Taxi driver is not a job for the stupid …
There are oodles of different types of intelligence (or talents if one doesn’t want to call them intelligences). Someone can be a terrific taxi driver, but not so great at other jobs.
Not only does one need the aptitude for a job, they also need tactful people skills appropriate for it (any job). Specifics of those qualities vary based upon the job. Poverty can come from lack of either. Success comes from finding the right niche for the person - and hoping it pays enough.
Then there are the other issues that can be involved - medical issues (physical or mental), childcare needs, transportation needs, housing needs, etc.
Personally (generally due to my job at high school) I know a fair number of humans with decent intelligence who lack the people skills, but there are more who lack the aptitude for higher paying jobs. Still, either can lead to poverty level living.
There’s a definite advantage to having a family above the poverty level. There’s quite a bit of education that happens outside of school - if one knows how to provide it and/or can afford to provide it. Kids who don’t get those opportunities tend to figure out at a fairly young age that they “aren’t as good” as their peers. They may very well be just as able, but having a low perception of themselves sure doesn’t help.
You don’t have to be intelligent to make money–even to make a lot of money. Look how many wealthy politicians right now don’t understand what a marginal tax rate is.
@SatchelSF That is a huge crock of racist, classist, and self congratulatory bull invented by privileged to hide the system that keeps them wealthy at the expense of anybody who is not from their race, class, or religion.
Denial of the benefits of the GI Bill, which allowed so many White people to rise from poverty, from African Americans. So while White people were able to buy new houses in the new suburbs with new modernized schools, and new clinics and hospitals with the newest gadgets and medical treatments, African Americans were left in poor neighborhoods in rental houses, with underfunded, dilapidated, and out of date schools, poor healthcare, and few other services.
Then, anybody who stayed in the “slums” were removed the the horrors which were the “projects”, where there was no work, no heating, no air-conditioning, no working elevators, and no home equity, not to mention schools that were worse than useless. So, while White people by their millions were given the opportunity to enter the middle class, Blacks and other minorities were kept in poverty, and barred from making their lives any better.
All this, you would have us believe, is “low intelligence”.
Families in rural West Virginia, with crappy schools, almost non-existent healthcare the only jobs available being back-breaking coal mining jobs, with terrible safety standards, and even these are disappearing. They can’t move anywhere, because their terrible education means that they have no marketable skills, and can’t afford either the move, or rental until they can get a job.
I guess this because they’re all stupid, right?
Anybody with a good middle class job who get seriously ill, will lose most of their savings because healthcare is so awful here, and, if they can’t work for more than a couple weeks, they’ll lose their jobs, and eventually everything. Their children now cannot afford to finish school, much less go to college.
I guess that these people are also suffering from “low intelligence”, right?.
Jews lived in rank poverty in Europe for centuries, because they were stupid, right? I guess that the ones that made it to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century and lived in the tenements of the Lower East Side of NY also suffered from a lack of intelligence, right?. I guess that some magician suddenly gifted Jews with intelligence when almost all of their kids broke out of poverty and moved into the middle class and upwards. Or was it the fact that the kids could mostly pass as White and gain access to the services generally reserved for White Christians? I guess we’ll never know.
Here’s a fun fact - people who claimed that the fact that the Jews who came were poor because they were stupid was what caused the USA to bar Jewish immigrants who were trying to escape the Nazis from coming into the USA, condemning them to death. Yes, the argument that people are poor because they have low intelligence was the excuse used to leave millions of Jews to be murdered by the Nazis.
I guess that when the WASPs made it easier for rich WASP kids to get into the Ivies than it was for Jews, by adding “legacy” to the admissions, it was because the rich WASPs were smarter than the poor Jews, right? Poor Jews weren’t as intelligent as the Rich White kids, that is why Jews did better on entrance exams, I guess, because, evidently Rich = Smart, right?
As for Linda Gottfredson - she does a lot of “research” to support White Supremacy. She is a rich White woman from generations of Rich White Christians, who is doing her best to “prove” that White people deserve to be in control of everything because they are smarter. She is a racist sociologist pretending to be a real scientist, covering her racist pseudoscience with a thin layer of scientific jargon to hide it’s true nature. Her work is mostly funded by the Pioneer Fund, a White supremacist organization which advocates for Eugenics.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/pioneer-fund
The main people who cite her work are either debunking it, or using it to forward racist agendas.
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^ Yawn, same old, same old…
@MWolf, your screed no doubt makes you feel good about yourself, but does nothing to advance a discussion about how to alleviate poverty. I made no mention of race, and I certainly harbor no feelings of anti-semitism; rather, I admire the Jewish people, and think that the broad history of (Ashkenazi) Jews in Europe and the United States demonstrates the centrality of intelligence to economic success in the face of, at times, massive and tragic racism and discrimination.
Not that it matters, but I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on at least some of the conditions faced by people in “poor neighborhoods in rental houses, with underfunded, dilapidated, and out of date schools, poor healthcare, and few other services,” having grown up myself in one of them, and spending much of my childhood and all my adolescence in a single parent (divorced) family dependent on welfare. It was the Bronx in the 1970s. (In those times there were actually still some poor, mostly older Jews around who had started on the Lower East Side but who hadn’t made it out to Westchester. The myth of course that all Jews are wealthy is probably even more damaging than the converse that Jews in Europe as a group lived in “rank poverty for centuries,” though of course at times many did.)
And imagine, even though I am (mostly) white and Christian, no one in my extended family, including nine uncles and aunts, had entered college prior to me, most never having even finished high school (including my own parents, who dropped out in the 10th and 11th grades). Somehow white privilege passed me by. Perhaps it was because of my partial Hispanic heritage.
It’s not about racism. Each race has a distribution of income and wealth. Unfortunately, I think the perhaps insurmountable challenge faced by people of good conscience today is to ignore the siren song of virtue signalling and get on with figuring out how to help people in poverty.
@SatchelSF While I applaud your ability to escape poverty, you are wrong in many of your claims. First, if you noticed While I pointed to the racist policies that stuck African Americans in poverty, I also used the example of Coal mining towns in West Virginia, which are predominantly White. I am showing how racism contributes to poverty, but it isn’t the only thing. lack of education in rural areas, lack of investment in education nationwide, an awful healthcare system, are also contribute to poverty
That being said, the claims of “everybody who wants to can stop being poor” in the USA is usually made by White people, which also matches the myth that most of the lowest income Americans are minorities. The person you cited gets her funding for these studies from a racist organization with the purpose of using her results for a racist agenda.
You also are making the exact same mistake that many make. The point of White Privilege is not that being white means that you are rich and successful, it is that it does give you an additional boost, compared to an African American in your exact same situation. There are a whole bunch of other types of privilege which you dis not have, such as wealth. There is privilege in being Christian, in being male, in being healthy. All of the things that make somebody’s life easier but that they haven’t earned.
A poor White man is in a better situation than a poor Black man or a poor White woman. A poor White man isn’t in a better situation, usually, than a wealthy Black man.
For example, I have the privilege of growing up in an educated family, and in a country which provided me the opportunity for a cheap undergraduate degree in a world-class university. So, even though I came back here with almost nothing, I did very well, and it was obvious from the beginning that I would. Somebody coming form a poor town without a decent education is much more likely to get caught in poverty and unable to get out.
The best way to alleviate poverty are:
A. Minimum wage that is a living wage.
B. Free healthcare for kids, and affordable healthcare for everybody
C. Free high quality K-12 education. Basically, get rid of private schools, and require that every school have the same resources. Schools also provide meals. so kids don’t go hungry, whatever the situations of their parents are.
When all kids get the same opportunities, healthcare, aren’t hungry, etc., we can start saying something about what they end up doing. When having a medical condition doesn’t cause people to lose everything, when people who work full time can actually provide a middle class life, which won’t be lost due to health issues, we can talk about how working can help get a good life.
As for “intelligence”, it is ridiculous to think that something as complex as human cognition can be boiled down to a single number. Anybody who understands data analysis will understand how ludicrous that is. It is like trying to decide which house is “best”. It is meaningless - is a house with many bedrooms “better” than a house with a huge kitchen? Is a house with a huge kitchen highly ranked by a person who doesn’t cook? Is a bigger house better? There are many factors that describe a house, and any ranking of them is only in the context of what somebody wants, and each are on a different scale. Same for cognitive abilities. Aside from how you can actually measure most of them, how do you compare a great musician to a great physicist. How about somebody who is pretty good in six different things versus somebody who is amazing in one? Even mathematical abilities differ substantially. I can do snap calculations in my head, while my wife, a mathematician, needs to write everything down.
So does an IQ of 150 mean that somebody is great at math? A great writer? Great at figuring out how to measure the size of the universe? Or. perhaps, they trained for a year to do the IQ tests, and are now very good at IQ tests, but not very creative, and so unable to to write a book, do doctoral research, or compose a great song.
Everybody who has ever tried to develop a single measurement for what they claim is “innate intelligence” has always a single purpose in kind - to prove that one group (their own) is more intelligent than other groups. In the USA it has usually been based on race, while Brits also include class. Any such measurement developed in Japan will likely “prove” that Japanese score highest, while Chinese will show that Han Chinese are the smartest, etc.
Read Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man”, it’s illuminating.
PS. How would you go about helping people in poverty?
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Fun debate, @MWolf, but as this is not a debating society, I’ll have to desist here 
But good Lord, Steven Gould? You have not read much in the literature if you are citing him at this stage of the game. Start here with this almost decade old NYT article, if you really think Gould has any influence anymore: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
On intelligence, for a reasoned, scholarly examination of what we know and don’t know about the question, you can start with the standard Hunt text. Everyone does. Happy reading!
I think it’s quite believable that the poorest people are of lower intelligence as measured by typical tests-I imagine that poor nutrition, cramped quarters, inability to access quality healthy care, lack of strong family history of advanced education, etc., and on and on and on could negatively impact their performance.
But are they poor because they are less “intelligent,” or are they less intelligent because they are (and their families have been) living in poverty, quite likely for generations?
Except you didn’t.
@SatchelSF I know that we’re having fun, but I think that we’ll piss off the moderators if we keep this up.
One last thing - NewYork Times is not a source you should use to determine what actual scientists are considering to be accurate or not. They’ve provided numerous a platform for pseudoscience and bad science too many times for that. As for that particular claim, very little was riding on that particular claim of Gould’s. To quote the news release by UPenn “But, he points out, that finding almost doesn’t matter.” Claiming that an entire set of work is debunked just because one part of one independent piece of work is inaccurate is a logical fallacy, and you should know that. It’s like Holocaust deniers claiming that the Holocaust didn’t take place because the claim that the Nazis made soap from human fat was debunked.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/new-take-on-infamous-Morton-skulls
PS. It’s Stephen Gould - I think that his parents wanted a fancier spelled name…
My grandfather was obviously very smart but would have scored dismally low on a standard intelligence test. He was born poor and had to drop out of school on his 12th birthday to go to work. His wife, my grandmother, was considered genetically too stupid to take care of herself and was born a ward of the government. Their son, given opportunities his parents never had, graduated HS at 16, went to Berkeley, and retired as a college professor.
He did not “pull himself up by his own bootstraps.” He was accorded opportunities his parents never had, good public schools with no racist barriers blocking him. His “IQ” would have tested 30 or 40 points higher than his parents. He was not born with an anomalous brain that was magically better.
Yes, their IQ difference correlates to their lifetime earnings. No, it had nothing to do with their genetics or their brain processing capacity, and everything to do with racism and poverty.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Not shocking at all to me based upon thread title, but the discussion has devolved into debate, some of it less-than-pleasant. Closing thread.