Sunday, January 7, 2018

Danial Goleman - Are rich people smarter?

Its worth a country investing in a good education for its people because it can create a more productive country and everyone benefits. More entrepreneurs, more skilled workers, more higher pay meaning more taxes collected reducing the burden on everyone else, more people in work and paying taxes, less crime, and so on. 

The influence of the environment


In this domain, rigorous experiments have been performed, not on people but on animals. This is how the development of the brains of respectively “rich” and “poor” mice has been studied. The “rich” mice lived in small groups in cages with plenty of toys, and “poor” mice lived in bigger numbers in empty cages. The neural networks in rich mice developed much faster and their brains became notably heavier than those from their poor counterparts. The rich mice became much smarter in finding their way out of a maze. In monkeys as well, it was found that the environment has a strong influence on brain development and intelligence (1).
In humans the impact of environmental factors is even stronger, this is what is shown in a recent study involving sugar cane planters in India. These small scale peasants receive more than half of their income in one go, shortly after harvest. For part of the year they are relatively rich and they are rather poor during the other part. It appears that these peasants have more mediocre results in cognitive tests during their “poor” periods. They lose up to 13 I.Q. points, the equivalent of a sleepless night or alcoholism. Yet these are the same people, with the same brains.
Furthermore there is the Flynn effect. After the 2nd World War US citizens got an average of 100 in I.Q. tests. In 2002 the same tests, which normally involve finding solutions to abstract problems, yielded and average of 118. This is a substantial increase. This effect has been seen in all industrialised countries, including Belgium. The increase was of 3 to 5% per decade. Nowadays this effect is closer to stagnation, and in some cases in regression.

Intelligence is not a static quantity, it can (strongly) fluctuate within the same person. Furthermore the environments are susceptible to change through time. A part of the intellectual ability is determined by genetic factors, but the surrounding environment also exerts a very big influence on the intelligence.

14 comments:

Noah Way said...

Absolutely. A big inheritance makes you smart. A bigger one makes you a genius. And they'll be the very first ones to tell you so.

Matt Franko said...

He is smarter than his father hate to break the news to you...

Noah Way said...

Maybe you're not as materially trained as you think.

Tom Hickey said...

Quite evidently people should be qualified for the position they occupy. Obviously, material systems people should be occupying positions that require STEM qualification.

Equally clearly, this is not always the case, and, in fact, is often not the case.

The question arises, why?

The problem is generally the selection process rather than lack of qualified people for positions needing to be filled.

This is particularly true where politics is involved. Politics is the domain of power, and that influences selection, often more than qualification. This can be true in corporate politics as well as public. Asymmetric power is at the bottom of it, or else ignorance.

Then there is also the Peter principlee. People are often promoted beyond their level of competence.

So results are also often FUBAR.

Kaivey said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kaivey said...

Daniel Dorling is professor of geography who studies the politics of different countries. He says in his book, Injustice, how professional people give their children confidence by involving in adult conversion with other professionals. They will often have other professionals around, say for dinner, and when discussing something important they might ask their children what do they think? It gets them involved and can impart a sense of extreme importance and confidence. When they grow up they naturally take the top jobs.

Daniel Dorling says how working class people can get often get promoted to positions where they feel very insecure feeling that they are not good enough. They hide this and work very hard at the job.

Matt Franko said...

"the neural networks in rich mice developed much faster and their brains became notably heavier than those from their poor counterparts."

this is what I am talking about... you have to TRAIN HARD... it has PERMANENT cognitive effects...

"writing papers" is not training hard... sorry... you need to be assigned NUMEROUS intense exercises...

Matt Franko said...

" this is not always the case, and, in fact, is often not the case."

this is the main problem...

Look at CBO there is probably not a trained accountant among them...

those people are Poli Sci and Political Economy people who probably were staff of some Congressman on the Budget Committee who has moved on so they farm out the unemployed staffers over to CBO and those people dont know what they are doing and just apply the "govt as household!" paradigm as that is all they know...

then they proceed to lecture us on Accounting... meanwhile they never even took 101...

Matt Franko said...

Here there are 3 "experts" talking to Congress on fiscal:

http://www.crfb.org/blogs/experts-congress-we-need-fiscal-goals


Guaranteed NONE of them ever even took Accounting 101...

Noah Way said...

Material competence comes from training and experience in the material world, for example the trades, or craft. There is no "material competence" in politics unless you are measuring self-service, graft and corruption, malfeasance, etc. And economics is pretty much bullshit ideology used to enslave the masses. So the erasure of material competence there would be how effectively it achieves that end.

Not in Denmark maybe but most certainly in the US.

John said...

Are rich people smarter? Smarter at making money, by hook and usually by crook, perhaps.

Clearly they're not as smart as the great scientists, mathematicians, medical scientists etc who didn't think about money, because the work was its own reward. Trump's rich because he inherited lots of money and then succeeded in losing huge chunks of it, but he's thicker than a mountain of pig shit, which curiously enough is exactly what he resembles. Are we meant to believe Don Jr is smart because he's rich?

Tom Hickey said...

Daniel Dorling is professor of geography who studies the politics of different countries. He says in his book, Injustice, how professional people give their children confidence by involving in adult conversion with other professionals. They will often have other professionals around, say for dinner, and when discussing something important they might ask their children what do they think? It gets them involved and can impart a sense of extreme importance and confidence. When they grow up they naturally take the top jobs....

Network effects of social class. Duh.

Matt Franko said...

He didn’t win the lottery for crying out loud...

You guys value organization and management skills at ZERO which is absurd....

Football teams don’t need a coaching staff???

Kaivey said...

I missed a word out, but you all understand it anyway.

'how professional people give their children confidence by involving them in adult conversion with other professionals.'