IQ and conscientiousness, as we measure them, are correlated with income.
I believe it remains to be shown that "competence" is also correlated with income.
I believe it remains to be shown that "competence" is also correlated with income.
IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Conscientiousness measures the willingness and desire to perform one's duties well. Additionally, among people that earned their wealth, the fact that they are wealthy demonstrates that they achieved their goal of becoming wealthy. These all indicate competence to me. Wealth, in general, can also be imagined as a state where one's needs are met, which is (for people that earned their wealth) almost always closely related to having achieved certain goals.
I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively.
Bear in mind that this is talking about populations as a whole- correlations are something we can tease out via sociological studies, and experiments are few and far between. There are facts about human nature that we will never prove conclusively, but to be an effective agent in the world, you should try to learn things about people that cannot be proven. Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.
The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.
It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%".
Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group.
The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me.
But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.
They are? Do you have studies indicating this?
I was mainly getting that point out of the way so the poster I was replying to wouldn't get hung up on my evil liberal agenda.
>Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.
I wouldn't call your viewpoint evil, but I'd like you to characterize where I'm arguing from in your own words. Seems like you think I've jumped into the looney bin.
Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful, because people can't change their IQ very much. But conscientiousness is worth advocating for. To me, it seems like the left-leaning opinion is so afraid to make judgements between people's measurable differences that they want to immediately shame people for recognizing those differences.
I wouldn't say "distasteful". I'd say "inaccurate". It's not clear what, exactly, IQ actually measures and it's up for debate if it measures intelligence in any meaningful way.
The scatter plots show a correlations strong enough that they startled me when I saw them. The higher the IQ, the lower the correlation though.