Month: January 2016

IQ and Permanent Income: Sizing Up the “IQ Paradox”

In his recent book Hive Mind economist Garett Jones argues that the direct effect of IQ on personal income is modest, and that most of the benefits of higher IQ flow from various spillover effects that make societies more productive, boosting everyone’s income. This, he says, explains the “IQ paradox” whereby IQ differences appear to explain a lot more of the economic differences between nations than within them.

Jones does not say in his book what he thinks the exact effect of IQ on personal income is, but on Twitter he has asserted that “Fans of g would do well to look at the labor lit: 1 IQ point predicts just 0.5% to 1.2% higher wages.” He has also said that, in terms of standardized effect sizes, IQ accounts for only about 10% of variance in personal income (a correlation of ~0.32).

While I don’t doubt Jones’s overall thesis that the effect of IQ on productivity is broader than its effect on personal productivity or income, I think he understates the importance of IQ in explaining income differences between individuals. I analyzed a large American population sample and found a substantially larger effect of IQ on permanent income than previous investigations. It appears that the literature Jones refers to has failed to pay sufficient attention to various measurement issues. Continue reading

The Evolutionary Default Hypothesis and Negative HBD

Jayman (2016) argues:

There is no reason to suspect that human groups that have been separated for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments would be the same in all their cognitive and behavioral qualities. In fact, a priori we should expect them not to be, since such equivalence after so many generations of separate evolution is nigh impossible.

We can quantify the expectation.

When it comes to quantitative genetic trait differences between populations, the evolutionary default expectation is that differences will be commensurate with the degree of drift (not to be equated with neutral mutations). For diploids, the formula is:

VA G,B = 2FST*VA, C
where,

VA G,B is the genetic variance between groups
VA, C is the additive genetic variance in a common ancestral population
2FST is 2 times the fixation index with respect to low mutation rate biallelic polymorphs of the type that underlie the traits in question (see: Edelaar and Björklund, 2011) Continue reading

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