Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

This comment cannot be saying what it seems to be saying, can you clarify what you mean? Maybe it was worded oddly.

First point: I live in Scandinavia. Poor people are just as dumb here as in USA, but we take better care of them. USA assumes that poor people should be able to take care of themselves, which doesn't work. Taking care of them doesn't make them smarter, but it makes their lives better which is the point.

That's not about smartness or dumbness, though. I don't think intelligence is correlated with poverty much, but poverty is additional difficulty, so they have to work harder for the same thing as someone who isn't poor.

But that isn't an issue where I'm from. The lifestyle difference between people with degrees and working class is tiny since the wage gaps are so small, and then add all government aids paying for everything including school lunches, daycare, college, healthcare etc on top of that. But still people from working class households perform extremely poorly. Helping them isn't about making them smarter or unlocking new potential because that doesn't work, it is simply to make everyone live a decent life.

It still doesn't necessarily come down to intelligence. It could just as well be motivation, or laziness, or other social pressures.

> I don't think intelligence is correlated with poverty much

This is contrary to the available science. IQ and earnings are strongly correlated.

One aspect is that there's at least partial causality the opposite way. While earnings are correlated with IQ, they are even more correlated with your family earnings/socioeconomic status (SES); and there are many aspects of how low SES screws up childhood development and education (on average, not necessarily for all individuals) that would result, among other things, in lower IQ test results. I.e. it's a reasonable hypothesis that the correlation implies that low intelligence makes it hard to be rich just as much as being poor prevents one from developing and applying their intelligence.

> I don't think intelligence is correlated with poverty much

There is a perfect correlation between the two

Can you point me to a reference that gives a “perfect correlation” I.e. corr(IQ, poverty) = -1.0?

I'm also from Scandinavia and I just don't agree with you. What you're saying doesn't line up with my own experiences, nor with my understanding of the statistics.

In general, it seems like you are attributing all academic performance to some innate "intelligence" in the singular. This is just a bad assumption. There are many factors behind how well you do in school, and most of them are quite obviously social. That doesn't mean that your parents academic performance doesn't influence your, but there's no basis for claiming that it's genetic. We can help people do better, and we have done so. Of course, what we're doing now isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com