Updated IQ and Well-Being Scores for the 50 U.S. States

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

16 points·mutant_glofish··9 comments

About 2% of the US population moves to a new state each year. Also states are very large, any most of them encompass radically different socioeconomic regions (try comparing Florida swampland to Miami highrises...) Any study that buckets people by state isn't going to be very useful.

Socioeconomic status is a weaker correlate to IQ than some other more prominent metrics.

The whole thing is kind of misleading because the correlation exists but isn't through the roof.

It’s interesting data but the analysis is pretty weak IMHO. Religious groups tend to drink less, yet the author supposed that they had found an invalid correlation and could not list a reason as to why. It also doesn’t acknowledge the bias built into the IQ exam, and it fails to reason about causality to my satisfaction.

These data do show a positive correlation between state alcohol consumption and state IQ. However, the children taking IQ tests and academic assessments is a different population than the one used for measuring alcohol consumption.

In general, I think the relationship between all of these measures could make a good example of Simpson’s paradox. It’s likely completely different correlations could be supported if the data were analyzed at the county level or if it were possible to completely disaggregate down to individuals.

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