Comment about poverty
Belliavsky’s comment was published at the NY Times:
The words “IQ” or “intelligence” never appear in this article, although The Bell Curve documented the correlation between IQ and income. There are some explanations that the author considers taboo.
Liberals will just say that poverty causes the low IQ.
Someone responded with a comment that says “There are millions of brilliant poor people.” That is wrong. “Poor people” doesn’t just mean people without much money, because that would include college students. “Poor people” really means people without much money who cause problems for their neighbors and for society. “Brilliantly” intelligent people rarely if ever cause problems for anyone unless they are mentally ill. So they are never considered to be “poor people.”
It would be more accurate to say that a strong majority of the brilliantly intelligent are not especially wealthy, and a surprisingly high percentage of them are financially struggling. I would agree with that statement.
Lion of the Blogosphere 
Theoretically, I agree with this post, butif you take into account what (for lack of a better term) is called “street smarts,” it is hard to deny that there are plenty of highly intelligent criminals. For example, I’m sure it actually takes a relatively high level of intelligence to get away with defrauding the government and corporations, and yet there are hundreds, maybe thousands of “poor people” who make their living that way.
Howitzer_Joe
September 5, 2014 at 1:57 PM
Yes, I am sometimes amazed at the efforts and creativity that NAMs show when defrauding the government. But, most of that fraud is not all that sophisticated (i.e. simply filing false paper work to obtain government benefits and services; stealing mail & old ladies’ pocketbooks to obtain IDs; the data entry clerk stealing patient and customer data from doctors’ offices and government social service agencies and then opening up credit or filing fraudulent income tax returns). But it’s not all that difficult to do when the government isn’t trying to hard to stop from being defrauded by NAMs.
On the other had, it seems like the large hundred million – billion dollar scams are committed by high-intelligence Jews (e.g. Madoff, Rothstein, Shapiro, Frankel, Stein, Pearlman, Israel, Schrenker, Weiss, Nadel, etc.); at least that’s what I see on CNBC’s “American Greed” every night. But, in the end, most of these frauds are nothing more than Ponzis.
E. Rekshun
September 5, 2014 at 3:05 PM
I have this argument with well meaning bobo’s all the time. They drag out studies showing low heritability of iq in little kids and then lalala over other work that shows it increases with age.
There’s a distinct difference in behaviour between low income but intelligent, and disorganised low IQ individuals. Spending control, planning and generally improving situation distinguishes the IQ group from the low. Of course other factors like poor health or a crashed economy affect them both negatively.
Liberals get stressed at any hereditary cause of IQ for wealth as they think this will be used as an excuse to cut funding to educational resources for the children of the poor/other races. Although some do cling on ilke grim death to the Marxist theory that ‘everything is a result of environment’ like it’s their religion.
Mathilda37
September 5, 2014 at 2:22 PM
Marx never wrote about nature vs nurture.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 5, 2014 at 5:36 PM
probably meant Cultural Marxism
grey enlightenment
September 5, 2014 at 5:47 PM
Well, communist then.
Mathilda37
September 5, 2014 at 6:03 PM
Good on Lion for that.
In America, and nowhere else, Marx has ceased to be a 19th century idealist philosopher who was patronized and collaborated with a German industrialist Engels.
Rather he has become Satan himself. Funny, if it weren’t so pernicious.
Yes folks! Marx was NOT a materialist in any Richard Dawkins sort of way.
Duke of Leinster
September 6, 2014 at 12:49 AM
There are millions of brilliant poor people.”
Heh, I got a kick out of that. It’s not totally wrong, as Howitzer Joe points out. And I’m sure there are plenty of brilliant people living in abject poverty in the third world where just having a higher than average IQ just wouldn’t mean much when you are trapped in societies with little access to clean water, let alone education or economic opportunity.
But in the First World, that’s not really the case. Everyone I’ve known who’s poor has either been dumb or made dumb decisions. There was often a combination of the two.
Mike Street Station
September 5, 2014 at 2:32 PM
Haredi Jews are and were an example of people who either aren’t dumb or have the potential not to be, but live outside their surrounding societies.
I can imagine there are smart people who belong to no such religious group who have chosen the same isolated life, like that (fictional) radio show host on the sitcom Northern Exposure.
Chomsky is an arrant HBDer. His whole bs theory of language hangs on it. But his criticism of the Bell Curve was…it would be true if all anyone ever wanted was status.
Duke of Leinster
September 6, 2014 at 12:55 AM
“Poor people” really means people without much money who cause problems for their neighbors and for society.
It’s been said before, but this is why it’s important to get on a well-paying career track – in order to be able to afford to move away from “poor people.”
E. Rekshun
September 5, 2014 at 2:47 PM
People impoverished in IQ points are poor, but a different type of poor They lack the cognitive capital to advance.
grey enlightenment
September 5, 2014 at 2:58 PM
Thanks for highlighting my NYT comment. They have published even stronger comments. For the article “America’s Racial Divide” documenting the usual “disparities” they published the following:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/upshot/americas-racial-divide-charted.html?abt=0002&abg=1#permid=12596956
Beliavsky Boston 17 days ago
We don’t know that whites and blacks will have equal outcomes in the absence of discrimination. As New York Times reporter has documented in his recent book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History”, there is an IQ difference of about one standard deviation between American whites and blacks. This alone will lead to substantial differences in outcomes such as average income and level of education.
Beliavsky
September 5, 2014 at 3:12 PM
That was smart to quote a NY Times reporter!
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 5, 2014 at 5:42 PM
this is a sign of progress
grey enlightenment
September 5, 2014 at 6:10 PM
…in the absence of discrimination…
Although there IS discrimination against blacks, this is a very small part of their (non-hbd) problems. Even drawling good ol’ boys would welcome a very smart black…I hope.
It’s an “unknown known” of most conservatives and liberals that black culture is blameless or that culture is just an epiphenomenon of the blood (the foremost Nazi tenet). One exception is the RC (but divorced) Indian conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza.
And Africans (from Africa) do well in the US. Don’t they? They’re an elite obviously, but at the same time they bring some culture with them. Slaves lost whatever culture they may have had.
Africa is crap, but so was Germany in Aristotle’s time, especially when compared to Athens. In fact, Germany was crap compared to Persia (modern Iran).
And it’s not a myth…there was a brief period when the whole of Europe was crap compared to the Caliphate.
Of course some exceedingly silly HBDers like Jayman will claim that’s ’cause the Germans evolved.
And the Earth was created in six days…whatever…
Duke of Leinster
September 6, 2014 at 1:14 AM
It’s hard to immigrate here from Africa given the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean, so we get Africa’s better half.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 6, 2014 at 10:14 AM
Also, compare USA to Rennaissance England, we were just neolithic agriculture and hunter gatherers, and now we surpass England’s GDP.
Toad
September 6, 2014 at 5:42 PM
Tesla died alone and penniless. I read the theory somewhere that the ultra-intelligent are actually more likely to be disenfranchised and poor than the merely highly intelligent.
slithy toves
September 5, 2014 at 4:48 PM
Terman claimed to find that his very brightest did tend to be “maladjusted”. But all his subjects had tested at 140 or higher (as children). His very highest means what? There may not have been enough to establish a pattern.
But,
1. the number of people who would blame their problems on this far exceeds the number who are actually that smart
2. one needn’t look for some pathology. The very smart are weird not absolutely but by definition, and therefore may go their whole lives never meeting anyone like themselves.
3. HBDers and other conservi-tards will try to “explain” this with the individualist ideology, that is if the very very smart underachieve it MUST be because there’s something (absolutely) wrong with them.
Duke of Leinster
September 6, 2014 at 1:22 AM
It may be that more than a century ago, society was much better for high-IQ people than it is today.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 6, 2014 at 10:14 AM
From wikipedia:
Lewis Terman
In 1921, Terman initiated the Genetic Studies of Genius, a long-term study of gifted children. He found that gifted children did not fit the existing stereotypes often associated with them: they were not weak and sickly social misfits, but in fact were generally taller, in better health, better developed physically, and better adapted socially than other children.
Toad
September 6, 2014 at 7:59 PM
Lion and the Pride (his readers) will find this NYT article extremely interesting:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/your-fate-thank-your-ancestors/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
Very HBD.
uatu
September 5, 2014 at 4:51 PM
How can that be?
Easy. It isn’t. Or the “American Dream” has always been a LIE.
America’s intergenerational income elasticity is lowest or near it in the developed world. It might be worse in that damp dump off the coast of Europe, the UK. It might even be worse in Italy.
What’s Italy’s excuse? It’s got hardly any immigration. Maybe it goes away when Italy is divided into the two countries it really is.
And corrected for race and geography the US wouldn’t be that bad? Well every other country would have to be so corrected too. Canada and Australia are both huge countries but with Scandinavian like iie. But then again the Australian accent is uniform. There is no Perth, Darwin, Cairns, Melbourne, Adelaide, or Hobart accent. Is there? (Maybe a Hobart accent.) Is that true in Canada too? Not quite. There is a very British Newfoundland accent and the Quebecois. So America has no excuse.
Intergenerational income elasticity has not decreased since the 70s in the US? And since the 50s?
Duke of Leinster
September 6, 2014 at 1:43 AM
No longer true. Brussels has decided to force Italy to accept African boat people. It’s the reverse situation from what we’ve been hearing lately out of Australia. My California Sicilian friend, who just came back from visiting his family on the Africa-facing Sicilian coast, says that his town of 4,000 just got about 2000 blacks. They wander the streets all day and get food and shelter paid from Rome. The town has a police force of 4, which has been instructed not to bother them.
tiny blades
September 6, 2014 at 8:45 PM
Never mind. This is that douche Gregory Clark again.
Did he set his criteria for assigning a number to “status” before his researches?
And hey I’d benefit from this pseudoscience as I’m a direct descendant of William Bradford and a family which has been socially prominent since the 18th c.
Whatever.
Listen to Clark. You’ll peg him IMMEDIATELY.
Here’s a HUGE heads up to all “conservatives”:
Even if you are among the elite in the Anglo-sphere you are all arrivistes. You come from stock who bitched and moaned about their lack of opportunity. But once you arrived you INSTANTLY pulled up the ladder behind you.
Maybe The Lords had a point when they opposed Lloyd-George and before him the colonists—proles.
Give me professional wrestling or give me death!
Duke of Leinster
September 6, 2014 at 1:58 AM
John Gotti had an IQ of 110. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of poor people who make or supplement their incomes through things like bank fraud and welfare scams aren’t a whole lot smarter than your average auto mechanic, and have IQs between 100 and 110. The person who comes up with whatever type of scam in the first place probably has an IQ above 110, but their scams are easily copied and primarily used by less intelligent people.
I agree with Lion. There simply aren’t millions of “brilliant” poor people in the US. It’s hard for me to think that anyone who’s actually lived around poor people or who’s had a lot of experience dealing with them could genuinely believe otherwise.
Robert
September 5, 2014 at 5:44 PM
^that was meant to be a reply to the first comment from Howitzer_Joe
Robert
September 5, 2014 at 5:48 PM
In poor neighborhoods (and even not so poor ones) the street culture is dominated by the stupidest and most antisocial people. The relatively well socialized people in those neighborhoods don’t want to put up with that behavior so just stay inside and effective cede the public sphere. You could get a feel for this effect just by looking at average age of observed people and comparing it to the actual average for the area. I’m sure the observed average would be way lower than the actual one.
Howie Stern
September 6, 2014 at 12:27 AM
I live in the real life Fishtown that Murray wrote about in ‘Coming Apart.’ The proles who live here have been here for generations and proles of all ages are constantly on the street. One thing I’ve noticed about white prole neighborhoods is that many proles feel a need to be CONSTANTLY outdoors whenever it’s above 40 degrees and it isn’t raining.
Not all Fishtown proles are terrible people, although a lot of them are very mean, and not all of them are stupid, but IMO they’re significantly less intelligent than middle class people and I find it hard to believe that there are lots of highly intelligent proles in prole neighborhoods who simply aren’t noticed because they choose to stay indoors.
Robert
September 7, 2014 at 6:57 PM
The American Middle Class is for the most part “prole”. Anyone whose priority is about “getting a job” or “earning a paycheck” is a prole.
Even among Academics/Professors, the ones who “bitch” about not making enough money from Academia, tend to teach at the less prestigious colleges and universities.
Proles love to rag on intellectual types: “these people got the wrong PhDs”, when sh*tting on them about their job prospects. They know nothing of the process of earning one, which is tedious and requires years of research and writing, not fully understanding that people who pursue doctorates are in it for the passion, not to make a direct living out of it.
JS
September 7, 2014 at 8:52 PM
“intelligent people rarely if ever cause problems for anyone unless they are mentally ill. “
There’s a reference in The Bell Curve that violent crime is more closely associated with IQ than income. Smart poor people have violent crime rates similar to smart wealthy people and vice versa.
destructure
September 6, 2014 at 12:58 AM
“Brilliantly” intelligent people rarely if ever cause problems for anyone unless they are mentally ill. So they are never considered to be “poor people.”
This explains why so many smart people are liberals/libertarians. They assume everyone is smart, because they’re smart, and everyone they know is smart, so what could possibly go wrong if people are free to do what they want?
aki (@DSGNTD_PLYR)
September 6, 2014 at 10:18 AM
“This explains why so many smart people are liberals/libertarians.”
That’s true for classical liberals and libertarians NOT liberals. What the smartest people want is less government regulation.
http://reason.com/archives/2014/06/13/are-conservatives-dumber-than-liberals
destructure
September 6, 2014 at 7:27 PM
If poor people are people “who cause problems for their neighbors and for society”, then all poor people cause problems for their neighbors and for society. By definition.
OK, you also said “without much money”. So what is the term for people with money who cause problems for their neighbors and society? Or is this phenomenon inconceivable?
Ed
September 6, 2014 at 12:15 PM
In the NYC area, they are called guidos.
Lion of the Blogosphere
September 6, 2014 at 2:23 PM
Since we have come to the conclusion that most, if not many Italian Americans are in a perpetual state of proledom and we use the word guido often here, eliciting MaryK’s wrath, Lion and she should read this blog which deals with some of the topics discussed on LoftB, except with an Italian American perspective.
Southern-Italian American ‘Education Attainment’ – Census Numbers … “Read ‘em ‘n Weep”…Guidos Galore
http://www.i-italy.org/bloggers/34186/southern-italian-american-education-attainment-census-numbers-read-em-n-weep-guidos-g
Despite the prole image of IAs, there is an Italian American Bourgeoisie. Tom Verso, the writer calls Italian American bobos the “Literati”, which makes sense because the true essence of a bobo is one who gets into self actualization endeavors that orbits around intellectualism/academic pursuits. He also calls the true Italian American elite, the “Prominenti”, similar to TOOS.
JS
September 7, 2014 at 10:18 PM
Lion might want to read this succinctly:
Why are Italian Americans underrepresented in the Ivy League? According to the post, there are 300 times more black faculty members than IAs at the Ivies. It’s not what you think. It’s the same reasons why IAs are less likely to become Democrats/Liberals and sympathize with non-White racial minorities. It’s also the SAME REASON as to why many IAs are in a perpetual state of proledom, which the writer says it’s cultural.
http://www.i-italy.org/bloggers/17923/michael-parenti-and-camille-paglia-ivy-league-vs-southern-italian-american-culture
On a similar note, Hispanics are also underrepresented in the Ivies. And that’s because Hispanics share a similar prole outlook with Italians. Not caring for an elite education or wanting to become the elite. They just want to be left alone and be happy with their low status job that pays the bills. Not surprising, since I noticed many Hispanics to be lacking in ambition.
JS
September 8, 2014 at 9:48 AM
Except it was the higher iq types who do things, like say, invade Iraq. This one move exceeds in violence and stupidity the sum total of every malevolent action by American blacks for four decades.
Ears Thyrel
September 6, 2014 at 1:47 PM