Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Michael Barone: Intellectual Garbage Scow Edition)

Mark Thoma does intellectual garbage pickup on the overrated Michael Barone.

He tackle's Barone's claim that "maybe" the fall in social mobility in America is due to the fact that a high IQ genetic elite has risen to the top of the fair meritocracy that is our society. And Mark's head explodes:

Economist's View: Does Michael Barone Believe the Poor Lack the Genetic Intelligence and Drive Needed to Compete in the Emerging U.S. Meritocracy?: Am I reading this column by Michael Barone correctly? Does it blame being poor on lack of intelligence? Do you believe, as he does, that if you are poor it is most likely because your parents were unintelligent?... Read it yourself....

Michael Barone: [P]olls show that Americans think their chances of moving up are better than a generation ago. Statistics tell a different story: There is a higher correlation today between parents' and children's income than in the 1980s, and the income gap between college graduates and non-graduated doubled between 1979 and 1997.

"America," concludes Parker, "is becoming a stratified society based on education: a meritocracy."... [This] is exactly what Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray predicted for America in their controversial book The Bell Curve, published 11 years ago. Herrnstein and Murray noted that intelligence is both measurable and in some large but unquantifiable part hereditary, an unexceptionable finding for experimental psychologists but maddening to social engineers. As college education becomes open to all with the requisite intelligence, graduates will tend to marry graduates and produce children with similar intelligence, while others will tend to produce children without it.

"Unchecked, these trends," Herrnstein and Murray wrote, "will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top."... Are we there yet?... [M]aybe so.

Yet should we be so gloomy?... Not everyone has an emotional need to be on top: How many people, if they thought seriously about it, would really want the burdens of a CEO, however lavish the pay?... As Murray has written, all you need to do to avoid poverty in this country is to graduate from high school, get and stay married, and take any job. The intelligence needed to get a place in the cognitive elite may become more concentrated in a fair meritocratic society, but the personal behaviors needed to find a valued place in society are available to everyone. Meritocracy may mean less mobility, but that is bearable if, as Brooks says, "America is becoming more virtuous."...

The inheritance of inequality is strikingly large in America today: if the father's lifetime was 100% above the American average for his day, the son's lifetime income will on average be 65% above the American average for his day. That's a lot of inherited inequality. Is this unequal distribution of wealth, income, and status in the United States today the result of the fact that a genetic elite has risen to the top in a "fair" IQ-driven meritocracy?

No.

This high degree of inherited inequality isn't because high IQ genetic eliteness genes are being passed down from fathers to sons. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2002), "The Inheritance of Inequality," report:

The direct effect of IQ on earnings... presented in Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2002a)... is 0.15, indicating that a [one] standard deviation change in the cognitive score, holding constant... remaining variables... changes... earnings by about one-seventh of a standard deviation.... An estimate of the causal impact of childhood IQ on years of schooling... is 0.53 (Winship and Korenman 1999). A rough estimate of the direct and indirect effect of IQ on earnings... is then... 0.15+(0.53)(0.22) = 0.266....

h is the heritability of IQ.... The value cannot be higher than 1, and most recent estimates are substantially lower, possibly more like a half or less.... [C]ouples tend to be more similar in IQ than would occur by random mate choice.... [The] genetic correlation of parent and offspring [is] (1 + m)/2....

Using the values estimated above, we see that the contribution of genetic inheritance of IQ to the intergenerational transmission of income is (h²(1+m)/2)(0.266)² = .035(1 + m)h². If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ball park estimates) and the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income] would be 0.01, or roughly two percent the observed intergenerational correlation [of lifetime income between parents and children].

Two percent is simply not a large number. Factors that currently account for two percent of lifetime earnings inequality are simply not yet a big deal, and cannot be responsible for the fall in social mobility.

If there is ever to be a genetic elite, its members will surely exhibit two behavioral traits: a facility with math, and a near-intinctive tendency to do back-of-the-envelope quantitative checks of assertions. We can conclude only one thing from Barone's column: neither he nor his descendents (unless they get really lucky in their mates) are plausible candidates for membership in any "genetic elite".

It is worth pointing out that neither Richard Herrnstein nor Charles Murray are plausible candidates for membership in any "genetic elite" either. Let me turn the microphone over to impeccably right-wing Jim Heckman, who comments on The Bell Curve:

The Book fails for five main reasons. 1. The central premise of this book is the empirically incorrect claim that a single factor - g or IQ - that explains linear correlations among test scores is primarily responsible for differences in individual performance in society at large.... There is much evidence that more than one factor -- as conventionally measured -- is required to explain conventional correlation matrices among test scores.... They do not emphasize how little of the variation in social outcomes is explained by AFQT or g. There is considerable room for factors other than their measure of ability to explain wages and other social outcomes. 2. In their empirical work, the authors assume that AFQT is a measure of immutable native intelligence. In fact, AFQT is an achievement test that can be manipulated by educational interventions. 3. The authors[']... implicit assumption of an immutable g that is all-powerful in determining social outcomes leads them to disregard a lot of evidence that a variety of relevant labor market and social skills can be improved. 4. The authors present no new evidence on the heritability of IQ or other socially productive characteristics.... [T]hey... [compare] IQ... [to] a crude measure of parental environmental influences. This comparison is misleading. It fails to recognize the crudity of their environmental measures and the environmental component that is built into their measure of IQ, which biases the evidence in favor of their position. Moreover, the comparison as they present it is intrinsically meaningless. 5. Finally, the authors' forecast of social trends is pure speculation... the social policy recommendations have an ad hoc flavor to them.... The appeal to Murray's version of communitarianism as a solution to the emerging problem of inequality among persons is a deus ex machina flight of fancy that is not credibly justified.

And take a look at http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001975.html as well.

Comments

[evagrius]

The best refution of the thesis is G.W. Bush himself.

[evagrius]

Oops. Refutation not refution, ( a Bushism).

[SocraticGadfly]

The internets... yeah, that's the ticket. That's how I brought the Bush family genius to the next level.

[Roehl Briones]

Great post. Fine example of confronting a hypothesis with the facts - it sure refutes the idea that economics is all about theory. Mind sharing the reference on Bowles and Gintis?

[Roger Albin]

Unbelievably stupid. So, over the past generation we have less access to higher education because of declining support for public education, we have stagnant middle class incomes, and good paying industrial jobs, a springboard for familial social mobility in the 50s and 60s, are disappearing. But no, the answer can't be any of these or other social changes, it has to be genetics. As for Murray, he is a statistical incompetent. His last book, the one ostensibly on human achievement, contained errors that wouldn't be made by a talented undergraduate.

[Kathleen]

"all you need to do to avoid poverty in this country is to graduate from high school, get and stay married, and take any job."

is there any evidence that this is true? because this seems really not true.

[P O'Neill]

It looks like there was a recent Vast Rightwing Conspiracy cocktail hour where The Bell Curve was a topic of conversation, because Andrew Sullivan is at it again too:

>>
The columnist David Brooks recently reiterated the data that have been looming for well over a decade now. From nadirs in the late 1970s most social indicators in the US have been solidly heading upward for a long, long while.
...

Educational standards? Judging by IQ scores, intelligence has been going up for much of the past century.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1733906,00.html
>>

So evidence of why IQ is a flawed statistic -- its upward trend -- becomes evidence of a social revival.

More here:
http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_bestofbothworlds_archive.html#112398295445266556

[Steve M.]

Black people should gather in D.C. and burn the fucking almanac of American Politics. I'll pay for the matches.

[Bill Humphries]

*That Book* came out back in the day, when I was an econ graduate student at Wisconsin. We were proud to see both Heckman and Art Goldberger, who taught in our program at Madison, write ringing take-downs of the book.

[ken melvin]

. . . and remove all doubt.

[Chris Gruber]

Funny how all the proponents of the Bell Curve notion are always white.

[justsomeguy]

If anybody thinks America today is a meritocracy, they need to get out more.

[PTate in Mn]

Americans, in general, hate the idea that differences in mental ability may contribute to different social and economic outcomes. So whenever someone suggests that mental ability may be contributing to poverty or decreasing social mobility or whatever, the happy, comfy position is to refute that claim. Do so, and everyone else who hates the idea of mental ability will pat you on the back: Gosh, whew, thanks for shooting down that boogeyman!

Just as a thought exercise, consider the social and political ramefications of the alternate hypothesis: what if we ARE seeing cognitive stratification of our society!?!!

[Then those who know how to spell "ramification" will have a big edge over those who don't.

But--as I quoted Bowles and Gintis--we aren't. IQ isn't inheritable enough and economic success doesn't have enough to do with brains (as opposed to, say, contacts) for society to become stratified by cognitive ability. If our socio-economic distribution does freeze up, it will freeze up along very different lines: an aristocracy, not a meritocracy.]

[Nancy]

"So whenever someone suggests that mental ability may be contributing to poverty or decreasing social mobility or whatever, the happy, comfy position is to refute that claim."

The belief that intelligence = wealth is a happy comfy position for the economically well-off - because it flatters them: of course they're well-off - because they're so damn smart. Luck, social contacts, family history, gender and ethnic advantages of course had nothing to do with it.

This is a country where G.W. Bush is president. What further proof do you need that we DON'T live in a meritocracy of mental elites?

[Dale]

Nancy,
You have offered the conclusive negative proof of the theory of cognitive elites. Now back to the real work of understanding how elites of money and power can over ride the democratic principle.

[ChristopherCharles]

Let's call Barone's drivel, courtesy of Hernnstein and Murray, exactly what it is - Social Darwinism, the favorite pseudo-theory of incompetent ruling classes since Herbert Spencer first misunderstood what Darwin was all about.

[Charles]

Strangely, no one seems to cite the passage in The Bell Curve where Murray (Herrnstein being noticeably dead that that point) says that because the poor are incurably stupid and lack any redeeming value, we need to set up protective enclaves for them.

You know: concentration camps.

Would that I were kidding, but it's in (if memory serves) Chapter 13.

My hypothesis is that Caucasians are deficient in EQ, empathy quotient, which explains why the rest of the world is chronically p--sed off at the US, in many cases with more than sufficient reason.

[Dan Kritchevsky]

Locally funded public schools and profit-driven health care see to it that poor American children get the worst education and health care, whatever inherited intellectual endowment they may have started out with. Unsound mind in an unsound body and all that.

As for "all you need to do to avoid poverty," Business Week and the BLS reported last year that one quarter of the American work force are now "working poor."

[Way Station]

While the statistics about the real meaning of so called IQ, under any name, might tempt you to take even those as something real, they ignore one simple fact. There is no way to measure intellegence. You can debunk the math-free drivel of Murray, Herrenstein, Barone and Sullivan with it quite well as was done above but the figures in themselves are meaningless.

Our elites and their mouthpieces simply don't like people with dark skin and they want to lord it over them and poor whites. The only thing they like about both groups is when they provide cheap labor and an ability of them to feel superior. They fund people who come up with pseudoscientific clap-trap to give it a veneer of science but it's nothing but a bunch of paid for lies.

We know what works to improve the lives of poor people, we don't need theory we have experience. The educational policies of approximately the 1930-1960 period were a part of it but an even more important part were the labor policies and assistance to working class people. There are two huge success stories, the advancement of black workers after civil rights legislation ended legal American arpartheid and the advancement of white women under affirmative action. Neither group has parity with white men but both groups made huge strides as a result of liberal legislation.

The Bell Curve is pretty much a part of the reaction to this success.

Ground has been lost steadily through the destruction of effective public education but also through the destruction of progressive labor policies. And now they're going after civil rights and affirmative action.

[msquick]

You don't have to be a math whiz to understand that financial success and IQ are not particularly related -- visit your local Mensa chapter -- not many millionaires there! (I am one of the former, not of the latter).

[Captain Video]

Of course the rich are smarter than the poor. The proof is that they did a much better job of picking the right parents. Just look at the brilliant job George Bush did in picking his father. The man must be a genius. :-)

[Captain Video]

If has been said that while college professors should pay attention to their A students, they should also pay attention to their C students because the C students are likely to come back at some time in the future and make the college an generous endowment.

[Tom]

I don't know what the problem is. Those alphas work much harder than we do, because they're so clever. I'm really glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. On the other hand, we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki.

[Ashish]

Those who define the concept of the IQ and design the tests for measuring the IQ are assumed to be intelligent themselves beforehand! What if they themselves were stupid? We can't take their own IQ test results seriously for obvious reasons.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

Barone is simply desparate for any explanation, however ludicrous, that does not implicate social conditions or, worst of all, call for the expenditure of public funds. That above all else must be avoided, for obvious reasons.

But as for:

"If there is ever to be a genetic elite, its members will surely exhibit two behavioral traits: a facility with math, and a near-intinctive tendency to do back-of-the-envelope quantitative checks of assertions. "

Dr.deLong, you're dreaming. If there is ever a genetic elite, its members will avoid anything quantitative like the plague. Rather, they will display great facility at manipulating rules to their advantage, and will be adept at social interaction, especially flattery and conspiracy. Probably, they will have an instinctive drive to attend law school.

The quants at MIT work for the upper class scions at Harvard, as you well know.

[Ashish]

Kids of parents who have high intelligence may instead be more likely to have autisim than general population. See the post on my blog, titled, "Assortative mating and autisim".

[Paul Callahan]

> near-intinctive tendency to do back-of-the-envelope quantitative checks of assertions.

I agree with Jonathan Goldberg's response above, but another thing that struck me is that the tendency to check assertions is really a matter of critical thinking, which is distinct from IQ. A putative IQ elite may be just as content as our present elite to leave unchecked any assertions that affirm their prejudices. To claim otherwise, you'd have to show that there is a clear survival value to knowing the unbiased truth, as opposed to using IQ-linked skills to manipulate privilege to one's advantage.

Assuming that a high-elite member might require self-delusion to cope psychologically with the unfairness, there is little reason to think that a genetic elite--apart from some small subsegment of quantitative thinkers--is going to look anything like DeLong's picture.

[Josiah Bartlett]

Several months ago I found an old HBR article that was very persuasive in attributing differences in wealth accumulation to pure luck ("Wealth Happens", Harvard Business Review, April 2002).

I would be very interested in the thoughts of some of the posters here regarding the validity of this thesis. It seems to totaly refute any "bell curve" claims.

[kharris]

Louis Armstrong was not qualified to be among the intellectual elite. His mom was a prostitute, his father a john. Satchmo was obviously among the artistic elite, so there must be a big distinction between artistry and intellect. But Jacob Bronowski would beg to differ, and he was smarter than Barone.

Or, reasoning backward from results, Armstrong's parents must have been intellectually (or artistically) gifted themselves. That would clear things up, yes? The only problems with this second view are that it is not falsifiable, since we can make the same claim whenever somebody makes good after a rough start, and oh my, it seems to contradict the original argument, that somehow being at the bottom is inherent.

Or maybe prostitutes are among the intellectural elite in certain circumstances....? Be patient. I'm still trying to work through the possibilities.

[Charles]

Onetwothree obviously hasn't read The Bell Curve.

The Bell Curve is elegantly refuted by... The Bell Curve.

The statistics show that American IQ has been rising over the last century. African American IQ has been rising faster than Caucasian IQ. If one extrapolates just a few decades, one would conclude that whites will be "the inferior race" in the foreseeable future.

Or, one might conclude that IQ is strongly influenced by environmental factors such as the availability of education and that Caucasian and African American IQs will converge as opportunity becomes equal.

This book is so bad, so very bad. Unfortunately the critics have for the most part failed to do the obvious: Apply the methodology of a study to see if the conclusions actually follow. If not, that alone proves that it is wrong, the authors are not merely wrong, they are either (a) incompetent, (b) liars, or (c) both.

[Mark]

The reason people rise to elite status and wealth is because a guy called god likes them more. Education should focuse on how to make that guy like you more.

[A. Zarkov]

The idea that more cognitive ability (as measured by IQ score) leads to greater income has a superficial and intuitive appeal. So even if false, people who hold to this notion don’t deserve abuse. This includes Michael Barone.

I am somewhat skeptical of the statement:

“The direct effect of IQ on earnings... presented in Bowles, Gintis, and Osborne (2002a)... is 0.15 ..”

Note without redaction, we find this number is somewhat softer.

"We have located 65 estimates of the normalized regression coefficient of a test
score in an earnings equation in 24 different studies of U.S. data over a period of
three decades. Our meta-analysis of these studies is presented in Bowles, Gintis,
and Osborne (2002a). The mean of these estimates is 0.15, indicating that a
standard deviation change in the cognitive score, holding constant the remaining
variables (including schooling), changes the natural logarithm of earnings by about
one-seventh of a standard deviation."

Why am I skeptical? For one thing, the ethnic group with the highest IQ scores is the Ashkenazi Jews, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi. Is it mere coincidence that Jews also have the highest (or one of the highest) income levels in the US? Of course traits other than IQ that contribute to income are surely operating here. More on this later.

One way to get a high income is to become a high paid professional. Can you do this without an above average IQ? Do you think all those high-paid quants on Wall Street don’t have high IQs to cite but one example? I don’t claim this refutes that “.15,” after all having a high IQ might be a necessary, but not sufficient condition in getting a high income. After all there are a lot a very smart, but low-paid mathematicians around. They simply made a poor career choice if they want income.

Identical twins not only have very similar IQ scores; they share many personality traits and they have similar incomes Boles and Gintis address this point in their section 4, where they say

“Although the genetic inheritance of IQ explains little of the intergenerational transmission
process, this says nothing about the possible importance of other genetically
transmitted traits. Indeed, the remarkable income similarity of identical twins compared
to fraternal twins suggests that genetic effects may be important.”

However their analysis seems to be limited to identical and fraternal twins. In his book “The Blank Slate” Steven Pinker discusses studies of identical twins reared apart, and this data indicates a significant heritability of both cognitive ability and personality. In particular the First Law of behavioral genetics states:

*All human behavioral traits are heritable* (page 373).

If the First Law is really true, then we should not be surprised to find that moneymaking ability gets passed from parents to children. Does this not suggest that as a country becomes more a meritocracy and less a caste system, we will see a tendency for high incomes to persist across generations? This would hold even with a 100% inheritance tax, and identical schooling.

[meno]

Tom,

Thank you for that doubleplusgood reminder.

[PaulC]

The idea that a lead weight has a higher gravitational acceleration than a feather has a "superficial and intuitive" appeal, and even conforms to most informal observations, which tend to be confounded by air resistance.

Do people who believe this notion "deserve abuse"?

Maybe not, but they're still wrong, and I don't see the relevance of pointing out that it's an easy thing to believe. I'm of the opinion that people ought to apply the most scrutiny to that which they're inclined to believe anyway, since these are the ideas that, even if wrong, are unlikely to be dislodged without concerted effort.

I think people are more deserving of abuse if they hold to something that sounds good than if they are championing something truly counterintuitive. In the latter case, they can at least claim a crankish heroism.

When a member of the elite propagates the intuitively appealing notion (to other elites anyway) that rising division is explained by the rising merit of the elite, and provides nothing new in the way of empirical evidence, then I think he deserves abuse in spades. Focused, forceful abuse may be the only thing that could possibly enforce the discipline of critical thinking in the face of such a clear conflict of interest.