Intelligence

Here is a fact which is probably politically incorrect to admit, but is true anyway: people on average just aren’t very smart. Unlike the children in Lake Woebegone, half of the American public are below average in intelligence (and a good portion probably don't even get the Lake Woebegone joke).

Intelligence is a complex, poorly understood, many-faceted attribute, and intelligence tests are therefore imperfect. They are culturally biased, and tend to favor left-brain tasks. But they are nevertheless pretty good predictors of success in our culture because our culture tends to reward left-brain activities. Intelligence tends to be distributed in a “bell curve” around the average, just as are most physical attributes, like height or weight. Intelligence tests are calibrated so that the center point or average of this bell curve is at 100, and the standard deviation is about 15. The diagram below shows the bell curve divided into standard deviations, with the proportion of the population in each segment.

In general, success in undergraduate college work requires an IQ at least one standard deviation above the average (about 115 or higher), though certainly there are exceptions. Success in medical school, law school, graduate work in math or sciences or engineering or computer programming, or executive management generally requires a somewhat higher IQ, although again there are individual exceptions. That implies that only about 1/3 of the general population has the mental ability to succeed in these higher-skill and higher paying fields. This is a reality that no amount of political posturing, class warfare or political correctness can avoid.

Lots of factors can produce lower intelligence. Unfortunate genes are certainly one cause, as are prenatal damage in the womb from the mother’s malnutrition or drug abuse. Lack of adequate intellectual stimulation and/or malnutrition (the two often go together) in early childhood can lower intelligence, as can drug or alcohol abuse.

Now until the industrial revolution most people worked on farms, and it doesn’t take an especially high IQ to herd sheep or cattle, follow a horse-drawn plow, chop down trees, build wooden buildings or pick crops. Nor did it take exceptional intelligence to drive a wagon, crew a sailing ship, or load and fire a musket in the army. So there was plenty of adequately-paying work for people at the lower end of the intelligence distribution.

And even when the industrial revolution arrived, there were plenty of jobs on factory assembly lines, or driving vehicles, or in manual labor for those with less than average intelligence.

The social disruption we now face is that our increasingly-complex technologically advanced society has fewer and fewer jobs available for that majority of the population who are not intellectually capable of the higher-skill, higher-paying jobs in the technology and information industries. Increasingly factory robots are displacing the few lower-skilled people still left on the assembly lines.

It is of course politically incorrect to discuss this reality, and certainly it is in bad taste. But discuss it we must, because it poses one of the most difficult problems our society faces – how to gainfully employ, at a reasonable living wage, that majority of the population who (often through no fault of their own) lack the intellectual capacity to succeed in the higher-skill jobs. No amount of political demagoguery is going to change this distribution of intelligence, nor the social problems it poses.

Security???

Since 9/11 we have now spent billions of dollars on new security systems around the nation. Has it been worth it?

July 28^th three peace activists, including an 82 year old nun, cut through the security fences around the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility — a new windowless, half-billion-dollar building encircled by enormous guard towers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- splashed the building with blood and hung banners on it, and were not noticed by the multi-million dollar security network of sensors and cameras and security patrols until they walked up to a police car and voluntarily gave themselves up.

August 10^th Daniel Casillo was on a jet ski in Jamaca Bay, just off of John F. Kennedy airport when it broke down.  He swam ashore, and despite all the security cameras and sensors climbed the airport fence, and walked dripping wet all the way across the airport and the airport runways to the Delta terminal, trying all the way to get noticed and rescued. Yet the multi-million dollar security system didn’t pick him up until he went up to a baggage handler and asked for help.

Government agencies testing the TSA system by trying to smuggle guns or knives past the inspectors report success about 70% of the time at some major airports. In December 2010 Houston businessman Farid Sief accidentally brought his loaded pistol on a flight from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport. The TSA never found it, even though it was in his briefcase and should have shown up clearly in the X-ray examination. In the same month the TSA’s new director admitted that every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some of the airports tested.

What does this tell us?

It tells us what we have all suspected anyway going through the TSA inspections at airports – much of this money has been spent for show rather than for effective security.

Pirates buy more music

Here is an interesting study by the American Assembly at Columbia University , summarized in the chart below.

Fundamentally it shows that the very people who pirate music online are also the people who buy more music through legitimate channels. Looking at the data it makes sense -- people who love music get it any way they can, legitimate and/or pirated; people who don't care about music obviously don't care about pirating it either.

I suspect the same pattern is true for e-books.

But it does pose a cautionary tale for the recording industry when they go after music downloaders -- they may well be persecuting/prosecuting their own best customers, which might not be such smart marketing.

Bullying in schools

One of my granddaughters just showed me a paper she has written as an assignment in her writing class.  It is on bullying in schools, and presents a sobering picture, backed up by studies, of how pervasive this problem is in our schools.

Of course, schools in general are doing very little about the problem -- as little as they can get away with without being sued by parents.  I guess the idea is that bullying is just something that kids do, and kids need to get used to it -- get "hardened up" against such abuse.  And in any case, teachers and administrators feel they don't have the time to attend to such problems unless they get really out of hand (like after a suicide!).

Now what struck me is that among adults, such bullying in the form of sexual or racial harassment, or threatening behavior, is against the law in the workplace in this country.  Companies can lose lawsuits for millions if they don't maintain a safe, non-threatening workplace, or if they don't intervene promptly and aggressively against inappropriate behavior.

So why is it that we protect adults by law from such behavior, but don't feel it necessary to protect our much more vulnerable kids from such behavior?

Why Obama’s “Tax the rich more” argument doesn’t make sense

President Obama has pushed his “tax the wealthy more” argument all through this campaign, and it is certainly an appealing populist position. “Robbing Peter to pay Paul” will always seem like a good idea to Paul.

Leave aside the point that taking the entire annual income of the fabled top 1% would make a hardly noticeable dent in the federal deficit, so that President Obama’s proposal does almost nothing to solve the real deficit and debt problem we face.

The real problem is much deeper than that. Think about the logic of the economy.   Companies, big or small, who want to expand their business or invest in a new product or line of business go to the bank and borrow money (or float bonds or sell stock, which is much the same thing, borrowing directly from the bond or stock holder) to finance the expansion or new investment. But where does the bank get the money to loan? It comes from people who put money into the bank in the first place as savings.   If nobody saved in the bank, the bank would have no money to loan.

Who provides most of the money saved in the bank (or invested in bonds or stock)?  Not the poor -- they need all their money for day-to-day living.  Most of the money put into the bank (or invested directly into bonds or stocks) comes from the only people who have more money than they need to use right away – the “rich” that Obama wants to tax. Oh, and average people’s pension funds are also a source of much of the investment money as well, so even many of the 99% are in this game indirectly.

So if the government taxes that money away from the wealthy instead of leaving it for them to put into the bank or invest in stocks or bonds, there is that much less money available in the system for businesses to expand or start up new businesses. This might not matter so much if the government turned around and used that money taxed from “the rich” to loan to businesses for their expansions and start-ups.  But mostly the government doesn’t do that – it spends almost all the money for its own purposes, which usually have nothing to do with helping businesses finance their expansions or new start-ups.

European governments tax the wealthy far more than we do, and European governments have much, much less vital economies. Of course European governments do many other things which also inhibit their economies, but this is surely a major contributor.

Like so many things, “taxing the rich more” sounds appealing to people who don’t think the economic problem through beyond the first step.  But it is counterproductive.  Far more effective, if President Obama really wants to help the system, would be to clean up the tax code, which is some 71,684 pages (as of 2010) of nightmare complexity, riddled with special deals for interests groups and favored corporations, supporting thousands of (very expensive) tax accountants and tax lawyers, not to mention thousands of IRS bureaucrats, none of who contribute anything tangible or productive to the nation's wealth.

Education best practices

Regarding the comments I have made in recent posts about the poor quality of American K-12 education, a document worth looking at is Successful Schools: From Research to Action Plans.  It summarizes the best practices identified in a number of studies, and proposes a means to implement them effectively.