IQ, Lies, and National Wealth

“Now there’s a fine choice for intelligent offspring.” – Star Trek, TOS

Is it just me, or does Biden’s only expression convey, “Now why did I walk into this room again?”

I once was in a meeting with one of my son’s clubs. One of the kids came over, “You know, John Wilder, I am very smart.” The kid was a junior in high school. “Really, Zeke? That’s great! Are you planning on going to college?”

“Yes, I think I might want to teach history,” Zeke replied.

“Wonderful! How did you do on the ACT?” I asked. The ACT is a test that measures both a student’s preparedness for college as well as the ability of their parents to pay for the test. I’ve heard a rumor that colleges like money.

Zeke told me his score, and I tossed it into the Internet. The nice thing about the Internet is that it has lots of data related to testing and IQ. Pretty quickly, I correlated Zeke’s ACT score with his IQ. This isn’t a perfect correlation, but it’s close enough.

Zeke’s IQ was (within a margin of error) about 85 according to his ACT scores. Is this correlation perfectly accurate? No. But it’s probably close enough and I didn’t think his parents would be happy if I kidnapped him and forced him to take an actual IQ test.

I once got a C on a Roman numeral test.

An IQ of 85 isn’t horrible. It does, however, mean that roughly 275,000,000 people in the United States have a higher IQ than Zeke. It doesn’t make them more moral than Zeke, and it doesn’t make them better people than Zeke, but they do learn more quickly and process information much faster than Zeke. Plenty of people with an IQ of 85 have had happy, productive lives.

But people with higher IQs than Zeke can also learn concepts that Zeke simply cannot. On one website it says that people with an IQ of 85 can . . . “complete any (college) course.”

This is a lie.

No one could honestly tell me that I could sprint as fast as an NFL® receiver. Nor should they, because that would be a lie. No one could honestly tell me that if I worked really hard at it, I could grow two more inches taller.

Do taller people sleep longer in bed?

The fact is that IQ isn’t like knowledge – I can study and learn more, but I can’t increase the overall processing speed I was born with. Just as if I never ran, I’d be slower than if I practiced, I can certainly do plenty of things to degrade that information processing capacity. But just like there’s a physical limit to how fast I can run, there’s a physical limit to how fast I can think and the number of things I can hold in my mind.

That’s the thing that most people miss about IQ – it follows the same bell curve that most human attributes follow – height, speed, strength. If anyone told Zeke he was five inches taller than he was, he would have laughed. But people told him he was smart, and he believed that.

I can understand how that might seem to the compassionate thing to do – to tell someone that they’re smart. The downside of that is simple – if Zeke feels like he’s smart because everyone told him he was just as smart as anyone else, what happens when he doesn’t have the success that other people have?

Will I be successful with my glass coffin business? Remains to be seen.

He becomes resentful. He sees others succeeding because of things he can’t fathom happening around him. What, then, must be the reason that other people are successful? They must have some sort of system that is rigged against Zeke.

If it were just Zeke, it still wouldn’t be okay to have this compassionate “participation-trophy” lie. It has consequences for him.

On a societal level, however, we’re busy sending people off to college that have no real business being there. The result is a large number of people in society today who think that they have all the tools necessary to be exceptionally successful at intellectual pursuits and it’s just not so. This creates a society-wide level of bitterness. It’s especially bad when those college kids with no intellectual prospects get worthless degrees (if it ends in “studies” it’s a worthless degree) and are then saddled with huge amounts of student loan debt.

Why is it hard to fight corruption in the United States? Because he controls the FBI.

And, since intelligence is mostly heritable (as proven again and again), it’s likely that these kids like Zeke have a parent (or, less likely, parents) that are also not as bright. Identical twins have virtually identical IQs, even when growing up separately. Nature matters a lot more than nurture. One statistic I read back in the day was that student performance in verbal IQ was tied to the number of books in the home of the parents. This mattered (again, as I recall) much more than the number of minutes the parents read to their children.

Society has a very, very particular relationship with the concept of the heritability of intelligence so much so that this is a huge hot button issue. Certain incentives in our current system encourage mothers of lesser intelligence to have even more not-so-bright babies. This is, of course, as featured in the documentary movie Idiocracy. Since this idea has such significant implications, not the least of which is the fate of nations: smart nations do better than, um, less bright ones. Here’s the data:

I’ve heard that talking to yourself is a sign of intelligence – at least that’s what I keep telling myself.

The data is from the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, so it dates back to before they year 2000, as far as I can tell. That really shouldn’t matter much, since the relationship is so strong. Smarter countries are richer – a lot richer.

We’re entering a period of time where resources will be far more constrained than at any point in my lifetime. We’re entering a time where we will have no choice but to stop lying to ourselves about IQ and its impact.

And when I die, I do want my ashes put into a participation trophy. I think I’ve urned it.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

53 thoughts on “IQ, Lies, and National Wealth”

  1. Bravo John! back in the day the 85 folks could get a union job driving a forklift and make a decent living. That is gone to China. Ignorant and Arrogant is a deadly combination. Kind of like POC rocket scientists are only in the movies

  2. well John, don’t you know it is racist to talk about IQ? We have swaths of peoples
    that have such a low IQ they hang around at about 70. Compare that with an IQ of about
    120…just look at the bell curve (forbidden knowledge) as it makes the natives restless.
    Then…they plot to steal from you, stores, and old ladies carrying a handbag. Dire
    consequences are in store for us. Reparations? The $ will go to programs that bankers
    will love/they will profit. The results will prove the point.

  3. IQ test results are an incomplete indicator of intellectual performance. Millions of high-IQ persons took the notvax, voted liberal, got on boxcars, etc.

    We’re entering a period of time where resources will be far more constrained than at any point in my lifetime.

    We’re entering the opposite. Resources are proportional to the understanding of how to extract them and manufacture them. What we have today is that anyone with a normal middle class income can assemble a CNC machine shop in their garage. The high-IQ liberals are trying to turn the electricity off by weaponizing their self-loathing, which they call “green”. The electricity may indeed go off in a new dark age…for a couple months while the urbans starve. Then the high-IQ rural non-liberals will turn the electricity back on again.

    1. Midwits took the Vaxx. Low IQ and high didn’t. Masters not PhD. GED not BA in social stupidity

      1. > Once off, unlikely it will come back on.
        Why? No electricity means the methods of long-distance surveillance, tax collection, and power/policy projection are disabled. Then everybody living next to an oil well or farm falls back older methods and does ok, while everyone living in a blue hive starves, freezes, or dies of bad sanitation diseases. Then nobody remains who want the power off, so the power is turned back on.

    3. from the Central California coast:

      IQ measures the ability to learn and grasp things, including theoretically, it does NOT measure wisdom, nor even common sense.

      Stupid people have less of everything, but there are certainly ditchdiggers with more common sense than rocket scientists and brain surgeons, as accident statistics bear out throughout history.

      Using IQ to determine actual performance – at anything – is like trying to measure horsepower with a laser level.

      Bare IQ is a predictor only of one ability: possibility.
      No one with an IQ of 70 is going to earn a pilot’s license or play piano concertos flawlessly.
      Anyone with an IQ of 90 is going to struggle at it, but may succeed.
      Someone with an IQ of 110 is going to come to it much more easily.

      None of that, however, tells you how hard each is going to try, and determination has a much better track record of success than most other measures, provided the task is within one’s ability to master it in the first place.
      Higher IQs merely grant a larger pool of options.

      The problem comes when stupid people are encouraged to keep learning how to defuse explosive devices, or keep getting elected to high office.
      The results of the two differ only in scale, at that point.

      1. And that was me, but evidently WordPress now has amnesia and Alzheimer’s.
        Or it’s run by Joe Biden.
        But, I repeat myself…

      2. No, it’s not a performance measure, to be sure. But it is a great predictor of performance, since the capacity is there – one study (in The Bell Curve) pointed out that it was actually better to be born with a higher IQ than to be born rich. But, you’re right, I’ve seen multiple genius-type folks never do anything at all with their lives.

    4. Actually . . . higher IQ folks tended to skip the Vaxx in higher proportions.

      I hope you’re right on the resources, but I tend to think not.

    1. I’d peg about 15% to 20% as the “right” number for college, and it looks like the stats prove it.

  5. I tried to complete one of those online IQ tests. I didn’t finish it. I realized that age has brought an awareness of how dumb I’ve become over time. Finishing the test would have only documented the fact.
    Jess

    1. Intelligence changes over time – the youth have fluid intelligence, great at novel problems, but the older folks have crystallized intelligence, better for taking and sharing the knowledge we have, and combining the old solutions we know to create solutions to new problems.

  6. It has mostly worked so far, the achievements of higher IQ Americans are kept running and gradually improved by the shrinking percentage of people with exceptional intelligence but we are fast approaching the point where the lower average IQ is going to catch up to us. When that happens the lights go off and the spicy times start.

    1. It is what has happened several times, in several places throughout history. But, our fate is in our hands.

  8. I hope there will be someone left to separate your ashes from the ashes of society in general. Maybe they can earn their keep filling an urn.

    1. Meh. Once I’m gone, I’m gone. I just want my family to have to make an incredibly difficult hike high into the mountains to spread them so I can be inconvenient.

  10. As important as is IQ, there is also the matter of the will to use it. Sadly, I see far too many bright, young people today, primarily White males, who certainly could be movers and shakers, but who simply don’t care to exert themselves. They see little to no percentage in busting arse, and I honestly can’t blame them.
    My elder son, for example, works for a ginormous international shipping concern in a position that, while respectable, is far beneath his capabilities. The company takes a lot of government business, and must therefore toe the DIE line. My lily-White son has been passed up for promotion numerous times in favor of others of lesser competence who check diversity boxes, leaving him dispirited and lacking ambition.
    He puts in his 8 hours, collects his pay and simply does not bother to aspire to anything greater within the rigged framework. Short of starting his own business (which would not qualify for subsidies like female- and minority-owned startups do) he is trapped by the fact of his White skin and male plumbing in a situation more insidious and unfair than any “glass ceiling” ever was.
    This is the fast track to Idiocracy. Rig the game against those who should and would maintain and advance the modern world in favor of those who by all rights ought to be in supporting roles only, and watch the whole edifice eventually collapse. I have no desire to be operated on by a “doctor” who went to medical school on a basketball scholarship, or take my chances in a jetliner piloted by a stone-age diversity hire, but here we are.

    1. Very well said – the next post is about the passion side. It is rigged, and we are soon to be in the midst of a competence crisis.

  11. Going to college makes you smart just like playing basketball makes you taller.

    3. from Santa Barbara-ish…

      Anyone who goes to college to get smart is already too stupid to attend.
      You had K-12 to “get smart”.

      College is to teach you how to question and where to look for the relevant data, and how to analyze and assimilate that into answers to distill them into actual knowledge.
      This is colloquially known as “thinking”.

      Its actual design purpose has been totally bastardized by
      a) substituting feelings for facts, while plugging ears with fingers and screaming “La! La! La! I can’t HEAR you!” at anything which hurts the pupal larvae in attendance (which includes 80% of faculty, based on direct observation), and
      b) spending inordinate time (which would be anything above ZERO minutes, total) trying to beat the K-12 curriculum remedially into people too stupid to learn it the first time, and who were unquestionably far too stupid to have let into college in the first place.
      Most of this has been driven by jackasses in corporate offices thinking a college degree = “smart”, and hiring sheepskin bearers instead of thinkers. Few of whom realize they’re the ones who got fleeced in the process of getting that sheepskin.

      This is why most graduates are barely adequate 10th graders by the time they earn a degree, and have made no progress towards the actual purpose, and why they’re even bigger idiot jackasses than the stupid bosses who hired them.

      Which explains most of western civilization since 1946.
      Progress since that time was only achieved by actual thinkers ruthlessly running over the idiots and trampling them into the dirt at every opportunity, and then kicking them in the balls for good measure, and occasionally taking scalps.

      Civilization is about to transition that process from metaphorical to actual, any day now.

      Plan accordingly.

      Bloghost note: Yes, WordPress now requires a new login ID every single time, and doesn’t save old ones.
      Which is new.

      Which bespeaks something thunk up by a Common Core college grad.

  12. Along the “Idiocracy” line, “Bevis & Butt-head” will be the norm sooner than later. Food for thought.

      1. yep, it’s MENSA. Got in on the basis of my GRE scores – obtained after walking in the test 15 minutes late with the spins from closing down a bar after 4 and a half hours of drinking boilermakers with a bunch of friends and a visiting poet named Charles Bukowsky… I attempted to leave after about an hour, telling the poet that I had this big test in 9 hours… He said, “Sit down, kid, you’ll do just fine.” He was right – 94th percentile math, 96th percentile verbal, 90th percentile analytical – the part I walked in late for. I was a member of MENSA for a year, I made the mistake of telling my research director about it, and he laughed and said “You just blew $33 of good money on nothing, I don’t let people in this group unless they have at least those kind of scores, now quit screwing around and get back to work…” I didn’t renew my membership. Four years to a PhD in physical/organic chemistry, then I did a law degree, passed the Patent Bar handily on the first try, and so forth. No vax, it was obvious to me that it could not possibly work, at the time I thought it was some sort of eugenics/IQ test, selecting out those who had lesser IQs and followed orders without questioning. Maybe I was right, we’ll see.

  14. >And, since intelligence is mostly heritable
    Then how would intelligence evolve? Caveman Og have caveman babies, right?
    > (as proven again and again)
    Find one medical study that has proven correct over time. Just one.

    Sorry, everyone, nothing is so simplistic in this life. We just don’t know why Thomas Soule is smarter than everyone here combined, but I’d bet my accumulated wealth that his ghetto mom and absent father were not Wakandans.

    1. One?

      https://www.livescience.com/47288-twin-study-importance-of-genetics.html
      Money quote:
      “Another study, commissioned by the editor of the journal Science, looked at genetics and IQ. The Minnesota researchers found that about 70 percent of IQ variation across the twin population was due to genetic differences among people, and 30 percent was due to environmental differences.”

      Thomas Sowell likely had smart parents. And the one kid of his that I know of is an electrical engineer.

      1. It’s still way too anecdotal. IQ develops from apes, so it can develop from any pairing.
        My point is that trying to correlate it with human physical attributes won’t work.
        My point about the medical studies is that we have no idea what conditions are needed for a higher IQ. Maybe Don’s post about iodine points down the correct path. Maybe it’s just missing chromium at a crucial time.
        But it’s not genetics.

        1. Goalpost moving detected.

          Nope, it is genetic. I guess we’ll disagree, but in this case all the evidence is on my side.

  15. Colleges, like schools, are essentially indoctrination centers for feminist and prog ideology. Been that way decades. Academic training is secondary. A distant secondary.

    Who runs the schools and colleges? Women.

    My prescription the past couple decades is: raze the schools and colleges, lime them over, do a little dance atop their ruins. Then praise God.

    A number of institutions may remain, and be converted into actual colleges, focusing on STEM and little else. All the faculty will be male.

    The administrators and deans and Gender Ombudspeople and Diversity Officers will be relocated to producing farms, where they can learn something about actual work for the first time in their lives. Four or five years slopping pigs should about do it.

    Don’t wanna work? You don’t eat. Have a nice day!

    1. Most colleges are very Leftist. Mine wasn’t, but now is. There are a few Right-leaning colleges left.

      Solution: colleges have to pay back loans on students that don’t perform well in life. Easy-peasey.

      1. Good good, I’m fine incorporating your solution with mine.

        We raze the colleges and unis, but STILL require all (former!) stoonts to pay back loans in full. With interest.

        Dayum I do favor your suggestion, much obliged.

      2. yeah, I think the same – you don’t get a real job lasting at least three years of full time paid employment – not the fake ass “jobs” that colleges “provide” – within five years of graduation, and the department picks up the full cost of the student loans, including interest. Most of these “studies” degrees have one or two positions opening up yearly in the entire US – so for 30,000 students, that’s one or two jobs. That would put most of these fraudulent unmarketable degree programs right out of business. Another thing would be to make student loans fully dischargeable in bankruptcy after, say, five years from the date of graduation. Banks would have to make honest assessments of loan risk then…

        1. Allowing bankruptcy on student loans would be a HUGE step in the right direction and could actually provide relief to people who need it.

  16. What resource did you use to estimate IQ? I searched a bit online and either the score estimators I found or the whole concept of IQ is bullcrap. I used my ACT and GT scores from my ASVAB on a couple different websites and there is no way I am that smart.

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