Tl;dr Poor people (and racial and ethnic minorities, and women, and queer folk) are not dumb. They just have to turn their equal cognitive resources towards things other (and more fundamental to survival) than their magnum opus/business idea/etc. Those who overcome this are HIGHLY effective, but it's not fair that we ask it of them. That's not how an effective or efficient or just society runs, and we leave money on the table and room for any adversaries we might have to maneuver when we doom whole classes of people to constant, pervasive desperation.
Can you blame the author for being overweight and not wanting to put up with feeling self-conscious at the gym? Being poor can push you to your limits even just trying to survive every day, not to mention be an effective worker, and being a good parent/spouse/partner/friend/family/etc to whoever is in your life. Doing 45 minutes of cardio while also feeling like an outsider is just not in the time or energy budget.
And when you worry about the possibility of someday not being able to afford food due to some extend unemployment episode, when you feel vulnerable any time you hear the word "recession" on the news, it is hard to convince your body not to eat as much as possible now, while food is abundant.
I recommend the book Scarcity for anyone interested in learning more about the psychology behind this. It was written Mullainathan and Shafir, both stars in their respective fields.
You do realize that men are more often victims of violent attacks and murders than women? Many (most?) of us are always vigilant for signs of potential violence, particularly when surrounded by groups of seemingly violent and/or armed people.
I had a great education/CV early in my career, and had the opportunity to interview at some of the top most companies prior to their IPO (some when they were tiny companies). Google, Facebook, Stripe and maybe 3 more that went on to be billion dollar exits. I screwed up every single time. Either I did not take the interview seriously, or took a more prestigious academic job compared to the start up opportunity. Talk about being in the right place, at the right time and still missing out. I have barely paid off a small fraction of my starter home (no longer in the Bay area). I really wonder if it is just luck or more complex than that. (Good) Luck got me the right opportunity,but it can't just be (Bad) luck that snatched away all those opportunities from materializing? Clear, I made extremely bad decisions, missed out on the greatest wealth creation event in history, and must live with this till my end.
Edit. There is a rich-dad, poor-dad point I'd like to make. My parents were extremely bad with investments and not very educated. This made me chase the higher prestige academic jobs as opposed to the lucrative startups. Also, when my white friends (with moderately-rich parents) were buying houses at 5% down, I said they were crazy and I was paying off 5% interest education loans, saving up for a bigger down-payment, buying my car for cash, etc. My parents went through the days of 20% interest and never understood the power of leverage. They passed on risk-aversion to me. Even now, I understand the power of leverage, but am still scared to use it.
I like the phrase "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity". So when you say you made bad decisions, didn't take it seriously, etc. it sounds like you recognize your own culpability in creating bad "luck".
There is something to be said for overcoming the inertia of the (bad) ideas we may have been raised with. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers how wealthy parent raise their children to be more assertive. One of his examples was a "genius" child with a 195 IQ who couldn't reach his goal of a PhD because of the ingrained passivity his parent taught him, which caused him to accept limitations he was told without questioning. To that extent, if we can't overcome those bad ideas, we're creating bad luck for ourselves.
And please don't take this as me piling on, because it's fairly clear from your post that you are still bothered by this. I imagine it's because you spend a lot of time imagining "what could have been", but to quote Theodore Roosevelt "comparison is the thief of joy". If you can get to a point where you're grateful for what you have rather than mulling over what you missed out on, you'll probably be happier for it. Genuinely wishing you the best of "luck" in the future.
Thanks for your kind words. I took it in a positive light, and appreciate your thoughts.
I usually bottle it in, but wrote the above post as a release. I'm definitely luckier than a good fraction of the planet. I also truly believe that at some point, we really need to stop blaming our parents, and take ownership for our own actions. It is just really hard some days, to face up to the missed opportunities.
Now that I have kids, I imagine advising myself as if I was advising my kids at some point in the future. That has really worked wonders. I'd advise my own kid to say c'est la vie, and move forward in life with optimism and confidence :)
Agreed here. I quite openly will say I’m lucky to have an intense interest in computers and to develop enough skill with them to get a job in the high paying tech industry. I didn’t choose what my passions, talents, or skills are after all.
I’m always surprised that people tend to take exception to this, saying it’s nothing to do with luck, I worked hard.
That’s also true. I did and still do work hard.
But that doesn’t invalidate the fact that I had zero control over the fact I happen to live in a society that relies upon, and therefore places a high value on, the area I happen to be skilled in. There’s people with great talent in other areas that are very hard to make a living from.
Much of where we end up in life is determined by luck and chance. That doesn’t mean we’re not also working for what we have. Just means there’s multiple variables, life is unpredictable and isn’t fully within our control, and if we happen to be highly talented at something society places great value on there’s an element of luck at play.
OP here: more like, if people's resources are NOT equal (and people's abilities are not really fungible: you can have someone who's not that great but has a novel POV, or a helpful trait) then this tilts things harshly against them.
You wind up with people who are not the brightest and greatest, burdened by massive cognitive overhead, hindered rather than groomed for success, and then as a society we turn around and look at the ones who were a bit better at stuff and point to their opulence and go 'look how MUCH better this person is!'
People don't have to be equal for this to be a concern. It's a matter of whether you think society's best served by finding the most exceptional person and then having them rule everything. Even if you were able to do that, even if the person IS quite superior, they will never measure up to the bar society sets for them. They're good, but they're not nearly as good as their wealth would make it appear.
And you look at poor people or people who are flat out failing at life. They're not good, but they're not NEARLY as not-good as their poverty would make it appear. You're seeing them at their worst, and it's a wasted resource on a colossal scale.
So this is basically the argument for 'create UBI under capitalism and dominate the world through the proliferation of cool GDP you create out of all your small business people'. Basically, 'one Elon Musk is useless compared to ten thousand folks a tenth as good as him'. :)
First point: I live in Scandinavia. Poor people are just as dumb here as in USA, but we take better care of them. USA assumes that poor people should be able to take care of themselves, which doesn't work. Taking care of them doesn't make them smarter, but it makes their lives better which is the point.
I'm also from Scandinavia and I just don't agree with you. What you're saying doesn't line up with my own experiences, nor with my understanding of the statistics.
In general, it seems like you are attributing all academic performance to some innate "intelligence" in the singular. This is just a bad assumption. There are many factors behind how well you do in school, and most of them are quite obviously social. That doesn't mean that your parents academic performance doesn't influence your, but there's no basis for claiming that it's genetic. We can help people do better, and we have done so. Of course, what we're doing now isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it.
That's not about smartness or dumbness, though. I don't think intelligence is correlated with poverty much, but poverty is additional difficulty, so they have to work harder for the same thing as someone who isn't poor.
One aspect is that there's at least partial causality the opposite way. While earnings are correlated with IQ, they are even more correlated with your family earnings/socioeconomic status (SES); and there are many aspects of how low SES screws up childhood development and education (on average, not necessarily for all individuals) that would result, among other things, in lower IQ test results. I.e. it's a reasonable hypothesis that the correlation implies that low intelligence makes it hard to be rich just as much as being poor prevents one from developing and applying their intelligence.
But that isn't an issue where I'm from. The lifestyle difference between people with degrees and working class is tiny since the wage gaps are so small, and then add all government aids paying for everything including school lunches, daycare, college, healthcare etc on top of that. But still people from working class households perform extremely poorly. Helping them isn't about making them smarter or unlocking new potential because that doesn't work, it is simply to make everyone live a decent life.
So your intelligence is based on how much money your parents made? Your intrinsic ability to be educated is a function of someone else's wallet? Something seems off in this statement. I wish your parents had money, then your statement would probably be coherent!
No, intelligence is mostly inherited. If your biological parents were smart then you will almost surely be smart and vice versa. And smart people end to earn more money, so intelligence is indirectly correlated with parental wealth. But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly. They do a bit better, but their biological parents still matters more.
If it was easy to produce smart kids then we would already do it, since smart people are so much more valuable to society the small amounts it requires to add that extra value would be nothing. But no country has managed to do this so far, its just a slow climb that follows the same trend in every western society no matter what policies they implemented.
It's not uncommon for smart people to be poor. You can be intelligent and have intelligent parents that came from poor countries, maybe parents that experienced a debilitating traumatic experience keeping them from working, or mental illnesses that don't inhibit intelligence, but do inhibit basic survival.
> But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly.
Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
> Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
What you've said is unfalsifiable voodoo mumbo-jumbo. Even if someone proved you wrong here and started the experiment with the poor child at newborn level, which is what people do when these bad faith criticisms are lobbed, you'd just claim that the DNA of the baby inherited generational trauma, which is what people with your bad faith criticism resort to once the criticism is inevitably proven wrong.
I don't see how this points at evidence of inter-generational trauma which to my knowledge is recognized as bullshit voodoo. Can you explain where it does so?
This doesn't hold up to the smallest amount of rational thought. Is everyone from a poor country less intelligent? How about a poorer city, they are stupider? This sounds like an argument made by a lucky person who wants to attribute that luck to some personal superiority.
Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions. Read “guns germs and steel” for why human development through the ages has a lot do with just being at the right place at the right time.
> Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions
This goes against all of the scientific literature we have. Intelligence is determined by genetics. It can be artificially lowered via poor socio-economic conditions, but it mostly cannot be lifted by higher socio economic conditions. In laymans terms, a traumatic life can make a child who was otherwise going to be smart not so smart, but a good life cannot make a child who was going to be dumb intelligent. Socioeconomic conditions can lower the intelligence determined by genetics, they cannot improve intelligence determined by genetics.
I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization of both the science and what I was saying. Genetic intelligence is not a min/maxed limit that we all have to work hard to reach. It is something that is fairly static and innate. It can be disrupted by trauma/nutrition but obviously for the vast majority of people that is absolutely not the case. We are born with, and live up to, our genetic intelligence. Very few of us in the first world were undernourished or subjected to extreme trauma at childhood.
Yes. The author of the comment seems not the understand simple concepts like averages and normal distributions. Additionally, he/her seems to assume a causal relationship where if you're poor it is because you're dumb, and not the other way around, or even a mix of those two things.
Yeah, on average, poor people score a few points low than the average for rich people. true. But this is not an absolute as the post's author seems to believe.
It doesn't mean all poor people are dumb, or that you are automatically smarter than someone who is poorer than you.
Picture mentally two bell curves with a lot of overlap and very long tails. Things are in reality way more nuanced than this dumb statement that poor == dumb.
On the aggregate, it is a useful datapoint, it means that probably as a society, you should reserve some more resources for education in poorer neighborhoods.
I can think of at least one society that formed in the 1930's for which this was an absolute mandate! But I don't recall reading much about them past about 1945, so perhaps you should do some further research.
Yeah and welfare programs and heavy redistribution programs were tried by a society that caused several times more deaths and suffering than the one you mentioned over way longer period which we don't hear from anymore either. What kind of argument is that, seriously.
Oh shit! Several times more?
Maybe you should actually read some actual data about Soviet Union. Saying that Soviet Union caused more suffering over longer period of time than Nazi Germany is way off.
And by the way - free healthcare and free higher education are actually very good things that worked like a charm.
How can you be so sure of that?
Intelligence is not something as clear-cut as eyes color. While there are some evidence of an inheritable component, it is probably the result of the expression of several genes, with complex and different phenotypic expressions. It is far from clear how much we can expect that the offspring of smart people will be also smart, once you account for all the other variables associated with nurturing.
Meanwhile we DO KNOW that nurturing have a strong effect. This is a fact.
And then you have the problem of how to ensure that smart people have more kids. Are you going to force smart people to have kids? raise their taxes? prison? What about lower intelligence people? what do you propose? compulsory sterilization and abortion? As you can see, even if we knew for sure that smart people having relatively more offspring would actually work, The policy changes to enact that are a complete minefield of ethical and practical problems. So, at least in our society, this is clearly not a solution.
But, on the other side we do know that we can have interventions on nutrition, education and other such stuff that do have a demonstrable effect on increasing a series of variables that we collectively call intelligence.
You have, right now, for kids that already living, not some hypothetical future Einstein's offspring, tools to raise their intelligence and to make the most of their genetic potential, even if on average, their potential is a bit smaller (and always remember, intelligence is normally distributed, outliers abound, and the difference between the average of both groups is not that big to start, meaning there is a lot of overlap in relative terms, and considering we have for more poor people than rich people, is very likely that by virtude of the sheer numbers, you have more genius individuals, in absolute quantity, than on the upper classes, even if the average tends in favor of the upper classes.
And as intelligence is normally distributed, by giving poor kids a chance, you will even be able to identify among them some high potential individuals and give them the nurturing they need to reach what they are innately able to if given the chance.
So, what is your policy choice? Chase a pipe dream, while increasing inequality, something that historically always led to violence, or do something that is feasible, doable, ethical and fair?
I agree, it is so much better to say things that sounds good but doesn't help anyone. What I said doesn't benefit me at all, but spouting platitudes would.
Not all poor people are dumb, but most are. And since we are talking about statistical level effects poor people being dumb will greatly influence them.
So instead of asking "why are poor people fat, we should fix that!" you can also ask "why are dumb people fat, we should fix that!". The second gives a lot of different angles and can help find solutions the first question wont find.
This is one of the many drawbacks of socialism, even the "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" that everyone seems to be obsessed with lately in the U.S. It assumes government paper-pushers are the smartest people around with the highest I.Q. ever, and everyone else is just a dumb lightweight. It's all about that soft bigotry of low expectations.
I don't get it. People form societies because we are better off collectively. We run into problems where some people manage to rig society in a way that some people are consistently worse off and others are consistently better off.
Society as a whole is better off => every single member is better of.
There is no such relationship. However, since every individual directly contributes to the total productivity of society, we want every member to reach their maximum potential and one way to achieve that is to introduce welfare so that people at the bottom don't have to be homeless or starve because we want them to have a second chance at life.
