Success

Preamble

I assume a few things.

1. The intrinsic value of a person has nothing to do with their IQ or any secular measure of success.
   
2. The law of supply and demand means compensation for jobs anybody can do will be lower. But see Point 1 above.
   
3. A man needs to work, if at all possible. His nature is to need to be needed and appreciated.
   
4. Godel's Unprovability Theorem can be applied to legal and regulatory frameworks. There will always be one more problem the system can't solve.
   

Getting in the door

I'll ignore the dishonest ways of making a living. They're all predatory or parasitic, involving clubs and dark alleys, lying labels, crony government policies and similar destructive tools.

To do a successful job, you have to get the job somehow, and here is where all the usual problems of the world come in. It is easier and more reliable to hire people you know you can trust because they're family, or friends, or trusted by friends. Notice how children of actors seem to have an in in the movie business, and how Ivy League people hire each other?

If you're a Hutu businessman, do you worry that a Tutsi might (feeling no tribal loyalty) be more likely to help himself from the till? Maybe that's prejudice, and maybe it isn't. Tribal loyalty isn't overwhelming, but it can tip the scales when choosing between two men you don't know and don't have good references for.

That seems unfair, and it is; but personal connections, tribal affiliation, and political pull are huge around the world, and even here in the USA where we like to think we're evenhanded. We do a better job being fair, even leaning over backwards sometimes, but some problems are very hard to get rid of; and multiplying regulations eventually replaces personal bias with political favoritism. Before you assume I'm bragging on the US ("better job being fair") without cause, ask how many Germans are professors in US colleges, and then ask how many Americans are professors in German colleges. Or French. Or Italian. Or Swiss.

Suppose you had an ethnic minority that were more skillful in some field than the rest, and came to dominate not just the rank-and-file but also the management, solely on merit. Now the thought experiment: how do you tell the difference between that situation and one in which that minority were selectively hiring only their own tribe?

The problem--not solvable as far as I can tell--is that whatever measurements you try to make to show that the hiring is purely by merit, they will not satisfy the envious counterclaim that "They're biased and if you just gave me a chance I could do as well." The politically expedient solution is to enforce injustice with quotas or penalties--and it isn't just a modern solution.

Raw Talent

I wanted to be an astronaut, of course, but I never had a shot at it. Vision, reaction time--not good enough. I could have worked on being in better physical shape, but I'd never have been one of the chosen pilots.

No amount of training would have made me a pro basketball player--I have neither the height nor the build for speed.

In math, though, I was fast. Some classmates mastered things almost as well, some eventually got it, and some didn't understand in time (by the end of the semester). That last group included some who, if you gave them another semester, would eventually master the material, and others who were so slow that I think by the time they mastered B they'd have forgotten A, and so would never be able to finish.

Just as there are physical gifts, there are mental ones, and there's no substitute for having the raw material.

I gather that twin studies put the hereditary component of IQ at about .8. IQ seems to correlate very well with college board tests, and with a host of other tests designed to eliminate cultural biases. The distribution is sort of like a bell curve, but not quite: nobody is below 0, and on the high end the tester is trying to estimate the intelligence of somebody smarter than him.

So this raw material for analytical skill is distributed in the population more or less like this familiar curve, with most people near the average and a few in the very dumb and very smart tails.

But success doesn't always line up with IQ, even in controlled environments like college. The talk linked by AVI tells us that there's a threshold IQ/SAT below which you typically don't succeed at all in college, but even above that the correlation between grade and SAT is only about .4.

The raw IQ by itself isn't the whole story. The difference isn't hard to find: perseverance and self discipline make up a lot (maybe all) the rest. Anybody around a college can quickly find some bright slackers and some hardworking ordinary guys.

Just as an example, college students more or less divide into the mostly partiers and the mostly studiers. In terms of perseverance you might get a distribution sort of like this.

When it comes grading time, the distribution would look more like the second plot than the first, blurred a bit. OK, blurred a lot. This is a toy model, given just to illustrate the point, not to describe College U.

Putting it together--what's missing?

I'm taking college success as a model for success in the rest of what you attempt. This isn't because college guarantees anything, but because it is a simpler model. In the rest of life accidents and the connections/tribes I mentioned above start to play bigger roles--college is a more controlled environment. Getting cancer isn't as large a risk in college life as it is in middle age careers, and college departments don't usually go under because of cheap Chinese imports.

Despite the differences, the similarities are significant. A job that requires more mental horsepower than you have will not be done very well. If you don't apply a lot of perseverance to your job, you probably won't keep it.

We try to make the playing field level by looking for discrimination, and we try to provide opportunity and encouragement. Despite lots of efforts there doesn't seem to be any way of providing mental horsepower from environmental stimulation; you have what you have.

What remains is for you to use what you have. But to do that requires some disciplines that we don't usually try to encourage. We demand that athletes and music students exercise self discipline, put aside pleasant distractions to focus on the goal, and persevere through bleak times. Athletes especially we demand courage of. We don't ask much of that from the rest.

Virtues

Perseverance and self control are among the virtues; signs of a good character. Justice, courage, balance/temperance, and fortitude/perseverance are one set of classic virtues, to which you can add humility, good will, and plenty of others.

It isn't that hard to see how these traits develop our innate skills and make us better people; I'd say it takes a willful blindness not to notice. But it seems these don't emerge spontaneously; they require training and practice. They didn't develop spontaneously in the kids I've known (ours and others), and they certainly don't grow spontaneously in good old me. I need lots of reminders, lots of reminders.

It's a bit hard to ask our children to develop virtues that we don't try to use ourselves. Easier to go along with whatever the culture's favorite trends are. Justice would mean evaluating ourselves--not fun. It is more pleasant to avoid situations that demand courage. And why not indulge myself a little more--I still have some checks left.

I'm trying to think of which of virtues we celebrate. We deprecate self-control. Vast expanses of advertising are designed to get you to lose that self-control in favor of buying something they want you to want.

"Tolerance" is a current favorite; but it is at best only a half virtue compared to its adult relatives justice and humility.

Any others? We're big on self esteem, but that's not exactly a virtue. We like heroes, but prefer them flawed.

We try to inculcate the civic virtue of respect--unless the reproof is likely to result in being accused of racism, in which case we just pretend nothing is wrong, or else the disrespect is understandable because of the child's problems. Of course a child who doesn't learn at home all the more desperately needs the rest of us to instruct him, but ... I got all kinds of static for reprimanding some black kids whose rudeness on the bus was escalating.

I don't have a clear suggestion here, just the observation that virtue plays a huge role in what we are eventually able to do. Not everything, as I pointed out at the start

Work world and the lower IQ

I keep hearing the same sorts of "We need to become a knowledge-based economy" punditry. Think about it a minute. If the only people working are the ones with lots of knowledge and high IQs, what do the rest of us do: Lounge and rot? Without something useful to do we get restless, and worse. (Sometimes even when we do have useful work...)

Ideally, except for the very lowest IQs, there should be something each person can do, however simple. Just looking around at the streets I think there is still plenty of room for unskilled labor. (It seems that more than half the time the leaves are damp enough that a leaf blower is no faster than a broom or rake.)

Parenthetically, children need to learn the work-related disciplines by doing simple jobs. But when all the simple lawn jobs are taken already by cheap imported labor, where do our children go to learn what it is like to be responsible for a job?

The simple jobs are not going to pay well, quite possibly not enough to live independently. The adverb "independently" seems critical here. Unfortunately I don't have any good schemes for encouraging mutual support or family support. If it isn't there I don't know how to make it appear. And we have a nasty tendency to value the person by how much money or equivalent they can earn.

I'm not brimming with wonderful solutions here. It is easy to say "teach the children about virtue and good character" and "take care of your family" but not so easy to do--though it is probably easier than bucking the vested interests who are importing cheap labor and cheap votes.

But for starters I think we should try a little "rectification of names:" call things by their real names and understand the things that are lacking.