If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percentIQ is not the problem. Patience/ability to defer gratification/culture is.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
HBD watch
The line from Amy Wax that I referenced yesterday is particularly interesting:
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2 comments:
"IQ is not the problem. Patience/ability to defer gratification/culture is."
My understanding is that this is almost impossible to determine because: 1) measuring patience is tough and 2) it's highly correlated with IQ.
So, it's like saying "IQ doesn't matter, being good at your job matters." The problem is that having a high IQ means, all else equal, that you're going to be good at your job.
Patience seems about as correlated with IQ as genes are -- on the order of 50%.
There are high-IQ folks with low patience, and low IQ folks with high patience. Though, unsurprisingly, they go together often. Hell, IQ is positively correlated with beauty.
Regardless...they are highly correlated, but they appear to be distinct, separately varying factors.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that culture has a MUCH bigger role to play in patience than in IQ.
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