Another factor is that modern meritocratic selection processes such as civil service exams or standardized exams we now have were actually adaptations from Imperial Chinese Civil Service exams which goes back centuries(Tang Dynasty onward).
As the Imperial Chinese Civil Service was considered the best route for professional and social advancement and for the most part, it relied solely on one’s exam placement, the process has had a far longer tradition in China and to an extent, other Chinese-influenced East Asian societies than was the case in the UK* or the US where one’s social class status, wealth, and/or political connections/patronage were the main/sole determinants as to who got selected for civil service positions or even private college admissions.
Caveats are that it was male only, sons who are descended from those in "mean" occupations such as prostitute, actor/actress, or dubiously regarded commoner occupations such as merchants(until 1461) for 3 generations or less were officially barred from registering for the exam, and in certain periods(i.e. Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century), one can "purchase" a lower-level degree to avoid taking lower-level exams(mainly county-level exams).....though there was a strong stigma to doing so as possessors of such degrees were viewed as using their wealth to avoid competing meritoriously by actually taking lower-level exams like everyone else in ways similar to how developmental/legacy admits to private elite colleges here in the US tend to be viewed.
** One notorious example of this was the system of purchasing officer commissions in the British army which was implemented by Charles II deliberately as a means to keep out the ambitious intelligent members of the middle and lower classes to prevent a revolutionary coup from the “lower orders” in wake of the English Civil War and the reign of Oliver Cromwell. It was also a way for the British Empire to maintain a cadre of career Army officers on the extreme cheap as their main source of income was from aristocratic/gentry landholdings or other forms of usually inherited personal wealth.
Understandable as if the only folks who could afford such commissions were the aristocrats or wealthy gentry…especially for the most socially prestigious regiments(i.e. Life Guards, Blues and Royals), they have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo of aristocratic/wealthy class dominance over the rest of British society. Only when deficiencies in the leadership qualities of British army officers became apparent during the Crimean War was this system of purchasing Army officer commissions scrutinized and abolished by 1871.
Not so sure why there seems to be this constant attack against blacks , Hispanics and other people with little financial resources.
Murray has not proven to be correct
"In August 1995, National Bureau of Economic Research economist Sanders Korenman and Harvard University sociologist Christopher Winship argued that measurement error was not properly handled by Herrnstein and Murray. Korenman and Winship concluded: “… there is evidence of substantial bias due to measurement error in their estimates of the effects of parents’ socioeconomic status. In addition, Herrnstein and Murray’s measure of parental socioeconomic status (SES) fails to capture the effects of important elements of family background (such as single-parent family structure at age 14). As a result, their analysis gives an exaggerated impression of the importance of IQ relative to parents’ SES, and relative to family background more generally. Estimates based on a variety of methods, including analyses of siblings, suggest that parental family background is at least as important, and may be more important than IQ in determining socioeconomic success in adulthood”
The list of criticism goes on and on against Murray. As stated above Murray is part of the neo facist and alt right dog whistle approach to poor people.
@OHMomof2 - Of course I did, and it is fairly typical of the criticism on the book when it was published. That criticism still does not change the fact that his projections were correct.
Quoting Paul Krugman is exactly what I mean when I said this is a political controversy rather than a scientific one. Everyone is entitled to their political views which is why I don’t want to go there. The twin studies have totally ended the scientific discussion. If you doubt this you need to read this book and many others. It is purely about the science of intelligence and genes and stays away from the less delicate wording of the Bell Curve. The scientific truth about the heritability of intelligence does unfortunately lead to some uncomfortable issues.
I am not tired of democratic socialism. I think it has a lot to offer especially to our education system
"The United Nations World Happiness Report 2013 shows that the happiest nations are concentrated in northern Europe, where the Nordic model of social democracy is employed, with Denmark topping the list. This is at times attributed to the success of the Nordic model in the region. The Nordic countries ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption. "
“According to a 2013 article in The Guardian, “Contrary to popular belief, Americans don’t have an innate allergy to socialism. Milwaukee has had several socialist mayors (Frank Zeidler, Emil Seidel and Daniel Hoan), and there is currently an independent socialist in the US Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont.” Sanders, once mayor of Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, has described himself as a democratic socialist and has praised Scandinavian-style social democracy”
The veracity of his conclusions are very self-evident. Growth in income inequality, lack of social mobility and the declining wealth and income level of the poorest Americans in the past 20 years have been well documented. If you want to argue otherwise, feel free.
The twin study does not say what you purport it to say. It says nothing about the inheritability of IQ from parent to children. It is not a scientific controversy. There is no credible evidence to back up the Murray dog whistles to the alt right. That’s why Murray probably doesn’t do peer review. He doesn’t like the scientific scrutiny it entails
OHmom the controversies you talk about are completely confined to the realm of politics and the fields of sociology. The hard science of the genetic basis of intelligence is completely settled. I challenge you to find a scientific paper that concludes that intelligence does not have a significant genetic component. The Minnesota Twin Study is not some minor thing. No serious scientist disputes its general conclusions. Are you really disputing that genetics has a major role in intelligence? The point here is that many of the behaviors aside from intelligence that Brooks discusses in his column also have a significant genetic component. This is why the MN Study was such a major landmark publication.
I think @simba9 misrepresents the past. 100 years ago Jews did extremely well on academic tests, which is part of why the Ivies went to a more holistic admissions process. 50 years ago, East Asians were doing better than Europeans on IQ tests. As to the heritability of IQ, Murray is a sidebar. There’s been multiple peer reviewed studies across multiple countries looking at identical twins, reared together and apart, and adoptions. Adult IQ seems to be at least as fixed at birth as adult height.
Well Charles Murray’s area of expertise is political science (his PhD is in PoliSci) so controversy over his work in that field is very relevant. Politics and Sociology are two places where controversy would be very relevant, actually.
It is NOT settled and in any case Murray isn’t a geneticist.
Is it Michael Jackson or Ray Bolger you are putting up in the field with this?
The question which has been bandied about for decades is how major of a role.
If we follow the arguments posed by you and like-minded folks, we’d be falling dangerously into biogenetic predeterminism which isn’t much different in form from past arguments monarchs, aristocrats, and the multi-generationed upper-classes used to justify their continued social, political, and economic dominance by citing their supposed “good breeding” and the “lower orders’” lack thereof.
And that way of thinking ended up leading to a lot of conflicts and when taken to extremes as was done by the KKK or the Nazis…oppression, violence, and unspeakable atrocities against those who were considered “lower orders” whether they’d be African-Americans in the US*…or the Jewish people, Roma, Slavs, and other “undesirables” in Nazi occupied Europe.
It’s also ironic as this form of biological predeterminism has been rejected in the East Asian and other cultures I’m familiar with. In their perspective, while having higher IQ can ease one’s route to success a bit, it is hard work, belief in oneself, and perseverance which determine the lion’s share of success.
The idea that genetics plays such a large part that it is destiny would be regarded even by those of my grandparents’ generation as an outmoded mentality more befitting those who are stuck in the mentality of the Imperial/feudal eras.
Lynchings were widespread across the US...especially in the South well into the mid-20th century.
In fact, it was considered so entertaining by many mainstream Whites of the era one can find plenty of photographs of smiling perpetrators and sympathetic bystanders…including local/regional LEOs. And let’s not forget the wholesale destruction of a section of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the violence/murder of its residents in 1921 because they happened to not only be African-American…but financially successful ones whom many local Whites felt were “too uppity” to be left alone:
Contrary to popular[citation needed] belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. In fact, according to the concept of regression toward the mean, parents whose IQ is at either extreme are more likely to produce offspring with IQ closer to the mean (or average).
Strachan, Tom; Read, Andrew (2011). Human Molecular Genetics, Fourth Edition. New York: Garland Science. pp. 80–81. ISBN 978-0-8153-4149-9.
Humphreys, Lloyd G. (1978). “To understand regression from parent to offspring, think statistically.”. Psychological Bulletin. 85 (6): 1317–1322. ISSN 0033-2909. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.85.6.1317.
Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne; Klebanov, Pamela K.; Duncan, Greg J. (1996). “Ethnic Differences in Children’s Intelligence Test Scores: Role of Economic Deprivation, Home Environment, and Maternal Characteristics”. Child Development. 67 (2): 396–408. JSTOR 1131822. PMID 8625720. doi:10.2307/1131822
The regression coefficient for parent child living apart is
Parent-child—Living apart .22 That is not very high
@say I hope this helps you understand the science behind what you are attempting to describe. If you have any questions I can point you to additional references.
@OHmomof2 gets it. Maybe you should PM her with any questions
Indeed. And sometimes, the union could end up producing children who end up being well-below the mean in practice.
One good example of this is an older college classmate who despite graduating in the top 15-20% of his boarding school class and was admitted to one Ivy as a legacy(grandparent) ended up crashing and burning so badly at our LAC that he was academically suspended for one year and his parents forced him to take a gap year to the point he ended up on the 7.5 year plan. He came from a well-to do upper-middle class family from a suburban family near the Philly Main Line…father was a highly intelligent tenured Prof…mother was an educator…both with grad degrees.
This was only underscored when while visiting the family, I witnessed the father scolding his son about how is it my academic performance was so much better than his despite coming from a lower-income background and attending an urban public school(albeit a public magnet) in contrast to the $20k+(in late 1980’s/early '90s dollars)/year boarding school his son attended and that the son wasted the educational opportunities offered by his family.