[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.

[Daishiman]

If you take it merely as a question of caloric intake you're right. If you're talking about the cost of high-quality and nutrient-rich food, there's a long way to go. The massive subsidizing of junk food through corn subsidies does not help, but if you try getting those calories through vegetables and quality meat you may find it's out of reach for many people, and that does have an impact on intelligence and development, especially when those cheap calories lead to obesity, diabetes, and other complications.

[bittired]

Unless every fast food restaurant is outlawed and shutdown and all crap food is outlawed and removed from the shelves of every store in the U.S., you are not going to stop anyone (low income or not) from eating it.

In fact, the U.S. actually provides incentives for companies to use high fructose corn syrup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795478

And for those on WIC, while many crap items aren't on the WIC list, parents can still abuse it by buying things like only Cheerios for their kids to eat instead of veggies, etc. And yes, regardless of welfare, Obesity and diabetes are going to remain very common among the poor in the U.S.

[yummyfajitas]

...especially when those cheap calories lead to obesity, diabetes, and other complications.

If you are purchasing too many calories, you are wasting money that could be spent on veggies.

Poor parents raising their children badly is a real problem that should be solved if we want to improve the next generation. One possible solution is to constrain the food choices of the poor - replace food stamps with food boxes and fill the box with only healthy options.

[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.

[gyepi]

This conversation is now a day old. Given current levels of attention spans, I am not sure that a response at this time would be useful, but nonetheless, you are right and I do owe you one.

First, I should point out that I speak from experience: I have been one of those poor children and have known many of them. I have experienced not having enough to eat and attended poor schools. Fortunately for me, these experiences were relatively short lived. However, because of those experiences, I retain a keen interest in the state of poverty, poor people, and how they live. Now, on to your points.

> 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.

Obviously there are exceptions, but most poor schools do not have internet access for the students or computers for them. If they do have a library, it is generally inadequate and most are not encouraged to use it. The greater problem, however, is the issue of hunger; it is very hard to concentrate or develop one's self in a hungry state. Adults can, and do learn, to deal with the state of hunger but children do not. A hungry child is only interested in one thing and when the state of hunger persists, will adapt, however they must, to a life of hunger. That generally means they will make what we would consider poor choices.

> If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.)

Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are, but unfortunately sidesteps a whole set of other reasons (historical, social, political, geographic) than generally has a far greater impact on one's life than genes. I was born in Africa and was lucky enough to have parents who eventually ended up in the United States where I availed myself of the opportunities, etc. I am proud of my intellect and have achieved much because of it, but I would never claim that I succeeded merely because of it. I have met many smart people who were simply not as lucky as I have been to make that claim.

> 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.

Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child. Problem is, there are many poor children in other countries who do not face these same pressures and yet, still have the same outcomes.

Parenting helps a lot. Community helps a lot. But if the lack of them were the problem, we'd see far less poverty than we do.

I'm afraid I've gone on for too long and will have lost some readers, but I hope this better explains my earlier posting and why I claimed that you did not speak from a knowledgeable position.

[bittired]

> Obviously there are exceptions, but most poor schools do not have internet access for the students or computers for them. If they do have a library, it is generally inadequate and most are not encouraged to use it.

I appreciate your response, but I believe that your experience is based of your childhood in Africa. In our local county library we probably have 30-40 computers available for free internet access. This was not the case 10 years ago, so perhaps you should visit the public library in the area of the U.S. where you believe that there is a lack of internet access and I would be surprised if at least one computer is there with internet access that could be used. I would bet that there is, and I doubt people would be discouraged from using it.

> Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are...

You missed my point entirely, I'm afraid. I don't think that poverty is genetically linked to lack of success. Poverty is not genetic. What I was saying was that if you have a group of people that are less intelligent because they are genetically predisposed to being less intelligent, then that group has a greater likelihood of being less successful and therefore poorer.

> Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child.

Everything I've been arguing about is about the U.S. I am definitely not speaking about Africa or other parts of the world, and I'm sorry that you took it that way. I think that there are a lot of places in the world in worse condition than in the U.S. I am only making the arguments I make here because throwing money at poverty does not help. It must be applied with care and education and guidance are even more important, at least when people are willing to listen and be taught. Unfortunately, some cultures and peoples are not interested in changing.

[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...

[thaumaturgy]

    American Psychological Association, 2003
    http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx

"People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully."

"Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts: rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence."

"They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context."

"Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded."

    ScienceDaily, 2010
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm

"The researchers also claim that African IQ test scores cannot be interpreted in terms of lower intelligence levels, as these scores have different psychometric characteristics than western IQ test scores. Until now, the incomparability of Western and African IQ scores had never been systematically proven."

    University of North Carolina, current curriculum
    http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm

"In school settings, psychologists often joke that IQ is what IQ tests measure. There is a lot of truth to this adage. Ideally, IQ tests sample a wide range of experiences and they measure a person’s ability to apply learned information in new and different ways. They do not measure capacity or potential. They do provide information about cognitive skills at a given point in time.

Because IQ tests chiefly measure success in school, they are value-laden. Scores provide a statistical indication of the extent to which a person has critical schools and information, but they should not be directly equated with intelligence. Test scores are a useful index of ability, but they may reflect test-taking sophistication, personality, and attitudinal characteristics as well as learned and innate ability (Plomin, 1989)."

    Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence
    http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence

"But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are."

"In modern cultures, more emphasis is being placed on abstraction. Students learn algebra at an earlier age than they used to, for instance, but in addition our everyday lives are full of abstractions."

    The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UCSD
    http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html

"This point was made very explicitly by a Kpelle anthropological acquaintance of mine who was versed in the more esoteric aspects of Kpelle secret societies and medicine (or magic, according to American stereotypes). We had been talking about what it means to be intelligent in Kpelle society (the most appropriate term is translated as "clever"). "Can you be a clever farmer?" I asked. "No," came the reply. "You can be a hardworking farmer, or you can be a lucky farmer, but we couldn't say that someone is a clever farmer. Everyone knows how to farm. We use 'clever' when we talk about the way someone gets other people to help him. Some people always win arguments. Some people know how to deal with strangers. Some people know powerful medicine. These are the things we talk about as clever.""

    Poverty Lowers IQ
    http://www.monitor.net/monitor/5-5-96/povertyiq.html

"Adjustments for socioeconomic conditions almost completely eliminate differences in IQ scores between black and white children, according to the study's co-investigators."

""The study strongly suggests that economic and learning environments of the home are the most powerful predictors of racial IQ differences in 5-year-olds," said Brooks-Gunn."

    Book Review
    http://bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/

"Human ­potential at birth is unchanged; we are not, in any fundamental sense, becoming a smarter species. But the way we live has changed. IQ tests were first ­established in the 19th century at a time when daily life was concrete and ­practical. The tests, however, had to be abstract to make them culturally ­neutral. People, therefore, found them harder because they were unaccustomed to such modes of thought."

"People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account."

(Note that this is a review of a book authored by James R Flynn, the discoverer of the Flynn Effect in IQ measurements. Previous HN commentary on this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038)

--

I could pretty easily come up with a lot more like this. Or, you could strike up a conversation with HN user tokenadult, who is knowledgeable on the subject.

Either way, IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability, and more researchers are adopting the view that it is impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences (and thus knowledge) from any other innate factors in IQ tests.

You really shouldn't assume that the people you're talking to don't know what they mean.

[blatherer]

you are proving him right by copy and pasting results of a google trawl without any analysis or apparent understanding. "IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability" is a bizarrely strong claim and so is the idea that it is "impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences". I think it's pretty clear that you are just looking for material to support pre-existing assumptions.

[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.