Although IQ and income are positively correlated at a value of about 0.4, commenter Mugabe feels this is mostly just an artifact of education, writing:
as LotB has mentioned: high IQ leads to high educational attainment and to connections and this really is more than sufficient to explain all of the correlation.
that is:
smart people get good grades and get into good schools and are socialized and etc.
the effect of IQ ceteris paribus is positive but not by much.
I agree that if you controlled for education, the correlation between IQ and income would be greatly diminished, probably going from 0.4 to less than 0.2. The Lion of the Blogosphere sometimes goes even further, suggesting that if you control for certain forms of education, the correlation between IQ and income might even be negative.
Way back in the 1990s, even the book The Bell Curve (which really popularized the link between IQ and money) admitted that among graduates of Harvard, there might even be a negative correlation between IQ and income if the brightest students go into research where they earned a modest living, while the dullest went into business where they might get rich.
But what if anything does this tell us about the independent effect of IQ on income? Does it prove that smart people get rich primarily because they have the right credentials, and not because they are better at adapting to the real world?
The problem with controlling for education is you’re not comparing different IQ levels with all else being equal, because when an IQ 110 and an IQ 150 both have an AB in English from Princeton, the lower IQ person probably has non-cognitive advantages (i.e. strong work ethic, rich well connected family, affirmative action, etc) that allowed him to achieve the same degree as someone 35 IQ points smarter, and those same advantages will help him make a high income when he leaves Princeton.
Similarly, when an IQ 67 and an IQ 107, both have only a 10th grade education, the IQ 107 must have non-cognitive liabilities (i.e. extreme laziness, low socioeconomic background, mental illness etc) that explain why he has the same education as a mentally retarded person despite having above average IQ.
Given this, we might expect lower IQ people to do relatively well economically when you control for education and higher IQ people to do relatively poorly, because controlling for education causes the lower IQ person to be advantaged in many non-cognitive domains.
Thus the ideal way to compare the independent effects of IQ and education on income is to take a random sample of American kids ranging from IQ 50 to 150, and send them all to Princeton, and instruct the professors to give them all a Magna Cum Laude AB in English, and instruct all the other students to network with them all equally, and then send them all out into the world to see who makes the most money with their fancy credential.
I have a feeling that if you controlled for education under these experimental conditions, you might even get a higher correlation between IQ and income then the 0.4 in the uncontrolled general population, because almost everyone with an IQ below 115 would be incapable of even doing the jobs their fancy degrees qualified them for, and would have nothing left to fall back on. And because the experimental sample has a wide range of IQs, we also don’t get the problem of range restriction that normally limits correlations in educationally homogeneous groups.
But even among those capable of doing the jobs, I would expect only a small decline in the IQ-income relation, because having assigned random people of different IQs the same degree, we don’t get the phenomenon of the lower IQ person having compensatory assets that normally occurs when people of different IQs obtain the same degree.
Alternatively, if we took a random group of Americans ranging from IQ 50 to 150, and denied them any formal schooling at all, it would be interesting to see the correlation between IQ and income. Once again, I think the correlation could possibly be even higher than in the uncontrolled general population, because with no schooling at all, high IQ people would be far more likely to acquire the basic literacy, numeracy, and social skills required to hold a job, while low and mediocre IQ people would simply end up unemployed, in jail, or homeless.
correct afaik.
but the point is that the economic and other success of high IQ folks is not something raw or naked or immediate. it is mediated by a culture which selects for IQ per se via proxies like education.
or more to the point…the smartest person in any large organization is almost never the ceo.
and at the same time…
if you get a high SAT or GMAT or LSAT but aren’t admitted to a prestigious college, b-school, or law school…
you have absolutely no advatange. at least in america.
Paul Allen reportedly scored perfect on the old SAT ( IQ 171) & attended Washington State, yet went on to become almost the richest man in America.
I don’t know if he was admitted to a better school but chose not to go.
And Bill Gates attended Harvard but dropped out, so it’s hard to say if Harvard played a large role in his success
But even with Allen & Gates, elite education might have played a role, but at the high school level, not college, since Lakeside is where they met and had intimate access to a computer (very rare for the time period according to Malcolm Gladwell )
the exception that proves the rule tiresome pp.
allen knew gates.
jobs knew woz who had a degree from berkeley.
Still, Gates & Allen were probably the smartest kids at even Lakeside and went on to be the richest in the history of that prestigous school, showing the effect of IQ independent of elite education
Of course the LotB would argue that Paul Allen is an outlier and thus doesn’t count
I’ve mentioned this to LotB, I think the argument you & he make might work better if you limited it to salary, rather than income in general
Salary seems more dependent on education than business income is & also has fewer outliers
Salary also seems more dependent on height than business income but that’s another topic
I think you have an advantage after you get your foot in the door.
If you ever get to play at Carnegie hall, you will impress the right people. The problem is that without the credential, you aren’t going to be handed the opportunity.
and even Jensen agreed that whatever it is once one has met the “cognitive threshold” extra IQ points were worthless.
i guess then the question is how high is the highest threshold in terms of earning power?
ren-tech and some elite law firms are the top, but they’re a small % of the 1% and a lot smarter than the average c-suiter.
you’ve already seen the average IQ of Swedish CEOs is 115.
one commenter, a norwegian, said (agreeing with me) that this is lower than it is other countries because sweden like canada doesn’t have any tests like the SAT.
and even Jensen agreed that whatever it is once one has met the “cognitive threshold” extra IQ points were worthless.
Where does he say that at? I’ve read the G-factor and never recall him saying that.
I know this has been debated to death on this prestigious blog but I don’t believe think there’s a threshold where intelligence matters less for income contrary to what some people want to believe. Pumpkin Person himself proved fairly decisively that the correlation between income and IQ is almost perfectly linearly throughout the entire IQ range.
I do think there’s other factors besides intelligence that matters like risk-takingness and social skill. These may ever-so-slightly correlate negatively with IQ beyond a certain threshold, but not by much. The only reason why IQ could possibly be negatively correlated with income at any point is that higher IQ has a slightly negative correlation with testosterone and the autistic side-effects of some high IQ genes may lead some high IQ people into academia rather than business or politics.
Much of the correlation between IQ and income is probably explained by education but clearly not all of it is. Higher IQ people just do everything better, even in business, including planning, getting funding from investors, having better credit, marketing their products, etc.
Lastly:
suggesting that if you control for certain forms of education, the correlation between IQ and education might even be negative.
Don’t you mean, “suggesting that if you control for certain forms of education, the correlation between IQ and income might even be negative”?
Don’t you mean, “suggesting that if you control for certain forms of education, the correlation between IQ and income might even be negative”?
Yes. That is indeed what I meant. Thanks for pointing out the error. I have now fixed it.
Where does he say that at? I’ve read the G-factor and never recall him saying that.
I suspect Mugabe might be alluding to this 1980 quote from Jensen:
” ‘The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school (about IQ 105), can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115). beyond this, the IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of ordinary occupational aspirations and criteria of success. That is not to say that there are not real differences between the intellectual capabilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150 or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences in this upper part of the scale have far less personal implications than the thresholds just described and are generally of lesser importance for success in the popular sense than are certain traits of personality and character.
However Jensen seems to contradict this in his 1998 book; though it’s a matter of interpretation.
pumpkin didn’t prove anything because he was misapplying h^2 as usual.
it’s impossible to say because as one goes up the iq range the number of people becomes smaller and smaller. i wouldn’t be surprised if there’ss till a positive effect, but all of the super smart and super successful are going to be swamped by the super successful who aren’t super smart and this may create the impression that after a not very high threshold iq doesn’t matter at all rather than that it matters just not very much.
The lack of SATs might explain the unspectacular IQs of Sweedish CEOs but I proposed a simpler explanation
https://pumpkinperson.com/2014/10/12/lion-of-the-blogosphere-discusses-the-iqs-of-ceos/
Mugabe – America’s status whoring is a joke. On the other hand, the proletariat in this country deserve what they get. Stupid is stupid does!
What does more money in this country buys you? More toys, toys, and more garbage in and out.
Money in America can buy you good health for yourself & loved ones, a prestigous education for your kids, good looks, a gorgeous private mansion overlooking the mountains & the ocean, a personal chef, a private jet & enough political power to own a chunk of congress & the White House & advance your ethnic genetic interests.
Plus the power to fund scientific research to answer all your deepest questions.
It can also buy a resource you can’t regenerate: time.
Frankly I think people who don’t want money are stupid, but it’s also stupid to spend so much time making money that you can’t enjoy it.
All petty things and that’s why Americans don’t know anything about good health, good food and a good life that are available to them without a lot of money. They spend more time earning it than enjoying life.
Americans are wasteful. They eat big expensive meals and then go to an expensive gym to burn off those calories. What idiocy!
This is why the elites love Americans. Like a coke dealer who needs addicts!
but unless you’re born with it you have to make sacrifices to get it and those aren’t worth it for decent people.
if you want a mansion, then you’re a prole. if you want a small house that costs 10 million because it’s on the malibu shore then you may be decent but a sucker.
money can’t buy health or beauty. this is bullshit.
Work ethic and grit are either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with IQ/talent.
IQ is also negatively correlated with “conventional” viewpoints — agnosticism, atheism, libertarianism, etc.
So, the lower IQ individuals from the group are more likely to a) work harder and b) have the conventional “I need to work, make money, and have a nice stable family” viewpoint.
So if you give the credential to random high IQ and low IQ people, you have to remember that there’s no guarantee the smart people will try to maximize their income potential. If anything, they have an easy ticket to medium income doing a job that is insanely easy that allows them time to pursue whatever other hobbies they have.
There aren’t many fields with high cognitive floors. Academics/sciences, engineering, law, and medicine are the main ones.
Work ethic and grit are either uncorrelated or negatively correlated with IQ/talent.
Jensen claims g is positively correlated with achievement motivation. One reason why this might happen is low IQ people learn early that no matter how hard they work, they’re never going to succeed, so they get into a lifelong habit of slacking off.
By contrast high IQ people get a much bigger payoff from working hard so it makes more sense for them to do so. On the other hand if you’re so smart that everything comes easily, you might get in the habit of being lazy, so there’s probably an optimum level of challenge people need to face.
IQ is also negatively correlated with “conventional” viewpoints — agnosticism, atheism, libertarianism, etc.
IQ is negatively correlated with religion, so by extension it should be positively correlated with agnosticism/atheism. IQ is negatively correlated with being a Republican (at least after controlling for income and ethnicity), but libertarians are not conventional Republicans.
So, the lower IQ individuals from the group are more likely to a) work harder and b) have the conventional “I need to work, make money, and have a nice stable family” viewpoint.
They’re also more likely to know that no matter how hard they work, they’re never going to succeed, and thus give up.
now pp’s repeating misinformation
iq was negatively correlated with relgion (is that belief or religioisty?). today in the UK it is positively correlated. british atheists tend to be dumber than british anglicans. it’s all on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence
By contrast high IQ people get a much bigger payoff from working hard so it makes more sense for them to do so. On the other hand if you’re so smart that everything comes easily, you might get in the habit of being lazy, so there’s probably an optimum level of challenge people need to face.
Which means that the correlation wouldn’t be particularly high. I predict that the same IQ range that has the most wealth success now would also have the most wealth success under your experiment’s parameters.
IQ is negatively correlated
It’s negatively correlated with conventional viewpoints. Before I listed off the unconventional viewpoints, I meant to add “high IQ people have viewpoints such as.”
So high IQ people are less likely to have the typical motivations low IQ people iwll have.
They’re also more likely to know that no matter how hard they work, they’re never going to succeed, and thus give up.
Speculation. The relationship I discussed has been empirically verified and demonstrated. Further, there are not many fields where “no matter how hard they work, they’re never going to succeed.”
pp already agrees that the relationship is weak.
the question is is there any relationship after a certain threshold? and is it the same relationship (slope) as that below it?
whoever thinks the richest are the smartest has either never met a rich person or never met a smart person.
fran liebowitz.
I believe that if smart individuals were focused on making money, they would be better at it. The main problem is that smart people look for meaning beyond money and ambition.
Making money is easy, so long as one can abandon integrity. Or at least, that’s my opinion.
indeed it is sometimes easy, but making it by actually doing something which is worth it always takes a lot of work. like liebowitz i’m incredibly lazy at some things and hard working at others, but hard work really is a necessary condition of getting things done and doing them well and on time. it just isn’t a sufficient condition. that is, hard work as a value initself is depsicable, but valuing genuine accomplishments is commendable and noble.
henry ford is a heroe.
wanting money per se is not only stupid, it’s despicable. john d rockefeller said so himself and he regarded his greatest accomplishment as the consolidation and streamlining of the american oil business.
pp wants a mansion and health. why doesn’t he build mansions or do medical research?
because these are hard work!
one way to easy money:
at my dog’s vet i was looking at the nyts magazine. it must be a fav of rich people. it was full of ads for them.
one was an ad for apartments in LA starting at 12 million. in the fine print it was stated there was a 3% commision for the agent. ch-ching! sell just one of those and you get 360k.
and in march of 2009 when the dow hit 6500 i thought “this is ridiculous” so i bought 50 k worth of long term options on a few companies like TSM, SBUX, and DIS.
it doubled by 2010 iirc.
but if i’d really had balls i would have taken the maximum leverage on s&p futures and rolled them over and over.
if i had i’d have millions from that 50k like niederhoffer had after doing the same with gold futures in the late 70s early 80s.
The “doing a great thing” approach to getting rich does require hard work. It also requires a certain skillset beyond competence, otherwise an individual will get taken advantage of.
A good example of “who rises to the top, in terms of income” are poker players.
David Sklansky received a perfect (or near-perfect) score on the old SAT. He wrote “The Theory of Poker,” the book on poker. He’s not anywhere near the top of those rankings.
Phil Ivey, Tom Dawn, Patrick Antonius are near the top. They have one thing in common: a high tolerance for risk. Phil Ivey has said several times that he “isn’t into the math.”
Ai yi yi!
I have great compassion for Swank’s mother. Nothing worse than having a dumb kid.
I think I’d rather be childless.
Fortunately both my kids are gifted. My eldest is only 11 but he already has a larger vocabulary than Swank & could probably beat Swank at basketball and running despite the fact that he’s white and Swank’s black.
But then unlike Swank, my husband and I have extremely good genes. He’s a rich PhD who was the star of both his university basketball team & one of the school’s top 5 runners.
When he proposed he said I was both the smartest and most beautiful woman he had ever met and that if I didn’t marry him, he couldn’t stand to see me anymore.
When he proposed he said I was both the smartest and most beautiful woman he had ever met and that if I didn’t marry him, he couldn’t stand to see me anymore.
…
Kate, you realize that no rejoinder is ever necessary with you, I hope.
no rejoinder indeed!
none of her comments are substantive. none! she’s a racist and a homophobe prole. her snatch smells like rotting fish.
is she really were a tenure track professor or tenured professor the world would have come to an end. it hasn’t so she isn’t.
her kids are very likely morons if she even has any or is even a she or is even a differnt person from pp.
the word for stupid women who brag about how “pretty” they are and how rich their husband is…
“whore”.
and more…
US bidness favors smart only up to a point.
i did two interviews with a pension consultancy in NJ and was told by one of the hiring managers on the second visit that the other thought i was “too smart to be an actuary”…and it wasn’t a put on…it was absolutely serious…we don’t want you because you’re too smart.
and on the public ewmployent side a guy in upstate NY iirc was rejected because his IQ was deemed too high to be a cop.
A good example of “who rises to the top, in terms of income” are poker players.
Interesting, but I don’t think the analogy works. The main problem is that games seem to be enormously dependent on very specialized crystallized knowledge acquired from years of narrow practice. By contrast, in real life, getting rich often depends on adapting to relatively new situations for which you have little experience.
For example a cook who suddenly has to expand his tiny restaurant into a large business will have a large learning curve to master, and early mistakes and missed opportunities could damage his future earnings for years to come.
US bidness favors smart only up to a point.
i did two interviews with a pension consultancy in NJ and was told by one of the hiring managers on the second visit that the other thought i was “too smart to be an actuary”…and it wasn’t a put on…it was absolutely serious…we don’t want you because you’re too smart.
Good! Life is far more interesting if smart people get ahead naturally, by making smart career choices, smart business decisions, or by being productive or Machiavellian; not because businesses are actively trying to prop smart people up.
That’s why I’m happy that so much of the public doesn’t believe in IQ. That makes it easier to study.
You can’t take an outlier real-life situation and pit it against your general idea of what poker is routinely like. Most of real life is repetitive and easily dealt with with prior knowledge.
Poker, past ABC-level, is entirely dependent on figuring out how other people think. http://www.pokerology.com/lessons/levels-of-thinking/. Every new player at the table is a “new situation.” People like Sklansky develop models for optimal play, but optimal play is not the most profitable. The most profitable way to play is to rapidly figure out how a particular opponent thinks and then adjusting one’s game to that opponent. That means altering hand ranges, betting sizes, etc. on the fly.
In poker, players routinely come out of nowhere with insane strategies that only work because the players have figured out how other professional players think, and the only people who manage to not lose millions are the ones who can “adapt to relatively new situations for which you have little experience.”
“According to Full Tilt Poker’s insider interview with Patrik Antonius, Isildur1 had a bankroll of approximately $2000 in Autumn 2008. He built his bankroll to $1.4 million and began playing on Full Tilt Poker in September. He first played Haseeb Qureshi, a high-stakes regular, at the $100/$200 stakes. After 24 hours, Isildur1 had won almost $500,000. He then resurfaced a month later and played Brian Townsend, Patrik Antonius, and Cole South at the $200/$400 to $500/$1000 tables and suffered a million dollar loss. A columnist on HighStakesDB, a website that monitors and tracks high-stakes activity online, suggested that Isildur1 was overly aggressive, which could cost him against elite competition. Isildur1, however, answered critics by winning approximately $2 million back from Townsend and South during the last week of October 2009.
With a profit of $1 million on Full Tilt Poker, Isildur1 waited at six heads-up $500/$1000 No Limit Hold’em tables for any challenger willing to play for such stakes. His first opponent was Tom Dwan, who is widely regarded as one of the top online heads-up players. They played six tables simultaneously, with over a million dollars in play for one week. By the end of the week, Isildur1 had gone on the largest run in the history of online poker, winning approximately $4 million from Dwan, prompting Dwan to issue a live challenge to play Isildur1 at the Full Tilt Poker Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge.[10] He then challenged Antonius to a rematch the following day and won $1.6 million from him on November 15 and peaked with $5.98 million in earnings on Full Tilt Poker.
Isildur1 challenged Phil Ivey, widely regarded as one of the best all-round players in the world, to play three tables heads-up no-limit hold’em at $500/$1000 stakes. After a week of play, Isildur1 incurred a $3.2 million loss to Ivey and stated in a subsequent interview that Ivey was the toughest opponent he had ever played.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Blom.
or rather henry ford is a hero.
there ya go.
texas hold ’em has been “solved” http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/01/texas-hold-em-poker-solved-computer. that is, for heads up a computer will always beat a human unless the human plays the same straregy. but with multiple humans some humans can “take advantage” of the others and the computer has no chance. is this true of on-line poker where no poker face is required or possible?
but swank says “past the ABCs”…i’m not a player but it seems to me that if one memorized the truly enormous odds table which has been generated by computer he would have an advantage. i’m thinking of a site by a dartmouth cs grad student i can’t find. idk…but i once wrote a program for Axis & Allies and i trounced the allies. if you ever play A&A, what the program showed was 1. always attack with overwhelming force 2. germany should make tanks exclusively and japan should attack the ussr.
The computer only solved limit hold em, which is a much simpler and easier game that players like Isildur1 can’t upset.
Most of the poker tells and insights into psychology people give are given up in betting patterns and decision time. It all ports to online very well.
But online is also flooded with number cruncher Sklansky clones. The only way to get ahead is to force them to make mistakes by getting them to believe that you are making mistakes. And you can only do this by opening up leaks in your game. You just need to be sure that what would be -EV generally is +EV vis a vis your “Sklansky” mark.
You can’t take an outlier real-life situation and pit it against your general idea of what poker is routinely like. Most of real life is repetitive and easily dealt with with prior knowledge.
In real life you learn from your mistakes but those mistakes are very costly, so by the time you learn the lesson, it’s too late. In poker, it’s never too late to learn from yesterday’s mistakes. There’s always a brand new game that starts tomorrow. By contrast in real life, you never get to entirely start over.
In poker, it’s never too late to learn from yesterday’s mistakes. There’s always a brand new game that starts tomorrow.
If you build up a 1 million dollar bankroll and Isildur1 wipes you clean, there’s not a “fresh game” waiting for you the next day, anymore than a “fresh new business opportunity” awaits you after your million dollar business investment goes bust.
You now have to move down in stakes and grind your bankroll back to where it was.
No one has infinite money. So no, you can’t just start over no sweat if you make a bad mistake, unless you’re at a low level to begin with.
Poker is a great analogy. Low barrier to entry (you can start playing with 5 dollars, no other qualifications necessary), highly abstract, and “good decisions” are rewarded directly with money.
FYI, here’s a chart that demonstrates the cognitive floors on most every profession are not particularly high:
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx
But the cognitive floors of different occupations tells us little about the effect IQ has on income independent of education. If you didn’t need a law degree to practice law, would that mean stupid people would suddenly become rich lawyers? I don’t think so. Rich lawyers have high IQs not so much because getting rich off law requires an Ivy League law degree, but primarily because just the act of practicing law at an extremely high level of competence, requires high g.
That’s not to deny that you typically need to attend a top 14 law school to maximize your legal earnings, but rather it’s to say that if law schools didn’t exist, high IQ lawyers would get rich by showing their high IQ on the job, instead of in the classroom.
My point about cognitive floors is that there are a lot of cognitively undemanding professions that are high-paying. Real Estate comes to mind.
Those jobs would bore smart people at a higher rate, and more smart people would find themselves as scientists, researchers, and academics.
just the act of practicing law at an extremely high level of competence, requires high g.
If by “practicing the law” you mean knowing and arguing the law, sure. But competence does not translate into income commensurate with performance. If it did, all workhorse associates would make partner. They don’t. The number one ability in law that is tied to income is the ability to get new business. And most clients aren’t particularly enamored with eggheads.
And most clients aren’t particularly enamored with eggheads
Yes they are. No one wants a dumb lawyer. Not even dumb people.
Clients (even sophisticated clients) a) don’t know enough about the law to even assess a lawyer’s knowledge of the law, and b) care more about character.
Even unsophisticated people can often tell whether someone is making sense and knows what they’re talking about, and if they’re not sophisticated enough to do that, they probably don’t have much money anyway and would not be a valuable client.
Also, in the absence of law schools, internet sources and various publications would create lists exposing incompetent lawyers and running them out of the business. There would also be malpractice lawsuits from unsatisfied clients who feel duped.
The correlation between perceived intelligence and actual intelligence is tiny. Most of those judgments are incidental to the halo-effect of being liked.
Clients need competent service. But clients don’t buy what they need. They, like everyone else, buy what they want. People want to be listened to, communicated with, and consulted.
In the real world, as it goes with women, how good you are objectively doesn’t matter if they like you, you’re in.
internet sources and various publications would create lists exposing incompetent lawyers and running them out of the business. There would also be malpractice lawsuits from unsatisfied clients who feel duped.
You must mean “in the absence of state bars.” “Law schools” aren’t the ones who set the regs and barriers to entry. But FYI: there’s nothing stopping anyone from doing those things now.
And also FYI: the ones who get listed or sued or badmouthed are incompetent and disliked. The amount of liked lawyers in those situations is probably near zero.
People buy what they want, not what they need.
The correlation between perceived intelligence and actual intelligence is tiny.
No it’s not; it’s huge. And it’s not that people are necessarily perceiving a lawyer as smart, they’re correctly perceiving him as an expert, and expertise is such a complex abstract field is g loaded.
Most of those judgments are incidental to the halo-effect of being liked.
No. People often really like people they consider dumb. But you don’t hire a lawyer you want to have a beer with, you hire a lawyer who can explain your contract to you and defend your rights. And people notice if the lawyer doesn’t know what he’s talking about or gets his facts wrong and his logic muddled.
Clients need competent service. But clients don’t buy what they need. They, like everyone else, buy what they want. People want to be listened to, communicated with, and consulted.
No, they want competent service. You need to get out of academia and step into the real world, instead of spending your time reading professors who themselves don’t live in the real world, and probably never have.
You must mean “in the absence of state bars.” “Law schools” aren’t the ones who set the regs and barriers to entry. But FYI: there’s nothing stopping anyone from doing those things now.
There’s less need to do it because incompetent people are largely screened out before they even become lawyers. If we got rid of law schools and state bars, they would be screened out after becoming lawyers by showing real world stupidity, not stupidity on a written test.
And also FYI: the ones who get listed or sued or badmouthed are incompetent and disliked. The amount of liked lawyers in those situations is probably near zero.
If you screw up badly your client’s not going to like you, no matter how “likeable” you are.
But you don’t hire a lawyer you want to have a beer with, you hire a lawyer who can explain your contract to you and defend your rights
And your judgment of how well your lawyer performs those tasks is heavily influenced by how much you like him or her. An adequate explanation becomes a very good explanation, and more importantly, a terrible explanation becomes an adequate explanation.
Participants gave significantly better writing evaluations for the more attractive author. On a scale of 1 to 9, the well-written essay by the attractive author received an average of 6.7 while the unattractive author received a 5.9 (with a 6.6 as a control). The gap was larger on the poor essay: the attractive author received an average of 5.2, the control a 4.7, and the unattractive a 2.7, suggesting readers are generally more willing to give physically attractive people the benefit of the doubt when performance is below standard than others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#Academics_and_intelligence
All the “screwups” you keep talking about are at a level that can be easily comprehended (i.e. reading a date to file a paper). These are a function of conscientiousness, the most important trait a lawyer can have, and a trait that has a negative correlation with IQ.
That said, is there a cognitive floor for the practice of law? Of course, and I never denied that.
Which goes to show you that income level and intelligence aren’t always correlated. Further, being passionate about an endeavor that requires higher IQ, but isn’t financially unrewarding, is not viewed as a good thing in societies rampant with money junkies, such as America, China and all 3rd world crapholes.
fran liebowitz – chumpsky’s doppelganger
Hey Pumpkin Person, did you see http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/04/income-weath-and-iq.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter by Steve Hsu a few days ago?
Nevermind, I see you did.
It’s also obvious that you’re a sockpuppet.