IQ and getting ahead

Pumpkinperson (who has a blog) writes in a comment:

The whole reason IQ is so fascinating to me is that intelligent people get to the top naturally by doing smart things & avoiding dumb mistakes. Elite schools demand that smart people get ahead by doing well on an IQ test ( SAT) that gives them credentials. This takes a fascinating natural phenomenon (smart people get to the top) & reduces it to a boring socially engineered self-prophecy & prevents us from studying the phenomenon under ideal circumstances. It’s like trying to study why the fastest cheetah gets the food only to discover someone has been testing the cheetahs for speed & feeding the fast ones instead of letting them catch food themselves.

This is a rather interesting way of looking at things. I don’t necessarily agree 100% with it.

I think it’s more correct to say that unintelligent people fall to the bottom rather than intelligent people rise to the top.

I think that most top-level careers have IQ floors that prevent the less intelligent from participating, but the number of people with IQs higher than the floor exceeds the number of slots available. There are many people with high IQs working at crappy service jobs because they couldn’t get into better career tracks.

A hundred years ago there were loads of very smart Ashkenazi Jews in New York City who worked in crappy sweatshop jobs. The infamous Triangle Fire happened in 1911, which was 103 years ago. That was more than 60 years after Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, and economics hadn’t changed much during that time period.

The approximately 25 years after World War II (1945 to 1970) was an anomalous period, especially in the United States, in which there was a massive increase in the standard of living for everyone, and a majority of people with high IQs really did rise above their parents’ station in life very easily. However the progress towards a more equitable society and one in which smart people had no problem getting ahead reversed around 1970. It was a slow reversal at first, but I think that the pace of the reversal is now accelerating. A college graduate in the 1950s had no problem finding a good career, whereas in 2014 college graduates are likely to only find work at crappy service jobs unless they have connections (usually from family but extroverted college grads often find their own connections) or they graduated from the most elite colleges (and even then, connections are important).

The 25-year post WWII period has come to be seen as the normal rather than the anomaly that it actually is. This has led to a lot of bad economic theory being generated.

On HBD blogs, a lot of commenters have read The Bell Curve, and while it’s an excellent book, it appears to have given many true-believing readers the incorrect impression that IQ causes higher earnings and education doesn’t matter, but if you read between the lines of that book you will see that Murray is being an advocate for IQ rather than merely presenting the facts, and none of the empirical evidence in the book disproves the correct explanation that people with higher IQs obtain better educational credentials, and it’s the educational credentials which cause higher earnings.

As I’ve pointed out many times before, hardly any employers actually give job applicants IQ tests, thus having a high IQ doesn’t directly lead to a better career. Only if the applicant uses his IQ to accomplish something that employers value can they find good employment. And employers hiring entry-level applicants value educational accomplishments and connections, and employers hiring non-entry-level employees value accomplishments at previous jobs and connections. (Connections are usually valued because of hiring-manager laziness and dysfunctional HR departments rather than because it’s an official company policy.) Thus the normal route to a successful career in the United States is that one gets good grades from a good college, and then obtains a good entry-level job which then enables the person to obtain a better next job. And all the time, one is supposed to “network.”