The Bell Curve

[_Analytics]

Chapter 3: The Economic Pressure to Partition

This was an interesting chapter that is pretty heavy on the statistics. The point is a little bit surprising but the statistics seem rock solid.

There are perhaps three points here. First, being intelligent helps you get a better job. Do well on a test, gets you into the right school, the education defines the occupation, and the occupation controls the salary. He readily admits that yes, part of this is driven by the education. But on the other hand, you have to be smart enough to learn what they teach in medical school.

The second point is the most surprising, but also the one with the strongest statistical support:

Test scores predict job performance because they measure g, Spearman's general intelligence factor, not because they identify "aptitude" for a specific job. Any broad test of general intelligence predicts proficiency in most common occupations, and does so more accurately than tests that are narrowly constructed around the job's specific tasks.

The advantage conferred by IQ is long-lasting. Much remains to be learned, but usually the smart employee tends to remain more productive than the less smart employee even after years on the job.

An IQ score is a better predictor of job productivity than a job interview, reference checks, or college transcript...

Intellilgence is fundamentally related to productivity. This relationship holds not only for highly skilled professions but for jobs across the spectrum. The power of the relationship is sufficient to give every business some incentive to use IQ as an important selection criterion

The strongest support for this is the U.S. military. Everybody who goes into the military is given the "ASVAB" test, which is used to determine whether the military will consider hiring you for different specialty jobs. They then send candidates into training programs, and then grade people on how well they do in training and in their subsequent jobs. They've been doing this with hundreds of thousands of soldiers across hundreds of specialty jobs, and the results of all of this are loaded into a single database across all branches of the military.

As a researcher, that type of data makes me salivate.

It turns out that the single best predictor of individual performance in the military is your ASVAB score. This is true across all jobs and within all jobs. The best infantrymen, cooks, CID agents, helicopter mechanics, intelligence analysts, and every single job are the ones who score the highest on the ASVAB. The ASVAB tests "g", general intelligence. They've tried creating special tests for different specialties. When they create a special test to see if somebody has the right aptitude to be jet pilot for example, they've found that the general IQ score does a much better job of predicting success than the specialized test. Different jobs have different requirements--for example you have to have the right body and be in incredible physical shape to be a SEAL. But among the people who meet the basic qualifications, the IQ score is by far the best predictor of how well he or she will do in the speciality.

He claims there is a ton of other data in the private sector that corroborates this. However, the military data is an incredible datasource.

He talks about the statistical measures of this and emphasizes that these are averages. While they have superlative statistical significance and are the best statistical predictors we have, individual performance does vary. But in any job, the most productive people probably have the highest IQ.

Finally, he talks about the difference in productivity between average employees and outstanding employees. The difference in productivity is significant in all jobs and huge in the more cerebral ones. This causes intense economic pressure for employers to find, retain, and promote the very best people and gives economic justification to pay them more--perhaps something like 40% more. And statistically, the best people tend to be the ones with the highest IQ. The reasoning here made intuitive sense, but I didn't follow the details of how productivity was measured.

Having said all that, I'll emphasize this last point: While he claims that IQ is by far the best statistical predictor in any job, there are other personal characteristics that dwarf the test scores.

Perhaps a freshman with an SAT math score of 500 had better not have his heart set on being a mathematician, but if instead he wants to run his own business, become a U.S. senator, or make a million dollars, he should not put aside those dreams because some of his friends have hgiehr scores. The link between test scores and those achievements is dwarfed by the totality of other characteristics that he brings to his life, and that's the fact that individuals should remember when they look at their test scores.

[_EAllusion]

]
"Section 1" of the book goes through their arguments about what is happening with the cognitive elites. So far, I think the book is nailing it.

Probably should look up commentary on the book at the same time if you are deciding to rely on it as its own sole authority. I don't know. I can't reply to "nailed it" as an argument.

On your first point, so far the book is only talking about intelligence per se. There has been not even a subtle hint of "intelligent" being a euphemism for "white."

This is getting a bit weird. Do you think I, and a bajillion other people, are making up the racial discussion that occurs in the book? Maybe give it a second or two? Or, I don't know, skip ahead a little to page 317? The explicit discussion on race occurs most intently there. From looking at my dusty copy, that goes on for about 40 pages. From there, they go into an extended lament on the wrong sorts of people reproducing, which they identify as the poor, immigrants, and low IQ "ethnic groups." Sparking my memory looking at this, I see they rely heavily on the AFQT (calculated from the ASVAB) via the NLSY, which, while they claim is a gold-standard IQ test, does explicitly measure things that educational level and oppurtunity is going to greatly impact.

The connective tissue on the subject of race is is everything they say about class can be inferred into their commentary on race, which they habitually walk you right up to in order to take a hard, long look at. Gardner, which I just looked up looking for quote, called this "scholarly brinkmanship," and what we might call plausible deniability.

Having found the quote, he says, "I became increasingly disturbed as I read and reread this 800 page work. I gradually realized I was encountering a style of thought previously unknown to me: scholarly brinkmanship. Whether concerning an issue of science, policy, or rhetoric, the authors come dangerously close to embracing the most extreme positions, yet in the end shy away from doing so. Discussing scientific work on intelligence, they never quite say that intelligence is all important and tied to one's genes; yet they signal that this is their belief and that readers ought to embrace the same conclusions. Discussing policy, they never quite say that affirmative action should be totally abandoned or that childbearing or immigration by those with low IQs should be curbed; yet they signal their sympathy for these options and intimate that readers ought to consider these possibilities. Finally, the rhetoric of the book encourages readers to identify with the IQ elite and to distance themselves from the dispossessed in what amounts to an invitation to class warfare. Scholarly brinkmanship encourages the reader to draw the strongest conclusions, while allowing the authors to disavow this intention."

The don't say that intelligence is a euphemism for White. They say that Blacks and Hispanics are of significantly lower intelligence than Whites, that this is probably at least partially genetic (and imply it is probably quite genetic), and therefore all the things they say about class apply disproportionately on the subject of race. Poor people on average are lazy (idle, to use their euphemism) and prone to crime because of their innate low intelligence. Oh, by the way, Black IQ averages near the borderline (as in almost intellectually disabled) range. Figure it out.

If he is right, individuals in the top 10% should be the ones doing great.

It's more that people who grow up doing great score relatively well on IQ measures than the reverse in terms of causation, but that is going to require you to carefully look at the footnotes and literature rather than take at face value claims are on the up and up. Also, they grossly exaggerate the effect of IQ on income through their circumstantial case. The correlation between IQ and income distribution is quite modest, not determinant. No, "business executive" is not some rarefied occupation that requires elite intelligence to achieve. Pays well, though. If you think it is, I envy the managers you have.

[_Analytics]

A friend of mine says that next-gen robots will take the jobs of most working class people. He does not necessarily relegate the "less intelligent" to the underclass, as many smart people have no motivation. We had been arguing about video games sucking up the lives of today's kids, with me saying it's a problem, while he countered saying that since robots will be putting so many out, then it's a good thing for a large section of the population to find amusement and somewhat blissful existence playing video games and that it's wrong to believe the idle should suffer for their idleness. What do you guys think?

Your friend has a point, I think. LDSFAQs once linked to something that I thought was interesting called "The Star Trek Economy." The idea was that so much productivity is going to be obtained through automation, eventually nobody should be required to work. A radical economic plan that is a step towards that is to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all welfare. This would be replaced by a plan to give every U.S. citizen over the age of 18 a check of $1,000 every month. Everybody gets that check, regardless of whether you are rich or poor, healthy or sick, young or old. So if you wanted to get together with a couple of buddies and waste away playing video games, go for it. If you want to get a job in the service industry, great--earning $12 an hour doing whatever won't make your $1,000 a month base disappear. If you want to be one of the few who is leveraging the technology that makes all this happen, you are going to be paying the taxes that finance this thing, but will still make billions after tax.

[_Analytics]

]
"Section 1" of the book goes through their arguments about what is happening with the cognitive elites. So far, I think the book is nailing it.

Probably should look up commentary on the book at the same time if you are deciding to rely on it as its own sole authority. I don't know. I can't reply to "nailed it" as an argument.

I'm just following your advice and reading the book, taking notes of my impressions as I go. I recognize I'm in the section that gets very little criticism, so I'm inclined to take it at face value. After I understand for myself what the thesis of the book actually is, I'll see how the later controversial sections rely on these sections and will circle back as necessary.

On your first point, so far the book is only talking about intelligence per se. There has been not even a subtle hint of "intelligent" being a euphemism for "white."

This is getting a bit weird. Do you think I, and a bajillion other people, are making up the racial discussion that occurs in the book? Maybe give it a second or two? Or, I don't know, skip ahead a little to page 317?

A "bajillion" is an exaggeration, of course. Some people think it is a sincere and generally competent attempt at examining the evidence. In that Sam Harris podcast that started this that I'm sure you haven't listened to, Harris said that he doesn't like the topic, that it is uncomfortable to him, that he doesn't think this provides us with very much useful information and in general doesn't recommend studying it. He says he considered Murray a fraud until a couple of months ago when Murray tried to give a speech and it started a riot. He only reluctantly read it then and was shocked by how even the tone is.

You know that I have pretty strong libertarian-leaning liberal instincts. I don't like where this is going. I'm just trying to figure out what the book actually says, and then go from there.

The explicit discussion on race occurs most intently there....

I'll get there in due course.

From looking at my dusty copy, that goes on for about 40 pages. From there, they go into an extended lament on the wrong sorts of people reproducing, which they identify as the poor, immigrants, and low IQ "ethnic groups." Sparking my memory looking at this, I see they rely heavily on the AFQT (calculated from the ASVAB) via the NLSY, which, while they claim is a gold-standard IQ test, does explicitly measure things that educational level and oppurtunity is going to greatly impact.

Murray does point out that in the military, the vast majority of enlisted men are high school graduates that went straight into the military without any further educational level. He claims this controls for educational level in part.

He also claims that there is an entire body of research that indicates that a "properly administered" IQ test isn't biased on race, etc. Does that body of research exist? How extensive is it?

The connective tissue on the subject of race is is everything they say about class can be inferred into their commentary on race, which they habitually walk you right up to in order to take a hard, long look at....

Yes, that is the basic criticism from that Scientific American review.

Gardner, which I just looked up looking for quote, called this "scholarly brinkmanship," and what we might call plausible deniability....

Fair point.

The don't say that intelligence is a euphemism for White. They say that Blacks and Hispanics are of significantly lower intelligence than Whites...

I know you are just being sloppy in your description, but the way you said it is patently false. They do not say "blacks are lower than whites." They say individual IQ varies from person to person, that IQ is just one factor (albeit an important one) for success, and that everyone should be judged as individuals. Then they say the data says that on average blacks have lower IQ scores than whites.

It's more that people who grow up doing great score relatively well on IQ measures than the reverse in terms of causation, but that is going to require you to carefully look at the footnotes and literature rather than take at face value claims are on the up and up. Also, they grossly exaggerate the effect of IQ on income through their circumstantial case. The correlation between IQ and income distribution is quite modest, not determinant.

Criticizing the book in sweeping, imprecise language isn't helpful. They don't claim the correlation between IQ and income is "determinant." They say:

"The correlations between IQ and various job-related measures are generally in the .2 to .6 range. Throughout the rest of the book, keep the following figure in mind, for it is what a highly significant correlation in the social scienes looks like. The figure uses actual data from a randomly selected q percent of nationally representative sample, using two variables that are universally acknowledged to have a large and socially important relationship, income, and education, with the line showing the expected change in income for each increment in years of education. For this sample, the correlation was a statistically significant .33, and the expected value of an additional year of education was an $2,800 in family income--a major substantive increase. Yet look at how numerous are the exceptions; note especially how people with twelfth-grade educations are spread out all along the income continuum. For virtually every topic we will be discussing throughout the rest of the book, a plot of the raw data would reveal as many or more exceptions to the general statistical relationship, and this must always be remembered in trying to translate the general rule to individuals.

"The exceptions associated with modest correlations mean that a wide range of IQ scores can be observed in almost any job, including complex jobs such as engineer or physician, a fact that provides President Bok and other critics of the importance of IQ with an abundant supply of exceptions to any general relationship. The exceptions do not invalidate the importance of a statistically significant correlation." (page 67)

That is what the book actually says. I feel like I am reading the book Sam Harris describes--not the one you describe.

[Guest]

I am on EA's side on this. I got the book on special order when it first came out. It makes a convincing argument, but a repugnant one. I argued about the racial issue in grad school-- school psychology program.

There are so many factors that need to be considered-- and I don't think the authors had any kind of focus on the exceptions.

And negative expectations are one of the reasons why I was uncomfortable with my role as a school psychologist. I tested a number of kids whose achievement was across the board higher than IQ. Most of them either had not been placed in special education until later, or came from advantaged and loving homes.

I had slow motor development, and there was fear that I might be "retarded". Being able to manage a pair of scissors was very important in the culture of my family, and I was late at that. Once I got the hang of reading, they couldn't keep books out of my hands.

From there, they go into an extended lament on the wrong sorts of people reproducing, which they identify as the poor, immigrants, and low IQ "ethnic groups." Sparking my memory looking at this, I see they rely heavily on the AFQT (calculated from the ASVAB) via the NLSY, which, while they claim is a gold-standard IQ test, does explicitly measure things that educational level and oppurtunity is going to greatly impact.

The connective tissue on the subject of race is is everything they say about class can be inferred into their commentary on race, which they habitually walk you right up to in order to take a hard, long look at. Gardner, which I just looked up looking for quote, called this "scholarly brinkmanship," and what we might call plausible deniability.

Right-- they lead you right up to the place where you can continue making assumptions, but they don't actually say it.

I once had a copy, but got rid of it.

[_Gadianton]

When is the chapter 4 summary coming out? I don't got all night.

[_Always Changing]

I am too tired to make much sense of anything, so I will wait until morning when my IQ is higher. LOL.

[_EAllusion]

I recognize I'm in the section that gets very little criticism, so I'm inclined to take it at face value.

You shouldn't.

A "bajillion" is an exaggeration, of course.

No, no. It's a bajillion. I've counted.

The book's discussion of race has an amount of replies in journals and academic press so large that I can't count it, so I found the "gee, no mention of race yet" comment strange. Like, do you expect that it won't be there? The social sciences have gone mad? Further, I'm pretty darn sure they start setting the backdrop of racial discussion right at the beginning and you probably have seen the topic touched on enough to know, based on the context of public commentary, what's to come.

Some people think it is a sincere and generally competent attempt at examining the evidence. In that Sam Harris podcast that started this that I'm sure you haven't listened to, Harris said that he doesn't like the topic, that it is uncomfortable to him, that he doesn't think this provides us with very much useful information and in general doesn't recommend studying it. He says he considered Murray a fraud until a couple of months ago when Murray tried to give a speech and it started a riot. He only reluctantly read it then and was shocked by how even the tone is.

I linked it specifically because I did listen to it a few weeks ago after it made its way into my knowledge from my general diet of science reading. I have fairly presented Sam Harris's tone of presentation and offered a linked analysis that makes that case in more detail.

Murray does point out that in the military, the vast majority of enlisted men are high school graduates that went straight into the military without any further educational level. He claims this controls for educational level in part.

That's absurd. Educational attainment and quality of educational exposure are distinct things. Do you think all high school graduates from infancy on got roughly the same level of educational exposure from their schooling and familial circumstances? That's in "I can't even" territory if you think that's an adequate reply. If you think that makes sense, let me ask you this: Why do we care so much about quality of schools if that's the case? Should we? Looks like we found an area where we can drastically cut funding if not since outcomes will be roughly equal from the worst educational tracks in the worst schools to the best of the best. Are you on board with that?

(P.S. Besides all that, there is variance on educational level at time the ASVAB is taken and it does correlate with performance with more education likely causing improved performance. This critique on page 1110 goes into some detail on this if you are interested.)

He also claims that there is an entire body of research that indicates that a "properly administered" IQ test isn't biased on race, etc. Does that body of research exist? How extensive is it?

This is discussed further in the book. The answer here is complex. The simple claim they go with is false. There are probably a variety of kinds of cultural biases in IQ testing and "culture-free" IQ testing isn't even possible. The specific testing they rely on, when they switch from talking about IQ measures generally to the dataset they are actually working with, directly measures knowledge of things like vocabulary. How could that not be impacted by what words you are exposed to in your culture? There's no culturally-neutral vocabulary set. Keep that in mind when they discuss how immigrants perform worse. How these biases are mediated and to what extent they have an impact is not something the literature gives a pat answer for, but the the short of it is there's some effect, but it doesn't entirely or even mostly explain between group differences we are interested in. And it varies from test to test.

I know you are just being sloppy in your description, but the way you said it is patently false. They do not say "blacks are lower than whites." They say individual IQ varies from person to person, that IQ is just one factor (albeit an important one) for success, and that everyone should be judged as individuals. Then they say the data says that on average blacks have lower IQ scores than whites.

"Blacks" "Hispanics" and "Whites" refers to group comparisons, Analytics. That's what the "s" and context is doing for that sentence. That doesn't mean every black is less intelligent than every white. It means that the population of black people has lower average intelligence than the population of white people if you think an IQ test is adequately measuring intelligence. They do point that out and discuss it at some length. The gap they discuss involves putting the mean black IQ on the cusp of borderline intellectual functioning. What we used to call "borderline mental retardation" if that more charged term helps.

I don't see how you cannot see the racial implication when they point out that poor people, another cohort they spend some length talking about having lower average IQ, are prone to laziness and crime because that is a consequence of what low IQ does. If I need to spell it out, they are saying that black people, on account of being less intelligent, are relatively prone to laziness and crime. I mean, they don't say that. They spend a lot of time instead saying they're totally not advocating racial prejudgment here, but it is the logical implication of what they are saying.

The net effect of this is to say don't assume a person is dumb because they are black, but if you discover that your city is becoming more black, expect your city to become less intelligent on average and filled with people more prone to "idleness," criminality, and other bad things because of their relatively innate stupidity. Don't prejudge your black neighbors, but if you start seeing a bunch of black people move into town, things are probably getting worse. They have a chapter on demography where they say just that behind the thinnest of veils, in fact. "Town" is just "the United States," "moving in" is "being born," and "black" is "ethnic groups of low intelligence we discussed previously."

Criticizing the book in sweeping, imprecise language isn't helpful. They don't claim the correlation between IQ and income is "determinant."

They imply a exaggerated relationship which you have been repeating here to the point that it is determinant. Determinant means, in this context at least, a factor that is important enough to be decisive in observed outcomes. It doesn't mean "sole cause" which is the meaning you seem to have taken on. Their thesis is that cognitive ability is determinant of positive social outcomes and increasingly so. If it is the case that the top 10% in IQ are heavily stratified into upper economic brackets as a consequence of intellectual ability, it would be proper to say intellectual ability is determinant of income status, at least for that subgroup. That's not the case though. The correlation is quite modest. They don't analyze their own dataset they are working with to answer the question of the relationship between income and ASVAB testing, but other researchers did. It's "meh." The problem is that kind of correlation cannot account for the kind of stratification in IQ and income status your question states.

[_EAllusion]

Food for thought Analytics: The link I have to the AFQT was a preparation site for the ASVAB that offered sample tests. Do you think the premise of that website is a lie? Do you think it is possible to prepare for the ASVAB and do better?

It is true that if I measure your IQ using a Stanford-Binet test when you are 8, that's going to correlate fairly well with a test that has actual inter-test reliability with it when you are older. But chances are most 8 year olds are on life-tracks that don't drastically alter, so that's unhelpful in proving lack of malleability of IQ beyond a young age, which a key point they spend some time on. In fact, they want you to think a great deal of this is genetically baked in. You're not there yet, but the relative futility of improving IQ much is one of their key points.

But their conclusions are dependent on the AFQT not earlier commentary on the full sweep of IQ meausres. And the premise is who you are when you are 8 is highly predictive of how you perform when you take that test regardless of exposure you get in-between. After all, you graduated high school, right? But if that's the case, if that's really the case, is a preparation course a legitimate program? You are who you are, right?

[_Analytics]

Thanks for the comments, EA. You make several good points.

I need to run to the airport, but before I go, let's review one thing. The reason I'm reading the book is to see what it actually says.

In reply to my request that you be more specific in your criticisms, you said:

They imply a exaggerated relationship which you have been repeating here to the point that it is determinant. Determinant means, in this context at least, a factor that is important enough to be decisive in observed outcomes...

I need you to be more specific. The book says, specifically, "The correlations between IQ and various job-related measures are generally in the .2 to .6 range." They do an excellent job of explaining in lay terms how to interpret that. And they repeatedly say that while IQ has the most predictive power of all of the variables in the dataset, individual factors that don't come through in the statistics are collectively the driving determinants of success.

So I'm having a hard time interpreting what you mean when you say they imply an "exaggerated" relationship. It seems like an earnest attempt at describing the actual research. Perhaps you are saying that almost all of the results are in the .2 to .3 range, and stuff in the .4 to .6 range are outliers? Therefore saying measures are generally in the .2 to .6 range is an exaggeration?