Jon Gotti (aka Dapper Don) and Donald Trump have a lot in common. Both charismatic New York proles who loved media attention; both persecuted by the feds and heroes to the working class man, to the point they were long considered Teflon, though both became convicted felons. Both rose to the pinnacle of cut-throat fields using charm, street smarts, and animal cunning.

Of course Trump was an Ivy League Leader of the Free World, while Gotti was “just” a high school dropout leader of the mob. Trump is worth over $3 billion, while Gotti died with “only” $30 million.

However when you consider that Trump’s father was a Forbes certified 400 richest person in all of America, while Gotti’s dad was a barely employed day laborer living in poverty, then both men were freakishly successful, relative to what they came from.

As I’ve previously noted, welfare or welfare adjacent people like Gotti’s dad average IQs around 92 (about 90 white norms) and given a 0.45 father-son IQ correlation, their sons would upwardly regress to the then U.S. mean of 98, (white norms) and thus average IQs of 96.

Thus when Gotti famously scored 110 on an IQ test before dropping out of high school (white norms since IQ tests were normed on only whites in those days), he scored 14 points above the mean of kids from his economic background.

Meanwhile self-made Forbes 400 types like Trump’s dad average IQs around 131(130 white norms) so their sons would regress downward to the U.S. mean of 98 (white norms) giving a mean IQ of 112. So given that Trump is to his family background as Gotti was to his, how much higher would Trump have scored compared to the mean of kids from his economic background?

Also 14 points?

Trump’s estimated IQ = 112 + 14 = 126 (white norms); 127 (U.S. norms).

Indeed in 2018, Trump’s doctor claimed he scored perfect on a dementia screening test, suggesting an IQ of 126 (white norms). Of course given he hit the test’s ceiling (if you believe the doctor was giving his professional assessment free of intimidation from Trump and his goons) it’s possible his IQ is even higher, though given his tiny active vocab, poor general knowledge, and failure to correctly multiply 17 by 6, I wouldn’t bet on it.

8:14 pm: On her way to the event Oprah says she was stopped by a black man who said he was voting for Trump because he gave him a cheque

8:16 pm: Lots of star power joining by zoom: Meryl Streep, Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez etc

8:28 pm: A black guy is asking Harris about the border. Harris says she’s prosecuted transnational gangs & she’s blaming Trump for blocking a bill that would have put 1500 security agents on the border because “he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem”. That should be her campaign add!

8:35 pm. Harris just promised to reintroduce and sign that bill

8:44 pm Harris is very Indian in her speech and mannerisms but she has enough black heritage to advance Oprah’s ethnic genetic interests.

8:46 pm: Merryl Streep is crying because a girl who was raped by her step-dad got pregnant and needs an abortion

8:49 pm: Some U.S. blacks don’t like Haitian immigrants either so it was very smart of Oprah to note earlier that the lies about cat eating not only endanger Haitians, but anyone who LOOKS Haitian

9:07: Tracy Ellis Ross used her her high Ashkenazi verbal genes to give a quality monologue honoring childless women but the audience laughed at her for addressing Harris before first kissing Oprah’s ring. Julia Roberts knew better.

9:23 pm: The BRILLIANT Merryl Streep just asked the best question of the year: “What happens when you win, and HE doesn’t accept it”

9:26 pm: I guarantee Trump is watching this.

10:12 pm: CNN is covering the event. Abbey Philip’s noted that Oprah already elevated Obama to the White House and is asking if she can do it again.

Perhaps the most comprehensive study of American Jewish IQ was a 1958 paper on 64 Yeshiva men (age 16 to 31; mean age 21.43). Author Boris M. Levinson states:

Our sample finally consisted of 64 subjects, classified as follows : (a) six senior Yeshiva High School students, (b) 31 Yeshiva College students, (c) 27 graduate students. Among them were four ordained rabbis. Every graduate student was an alumnus of Yeshiva College. The writer believes that the sample secured was fairly representative of the Yeshiva population…

Below are the scores of the sample on the original Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). The 11 subtest scores are expressed on a scale where the average American scores 10 (SD = 3), and the verbal, performance, and full-scale IQs are expressed on a scale where the average American scores 100 (SD = 15). To convert scaled scores to IQ equivalents, just multiply by 5 and then add 50. Because the study, was submitted for publication in 1957 and the WAIS was standardized in 1953.5, there was a trivial Flynn effect I adjusted for.

Unfortunately, this study was restricted to the Yeshiva population who, despite their religiosity, are presumably more educated than the general Jewish American population. However if we assume Yeshiva young adults were somewhat equivalent to Jewish university students (which I suspect virtually almost all of them were or would become), then it’s possible to adjust their scores downward to estimate how the average Jewish American would have scored.

But first we need to know how the WAIS correlated with education among young adults in the 1950s, and fortunately David Wechsler published that data on page 251 of his book The Measurement and Appraisal of ADULT INTELLIGENCE Fourth Edition.

WAIS measures	Correlation with education in 1952.5 (age 25-34) n=300
Information	0.655
Comprehension	0.511
Arithmetic	0.490
Similarities	0.522
Digit Span	0.421
Vocabulary	0.649
Digit Symbol	0.590
Picture Completion	0.441
Block Design	0.397
Picture Arrangement	0.476
Object Assembly	0.349
Verbal Score	0.662
Performance Score	0.570
Total Score	0.658

The next question that needs to be answered is how educated were Jewish university students in the 1950s, compared to the general U.S. Jewish population. According to Diana B. Turk of Jewish Women’s Archives,: “By 1960, sixty-three percent of Jewish men and women aged eighteen though twenty-four attended college” This suggests Jewish university students were half a standard deviation more educated than America’s average Jewish young adult.

On a scale where all Americans average IQ 100 (SD = 15) and scaled scores of 10 (SD = 3), if we crudely assume, that Jewish Americans have the same IQ standard deviation as American whites (SD = 14.5 and 2.9 respectively) and the same correlations with education as Americans as a whole, and further assuming a bivariate normal distribution, we can simply take the product of half the Jewish standard deviation and the correlation between IQ and education and subtract it from the median scores in the Yeshiva sample (adjusted for the Flynn effect) to get the general U.S. Jewish average.

This gives the following:

	U.S. norms	U.S. white norms
Information	14.89
Comprehension	15
Arithmetic	13.15
Similarities	11.93
Digit Span	12.3
Vocabulary	12.8
Digit Symbol	10.88
Picture Completion	11.1
Block Design	10.28
Picture Arrangement	9.2
Object Assembly	8.3
Verbal IQ	121	120
Performance IQ	98	96
Full-scale IQ	112	110

My analysis suggests the average American Jew has a verbal IQ of 120 (white norms) and a Performance IQ of 96. Until a representative sample of Jewish Americans take a comprehensive test, it’s hard to know how accurate my estimate is.

Of course there have been such studies of Jewish school children, and because virtually everyone attends school in childhood, these are arguably more representative of the general Jewish population. After adjusting for the Flynn effect, Richard Lynn reported two such studies in Canada on page 117 of The Global Bell Curve:

Note that in the first study, spatial IQ refers to Wechsler performance IQ (though the two constructs are not identical )Averaging across both studies, the average verbal IQ is 115 (white norms)and the average “spatial IQ” is 102. This gives a verbal > spatial/performance IQ gap of 13 points (much smaller than the 24 point gap I estimated) however Lynn is citing childhood IQ, and Daniel Seligman notes in his book A Question of Intelligence:

Some studies show rising verbal scores as the Jewish children pass through school, but the reasons for this increase are unclear. Some scholars view it as a maturational change, that is, the group is genetically programmed to improve its already superior verbal skills with age.

Does Seligman speak from personal experience? Based on pro-rating the Wechsler scores he describes in his book, I estimated he has a verbal IQ of 146 (white norms) and a Performance IQ of 98!

8:54 pm: CNN is saying Harris is excellent at preparation, but Trump is unpredictable so she will need to think on her feet. Or as Jensen liked to say “intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do”

8:57 pm: Chris Wallace predicts Trump will have a HUGE height advantage, however I don’t think that matters much because women are supposed to be short

9:05 pm: Harris is starting strong, attacking Trump for being too pro-rich.

9:07 pm: Trump looks good and is talking fast and fluently.

9:16 pm: Trump is now calling Harris a Marxist, how stupid does he think we are?

9:19 pm: Harris is winning visually. She gives better reaction shots; he wont even look at her.

9:29: Harris baited Trump into bragging about how rallies. Now Trump is repeating the conspiracy theory that immigrants are eating our pets.

9:39: Harris seems to be winning but Trump has really hammered home on immigration, crime and inflation and that will resonate with a lot of people…Of course Trump is lying about his net worth again. He does not have MANY MANY billions

9:54: Trump lies so much it’s impossible for even CNN to fact check him in real time

10:00: Trump is sucking up to Israel again. Accusing

10:12: Trump just said “we have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive” LOL

10:15: Trump is right on Ukraine but it’s a tough sell

10:39: Harris won, better body language, well rehearsed talking points, good facial reactions, and exceeded low expectations

10:43: Very difficult for a woman to be tough without looking like a bitch, but Harris is the rare woman who can pull it off.

10:52: Not surprisingly CNN agrees with me Harris won. They’re calling it a “devastating” loss for Trump, but we wont know for sure until the polls and focus groups come in.

11:17: Taylor Swift just endorsed Harris. She’s trying to be like Oprah, making the leap from huge pop-culture icon to political king maker like Oprah did in 2008.

11:22: CNN high IQ fact checker Daniel Dale saying Trump lied 33 times; Harris lied once.

11:38: JD Vance doing a great job defending Trump to the gorgeous Katelyn Collins in the spin room, however he doubled down on the Haitian pet eaters conspiracy theory, causing CNN’s Dana Bash to claim racism.

11:46: CNN has an Erie county Pennsylvania focus group of undecideds. 4 think Trump won, 8 thought Harris won. The focus group reacted most positively when Harris defended abortion rights and when Trump trashed Biden’s pull-out of Afghanistan and all the abandoned military equipment.

12:02 am: CNN instant poll of debate watchers just released: 63% say Harris won; 37% say Trump won. Almost an exact reversal of the Trump-Biden debate this summer where 2/3rds thought Trump won. Going into debate, 50% expected Trump to win and 50% expected Harris to.

12:10 am: Trump just told the gorgeous Katelyn Collins that he won all the polls on the debate . Trump claims that in one poll 92% said he won, another 86% said he won, another 77% said he won. It’s lies. All lies…But in Trump’s defense, he’s almost 80 so the fact that he held his own against a much younger opponent and biased moderators is impressive.

12:21 am: More results from CNN’s instant poll of debate watchers. Before the debate, 39% and 41% of debate watchers had a favorable opinion of Harris and Trump respectively. After the debate the numbers flipped to 45% and 39% respectively.

Very impressive that Candace Owens defeated an Ashkenazi Rabbi in a debate. Candace is the most famous American woman in new media, so I’m not surprised she did well.

As Rushton speculated long ago:

“There are always going to be those who are WAY OFF in the top 1% and indeed one would have to be to succeed in a field as competitive as television talk shows”.

Candace may not be on television, but the internet today is almost as big as TV was in Rushton’s day, so despite her small head, Candace is arguably the modern equivalent of a successful TV talk show host and thus in the top 1% of Black American IQ.

From 1981 to 1991, the LSAT was scored on a scale where 10 was the lowest possible score, and 48 was the highest. In the below chart, we see how various scores equated to percentile rank among those who took the LSAT (an elite sample):

LSAT score	percentile among elite sample who takes the LSAT	Source	Z score assuming LSAT takers form a Gaussian distribution
32	51	year unspecified, note 79, Rothstein & Yoon 2008	0
35	65	Circa 1990 distribution	+0.4
38	79	1990- 1991 distribution; note 53 Rothstein & Yoon 2008	+0.8
41	89	1990-1991 distribution; note 53 Rothstein & Yoon 2008	+1.2
41	90	1990-1991 distribution note 71 Rothstein & Yoon 2008	+1.27
42	94	1987 to 1988 distribution	+1.53
45	98	1987 to 1988 distribution	+2.07

From the above data, our best estimate is LSAT takers had a mean score of 32.6 with an SD of 6.3.

In this article I once again try to convert these scores to IQ but this time using equipercentile equating, a technique in which I will map LSAT scores to IQ by equating both distributions in a sample that took both tests.

I am aware of only nine people with both reported LSAT scores on this scale, and reported scores on tests that can be converted to IQ. Some of these are from famous people (Barack Obama, Eliot Spitzer, Lion of the Blogospher) but most are from the Omni magazine sample used to norm Ron Hoeflin’s Mega Test, though only when there was no score from a more established test (SAT/GRE) with which which to pair the LSAT score, did I use the Mega Test score

Person	LSAT score	Score on another test	IQ equivalent of other test (U.S. norms, sigma 15)	Source
Eliot Spitzer	48	1590 on Old SAT	170	wikipedia (2024-09-24)
Lion of the Blogosphere	46	1410 on Old SAT	143	Discussion on X.com (2024-06-02)
Barack Obama	43.5 (42 to 45)	128 on WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children)	124 after adjustment for suspected Flynn effect	Source for LSAT score Source for WISC score
Mega Test taker	43	1400 old GRE	141	Omni sample
Mega Test taker	42	1540 old SAT	157	Omni sample
Mega Test taker	42	1360 old SAT	139	Omni sample
Mega Test taker	41	1370 old SAT	140	Omni sample
Mega Test taker	34	1290 old SAT	139	Omni sample
Mega Test taker	34	6 on the Mega Test	125	Omni sample

For these nine individuals, the correlation between the LSAT and another IQ test they took was about 0.53. Their average LSAT score is 41.5 (SD = 4.5) and their average IQ is 142 (SD = 13).

Thus the formula for converting LSATs from this era to IQ (U.S. norms):

IQ = [(LSAT – 41.5)/4.5](13) + 142

Recall from above that the mean LSAT scores of LSAT takers was 32.6 (SD = 6.3). Thus on a scale where Americans on the whole have an average IQ of 100 (SD = 15), the law school bound elite had averaged IQ 116 (SD 18.9). An average IQ of 116 sounds plausible given that this was just over the mean for college grads in the 1980s but the SD of 18.9 is surprisingly high and may be an artifact of some kind.

Hoeflin writes:

It is most remarkable that Hoeflin got data on the combined SATs of all FIVE MILLION people who took the SAT from 1984 to 1988. I wonder how he was able to get it. This makes the Mega Test potentially the best normed test of all time.

Hoeflin continues:

How did he arrive at 15 million 18-year-olds from 1984 to 1988? According to a USA Today article published June 12th, 2020:

Year	Number of babies born in the U.S.
1966	3,606,274
1967	3,520,959
1968	3,501,564
1969	3,600,206
1970	3,731,386

That’s a grand total of 17,960,389 babies born from 1966 to 1970. Of course not all of these babies would have lived long enough to be 18 from 1984 to 1988. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune , about 10% of Americans born 1966 to 1970 were dead by 2021. Even if we absurdly assume, all of them died before 1984 to 1988, that would still leave 16,164,350 alive by those years. Perhaps about a million emigrated, but I suspect they would have been more than replaced by all the kids who immigrated.

I realize Hoeflin may have rounded down to 15 million for simplicity and this my not ave affected the IQs he assigned all that much, but when you create the Mega test; Mega for million because he wanted to identify scores with one in a million rarity, it helps if his denominator is not off by a million.

I can not find a single published study correlating the LSAT with any other intelligence test although the data certainly exists. For example a 1985 study found a 0.72 correlation between LSAT and SATs in 5,854 students, though whether this study was ever published and where, I know not.

From 1948 to 1981, the LSAT was scored using a 200 to 800 point scale similar to the sub-scales of the SAT. Then from 1981 to 1991, it used a 48 point scale. Then starting in 1991, scores were expressed using a 120 to 180 scale. It is this latest version that I discuss in this article.

According to wikipedia: “Although the exact percentile of a given score will vary slightly between examinations, there tends to be little variance. The 50th percentile is typically a score of about 151; the 90th percentile is around 165 and the 99th is about 173. A 178 or better usually places the examinee in the 99.9th percentile.”

In other words, assuming a bellish curve, LSAT takers have an LSAT mean of about 152.1 and an SD of about 8.8.

Here’s a reddit thread where people listed their scores on both the LSAT and the ACT/SAT.

Because the SAT is constantly changing, I decided to focus on the LSAT-ACT correlation, ignoring the SAT.

The correlation between self-reported LSAT scores and ACT scores was +0.47 (n = 21).

Because I know a lot more about how SAT scores relate to IQ than I do about how ACT scores do, I converted all the ACT score to IQ using table A.1 from a 1999 paper by Neil J. Dorans:

The LSAT scores of the sample had a mean of 163 (SD 9.03) and the ACTs converted to SATs scores had a mean of 1307 (SD 161). Then using my formula for converting the post-April 1995 to pre-March 2016 SAT to IQ (IQ equivalent = 23.835 + 0.081(SAT score)) the sample had a mean IQ of 130 (SD 13).

Thus, the formula for equating LSAT to IQ (U.S.) norms:

IQ = [(LSAT – 163)/9.03](13) + 130

Recall that above we estimated LSAT takers have an LSAT mean of about 152.1 and an SD of about 8.8. So on the standard scale where Americans average IQ 100 with an SD of 15, the law school-bound elite average IQ 114 with an SD of 12.7, at least in the recent decades.