I’ve been very busy the past week or so. There’s a lot I could blog, but I just don’t have the time. I should mention that I’m now reading my friend Garett Jones’ book Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own. It’s a good complement to Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Reading them in sequence reminds me of how One Explanation to Rule Them All is usually not a good fit with reality broken down into its more complex bits. I’m about ~2/3 of the way through Garett’s book, and it’s a pretty quick read. I feel a bit bad for Garett though because he has to spend so much time justifying the utility of intelligence testing (much of it reads like Intelligent: All That Matters). Like The Secret of Our Success I’d really recommend Hive Mind if you have a background that’s outside of its core area of economics and psychometrics; there’s a lot you’ll learn, and it’s not a heavy lift.
One the issues that Garett mentions in Hive Mind is that IQ is only a modest (though robust) predictor of income. This explains why there are so many stupid people who happen to be well off, and vice versa. Much of where you end up in life is stochastic, in addition to other factors like personal background (i.e., “connections”), appearance, and personality. That being said when looking at groups of people as a unit IQ is much more predictive. It strikes me that this is just a lot of the random/stochastic effects being cancelled out, as they’re not systematically biased. I think there’s a relationship here to the dynamics that Greg Clark explored in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. While Garett surveys spatial patterns, Greg was highlighting temporal (inter-generational) patterns.
What else is going on?
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