Re: When the Levees Broke

jimstevens wrote:

El Castor wrote:
Fred Ghadry wrote:
E (Bet) Anthony wrote:
jimstevens wrote:

Intelligence has nothing to do with it! Of course, someone with high
intelligence may "get it" a lot quicker then someone a quart low. But,
anyone can have a decent and secure life in America if they are
willing to just work hard and apply a few very simple values in their
daily routine.

I do not understand why something as simple as that doesn't sink in.

Everything I've read points to family influence, family values, and family expectations. For reasons too numerous and mysterious to list, under-achievers of any race don't seem to have families that demand high performance.

It's curious how influence, values, and expectations seem to work so
much better in a family of above average intelligence rather than one
that's below average -- without regard to race. One university study
cited in the Bell Curve compared the economic success of Blacks and
Whites with similar IQ's. Their incomes differed by about 1% -- which
Herrnstein and Murray were willing to attribute to racism. The point
is, they were nearly identical. For the liberal this is a frightening
concept. However, conservatives are equally repelled by the idea that
the poor are the way they are, not because they are lazy, but because
their economic success was pre-ordained by the brain they inherited
from their parents. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (http://www.bls.gov/nls/),
an on-going project of the Department of Labor since the 1960's, has
studied tens of thousands of teenagers over the span of their working
lives. University researchers have been able to clearly relate IQ in
those teenagers to financial success later in life. That doesn't mean
that everyone with an IQ of 140 will be worth a million bucks by age
40, but it does mean that your cardiologist or the guy that programmed
the news reader software I'm typing in, or designed the monitor I'm
looking at, doesn't have an IQ of 80. On the whole, cardiology,
programming, and electronics pay better than low skilled manual labor.
And there is another difference. Studies have shown that the guy with
an IQ of 120 is intellectually inclined to make decisions now which
favorably influence his life many years down the road, while the guy
with an IQ of 80 is much more inclined to simply live for the moment.
Who is going to wind up with a better retirement? There are roughly as
many people with an IQ of 75 as with an IQ of 125. Which one do you
think is more likely to live in a nice house in the suburbs, and which
one will be shooting up drugs in an inner city slum?

With this rationale, we might as well just keep housing, feeding, and
protecting these less-then-fully-developed-humans forever? We agree
on some of the points but very sharply split on assigning so much to
intelligence. A predictor of success? Certainly!
Those who do not have average to high intelligence destined to
failure?


Housing, feeding, and caring for the less-than-fully-developed group seems to me to be the nub of the question. Every time the do-gooders bleat about "inequality" or whatever, I wonder just how one would make their theory work in the real world.

I don't believe that those of less intelligence are "destined" for anything. It is true though, that some people stop striving at a point below what they might otherwise be expected to achieve. It seems to be a feature of our cultural self-hatred that we deny the reality of such a phenomenon and insist that if only we had done "x" the under-achievers would have reached "equality", whatever that means.

The cold, hard reality is that there's a normal distribution (aka Bell curve) of achievement in all societies. The obvious danger is slanted over-interpretation of that normal distribution, proving whatever it is that the interpreter wants to prove.

If it can be shown that there are artificial restraints, such as slavery or blatant racial discrimination, then a society should act to remove the constraint. Absent that, if the society decides to house, feed, and care for the lower end of the spectrum, there is no point in continuing to bemoan "lack of equality" and so on. There is of course a fine line to be observed here, but in our society, at any rate, the *opportunity* to succeed is there for everyone. It is only those who throw in the towel early in the match who slam the door on their likelihood of success. The same cannot be said about many third-world countries where artificial constraints are the norm.

.

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