Could I get an explanation as to why the Jews are in the higher income brackets?
edit: before I get people bitching at me http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html
this is a great link since we had this argument here before with about half HNers thinking that income somehow correlates to IQ.
however this link doesn't explain why you think jews (as practitioners of judaism, not as a nationality) have higher IQs?
You could similarly link the Hindu religion to dark hair, or other genetic traits common among ethnic groups who have a high percentage of Hindu practitioners. It wouldn't be true all the time, but it would probably show a significant correlation.
If you look at the data included with the GRE CD, you can see the same trend: those who perform spectacularly on the verbal portion are philosophy majors and the like. How much would you expect their average salary to be? No doubt it's significantly less than for most engineers, who don't verbally perform as well, but hit close to the (low) ceiling of the math portion. Income vs. verbal IQ within the same education class is probably all over the map because of this, and no doubt significantly confounded wrt cause-and-effect.
On the other hand, I would expect there to be a strong benefit to verbal intelligence within each profession.
TLDR: The link hardly proves that a higher IQ does not cause higher income.
The Jews have almost always had extraordinary pressures, e.g., killed outright (e.g., Nazi Germany), restricted from owning land (e.g., Venice, Spain). Among their responses to the first was to migrate and, to the second, to move into commerce, moneylending, finance, etc.
If your group is dealing with pressures that another population is not exposed to, then your group's survivors will better deal with that pressure. If, at the same time, that pressure becomes more widespread in a society, then your group also benefits from that. That is, the Jews were involved in commerce and market economies earlier than other groups on average.
Of course this isn't everything. Consider the European gypsies. Certainly they suffered many, if not most, of the same pressures as the Jews, but their current situation is comparatively grim.
I think the more likely explanation is cultural. Yes, Jews were forced into certain professions, but they have also historically emphasized (religious) education. As Jews in the Western world became more assimilated, the emphasis on religion decreased, but the emphasis on education did not. This familial emphasis on education is still felt today and has manifested itself as a propensity for Jews to enter highly skilled professions, such as law and medicine.
Not true.
2. The Jews _were_ under extreme pressure: people apparently felt free to kill them, persecute them, rape them, wipe them out. What could be more extreme?
3. Yes, culture would help. But it would also speed genetic change as Jews increasingly moved into an ecological niche defined by a particular set of abilities (e.g., counting, visualization, quantification, pattern recognition, concept formation) used in fields such as finance.
But maybe I'm asking too much.
I'm not sure about this. Most ex-Soviet Jews went to Israel, I believe. I think the vast majority of Jews in America have west-European roots.
The truth is the Orthodox Jewish community pushes education a very much. In the Modern Orthodox community this translates into both Academic and Torah learning. While in the Ultra Orthodox communities, this often times (not always) translates into learning Torah for most if not all of the day.
It is also very expensive to live an Orthodox Jewish life. Kosher food is more expensive, living in an Orthodox community is more expensive, and Jewish private school tuition is a minimum of $19,000 a year per kid for high school. It is pretty much a prerequesite to make over a hundred thousand in order to live in the Orthodox community.
So it wasn't simply that they had to compensate in other areas as a result of not being allowed to own land, but that they had rights that others didn't.
The only acceptable professions to Jewish mothers are doctor, lawyer and maybe investment banker. On top of that, there are extreme social pressures to succeed. Add a tight knit community and blamo, generations of high paid Jews.
Seriously, culture has a far greater impact on success than intelligence.
Then leave out the less succesfull ones who don't identify themselves as part of that group.