition, stimulation, and education.

To start look at http://www.thewayforwardproject.org/file_uploads/Gen10%20IQ%... for a meta analysis of thousands of studies finding that the IQ difference between growing up in an orphanage and foster care averaging 20 points.

Independently, the estimated difference between average IQ in the mid-30s and today is 20 points. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect for verification. In that time period the main things that have changed are nutrition, stimulation and education.

So there you have it. Two unrelated analyses of completely different things finding that nutrition, stimulation and education can explain 20 point IQ differences between otherwise similar populations.

[Steko]

Did you just pull "40 points" out of thin air because there are plenty of studies showing economic causes for smaller differences?

[nullc]

If your nutrition is poor enough you will be dead. It is well established that dead people necessarily have low IQs. Q.E.D.

[rayiner]

It depends on how you ascribe causation to hereditary factors. Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ? I don't think so, because a 4 year old has no agency over his economic circumstances.

[btilly]

Does it make sense to say that a 4 year old is poor because of his low IQ?

No.

But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.

[bittired]

I actually don't believe at a micro-level that causation comes into play at all. I was responding to the statement that at a macro-level there is probability of causation, and it is more rational that poverty is caused by stupidity than poverty causes stupidity. The latter is nonsense.

[vacri]

Part of the IQ test includes vocabulary, and it's not that much of a leap to say that more highly-educated people have a broader, deeper vocabulary, even when controlled for cultural effects. A smaller vocabulary will give you a lower IQ. There are likely to be other factors affected by exposure to wider experiences than you might not get when impoverished; for example, in general, the more you handle numbers, the better you get at manipulating them.

[newnewnew]

Highly educated people might also have higher innate intelligence, which allows them to pick up words easier and develop larger vocabularies. Let's not forget that IQ has been shown to be significantly heritable by adoption studies.

[arkades]

Attending college increases pre-college IQ scores a mean of just under 20 points (I don't recall the precise number from the study now, I remember it was between 15 and 20). That's not "smarter people get into college" - that's before-and-after on the same subjects.

Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.

[rlanday]

I would like to see that study if you can find it. IQ is generally believed to become more genetic (that is, environmental effects start to wear off) as people get older.

[arkades]

Sorry, I hit up Google Scholar trying to find it but had no luck. It's not my field of expertise, so I don't know the proper jargon to throw in to get the right search results.

[6d0debc071]

> Being poor does not cause lower IQ

Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty.

What basis do you have for your claim?

[bittired]

Here is the logic:

1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world.

2. Take all of their money away.

3. Give it to the other 50%.

Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ?

DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!

[jre]

I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household.

Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.

[bittired]

You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ).

IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind.

Intelligence is building upon that.

Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.

[jiggy2011]

"An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

[mpyne]

> A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.

I like to consider myself one of those people.

But I have to say, I can't imagine how my IQ would have stayed the same as I got older if I had not at least been able to eat regularly, drink clean water, make medical check-ups, etc.

I get what you have been implying, which is that a person's theoretical intellectual capability is not necessarily tied to their current intellectual capability. But the brain is an adaptive organ, not a monolith that comes out of the womb fully-formed.

It's at least possible (and likely, IMO) that there are various 'gates' in the development of the brain where if pre-requisites for development are not met, that the opportunity for that natural development gets closed off as the brain moves onto further forms of modification and maintenance of its neural net.

At some point the brain has to switch over from adolescent development to adult 'maintenance programming'. If you are resource-constrained during that adolescent phase it may be difficult to catch back up, even in a resource surplus as an adult. This would show as a lower IQ (even on an ideal IQ test), even though a higher IQ could have been achieved with proper 'care & feeding' as a child.

[antoko]

You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error.

"Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.

[bittired]

IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor.

Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. If we were able to teach good parenting skills, social skills, and ethics adequately in schools, and help them develop sense of community, then many of the problems (unrelated to genetics) related to intelligence being lower would go away. I hope if anyone takes home anything from what I'm saying, it is that you can't throw money at a problem like this. Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap.

However, back to the study. Genetic problems with IQ cannot be solved by money, period. Also, being poor does not make you have lower potential for intelligence. That has been my point all over this thread.

[Daishiman]

> Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap.

Except that welfare actually works, and despite the fact that poor people are in general poor money managers, a marginal income that improves some environmental variables goes a lon way towards improving intelligence. Especially when it translates to greater food availability.

[yummyfajitas]

Especially when it translates to greater food availability.

The poor in the US do not suffer from a lack of food availability.

5.1% of poor children don't get enough to eat. For comparison, 5.7% of children above 4 x poverty line don't get enough to eat.

http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html

Food availability is a solved problem in the United States. Portraying it as a problem takes resources away from real problems which need to be solved.

[gyepi]

> Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty.

I appreciate that you are trying really hard to make an argument, but you literally have no idea what you are talking about.

[bittired]

I appreciate that you are trying to refute my argument, but just saying that someone does not know what they are talking about has got to be one of the least intelligent ways of doing so. Explain to me exactly how I am wrong. I see no other comments by you in this thread, so I have no idea what you are thinking. I'm not a mind reader.

[Dylan16807]

IQ is not abstract 'perfect world' capacity. It's a reflection of how well developed your brain actually is (to the limits of what areas it can measure). Without nutrition, the brain doesn't build actual neural capacity, and the IQ is lower than well-fed peers.

[AlexandrB]

IQ is not an objective measure of innate intelligence, hence it creeps up over time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Since this effect is so rapid (~100 years), it is unlikely be due to genetic changes. It's pretty clear that developmental and social factors are playing into IQ test results. Both of these are negatively affected by being born into a low income family (less access to food, learning materials, mentors, other IQ individuals, etc.).

[thaumaturgy]

After a generation or two? Yes.

Consider the elements of an IQ test: vocabulary, pattern recognition, mathematics, abstract logic. What kind of environment would you think is more likely to teach children the things they need to do well on an IQ test?

[chrischen]

I'm pretty sure they don't test vocab or math in an IQ test. I think you're thinking of the modern day SATs, which can be affected by poverty.

[thaumaturgy]

Nope. By "math" I was referring to number sequences (which number comes next...), as opposed to geometric patterns (which shape comes next...); by "vocab" I was referring to analogical questions (a is to b as c is to __).

If SATs are readily accepted to be affected by poverty, I fail to understand why IQ tests wouldn't be also.

[chrischen]

Because IQ tests are administered across races, cultures, languages, education levels, and even age, and are normalized across these factors.

Obviously for vocab, a Chinese person would fail if they don't understand English, so they'd translate it. For a poor American, the vocab skills required on an IQ test are pretty basic.

Also, the modern SAT tests are stated by CollegeBoard[1] to NOT correlate to IQ anymore. They correlate to education.

You're conflating a test for knowledge vs a test for cognitive ability.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/view...

[Dylan16807]

Is the concept of 'causes' so hard? Severe lack of money, over a period of years, causes bad nutrition which causes development to be impaired.

This causation takes time.

The amount of money at a specific moment is meaningless because it's 0% of the experimental window. Look at the average and compare it to food and necessity prices.

[6d0debc071]

In other words, do I think the removal of something posited to be developmentally advantageous would lower IQ after the developmental period had passed?

[bittired]

No, I was saying that money in pocket != intelligence.

[6d0debc071]

'Does not equal' is a very strongly bound form of 'cause.' I don't think you can meaningfully make that definition apply to the topic.

[rooshdi]

But money may = opportunity.

[rooshdi]

"This is a population who is in need of early identification and support services. Consistent with previous research, our data suggest that children who grow up in low income households and who have experienced neglect are at risk for difficulties with cognitive and academic achievement. The importance of these findings cannot be overstated given that appropriate early assessments and interventions may help change developmental trajectories and long-term outcomes."

http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/...

[joesb]

Step 1 is more like:

"Given all of the kids who would grow up to be the smartest 50% of the people in the world."

The problem is we are not able to predict this first step.

[rtpg]

Pretty sure growing up in poverty can negatively influence access to mentally stimulating things. Not saying that the number on the bank account directly influences IQ, but tackling poverty would probably have ripples in the school system too.

[bittired]

This is going in a bad direction for sure now, but here is this thing:

Some people, regardless of race, have lower intellectual capacity. That is what IQ tests try to measure, but fail to do completely because a lot is still based on education and experience that is difficult to factor out of the tests.

A greater number of those people that have less intellectual capacity are not going to be as financially successful. Unless you just make them. And that "making" them is as temporary as the funds that keep going to them. That is NOT to say that we should not feed the poor and hungry. We should! And, we should try to educate them more, because they need more help. However, that is charity. People deserve love, food, and shelter. But, we are not able to "bring up" people to a level that cannot be sustained because they don't have the intellectual capacity. That is why welfare fails and is taken advantage of. Unless you have some sort of medicine or medical treatment that can make people with less intellectual capacity have greater intellectual capacity to even everyone out, then it should be considered charity to help the poor- not some sort of way to make everyone smarter.

[rtpg]

I get your point, I just don't think that "intellectual capacity" is really the limiting factor here. Education is a place where we really can make the pie bigger for everyone I think. And economics isn't zero-sum, we can at least try to make sure people can have 3 meals a day.

Also, I'm not completely convinced of the amount of importance of intellect by birth. But that's more of an opinion I hold, I have no evidence to back it up.

[Daishiman]

Except that intellectual capacity is evidently not the main factor in determining the poverty level of people; it's certainly among one of the variables, but the fact that poor people are better off in some systems and countries rather than others and social mobility also varies substantially, it means that there's a ton of things that can work as government policy to improve the situation.

[pbhjpbhj]

Can't agree more with your first sentence and it's very depressing.

Relatives purchased tickets for a show for me and my son to go to featuring fighting robots. He was extremely stimulated by it, not surprisingly, and I so want to capture that enthusiasm towards some engineering (make a robot).

Without the wealthier relatives that stimulation wouldn't have been there. Without wealthier parents he's not going to (in short term at least) have access to resources to develop towards the potential educational outcomes from that experience.

Taking a world view we must be in the top reaches of wealth too I'd imagine. Sad.

[monkeyspaw]

There are also issues with using IQ as a proxy for... anything. Especially when we're talking about topics with strong racial components.