tl;dr - "Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine."
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine, conditional on being carried to full term."
It's a good thing to back up with a scientific study and facts, but I'd hardly call it surprising (the article did) except to those who have no idea what this poverty looks like.
Another interesting part of the bias might be that I've never heard the term "crack baby" (or similar) outside the context of US ghettos, while cocaine is used globally in many countries.
I think this is a very important observation. Sometimes poverty doesn't look anything like this.
I'd like to note that although I grew up in "technical" poverty, e.g. in a small rural community with a median income of $11,121, very few saw much violence or any of the markers of poverty lifestyle this article talks about.
Although my anecdote is not scientific, I do think this has much more to do with observed culture than with an arbitrary signifier like poverty. Urban poverty and rural poverty are entirely different things, for instance. As is transient and temporary versus chronic poverty.
The results are surprising in the sense that what was said, and generally believed even by professionals in the field, at the height of the issue was that it would be impossible for these children to develop at all. Poverty has a known affect on development, it was believed that these crack babies wouldn't even have the chance to hit that level.
The surprise comes from that the previous belief couldn't be more wrong. The actual effect was basically non-existent.
Do you have any links to support this? I had always heard that chemically, they are both "cocaine" and the "crack" preparation simply allows quicker intake and thus a faster high.
Crack is the freebase form of Cocaine. It is preferred for smoking (quicker intake ,less needed) because of the change in the evaporation point.
Oddly, Crack Cocaine is just the active ingredient (cocaine), powder cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride.
My original point is that no, calling it crack cocaine is not codeword for poor [insert racial slur for black people] doing stupid things, an assertion that the OP tried to make by implying bias in the article and saying the rest of the world just calls it cocaine.
Crack is basically freebasing in kit form.
Some people, regardless of race, have lower intellectual capacity. That is what IQ tests try to measure, but fail to do completely because a lot is still based on education and experience that is difficult to factor out of the tests.
A greater number of those people that have less intellectual capacity are not going to be as financially successful. Unless you just make them. And that "making" them is as temporary as the funds that keep going to them. That is NOT to say that we should not feed the poor and hungry. We should! And, we should try to educate them more, because they need more help. However, that is charity. People deserve love, food, and shelter. But, we are not able to "bring up" people to a level that cannot be sustained because they don't have the intellectual capacity. That is why welfare fails and is taken advantage of. Unless you have some sort of medicine or medical treatment that can make people with less intellectual capacity have greater intellectual capacity to even everyone out, then it should be considered charity to help the poor- not some sort of way to make everyone smarter.
Also, I'm not completely convinced of the amount of importance of intellect by birth. But that's more of an opinion I hold, I have no evidence to back it up.
Relatives purchased tickets for a show for me and my son to go to featuring fighting robots. He was extremely stimulated by it, not surprisingly, and I so want to capture that enthusiasm towards some engineering (make a robot).
Without the wealthier relatives that stimulation wouldn't have been there. Without wealthier parents he's not going to (in short term at least) have access to resources to develop towards the potential educational outcomes from that experience.
Taking a world view we must be in the top reaches of wealth too I'd imagine. Sad.
Down the page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078722 - we have lancewiggs saying that the results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty.
What basis do you have for your claim?
1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world.
2. Take all of their money away.
3. Give it to the other 50%.
Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ?
DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!
Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.
IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind.
Intelligence is building upon that.
Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.
I like to consider myself one of those people.
But I have to say, I can't imagine how my IQ would have stayed the same as I got older if I had not at least been able to eat regularly, drink clean water, make medical check-ups, etc.
I get what you have been implying, which is that a person's theoretical intellectual capability is not necessarily tied to their current intellectual capability. But the brain is an adaptive organ, not a monolith that comes out of the womb fully-formed.
It's at least possible (and likely, IMO) that there are various 'gates' in the development of the brain where if pre-requisites for development are not met, that the opportunity for that natural development gets closed off as the brain moves onto further forms of modification and maintenance of its neural net.
At some point the brain has to switch over from adolescent development to adult 'maintenance programming'. If you are resource-constrained during that adolescent phase it may be difficult to catch back up, even in a resource surplus as an adult. This would show as a lower IQ (even on an ideal IQ test), even though a higher IQ could have been achieved with proper 'care & feeding' as a child.
"Given all of the kids who would grow up to be the smartest 50% of the people in the world."
The problem is we are not able to predict this first step.
Consider the elements of an IQ test: vocabulary, pattern recognition, mathematics, abstract logic. What kind of environment would you think is more likely to teach children the things they need to do well on an IQ test?
If SATs are readily accepted to be affected by poverty, I fail to understand why IQ tests wouldn't be also.
Obviously for vocab, a Chinese person would fail if they don't understand English, so they'd translate it. For a poor American, the vocab skills required on an IQ test are pretty basic.
Also, the modern SAT tests are stated by CollegeBoard[1] to NOT correlate to IQ anymore. They correlate to education.
You're conflating a test for knowledge vs a test for cognitive ability.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/view...
American Psychological Association, 2003
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx
"Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts: rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence."
"They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context."
"Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded."
ScienceDaily, 2010
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm
University of North Carolina, current curriculum
http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm
Because IQ tests chiefly measure success in school, they are value-laden. Scores provide a statistical indication of the extent to which a person has critical schools and information, but they should not be directly equated with intelligence. Test scores are a useful index of ability, but they may reflect test-taking sophistication, personality, and attitudinal characteristics as well as learned and innate ability (Plomin, 1989)."
Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence
http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence
"In modern cultures, more emphasis is being placed on abstraction. Students learn algebra at an earlier age than they used to, for instance, but in addition our everyday lives are full of abstractions."
The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UCSD
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html
Poverty Lowers IQ
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/5-5-96/povertyiq.html
""The study strongly suggests that economic and learning environments of the home are the most powerful predictors of racial IQ differences in 5-year-olds," said Brooks-Gunn."
Book Review
http://bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/
"People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account."
(Note that this is a review of a book authored by James R Flynn, the discoverer of the Flynn Effect in IQ measurements. Previous HN commentary on this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038)
--
I could pretty easily come up with a lot more like this. Or, you could strike up a conversation with HN user tokenadult, who is knowledgeable on the subject.
Either way, IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability, and more researchers are adopting the view that it is impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences (and thus knowledge) from any other innate factors in IQ tests.
You really shouldn't assume that the people you're talking to don't know what they mean.
"Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.
Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. If we were able to teach good parenting skills, social skills, and ethics adequately in schools, and help them develop sense of community, then many of the problems (unrelated to genetics) related to intelligence being lower would go away. I hope if anyone takes home anything from what I'm saying, it is that you can't throw money at a problem like this. Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap.
However, back to the study. Genetic problems with IQ cannot be solved by money, period. Also, being poor does not make you have lower potential for intelligence. That has been my point all over this thread.
I appreciate that you are trying really hard to make an argument, but you literally have no idea what you are talking about.
First, I should point out that I speak from experience: I have been one of those poor children and have known many of them. I have experienced not having enough to eat and attended poor schools. Fortunately for me, these experiences were relatively short lived. However, because of those experiences, I retain a keen interest in the state of poverty, poor people, and how they live. Now, on to your points.
> Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also.
Obviously there are exceptions, but most poor schools do not have internet access for the students or computers for them. If they do have a library, it is generally inadequate and most are not encouraged to use it. The greater problem, however, is the issue of hunger; it is very hard to concentrate or develop one's self in a hungry state. Adults can, and do learn, to deal with the state of hunger but children do not. A hungry child is only interested in one thing and when the state of hunger persists, will adapt, however they must, to a life of hunger. That generally means they will make what we would consider poor choices.
> If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.)
Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are, but unfortunately sidesteps a whole set of other reasons (historical, social, political, geographic) than generally has a far greater impact on one's life than genes. I was born in Africa and was lucky enough to have parents who eventually ended up in the United States where I availed myself of the opportunities, etc. I am proud of my intellect and have achieved much because of it, but I would never claim that I succeeded merely because of it. I have met many smart people who were simply not as lucky as I have been to make that claim.
> and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty.
Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child. Problem is, there are many poor children in other countries who do not face these same pressures and yet, still have the same outcomes.
Parenting helps a lot. Community helps a lot. But if the lack of them were the problem, we'd see far less poverty than we do.
I'm afraid I've gone on for too long and will have lost some readers, but I hope this better explains my earlier posting and why I claimed that you did not speak from a knowledgeable position.
I appreciate your response, but I believe that your experience is based of your childhood in Africa. In our local county library we probably have 30-40 computers available for free internet access. This was not the case 10 years ago, so perhaps you should visit the public library in the area of the U.S. where you believe that there is a lack of internet access and I would be surprised if at least one computer is there with internet access that could be used. I would bet that there is, and I doubt people would be discouraged from using it.
> Tarring poor people (or any other sort, for that matter) with some sort of genetic failing is a convenient way to explain why they are less successful than you are...
You missed my point entirely, I'm afraid. I don't think that poverty is genetically linked to lack of success. Poverty is not genetic. What I was saying was that if you have a group of people that are less intelligent because they are genetically predisposed to being less intelligent, then that group has a greater likelihood of being less successful and therefore poorer.
> Here, the combination of factors listed seem to point to an urban American child.
Everything I've been arguing about is about the U.S. I am definitely not speaking about Africa or other parts of the world, and I'm sorry that you took it that way. I think that there are a lot of places in the world in worse condition than in the U.S. I am only making the arguments I make here because throwing money at poverty does not help. It must be applied with care and education and guidance are even more important, at least when people are willing to listen and be taught. Unfortunately, some cultures and peoples are not interested in changing.
The question of why poor people don't take advantage of the amenities available to them or, in other words, pull themselves up by their bootstraps (in this case, using computers with free internet access) does come up. The answer is that some do. But it is not the solution for everyone, just as it is not the solution for the rest of society. You might and I would, but I am an exception and would not expect others to follow the same paths I have.
On the issue of genetics, I understand you to be saying that only the stupid are poor. Sorry, genetics don't work that way and poor people aren't all stupid. There is just as much variation in their ranks as in others.
In any case, I think further discussion of the topic would be unproductive so I'll stop here.
> Sorry, genetics don't work that way and poor people aren't all stupid.
If you reread what I've said in multiple places in this topic, I don't think that at all. In fact, that is why I started arguing with the initial post. To summarize:
1. Being poor does not make you stupid.
2. Giving money to the poor is best handled by an organization that can ensure the money is not being abused. In the U.S., the cost of adequate administration of aid to the poor is not possible, and they do such a poor job at it that welfare is abused to the point that it is hurtful to the poor because it keeps them down and dependent on the government or worse it keeps them using drugs. Charities such as the Catholic church which gives more money and time than any other organization including the Red Cross are better fit to do this, however the growth and acceptance of atheism/child abuse by priests/the economy/several other rights (gay right to marry, pro-choice, wanting openly-gay/female priests) issues continue to lower giving without a similarly efficient organization (nuns who work for room/board without families) getting those funds.
3. I understand that not all have the opportunities I've described (libraries, computers), and I think they should. It is more common in the U.S., and one of the main reasons it isn't used as much or in the right way is due to parenting and community. I think that we need to spend more time working on all of that, not just using the welfare system (which in the U.S. is a bureaucratic mess that is unable to effectively manage how funding is allocated).
Except that welfare actually works, and despite the fact that poor people are in general poor money managers, a marginal income that improves some environmental variables goes a lon way towards improving intelligence. Especially when it translates to greater food availability.
The poor in the US do not suffer from a lack of food availability.
5.1% of poor children don't get enough to eat. For comparison, 5.7% of children above 4 x poverty line don't get enough to eat.
http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html
Food availability is a solved problem in the United States. Portraying it as a problem takes resources away from real problems which need to be solved.
If you are purchasing too many calories, you are wasting money that could be spent on veggies.
Poor parents raising their children badly is a real problem that should be solved if we want to improve the next generation. One possible solution is to constrain the food choices of the poor - replace food stamps with food boxes and fill the box with only healthy options.
In fact, the U.S. actually provides incentives for companies to use high fructose corn syrup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795478
And for those on WIC, while many crap items aren't on the WIC list, parents can still abuse it by buying things like only Cheerios for their kids to eat instead of veggies, etc. And yes, regardless of welfare, Obesity and diabetes are going to remain very common among the poor in the U.S.
Since this effect is so rapid (~100 years), it is unlikely be due to genetic changes. It's pretty clear that developmental and social factors are playing into IQ test results. Both of these are negatively affected by being born into a low income family (less access to food, learning materials, mentors, other IQ individuals, etc.).
http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/...
This causation takes time.
The amount of money at a specific moment is meaningless because it's 0% of the experimental window. Look at the average and compare it to food and necessity prices.
Growing up wealthy entails a lot more advantages than four years of courses, at that.
It is true that people with low IQs will tend to become poorer (though conscientiousness is often a bigger factor), but reversion to the mean should limit the impact of that in the children of poor people.
EDIT: Here's a rather in depth article on the topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/race-iq-and-... There's tons of evidence that at a population level wealth is the main driver of IQ differences, though genetics does play a large role at the individual level.
We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situation is that it precludes any of the normal ways that people can sort themselves into poverty - it wasn't as if there was any huge migration in Germany that made all the smarter people end up on the west side of the divide. Can you provide a causal mechanism other than poverty->low IQ that could explain that?
Or how about all the immigrants from rural Ireland that had significantly lower IQs than the residents of the cities they immigrated into, but whose children and descendants had substantially the same IQs as other residents of those cities?
There's really a mountain of evidence that the causality here runs both ways.
Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or something like that. Then we will never eliminate poverty, anyways.
To "solve" poverty I believe the big question is how to inspire people that it is possible to improve their situation? How to provide hope to poor people? In Germany I think it is intellectually realistic that anybody can improve, but people do not believe it. Essentially, (in the wealthy western world) poverty is not a technical problem, but rather an emotional one.
I do not care about IQ much. I do not know my own IQ. Since I am currently pursuing a PhD I am probably above average, but who really cares? Studies show that IQ predicts academic success, so it means something for high-education jobs. For creative tasks it's useless. Effectively, the IQ of a child only provides a hint about future career choices, but not about success or wealth.
Now, it might be that communism was crushing the hope of East Germans or something. That could also explain this particular difference. But we can measure social mobility and people's beliefs in social mobility across countries and see if it makes a difference. And as far as I can tell it doesn't, since social mobility and believe in social mobility are lower in most places today than they were in 1960, but the Flynn effect[1] continues to march on.
Having beliefs is nice and complex beliefs like those put us humans way above the vast majority of the lifeforms on this planet. But as someone pursing a PhD I would hope that you would examine the implications of your beliefs and test those implications against reality.
And IQ does have predictive power with respect to income[2], though not as strongly as other factors.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.
No.
But it does make sense to say that a 4 year old is both poor and has a low IQ because his parents do. And this applies whether you believe that his low IQ is due to heredity or a poor environment caused by his parents.
Good nutrition, stimulation, and education are all important during development. This things are all much easier to access when you have more money.
But not so important that they would have a 40 point IQ difference. If it is, show me the studies confirming that.
To start look at http://www.thewayforwardproject.org/file_uploads/Gen10%20IQ%... for a meta analysis of thousands of studies finding that the IQ difference between growing up in an orphanage and foster care averaging 20 points.
Independently, the estimated difference between average IQ in the mid-30s and today is 20 points. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect for verification. In that time period the main things that have changed are nutrition, stimulation and education.
So there you have it. Two unrelated analyses of completely different things finding that nutrition, stimulation and education can explain 20 point IQ differences between otherwise similar populations.
If intellectual capacity was purely genetic, this would make some sense. You can't buy better genes for yourself or your children. [1] However, intellectual capacity is demonstrably affected by a variety of environmental factors, including early nutrition, that themselves are strongly influenced by wealth, so we've got pretty good ideas of some of the mechanisms by which wealth influences intellectual capacity.
> In this case, I think the causation is in the other direction. Over time, people with less intellectual capacity will be less successful, and therefore poorer. That is rational. The other direction is irrational.
I think you are confusing "rationality" with fit to your preferred, non-evidence-based, model of the way the world should work.
[1] Well, except that wealth affects mate selection opportunities, so, even with purely genetic intellectual capacity, wealth could plausibly have some influence.
This is an interesting and almost 'common sense' observation about demographics. It is more difficult to thrive in a poor environment then it is to do badly out of a rich environment.
That's why we are obsessed about 'rags to riches' stories right?
"Coming Apart" is also essential reading to understand modern society.