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Is IQ what is truly scarce?
There is a new view -- or should I say an old view? -- percolating in the blogosphere: "There is something special about IQ. We must conserve IQ at very high cost, and gains in IQ will bring very high social returns."
In practical terms, "Conservation of IQ" is used to argue for limits on immigration, against various meliorist attempts, and possibly even for eugenics. I've heard it used to argue for outlawing marijuana, which of course destroys brain cells.
Imagine an evolutionary approach: given the Industrial Revolution and subsequent developments, perhaps IQ has higher social returns than was once the case. So we must rebuild our intuitions to favor IQ more than otherwise. When evaluating policy, one question is simply to ask whether it raises or lowers average IQ within a polity or region.
There is also a methodological argument: IQ is (arguably) prior to economic notions of rationality. Perhaps economists should treat rationality as an open variable and dependent on IQ.
I don't assign special status to The Conservation of IQ for two reasons. The first is the Flynn effect, or the fact that measured IQs have been rising steadily over time. This implies some combination of a) IQ gains come naturally under conditions of progress, and b) IQ statistics are to some extent phony and don't measure real intelligence. We can debate the mix, but either deflates fears that IQ is somehow especially scarce or endangered. These data also suggest that IQ is an artifice to be unpacked rather than a primary category.
Second, defenders of the IQ view tend to read evolutionary biology and intelligence research. My roots are in cultural history. Clusters of amazing achievement come and go pretty quickly, usually through some mix of environmental effects and luck. Look at Venetian painting. It was much better centuries ago, but I doubt if Venetian IQs have been falling. Once we see how such enormous differences can be explained by non-IQ factors, I again don't obsess over the variable.
I do think economists should study IQ more. And for sure I value it in friends. But when analyzing social problems, institutions, social psychology, and economic mechanisms still command most of my analytic attention.
A few of you had asked about IQ, I crammed my thoughts into this one post, so this is #04-07 in a series of 50. Do, by the way, save your thoughts on immigration for other posts.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 1, 2007 at 07:43 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
Steve Sailer must have made it into the top fifty, then.
"IQ" seems to hold the same meaning for some conservatives that "social class" holds for some liberals. It's this hard-to-measure phenomenon that separates everyone into groups that they can't do much to get out of.
Posted by: Noumenon at Mar 1, 2007 8:37:44 AM
A third possible explanation for the Flynn Effect: IQ is real, but the ability to take IQ tests has increased. A for phenomena like Venetian painting, IQ would seem to be a necessary but insufficient explanation. Nothing like the Italian Renaissance has occurred in areas of the world with low IQ.
Posted by: Dennis Mangan at Mar 1, 2007 8:42:51 AM
"b) IQ statistics are to some extent phony and don't measure real intelligence."
I'm not sure why you would take the Flynn effect to mean this. IQ is supposed to measure intelligence, not the inherent capacity for intelligence at conception.
Posted by: josh at Mar 1, 2007 8:56:01 AM
"When evaluating policy, one question is simply to ask whether it raises or lowers average IQ within a polity or region."
Using "average" seems particularly perverse. Would you really argue that a person of 160 IQ is likely to be more productive than if she had someone of 150 IQ to help her out?
Doesn't this just suggest a policy of encouraging all but the very smartest person to leave?
Posted by: Toby at Mar 1, 2007 9:01:48 AM
Paul Graham asks a similarly interesting question in his book Hackers and Painters.
He wonders how many Leo Da Vincis are currently walking the earth, but who are without
a Florence in which to flourish. I would guess that there are at least 5 Da Vincis in
the US alone, all of whose talents are untapped.
Posted by: Rue Des Quatre Vents at Mar 1, 2007 9:05:40 AM
Maybe average IQ is less important than the total number of high-IQ people within a given society. Suppose 100 new people moved into your town - five with an IQ of 180, the rest with an IQ of 95. The average hasn't changed, but I'm guessing this would be very good for your town.
Posted by: Mike at Mar 1, 2007 9:12:48 AM
Traits like courage, ambition and persistence in the face of adversity may be as important as IQ and they may enhance the positive benefits of high IQ. Perhaps they should be measured as well. Or does the IQ concept incorporate them?
Posted by: Robert Speirs at Mar 1, 2007 9:26:19 AM
After dealing with the public schools, I think a policy of investing in
people with high IQs when they are observed would make for sound public policy.
I have 2 "gifted" kids, and one "special ed" kid. We know both sides of the system.
For every dollar spent on special-ed, something like 4 cents is spent on our best and brightest.
This just seems so obvious to me, but I don't see much progress being made.
Posted by: krat at Mar 1, 2007 9:26:49 AM
The first is the Flynn effect, or the fact that measured IQs have been rising steadily over time.
Maybe. The wikipedia article does note that there is evidence suggesting that in England and Continental Europe, the Flynn effect ended sometime in the 1990s, and that there has subsequently been moderate regression. So I'm not sure we can count on that.
As far as cultural factors, yes, I think those are important, as you note. But we have little to no control over cultural factors, and we can't measure them yet in any event. All we have is generalities there -- vague ideas that this incentive will encourage that positive behaviour and so forth. On the other hand, I think that ceteris paribus, living in a high IQ society (or perhaps a society dominated by high-IQ individuals) is preferable to a low-IQ society.
Posted by: Taeyoung at Mar 1, 2007 9:29:18 AM
Does the "long tail theory" affect of culture - produced and consumed - distort the perception of contemporary "De Vincis"? Is there a paucity of genius, or abundance? Does niche culture hide brilliant individuals that seem to litter the memory of historical periods, or am I missing the point all together?
Posted by: steveintheknow at Mar 1, 2007 9:34:44 AM
It seems pretty clear that _at best_ IQ measures not one thing but a strange and unreasonable grab-bag of skills, no one of which has any special connection to what people hoped IQ would do. (Binet, to his credit, seems to have understood that much better than the Stanford folks who made the modern Hash out of his works.) There are many, many things wrong with most discussions of IQ, but the fact that it's not a single or natural thing is what's most deeply wrong with most of them.
Posted by: Matt at Mar 1, 2007 9:41:12 AM
The theme in the comments above seems to be that instead of worrying about average IQ's, we should worry about how to nurture people of high IQ's and connect them with opportunties to succeed. Krat is right that our society concentrates educational spending on bringing people from below up to average, and just about anyone who went to an American high school knows highly intelligent people who burned out or dropped out or downplayed their intelligence in order to fit in. Many other societies (such as India and China) do the opposite by focusing resources on stars.
IMHO, the right question to ask isn't how to raise the average level of IQ's, but whether marginal returns are better for improving average IQ's or for improving the development of people with high IQ's from precocious to productive.
Posted by: DK at Mar 1, 2007 9:54:20 AM
Perhaps another reason not to "assign special status to The Conservation of IQ" is that most of the people talking about the issue have high IQs and therefore will be inclined to think that high IQ is more precious or more important than it really is.
Posted by: jp at Mar 1, 2007 9:55:41 AM
"New Zealanders who emigrate to Australia raise the IQ of both countries." - Sir Robert Muldoon, former Prime Minister of New Zealand.
Posted by: amac at Mar 1, 2007 10:18:46 AM
IQ may well be scarce, but the notion that there is such a thing as "the truly scarce resource" has no basis in economics or logic. A lot of people seem to be confusing IQ numbers with general human capital, which is indeed extremely undervalued - phasing out our dysfunctional public schools in favor of a voucher-based system would remedy this.
Posted by: anon at Mar 1, 2007 10:47:50 AM
Apologies if I'm taking the conversation off at a tangent, but ...
I think one of the biggest disservices profs have done where the arts are concerned is to leave a lot of people with the impression that artists are smart, and that the greatest artists are the smartest artists.
I've spent almost 30 years in the arts and the media fields, I've met and yakked with working artists in all kinds of fields, I've talked with millionaires and Nobelists. And the one thing that has leaped out at me most is that there is no relationship between smarts in the IQ sense and artistic talent and/or achievement. I mean, once basic day-to-day competence has been taken care of. And often barely that. Artists who you'd think would be intellectual titans given the work they produce sometimes turn out to be dimwits. High-powered brainy people often struggle unsuccessfully with basic creativity in the arts sense.
Quick acknowlegement: sure, there are creative artists who are also smart, and sure there are smart people who are also creative in the arty sense. But they're so rare that it seems fair to call them exceptions.
As far as I've been able to tell, art-talent is far more akin to athletic talent than it is to smarts. It's more usefully thought of as being in the body and the instincts than it is in the head.
Small irreverent hunch so far as the "Why do profs and critics lie to us about this?" question goes. Art-history and lit-history teachers and profs and critics usually either don't know these facts, or hate them. After all, they're smart people who are studying and encouraging the study of art. Yet the artists whose work they serve are usually less smart than the profs themselves. And what the profs have to offer (smarts, information) isn't something that often plays much of a role in the actual creation of art. Where's the justice?
OK now, returning you to your usual programming ...
Posted by: MIchael Blowhard at Mar 1, 2007 11:30:56 AM
Michael -- I'm willing to buy that for visual artists and maybe even composers, but do you really think it's true for writers? It's hard for me to believe that someone could be a great novelist or poet (at least before about 1920 w/r/t poets) without having a high IQ.
Posted by: jp at Mar 1, 2007 11:38:02 AM
Perhaps it's irrelevant for immigration whether achievement for groups is primarily IQ or cultural. The point is to encourage groups with high performance and high potential for future gains.
We know quite well that certain subgroups of immigrant populations have both high measured achievement and high potential for achievement (judging from 2nd and 3rd generations. In contrast, the current immigration rules seem to select for groups with low iq, low achievement, and low long term achievement. (Again judging by 2nd generation test scores, crime rates, ability to finish college, rates of entrepreneurship).
Unless social capital and measured iq are wildly uncorrelated, who really cares whether the underlying cause is cultural or genetic? If the cultural effects are strong enough and hard to affect, it's effectively AS IF it's all hard-wired.
Now if the US were willing to engage in massive, liberty destroying assimilationist tactics, that would be something else. But as it stands, do we have one iota of evidence that groups which stereotypically don't do well on iq tests fully converge to the American norm after 3 generations?
Posted by: cutter at Mar 1, 2007 11:42:08 AM
dk above, i think hits the nail on it's head.
Posted by: sa at Mar 1, 2007 12:00:12 PM
JP -- It being understood I'm talking only out of limited personal experience (but more extensive and more down-to-earth than most people's) ... Yeah, I've found it holds true for writers too. Fiction depends much more on imagination than it does on cerebration-power. And a poetry gift is more like having a good singing voice than it is like taking a test.
I think the reason many people think of creative writing as being dependent on smarts is that we've all gone to school, and that has led us to think of writing as being connected to school-type smarts. And certainly some kinds of writing are connected to smarts: good clear nonfiction, for instance. Expository prose. And critics and profs encourage us to think of writing as having to do with smarts. So we mistakenly assume that people who use words effectively are smart, because the people who could use words effectively in a school setting generally were indeed smart.
But art, even writing-art, isn't created in a school setting most of the time. It's more about questions like "do I believe in this character?", and "is this working for the audience?" Writing an effective story or poem has almost nothing to do with writing a winning term paper. Completely different activities, dependent on completely different sides of the personality. Charles Dickens was smart or not-smart as a person, but his fiction-talent had more to do with theatrical flair than with brainpower. As an artist, he was more like an actor than like a Smart Person. The verbal facility he had was just an accompanying and nice gift, akin to an athlete or dancer's physical prowess.
One handy way of picturing what's happened in highbrow fiction in the last four or five decades is that the intellectuals and schools got hold of it. (Great old joke: Post-bop is what became of jazz once the critics took over.) So a lot of recent highbrow fiction of the kind that gets serious consideration is in fact intellectually complicated stuff. But that just means that it's written largely to impress profs and critics, not that it's much as fiction. It's an intellectual's idea of fiction. Interesting and common phenomenon is that people in their 20s follow new highbrow fiction ... and then lose interest in their 30s, when they discover that, as adults, they're allowed to read to please themselves.
Anyway, a very interesting piece about the whole English-major, writing-about-fiction thing is this essay by Paul Graham.
Apologies for gassing on ...
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Mar 1, 2007 12:29:17 PM
In practical terms, "Conservation of IQ" is used to argue for limits on immigration, against various meliorist attempts, and possibly even for eugenics. I've heard it used to argue for outlawing marijuana, which of course destroys brain cells.
What a load of collectivist nonsense. IQ may be valuable in some special way or it may not, but regardless of any of that, my IQ belongs to me, and that means I have the right to use it, or not, or move it around, or destroy it if I so choose. To argue otherwise is to claim that I belong to the state, which is the most morally repugnant notion ever conceived by man.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Mar 1, 2007 12:32:46 PM
A thought: economics relies on money, which is the forced projection of our preferences into a strictly ordered scale, which makes sense, because humans have to make choices to prioritize one thing over another when buying and selling.
There is, however, no reason why human intelligence should "naturally" conform to any sort of strict ordering. In fact, experience suggests otherwise -- the effects that influence IQ may be real, but IQ itself shouldn't be regarded as anything more than a bastardized average with unknown weights of those effects.
Posted by: Mycroft at Mar 1, 2007 12:37:58 PM
There is a good article by Linda S. Gottfredson that talks about IQ and g in the context of education issues. See http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005cognitivediversity.pdf
Seems to be quite consistent with everything I've read in this area, and is a good summary.
Posted by: Tim Lundeen at Mar 1, 2007 12:47:11 PM
All things being equal, higher IQ (whatever it is) is good. But to paraphrase Warren Buffett, its better to have a society of dumb yet honest people, rather than brilliant and malicious ones.
Posted by: cllam at Mar 1, 2007 1:00:21 PM
"...marijuana, which of course destroys brain cells"
Really? Could you cite any research?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8155
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,172194,00.html
Posted by: Giovanni at Mar 1, 2007 1:13:17 PM
