Economic Inequality In USA At 43 Year High

The gap between the rich and poor, and between the rich and the middle class, is today wider than at any other time in the past four decades. . . . From 1947 to 1968, the U.S. experienced increasing equality in the distribution of incomes. Since 1968, however, inequality has steadily and inexorably grown.

From here.

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Life Sucks In Much Of The World

Much of Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Yemen, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, North Korea, Nepal and East Timor all made the 2011 top sixty failed states list of Foreign Policy magazine. A nation generally finds it way onto this list with dire poverty, political violence, and poor public health.

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Three Hots, A Cot, Medical Care and Safety

One of the foundational ideas of criminal justice is that the threat of incarceration discourages crime because it is worse to be in prison than to not be in prison. For most Americans, this is an accurate statement. For many young black men in the United States, this is a closer call.

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison, it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the death rates of black males not incarcerated.

From Evelyn J. Patterson, "Incarcerating Death: Mortality in U.S. State Correctional Facilities, 1985–1998," Demography, Volume 47, Number 3, August 2010, E-ISSN: 1533-7790 Print ISSN: 0070-3370, DOI: 10.1353/dem.0.0123.

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Financial Risk and Insecurity

A few stray thoughts on risk.

1. One of the core organizing principles of bankruptcy law, securities law, the policy analysis of appropriate debt-equity levels in corporations, the regulation of gambling, Social Security policy, mandatory insurance regimes and more is the notion that generally speaking, people should only be putting at risk money that they can afford to lose.

For example, SEC private offering rules limit allow only "accredited investors" to invest significant sums of money in investments that are not subject to the disclosure regimes that applies to publicly held companies. Generally, qualification for this class of investments is some combination of wealth and sophitication, and criticism of the rules often argue that they are insufficient because they don't adequately protect the unsophisticated wealthy. But, part of the reason for a purely wealth based restriction on investments that pose potentially higher risks than the ordinary investment is the notion that the wealthy can afford to lose the money and go on in life, while widows, orphans and middle class families cannot.

2. One of the common ways to define the line between the rich and the merely upper middle class is that the rich don't have to work to meet their needs, and instead, can rely on their wealth to support themselves.

One can imagine a similar tack in defining other social classes. The poor are those who cannot support themselves from either their property or their labor. The working and middle and upper middle classes, together, can support themselves through their labor but need to work to support themselves, with the differences between those classes being mostly the level of comfort that they can afford themselves and the kind of work thath they do.

But, another way of thinking about social class in the middle range is in terms of security. How secure is one's job? Do you have adequate life insurance if you died? Do you have adequate disability insurance if you were disabled on a temporary or permanent basis? Do you have health insurance to allow you to receive medical treatment if you are sick or injured? Do you have adequate insurance to deal with a serious casualty to a car or a home or a tort lawsuit against you? Do you have adequate insurance to avoid ruin if you were sued for professional malpractice? Do you have sufficient savings or access to credit to defend yourself or a family member adequately in the event of a criminal prosecution? Could you take advantage of an opportunity to send a child to a good quality, expensive private school or college? How long could you afford to be unemployed before your life would fall apart? Could you economically weather a drug addition for you or your family and pay for treatment?

One of the reasons that the financial crisis crept up on us is that while a lot of people were able to maintain their lifestyles on a day to day basis, that the insecurity and fragility of their lifes increased.

There are a lot of people who are on the brink of disaster. A money without income would cause them to default on their credit cards, their lack of health insurance or inadequate health insurance means that they could afford to pay for the medical bills in a major illness or injury, they have no savings to prevent even a small financial misstep in revenue or expenses from leading to the loss of a home to foreclosure, eviction from a rental home, or repossession of a car.

A large share of these individuals get lucky and manage. They do get in enough money to pay the bills by happenstance and good luck and clever financial juggling. They don't get sick when they don't have health insurance. The avoid criminal prosecutions. They find a job swiftly after losing their old one before it all falls apart.

One can have a modest income and not be insecure. A lot of low ranking civil servants (e.g. postal workers, school janitors, parking enforcement agents, pre-school teachers, and library assistants), enlisted soldiers, military veterans, union employees (e.g. many grocery workers), clergy and simply thrifty prudent people who have never had very high incomes fit in this category, for example. This class of the low income but not insecure also includes a lot of bohemian trust funders often toiling away in "glamorous" but low paying positions - as ballet dancers, artists, poets, performance artists, non-profit professionals, eternal graduate students and post-docs, and lower tier politicians.

There are also reasonably high income earners who are fairly insecure. Many athletes and entertainers can be expected to have brief careers that produce high but intermittent incomes. Properous prostitutes and drug dealers are in much the same situation. Some farmers and fishers and foresters and miners make good incomes when commodity prices are high and yields are good, but have the thin safety net of the self-employed and if they have significant leverage may risk losing it all in less good times. Personal injury lawyers can make a lot of money in one case and then have long dry spells. Also prone to bursts of wealth between slow periods are commission salespeople and employees of high end establishments who are compensated mostly with tips. There is a significant shift from having enterprises meet their needs from employees to having them meet their needs from a disorganized safety-net free class of one job at a time independent contractors that has increasingly moved up their income ladder.

A step down from those on the brink of disaster is the growing class of people who aren't entirely destitute but also can no longer afford to "play by the rules." They are in default on one or more debts. They didn't pay their car registration or the taxes they owed. Their mortgage is upside down in a recourse mortgage state and they have no realistic hope of selling their home in anything other than a short sale for the foreseeable future. They are missing tuition payments at private schools or colleges. The numbers over at Calculated Risk every month suggest that the percentage of people in this situation is soaring. Rather than being chronically poor, they are the formerly middle class and working class but are in the midst of the long fall without a safety net that American society makes possible

There has always been a class of people who are prone to intermittent unemployment, but this class of people has grown, and the class of people who are intermittently underemployed has has grown invisibly but dramatically: skilled tradesmen who become day laborers in bad times; teachers who become substitute teachers and retail workers in bad times; farmers who do handyman work when crop revenues are modest and more skilled construction work isn't available in the off season; construction business owners and engineers who do ordinary construction work rather than managing others when the industry is weak; CPAs who do simple book keeping when more sophisticated employment is not available.

Public policy has a few nods to these classes of people - the right to cure a mortgage or rent payment that is in default, the Chapter 13 bankruptcy, COBRA, the right to emergency stabilizing treatment at emergency rooms, credit counseling agencies, offers in compromise and installment payment tax plans, personal recognizance bonds and probation sentences for criminal defendants, and unemployment insurance, for example, but the effort isn't very comprehensive or thoughtful.

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Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

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It Still Sucks To Be Poor

Low levels of household income are associated with several lifetime mental disorders and suicide attempts, and a decrease in income is associated with a higher risk for anxiety, substance use, and mood disorders[.]

From here.

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Fuzzy Descriptions Of What Should Be

Sometimes ideas about how to solve the problems in our society are fuzzy.  You have an intuitive notion about what they should look like before you have a rigorous argument for why they should be that way or how we will get there.  The intuition may be accurate, may be nostalgia for a past that may never have even been, or may be inaccurate products of cognitive biases.  But, it doesn't hurt to articulate and examine them in incomplete form.  This is what I'm doing today.

* We need to develop more middle ground in our economy and social class system between winner-take-all successes and those who are just getting by; to invigorate the middle class.

For example, lawyer income is bimodal.  The high end is a cluster of lawyers making very high earnings working at big firms (or sometimes botiques) for big businesses and their senior managers; it also has a modest number of plaintiff's lawyers who have been very successful at taking them on in big dollar case.  The low end has lawyers in small and medium sized firms and government agencies dealing with the issues presented by small businesses and individuals.  There is very little middle ground.

The absence of middle ground is surprising, because there is an obvious niche to fill.  In theory, it makes sense to have lawyers making in between incomes, with credentials that are good but not top ten law school honors and law review and Supreme Court clerkship class, working less insane hours than large firms, doing what they call in the trade "commodity work" (i.e. recurring, predictable, moderate stakes matters, as opposed to "bet the company" disputes and deals that big firms want) , doing competent work in an assembly line fashion, and charging less for it.  There are some specific areas where this happens: foreclosure practice, a few tax dispute resolution shops and insurance defense law firms.  But, there are lots of kinds of practice where one would expect it, but you don't see it: employment cases and a lot of business planning work.

We also have a lot of valueable legal work that isn't done, or is done by overworked and underpaid idealists, because it is hard to make pay.  This includes a lot of family law in low asset/low income households, a lot of termination of parental rights litigation, a lot of criminal defense work for moderate to low income individuals, representation of consumer defendants in debt collection and eviction and foreclosure cases, a fair amount of probate litigation in low asset estates, and immigration law work in areas other than employer visas.  Lawyers with seven years of post-high school education are very expensive ways to meet the public need to counsel and advocacy in these areas, but many individuals who are involved in these kinds of disputes aren't qualified to represent themselves competently.  If independent specialized paraprofessionals who could just hand child custody cases, or just handle criminal defense work, or just handle immigration work could do these kind of cases with an associates or undergraduate pre-professional degree, rather than a law degree, unmet legal needs could be filled in an affordable way that is more competent than the status quo without really impacting the market for existing lawyers much, and a lot of middle class jobs would be created in the process.  In some cases, the most sensible way to handle these cases would be the way we handle most criminal cases - with their services provided by a government agency with professional employees on payroll, but this wouldn't have to be the case.

This has happened somewhat in the area of tax law, where certified financial planners and certified public accountants, tax preparers, and enrolled agents before the IRS fill the gap between what people need and what they can afford that lawyers cannot bridge.  In the area of bankruptcy, in theory, independent paraprofessionals are mere scrivners, but in practice, they subtly provide more guidance to bankruptcy petitioners than their formal duties suggest.  There is also a very small niche conceirge/personal assistant niche of people who help people with personal consumer disputes sometimes formalized as a "health care advocate" when it involves medical bills.

Another example is in the mental health field.  We have psychiatrists, whose investment in becoming an M.D. makes them very expensive and gives them an immense amount of training that is irrelevant to what they actually do, who can prescribe mental health medications but are too expensive to take a more wholistic view, and a lot of psychologists, counselors, and the like who have some relevant education and credentials, but can't prescribe the medications that would be necessary to best address some of the cases that they encounter.  Some states are experimenting with empowering lower paid mental health professionals to write some prescriptions.  Colorado has a provision that allows some non-medical doctors to do this, but the rules are very restrictive. 

It would also be good if mental health could move to a less transaction/fee for service/medical model, to something closer to a pastoral care kind of model where anyone in the appropriate group, however defined, would receive care as needed, despite the tendency (often desirable) toward commodification in other parts of professional practice.  Some mental health issues are episodic and succeptible to being "cured" but many are life long conditions that are fundamentally a part of who someone is and always will be.  An injury/disease model of care is a poor way to address those cases.

We are seeing the development of middle ground to some extent with the establishment of urgent care centers as middle ground between family practice and the ER, and the establishment of retail location based clinics staffed mostly by RNs at places like Walgreens, Wal-Mart and King Soopers that handle not-so-urgent primary care needs like vaccinations and well child checkups and minor infectious diseases and pregancy testing.  We are also seeing the resurgence of the midwife who is not an M.D. as a middle ground health care provider.  Indeed, to some extent, the evolving health care industry model of having many different professions dealing with specialized parts of the total problem, after receiving intermediate levels of training and receiving intermediate levels of pay, is a model that would make sense in other.

* We need a more healthy environment for medium sized businesses.

Another area where a gap has emerged, not unrelated to the gap in legal services, is the gap between the truly small business and the large publicly held business.  There aren't mid-range lawyers because there aren't mid-range enterprises for them to represent in the numbers that there used to be. 

The United States is particularly deficient in the ranks of its medium sized businesses - small restaurant and retail chains, manufacturing ventures that employ a few hundred people, and so on.  We have some really impressive very national and multinational firms that account for an increasing share of our economy, and we have a large sector of not very economically important proprietorships or very small businesses, but surprising few that involve dozens to hundreds of employees, that involve single or double digit millions of dollars of revenues, that involve dozens to hundreds of equity investors.  Venture capitalist and angel investors can funnel small businesses to the big time, and consolidators come along and turn industries dominanted by small firms into industries dominated by big business now and then, but somehow, medium sized businesses seem to lack staying power.

Some of the areas where small and medium sized businesses thrive are dying out or on borrowed time.  Liquor stores in Colorado fiercely defend their perogatives, because they know that if grocery stores can sell their goods that they will die.  Wal-Marts have shuttered thousands of small town independent businesses because they are more competitive on price.  Better quality control and marketing have led franchises to squeeze a large share of the independent fast food businesses out of the market.  Blockbuster pretty much wiped out the independent videostore industry through consolidation and competition before it collapsed itself.  Small evangelical churches are losing ground to megachurches.

There are exceptions.  Craft brewing of beer and spirits and small vinyards seem to be holding their own.  Medium sized venture charter schools seem to be springing up left and right.  Urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers are cutting into the near monpology that large hospitals used to have on those kinds of medical services.  There are a host of new medium sized medical marijuana ventures.  Farming seems to be shifting from proprietorships to medium sized operations.

But, we need to better understand what leads medium sized ventures to be optimal from an economy of scale perspective, and look at the possibility that modest policy changes that don't do undue damage to consumer prices can make the economy more attractive to medium sized businesses in parts of the economy. 

We also need to get a better philsophical grasp on what medium sized ventures can offer the economy that big businesses and small businesses do not so that we can promote medium sized ventures in parts of the economy where they add value that the current economic system may not be adequately capturing.  For example, one of the lessons of the financial crisis has been that there are systemic risks involved in having "too big to fail" enterprises in the economy.  It is also becoming increasingly clear that the existing model of management dominated publicly held corporations that are highly insultated from shareholders is an ineffective way of keeping senior management performing well, making prudent judgments for the long term, and keeping senior management from self-dealing in its own compensation.

Some of the gap is less monetary.  We need to have more institutions where it is easier to reach someone in the organization with real authority.  We need to have more firms that have humanity and individuality.  We need to break up centers of wealth and power so that our society is not dominated by plutocrats.  We need the "warm glow" that comes from dealing with something other than a massive impersonal bureaucracy.  We need institutions that recognize that consumers would prefer not to deal entirely with robots and powerless bureacrats on the other side of the phone in who knows where when you have a problem.

Put another way, what benefits to big businesses have over medium sized businesses and why?  Is the problem that our securities laws and tax laws don't facilitate the financing of these businesses well?  Is the problem that big businesses have better economies of scale in regulatory compliance?  Is it a matter of marketing?  Is it a shortage of executive leadership?

In the legal industry, this is central to the discussion about the "death of big law".  Big law firms seem to be offering increasingly little value added simply by being big.  There seem to be few common assets and synergies.  Whole departments routinely jump ship to form their own firms or join other firms.

The approach to regulating unnecessarily large firm size in all industries, through anti-trust laws has largely been a bust.  So, we need to throw out that model and look for different ways to create the right incentives for these businesses to thrive when it is appropriate.

* We need to find better options for members of the less educated working class.

One of President Clinton's iconic stances was his plea that working people who played by the rules should get a fair deal in life.  If you graduate from high school, marry before having children, stay married even when times are tough, make your best efforts to find work when you are not disabled, don't commit crimes, and do your job reasonably competently, you ought to be able to expect a decent, if modest life for your family like a decent place to live in a safe neighborhood, access to the health care you need, an ability to send your kids to college if they are academically up to it, a safety net when you can't find work for no fault of your own, a chance to retire when you are old.  Few developed countries in the world do a worse job of fulfilling that promise.

In truth, we need an even broader promise.  We need to have an economy that makes playing by the rules going forward a good option, even if you aren't married to the other parent of your children, even if you somehow or other failed to get a high school diploma in your late teens, even if you have committed a crime in the past, even if you really screwed up on your job in the past and were fired for good cause, or if you incurred more debts than you could pay destroying your credit, or what have you.

We need to have a system in which somebody feels responsible for finding the most productive and meaningful thing that we can put each person who is able and ready to work to do, to insure that people who take that path get what they need to have a decent life, and to subsidize the difference between the value that they create and what it costs to provide a decent life if necessary.

We should find something for people to do that adds value to society first and figure out how to turn that value into money second.  Better to have someone doing work that has a market value of $5 an hour and to subsdize the rest of the cost of having them live a decent life, than having that person sit idle and trying to deal with the costs that are created when that person's family can't get by.

There are some people whose lives are screwed up because they are simply dysfunctional people.  But, most of the people in the United States whose lives are screwed up are willing to work, would place a lot fewer burdens on the public if they had the resources to meet their basic needs, but can't manage to earn enough to meet their basic needs.

For example, there are some hard core homeless people who are just incapable of functioning in normal society, often due to severe untreated mental health issues or disabilities or disagreeable personalities.  But, there are far more for whom the problem is simply not having enough money to afford a modest apartment.

A lot of child abuse and neglect, a lot of families that have trouble staying together, a lot of crime, a lot of failure in the education system, is driven by poverty pure and simple, and would go away with a steady job that pays enough to support a family.

Sometimes a little skill training or further education will allow the person to find employment and provide for their family without further assistance, but often it won't.  Some people will need help finding decent work only in periods of high unemployment, others will be persistently hard to employ.  In a minority of cases, it may be easier simply to let someone have a pension and not trying to find anything for them to do, as we do in the case of people who are classified as having total disabilities or are retired.

* We probably devote too many resources to selling things.

Economics suggests that the amount of a particular good or service that is sold and the number of people involved in selling it, are only dimly related.  Supply, demand and price are the key factors in sales volume.  If labor was more scarce, we could sell just as many cars and refrigerators and annuities and nails and houses with fewer people.  Commission sales have Malthusian tendencies.  The sales force expands until everyone involved in selling is barely making it, instead of staying at a size just large enough to sell what the market wants with a minimum of staff making maximal compensation.  Big box stores have made their fortune, in part, by recognizing this fact and having smaller sales staffs per dollar of revenue so they can offer lower prices.

In part, this is a good thing.  Selling stuff is often a mid-level job that lots of people can do that seems to create demonstrable value, so it has picked up a lot of the slack as farming, fishing, forestry, mining, manufacturing, utilities, and so on have become more efficient and no longer require such a large share of the labor force.  But, the ratio of people who actually make the stuff we need in the economy, to the people who are selling and administering and financing the distribution of that stuff once it has been made seems like it has gotten out of hand.  It takes nine administrators to send out bills for the work of two and a half doctors.  Marketing costs have become a substantial share of the costs of all sorts of goods and services compared to the cost of the goods itself.

It isn't that marketing and administration aren't important.  We don't want to end up like the Soviet's with factories churning out goods that nobody wants to buy because marketing isn't given the importance that it deserves.  But, is our economy really better off with an Aurora Mall that has a third or more of its retail space devoted to selling cell phones and associated accessories, with large number of locations at the same mall often all competing to sell goods made at the same factory and services provided by the same operations company?

* Our society is goods rich and service poor.

People who would often really benefit from services don't receive them because they can't afford them from their own earnings.  Our nursing homes and hospitals are frequently understaffed.  Our probationers and parolees are frequently undersupervised.  Our classrooms could benefit from having more teacher's aides in them.  Our kids could use more mentoring and tutoring.  Our neighorhoods would be nicer is our sidewalks were professionally clearned every time it snowed and our sidestreets were professionally cleared by people with the right equipment, rather than waiting for snow to melt off roads and for individual households to clear these sidewalks.  Our jobless could use more career guidance and training.  Our ailing bridges and road could use more repairs.  Our addicts could use more counselers.  Our criminal defendants could use more public defenders and investigators to manage the crushing case loads.  Our old houses could use more maintenance and rennovations.  Our call centers could use shorter waits and better quality service.  We would benefit from a society with more art and more performing artists.  Lawn care professionals would probably do a better job that the do it yourselfer homeowners usually do.

Efficiency is a good thing.  But, when it comes to providing services it is harder to sever the amount of labor provided and the amount of benfit confered by the services.  The quality of a refrigerator is an objective thing, and is no worse if it can be achieved with fewer man hours.  Fifteen minutes of therapy can rarely be as helpful as two hours of therapy, even with an extremely qualified therapist.

We need some better way to turn idle labor into beneficial services, and to turn beneficial services into money for the people who provide those services, so that we can increase the size of the pie and as a result, make our society more affluent.  But, for some reason, the market economy is failing to do that, in part, because the people who need services often have trouble affording them when they need those services.

We seem close to the point where we are producing all the goods that our society needs.  But, we need to find a way to redirect effort that goes towards selling goods and services and administrating their provision and potential work that goes idle because no one has found an economic way to utilize it, into efforts to create additional services that have value. 

The mismatch between ability to pay, and need for goods and services is reducing our society's productivity. 

* We need more authoritative attention to complicated problems.

No court system in the world has as few judges per lawyer, or per case, as the United States.  As a result, our court procedures tend to focus on reducing judicial effort even when more judicial effort would create value.  There are some classes of cases where this is not a problem, because they are largely pro forma, or where this merely shifts work from the public sector judiciary to the litigants who really care about the outcome.  But, there are lots of cases where taking the time to understand and deal meaningfully with the merits of a dispute early on would make a huge difference in the maount of private sector time devoted to resolving it.

The tendency isn't limited to the courts.  Public policies that are clearly failing, like the crack-powder cocaine differential in the criminal justice system, persisted for a couple of decades before legislators did something about the problem.  Judicial calls for legislative reform of an issue that comes up in a case producing a bad result frequently go unheeded.  Prison administrators who know that abuses are taking place under their watch don't have the inclination or the authority to solve those problems.  Failing schools fester for decades, for want to guidance and leadership from someone with authority on what to do about them.

One of the bigger problems in a democracy is that the need for an electoral or legislative mandate denies people on the ground the authority to deal with problems that they understand better than anyone else and solve them, even if they know of a solution that would work.

* We work too much.

Americans work more hours per year than any other country in the world.  We take few vacations.  We have very little maternity leave.  We rely heavily on day care.  We retire late.  We have few holidays and little personal time.  Part-time jobs are often not viable alternatives even for those who would prefer to work fewer hours for less money.  We need to find a way to negotiate more balanced alternatives.

READ MORE - Fuzzy Descriptions Of What Should Be

Fines As An Alternative To Incarceration

Colorado, like almost all American jurisdictions, makes heavy use of small fines for petty criminal offenses, but includes fines almost as an afterthought, if at all, as the sanction for more serious offenses and has the option to impose many months or years of incarceration as a sentence even in the case of offenses that are usually disposed of only with a fine such as municipal ordinance violations and more serious traffic offenses.

As the Denver Daily News explains:

The fine for using a prostitute would be raised up to $10,000 under a bill that passed out of the Senate yesterday. The minimum fine for prostitution-related offenses would be raised to $5,000. The current fine for prostitution-related offenses can currently be under $100. Additionally, the bill would create “john schools” that first-time offenders could attend to get a deferred judgment. The scared straight-type program would educate first-time offenders on the harrowing effects of prostitution. The bill passed on a 32-2 vote and now goes to the House.

While sentences of incarceration produce big costs for taxpayers, fines raise revenues. Moreover, the maximum sentence of incarceration for an offense is generally much more severe in terms of economic impact than the related fine.

For example, a judge can impose a sentence of eighteen months of imprisonment for a class one misdemeanor, or a fine of $5,000. But, an eighteen month sentence of imprisonment would deprive the person sentenced of eighteen months of income in a state where the median income in a single person household is $52,430 in Colorado in 2010, depriving that median individual of more than $75,000 of income, in addition to considerable lost future income because the incarcerated individual is very likely to be unemployed for a substantial period of time upon release, and economic harm associated with involuntarily breaking their residential or automotive lease or default on their mortgage and car payments, etc. Even for someone earning only a far below median wage and netting out costs of room and board that are provided in jail, eighteen months of incarceration has far more economic impact than a $5,000 fine for a large share of all convicted criminal defendants.

Similarly, a judge can impose a sentence of a year in jail for a class two misdemeanor, but can impose of fine of no more than $1,000, and can impose a sentence of six months in jail for a class three misdemeanor, but can impose a fine of only $750.

The amounts of the fine somewhat understate the situation, because a variety of courts costs and fees apply when an individual is convicted of a crime, and there are also costs for a privately retained criminal defense attorney (if any), and the possibility of a restitution award. But, the general observation holds true and restitution awards are generally far narrower than the compensatory element of a civil tort judgment.

Of course, one of the reasons that we ended up with this kind of statutory framework is that a large share of criminal defendants in the United States are indigent or near indigent (something that can be estimated by the large percentage of criminal defendants who avail themselves of the services of the public defender), and that when imposed together with incarceration, the defendant has little or no means of generating income to pay it. Imposing fines that can never be paid is pointless and makes it harder to reintegrate the defendant into the community after the defendant is released. Indeed, one of the rules of thumb in the law is that legislators and judges and regulators tend to punish offenses committed by defendants without the financial wherewithal to make those they harm whole with incarceration and tend to punish offenses committed by defendants with an ability to pay with civil judgments and fines.

But, not all criminal defendants are indigent. One of the reasons that a large fine for people who purchase the services of prostitutes is attractive to legislators is that this is a class of criminal defendants who often do have the financial means to pay these fines. Many traffic, vice and white collar criminal defendants, generally, have a substantial ability to pay criminal fines. And, some minority of everyday crimes, especially misdemeanors and less serious felonies, are likewise committed by individuals with an ability to pay substantial fines for whom a sentence of incarceration would be an intense economic burden.  Large fines also make the option of prosecuting criminal cases against corporate defendants more attractive.

The predominant punishment in Germany and many Scandinavian countries for what would be serious misdemeanors or minor felonies in the United States is a "day fine" equal to one day's average income in some recent time period for the defendant times the number of days of fines imposed, in lieu of a maximum term of incarceration of the same length. Defaults result in imprisonment for the number of day-fine days of fines not paid. This keeps the defendant in the community, employed, with an incentive to work more to pay off the fine and shed the burden sooner, and without imposing significant administration costs on the public and without disproportionately punishing low income defendants. Part of what makes that system work is the fact t hat these countries don't have the kind of "underclass" of persistently poor people who regularly get caught up in their criminal justice system that we do in the United States. But, there is still surely a class of offenses in the United States for which a day-fine would be a useful criminal justice option.

This isn't to say that I support this Johns bill just passed by the State Senate. The policy case for criminalizing prostitution between consenting adults at all is weak, and many our world peers tolerate some form of legalized prostitution. In my view, taxing and regulating vice is generally preferrable to using the criminal law to prohibit it and trying to enforce that law.

But, while I don't support increasing penalties for adult prostitution, period, the approach of imposing a high fine for an offense in a situation where there is a realistic possibility that criminal defendants will be able to pay it, rather than incarceration, is an option that has much wider applicability.

Similarly, in cases where the existing fines are the predominant form of punishment for a crime and are adequate to the task, for example, for many traffic offenses that carry criminal penalties, ordinance violations, petty offenses and minor misdemeanors, removing the possibility of a sentence of incarceration would be desirable, because it would lower the stakes of proceeding, reduce the possibility of abuses of judicial discretion in sentencing, elminate the constitutional requirement that counsel be provided at public expense in the proceeding, and have little impact on the day to day outcomes of the criminal justice system in these areas. Where an offense is such that arrest power and brief periods of incarceration are helpful in enforcing the law (e.g. public drunkeness or disturbing the peace), a maximum period of incarceration of a few days, as opposed to many months, might be attached to a significant fine.

READ MORE - Fines As An Alternative To Incarceration

Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Democratic socialists, including those in Britain, are much better at conducting very large scale, multi-purpose longitudinal studies than Americans, and those studies are starting to bear fruit. The British National Child Development Study tracks 17,634 children born in March 1958 for fifty years, checking in on the subject's progress at nine regular intervals from birth to the present and gathering detailed and accurate informaton each time from multiple sources in multiple institutions. What did they find?

In this article we assess and compare long-term adult socioeconomic status impacts from having experienced psychological and physical health problems in childhood. . . . Large effects are found due to childhood psychological problems on the ability of affected children to work and earn as adults and on intergenerational and within-generation social mobility. Adult family incomes are reduced by 28% by age 50, with sustained impacts on labor supply, marriage stability, and the conscientiousness and agreeableness components of the “Big Five” personality traits. Effects of psychological health disorders during childhood are far more important over a lifetime than physical health problems.

From Alissa Goodman, Robert Joyce, and James P. Smith, "The long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life", PNSA 2010.

The abstract poses the question as one of a particular childhood "problem" having a long term effect, but the results are equally consistent with the notion that psychological health has a large congential component, with much of the rest of the environmental component been based on the quality of one's early childhood environment, rather than later environment. In this view, the "problems" that a child experiences are simply manifestations of who a child is that persist throughout life rather than being the cause of later in life difficulties. In our mental health and IQ focused world, in which capacity to labor physically is largely unimportant socio-economically, it also isn't surprising that fitness that is physical, or the lack of that fitness is comparatively unimportant.

Alas, the early childhood window may be surprisingly narrow, and social class effects tend to be much more powerful than instructional effects. For example, according to another very large longitudinal study (n=13,776), the beneficial effects of full day kindergarten programs relative to partial day kindergarten programs in low income children tend to vanish by the third grade:

[T]he study found that the reading and math skills of children in full-day kindergarten grew faster from the fall to the spring of their kindergarten year, compared to the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten.

However, the study also found that the full-day kindergarteners' gains in reading and math did not last far beyond the kindergarten year. In fact, from the spring of their kindergarten year through fifth grade, the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten grew faster than those of children in full-day kindergarten, with the advantage of full-day versus part-day programs fading by the spring of third grade. The fade-out can be explained, in part, by the fact that the children in part-day kindergarten were less poor and had more stimulating home environments than those in full-day programs[.]

Social class linked intellectual achievement gaps are already great at age two.

Implications

The good news, for the parents of older children, I suppose, is that whatever good or bad your parenting has had on their lives, the older your children get, the less the quality of your parenting seems to matter. So, the pressure isn't as intense. A child's academic progress and character as a late tween is immensely predictive of the rest of the course of that child's life.

Then again, this may simply be a product of the fact that whatever parenting and educational quality was present early on continues to be present and having the same effect, with interruptions of these patterns being too rare to be statistically significant. Unless you are comparing kids who experience late childhood misfortune against their otherwise equal pre-misfortunte peers, you can really accurately measure the impact of those misfortunes on a child's life chances.

On the other hand, these studies are really terribly discouraging for those whose job it is to try to get people on track in life once their early childhood years have passed. The school system, for example, frequently becomes involved in a child's life only starting in kindergarten at age five or six years old, and the second study seems to suggest that it is already extremely hard to help kids who are developmentally behind at that point catch up to their more academically ready peers.

Needless to say, if your job is to turn around the lives of kids who have already started high school, fifteen years of accumulated inertia is just that much harder to reverse. If your job is to turn around the lives of adult prison inmates, the burden you must overcome is surely even more profoundly difficult to surmount.

As previous posts at this blog have noted, you may be born with a gene which is a powerful predicter of your capacity to sustain a long term marriage, and people who commit violent crimes as adults overwhelmingly are already continuing to have discipline issues that their peers have grown out of by the time that they are in elementary school: "it is extremely unlikely that an adolescent who has not been highly physically aggressive in the past will suddenly manifest significant problems with physical aggression." Such seemingly learned and social traits as succeptibility to bullying and one's likelihood of being a teenaged crime victim likewise show powerful genetic predispositions. The non-IQ factors that play an important part in life success seem to manifest just as early in life as academic ability does: Your ability to defer gratification at age four turns out to be a powerful discriminator for your life success a decade and a half later. Children likely to grow up to be psychopaths already start acting differently at age three (also here). A group of three non-IQ related genes can account to up to a 0.5 point difference in your GPA on top of any IQ effect.

We may live in the post-nature v. nuture synthesis of genes x enviroment, but the more we know, the more predictable our lives seem to be. For us, like characters in Greek tragedies, it seems that knowing our fates offers us surprisingly little help in changing our fates. Our genes are seemingly immutable, and most mental health genetic conditions are incurable, even if they are treatable in some cases. Many psychological predispositions have no established treatment. Even if you know you have a gene that makes you likely to have short lived relationships, there is no drug you can take to fix that and no solidly evidence based therapy that will solve your predisposition. Gene therapy hasn't reached that point yet, and given the implications it would have for personal identity and neurodiversity in society as a whole, perhaps this is a good thing.

Our enviroments, while theoretically mutable, aren't easy to change. And they seem to matter. People in the top fifth of the income distribution are twenty-eight times as likely to attend a selective college as those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example. We don't choose our parents, and it seems as if those of us who are raised by someone other than our parents are usually worse off in the bargain - although perhaps starting off in a spot like that leaves one off poorly even with great improvement. And, of course, unlike J.K. Rowling or Eminem, most of us who find ourselves in poverty don't readily emerge from it to great riches by virtue of our intellectual talents. Parents who know that their poverty and lack of education is dragging down their children have little capacity to do anything about it. Even the heart wrenching option once available of sending tween or teen children into domestic service for a more prosperous family, or a scholarship funded tenure at a boarding school, in hopes that some of the benefits of that social class will rub off on them has largely vanished as options. Assortive marriage trends are reducing the availability of marriage as a means of class advancement, and American social class lines are deeper than those in contemporary Europe or earlier eras of American history. Just about the only thing a parent can do to improve the environment that the parent provides his or her children is to transform him or herself, which is a profoundly difficult matter.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people do indeed change sometimes. But, the overwhelming weight of the statistics and studies tell us that this is the exception and not the norm, and becomes ever more exceptional as we get older. Kids who are well behind grade level in reading in the third grade are almost certainly not going to go to Harvard, are exceedingly unlikely to go to medical school or law school, and will have to struggle mightily and have considerable good fortune to earn a college degree of any kind. Kids who are perfect angels in fifth grade are exceedingly unlikely to have criminal justice problems or violence issues in the remainder of their lives unless they have a family history of a late manifesting mental health condition like bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or substance abuse, or experience a brain injury, or sustain PTSD.

I don't want the world to be this way. I'm a liberal. I believe in progress and opportunity and social mobility. I value education. Environment does matter, especially for the less well off, even if they can't change that environment themselves.

But, one can't simply ignore what study after study after study tells you either. One can look for loopholes and exceptions and ways to beat the system. There clearly are some and they should be leveraged for all that they are worth. The more I read these studies, the more that I am forced to conclude that policies designed to secure social justice have to focus more on developing meaningful productive paths for the people who we have in our society, and less on trying to transform people into something that they are not and cannot reasonably aspire to become -- especially for older youths and adults for whom the die is more firmly cast.

READ MORE - Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Self-Control Accounts For Much Of "W"

There is no real doubt that it is possible to measure a quantity, commonly called "IQ" whose platonic ideal in the psychological literature is called "g" that is closely linked to academic success and more generally linked to success in a whole host of other things in life.

But, it has also become increasingly clear, as I have previously noted, that people vary in persistent, systemic ways that arise early in life and that are uncorrelated with "g" which Steve Hsu likes to call "W."

In his oversimplified equation: "Grades = ability + work ethic = IQ + W"

Work ethic, however, is really a place filler for one or more unknown traits that influence performance after controlling for IQ in academics and a variety of other pursuits. One such W factor was found in dopamine gene variants. A study looking at lawyer practice performance after controlling for grades and LSAT scores has homed in on what seem to me to be several factors, with organization and self-discipline making up one large component, and effectiveness in interpersonal communication and practical judgment, which seem congruent to the idea of emotional intelligence, as another.

Some studies of childhood self-control v. impulsivity seem to buttress the dopamine gene and organization/self-discipline component of W findings.

Children with lower scores (poorer self-control) had poorer health at the age of 32. Their lungs didn’t perform as well. They were more likely to have gum disease, be overweight, or depend on drugs like tobacco, alcohol or cannabis. Among those with the highest levels of self-control, 11% had multiple health problems, compared to 27% of those with the lowest levels.

Those with poorer self-control were also more likely to run into financial or social problems. As teenagers, they were more likely to start smoking, leave school with no qualifications, or have unplanned pregnancies. As adults, they had more credit problems and troubles with money, and fewer tangible assets like a home, savings or a pension. They were more likely to have been convicted of a crime, and their own children were more likely to be raised in a single-parent household. And in fact, their childhood self-control was a better predictor of these financial worries than either their IQs or social backgrounds. . . . the more self-control people had as children, the better their futures, even for those at the high end of the scale. They also found that children who developed better self-control as they grew up fared better than those who stayed at the same level.

The differences observed in this study were pronounced by age three! But "7 percent of youngsters in the long-term study developed notably better self-control as they got older. Members of this group displayed better health, made more money and had fewer criminal run-ins as adults than would have been predicted by their self-control levels as young children."

The study largely replicates with a different testing methodolgy, the famous marshmallow test of Walter Mischel at Stanford University that demonstrated that a young child's ability to postpone eating a marshmallow in exchange for a reward later predicted a wide variety of lifetime success measures later in life.

W because it is less well defined and may have multiple components, is less well studied than IQ. But, it seems to be something "real" that can influence crime, poverty, health, social class and success in life at all levels. So, it deserves at least as much attention as IQ. For example, we know far less about how strongly W is hereditary than we do about how much IQ is hereditary.

My own sense is that there are probably multiple, independent components to "W" and that an impulsivity/self-control dimension is probably one of the most important components of it. Another big component may be "emotional intelligence" or "empathy" or "interpersonal skills" or something along that line. There are probably one or two other significant components as well - perhaps creativity, perhaps some other traits.

The impulsivity/self-control component of "W" seems to have some similarity to traits in the Five Factor Personality Model, particularly conscientiousness as:

A considerable amount of research indicates that conscientiousness is one of the best predictors of performance in the workplace, and indeed that after general mental ability is taken into account, the other four of the Big Five personality traits do not aid in predicting career success.

- per this study.

My sense is that the impulsivity/self-control dimension has a fairly strong hereditary element which may be possible to link to a fairly modest number of gene variations, although there is probably a significant gene x environment component to this as well. Efforts to teach self-control have shown measurable success. I have less intuition regarding the extent to which other components of "W" are hereditary or learned, although a guess of 50% hereditary, in line with the heritability of a great many psychological and personality traits, might be a good starting point for a guess on those.

There is, of course, a considerable literature, on ADHD (which has both a hyperactive-impulsive and an inattention component separately measured and used to determine subtypes of the condition), impulsivity (possibly with three or more distinct subcomponents), a variety of "impulse control disorders," the personality trait of novelty seeking, and a cluster of similar traits in the mental health and psychology literature. There is no doubt overlap between these concepts and the Big Five personality trait conscientiousness.

READ MORE - Self-Control Accounts For Much Of "W"

Achievement Gap Starts Very Early (Updated)

Achievement Gaps Are Huge At Age Four

In the mid-1960s, Betty Hart was a graduate student in child development working at a preschool in Kansas City, Kan. The preschool was for poor kids — really poor kids. Many came from troubled housing projects nearby. . . . Hart's job was to teach these underprivileged kids how to speak like the children of her professors at the University of Kansas.

For years, she and university professor Todd Risley worked tirelessly toward this goal, doing everything they could think of to expand the vocabularies of these 4-year-olds. The idea was that if the kids could speak with the fluency of their wealthier peers across town, they might go on to similar academic achievements.

But success was elusive. "We tried everything," Hart says. "Everything we could. ... We couldn't do it."

The problem, they realized, was that they weren't getting to the kids early enough. Which led to this question: If age 4 was too late, when was early enough?

From here

Forget achievement gaps in third grade CSAP scores (where they are already stark), let alone achievement gaps in high school. According to these researchers who deeply wanted to reach a different result, the achievement gap is already deep and almost insurmountable at age 4!

Talking To Babies Seems To Make A Big Difference

Their detailed study of forty families from poor, middle class and rich backgrounds found that the affluent talked to their babies and toddlers three times as much as the poor.

According to their research, the average child in a welfare home heard about 600 words an hour while a child in a professional home heard 2,100.

"Children in professional families are talked to three times as much as the average child in a welfare family," Hart says.

And that adds up. Hart and Risley estimated that by the age of 4, children of professional parents had heard on average 48 million words addressed to them while children in poor welfare families had heard only 13 million.

A study by Alan Mendelsohn in the journal the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine this month says that early intervention to have poor parents interact verbally more with their children (in fifteen sessions of 45 minutes each) works.

Skeptics question how long the benefits of this kind of intervention will last, although studies showing that quality pre-schools of very long lasting positive impacts give some hope that the short term success of Mendelsohn's inteventions could persist, and there is a body of evidence that seems to show that catching up gets harder and harder to do as time passes.

The Case That This Is Really A Manifestation Of IQ

An alternative possibility is that IQ, which has been shown to have a strong hereditary component, is simply low in both poor children and poor parents, relative to their middle and upper class peers. There are a number of reasons to think that this might be the case:

1. The earlier you get deep, almost insurmountable difference in cognitive function, the harder it is to attribute that difference to environment. If environment has an immense impact in the first four years, it is hard to think that it has so pitiful an impact in the rest of a person's life.

2. This is particularly true given that somone who learns a new language in a total immersion environment as a young teenager can usually become an almost accent free teenager with a near adult fluency in that new language. The language learning ability, per se, does decline as one gets older and older second language learners almost never attain unaccented fluency in the new language, but the cognitive barrier to learning a new second language closes about a decade after one turns four.

Factors like vocabulary and ideomatic usage are large data sets that have to be learned, but the set of vocabulary words that distinguish the dim from the bright is on the order of a few thousand words, and the number of irregular usage situations necessary to really distinguish one as educated or not probably number under a thousand.

In order words, for the "talking to baby produces lifetime achievement" hypothesis to hold water, one has to infer a more indirect relationship -- that talking to baby stimulates a broad spectrum of time limited brain development activity -- rather than simply inferring that talking to baby provides more opportunities to learn words and master other elements of language.

3. It is hard to believe that the correlation between social class and parenting style is a strong as it would have to be to produce the achievement gaps observed. Certainly, it is easy to imagine that professional parents talk more to their babies on average than parents who are in poverty. But, is that difference really close to universal? Are their really no bright upper class kids who had low levels of child-adult verbal interplay as babies and toddlers?

4. If talking to babies is so important and anyone can do it, why hasn't our culture in millenia after millenia attached more importance to this, out of intuition? Why does a little bit less talking to a baby seems socially like a fairly minor parenting point instead of a huge parenting imperitive?

The Case That Talking To Babies Matters A Lot

Of course, there are also reasons to take these findings, particularly in light of Mendelsohn's study that shows that early intervention does matter a lot, seriously. The literature on the long term benefits of high quality pre-schools is one. The fact that a lot of brain development does take place at a very young age is another, as is the literature supporting a breast feeding-IQ link. The literature that shows that IQ looks much more hereditary in middle class and upper middle class families covered by twin studies than it does in poor families, where environmental factors seem to play a larger role, is another. The apparently evidence that the Flynn effect (i.e. long term secular trends in entire populations towards higher IQ in recent times) is mostly due to improvements environment for those who were at the low end of the IQ scale in the earlier periods is another.

[UPDATE added 1/12/2011]

Razib at Gene Expression does a brilliant job of summarizing the cutting edge literature on the link between social class and the heritability of of intelligence. He lays out the data from the 2003 study that shows that genetics matter much more in high socio-economic status families, while shared environment is the predominant factor for those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. The tendency of improved socio-economic status to make genetics a larger share of IQ variation is surprisingly linear from about the 25th percentile of socio-economic status (below which the effect is less intensely connected to socio-economic status percentile) through about the 85th percentile (after which the returns to additional socio-economic status dampen modestly).

He also presents striking data from a 2010 study demonstrating that while cognitive ability has little to do with socio-economic status at 10 months at any socio-economic level, that by the time a toddler is two years old socio-economic impacts on cognitive ability are already pronounced with heredity being much more relevant (50% of the variation v. almost none in low SES toddler and an intermediate amount for those in the middle) in better off toddlers.

Put another way, genetics seems to be primarily relevant to peak potential IQ, but peak potential only begins to be relevant once one's environmental conditions are favorable enough to have an opportunity to achieve that potential.

Great environments prevent you from being brought down by your circumstances, but they also aren't enough by themselves, as he succinctly sums it up, "Practice may make perfect, but perfection may be a goal to which you aspire only if you have initial talent or inclination." Heredity becomes more important as one gets older and has more control over one's environment. Those who received boosts from exceptional environments beyond their comfort range slack off when given the chance, those who were held back by poor environments tend to thrive once they are free to make their own choices.

His comparison to stature, is apt. He notes that "environment explains more of the variance in height in developing nations, while it explains almost none of the height in developed nations." Better nutrition in rich countries allows people to reach their full potential in height. But, in poor countries poor nutrition prevents people from reaching peak potential. His observation that there "are probably diminishing marginal returns on “nurturing” environments for a child when it comes to their intellectual development," which flows from the fact that genetics accounts for close to 85% of variance in IQ by the time one hits the high end of socio-economic status, is also apt.

Still, he also notes, as I have, that social class differences in IQ (that often flow from IQ), which are exacerbated by assortive marriage (or assortive mating anyway), potentially confounds the model of good environment as something that facilitates peak potential. In other words, perhaps environment is less capable of suppressing the IQ of generally bright children than is in the case of generally less bright children whose intellectual development advances only with good parenting.

Along the same lines, perhaps some of the variation in hereditary influence is a product the of the IQ measuring instrument which is designed to arbitrarily reproduce a normal distribution when it could be that this is a poor approximation of the structure and distribution of intelligence for those at the extremes of the range that IQ tests are designed to measure. The high level of inaccuracy of IQ tests at predicting academic performance in autistic children is suggestive of this possibility, as are the strongly diminishing correlation of IQ with success in the real world amongst very high IQ individuals. Arbitrary units for quantifying IQ that inaccurately measure to relative magnitude of IQ differences in the middle range relative to some hypothetical absolute scale would also add systemic noise to the genetics-environment data in the middle of the range.

By analogy, it you try to do temperature calculations using temperatures measured in degrees Celsius, which arbitrarily sets zero at the freezing point of water and one hundred at water's boiling point, for high temperature phenomena like metallurgy, the correct equations of thermodynamics are going to work reasonably well. But, a failure to use a Kelvin scale (which puts zero at the laws of physics defined absolute zero of approximately -273.15 degrees Celsius) for room temperature and low temperature phenomena, using Celsius temperatures in the correct thermodynamic equations is going to produce widely inaccurate results. Purely proportional relationships to temperature, for example, will look very unproportional, will make a correct mechanism for the relationships difficult to conceptualize, and will produce ugly equations in situations where temperature is just one of several variables.

If we used some non-arbitrary zero and peak number to measure intelligence, or used an intelligence measurement unit related to some real world quantity other than percentile in performance (e.g. seconds of processing time to solve some problem that people in the IQ range that the test is measuring can solve in reasonable amount of time), some of the observed IQ properties might disappear as artifacts of the measurement method.

[End Update.]

Maybe IQ is mostly genetic if you have a decent environment, but that insufficient verbal interactions with adults relative to some critical threshold is as important as insufficient folic acid in pregnant women.

Also, even if IQ is a significant cause of the gaps at age four [update: or even two!], if talking to babies more could narrow that gap, even modestly, this provides a concrete way to make everyone in society better off on average by doing something that almost no one believes to be harmful to either parents or children. The downside risk of following this parenting advice is nil. But, the guilt potential for parents who ignore this advice, if it later studies confirm that it is very important, is huge.

And, if this really is important and will soon become part of the catechism of important tips for young parents, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a parenting choice previously believed to be of trivial importance, like putting babies to bed on their backs, actually has a very significant positive impact.

READ MORE - Achievement Gap Starts Very Early (Updated)