Tyler Cowen on IQ Tests and Development

If the seventeen-year-old had dropped out of school at 15, stopped reading and writing and stopped going to math class and doing math homework, and gone to work on a farm in poor rural Mexico, his math SAT score right now would be close to his PSAT score then rather than 210 points higher, and his reading and writing SAT scores right now would be close to his PSAT score then rather than 180 points higher.

Tyler Cowen on IQ and development:

Marginal Revolution: IQ and the Wealth of Nations: IQ How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog?  I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution.  Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples' blogs. I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience.  I've spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there.  They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring.  And that's in their second language, Spanish. I'm also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably.  In fact I can't think of any written test -- no matter how simple -- they could pass.  They simply don't have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome. Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people.  If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village.  But still, there you have it.  Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts. So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?

Comments

[Count Cant]

Cowen is certainly on to something. I have had the same experience working with a lot of guys in manual labor who struck me as surprisingly sharp in some hard-to-measure way. And one that should be measured, or appreciated independently of its measurability.

(Thing is, though, it was clearly well-ordered, even if there was no measure attached to it. There were some sharp guys, some not-so-sharp guys, and some extremely sharp guys, all in the same shop.)

[robertdfeinman]

If the point is that IQ tests don't measure "intelligence" than he needs to get out more. This has been the subject of criticism since the 1960's and Banesh Hoffman.

IQ tests measure what the people who look at the results want to measure. Let's assume it is some combination of fitness to work in the post-industrial era as well as a willingness to do lots of rote stuff in school without objecting. Thus, an employee who can be trained easily and will be compliant.

Neither of these characteristics is important for agricultural workers or assembly line workers. The one area which is facing a measurement problem is the military. As the army gets more high tech the skills start to look more like those needed in the knowledge industries and less like the ability to stop a bullet.

The Army recruits from one demographic, but would like to have more people from the other one.

[andres]

Economic development, as we have erroneously defined it, is technologically driven. Which means that a people capable of more "development" must be able to understand and operate the latest technology, much of which is electronics or biological-related. CalTech graduates have such knowledge. The residents of San Agustin Oapan do not.

However, to leave it at that is to make the very dangerous assumption that technology _by itself_ is an evolutionary advantage. I believe that it is not. Technology by itself also gives us the capability to more efficiently kill our fellow human beings, more quickly exhaust or finite natural resources, and more efficiently poison our environment.

I'm starting to think that all college graduations (as opposed to admission) should require a non-verbal, non-written E.Q. (ethical quotient) test which gauges an individual's decisions under certain conditions. Such a test may still be non-feasible, but it is worth keeping in the back of one's mind.

[Matt]

I'd long hoped that Cowens was at least a bit embarrassed about some of the commenters at his site, the ones who tend to think that, say, what's wrong with immigration is that it lets in brown people and we all know brown people are stupid so it will ruin our country. There are quite a lot of those on MR. This post makes me feel a bit better, though I wish he'd be more explicit about rejecting those views.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Seems like a pretty high ratio of speculation to fact on your part and Tyler's, Brad. It ignores a mountain of evidence correlating IQ with performance, not only on "school" type tasks but also such low tech military tasks as infantryman. Sure, we all tell our kids that their IQs and test scores would stop going up if they stopped studying, but the evidence is hardly convincing. Only a part of the performance gap between 15 and 17 is explicable by study.

[Scott Martens]

Alexander Luria was already there in the 30s in Central Asia. He asked elementary school math questions to those with little or no school and got uncomprehending stares. He rephrased the same questions as a word problems with local phenomena, and they scored fine.

Binet developed the IQ test as a mechanism for monitoring students progress in school. In that restrained context, it's a brilliant tool. That is the sole, thin justification for the use of Binet style-testing for college admissions: that it can estimate moderately well prospects for success in college.

But in the end, there's making good decisions and making bad decisions. No other form of intelligence counts.

[stewart]

IQ tests measure the products of intelligence - that is, they measure some sort of output. These are measures of what you have learned from schooling or the media (who discovered America?), more abstract reasoning and manipulation of present information (take these pieces and make this puzzle), and symbolic logic (as in the Luria tasks mentioned by Scott above).
All people have intelligence; when would it not be helpful to either manipulate your environment or your companions? It's ridiculous to assume that this is less useful for one group or another, which is the belief underlying assumptions of innate differences between sexes, ethnic groups, etc. But how we use our intelligence, and the information we've acquired, is strongly influenced by our background. Symbolic logic is now taught at younger levels, and is likely one of the reasons why people now are 'smarter' than our parents and grandparents, on average (although we may not know as much). Factual information (and the skills to acquire it) is a focus of schooling. For Tyler's village, that leaves slightly abstract reasoning and manipulation of present information as skills that perhaps could be meaningfully assessed, if there was a purpose for it.
In my work with people with varying backgrounds, that last area is the one that can help distinguish between those who are wiser or less wise at manipulating and responding to their environemtn, in the absence of formal schooling. My in-laws are no fools, but their schooling stopped at Grade 2 or Grade 5 (blame Hitler and the Russians). Symbolic logic - feh. However, try assembling and disassembling something mechanical, and doing it right, or examining the motives behind someone's behaviour, and their skills come through.
'Intelligence and the Wealth of Nations' makes the common mistake of confusing intelligence and knowledge, which are closely related but not identical. (But can someone explain to me why Korea shows superior fine motor coordination to other nations?)

[Maynard Handley]

"
Alexander Luria was already there in the 30s in Central Asia. He asked elementary school math questions to those with little or no school and got uncomprehending stares. He rephrased the same questions as a word problems with local phenomena, and they scored fine.
"

So IQ measures abstraction and the ability to deal with phenomena unlike those one has encountered before. Gee, I can't imagine why that would be a useful skill, or why not possessing it would hurt one economically.