[quote=“hebegebe, post:81, topic:2081974”]
The economy of the USA is set up that the most hereditary factor is wealth. So, if a parent has made a lot of money, their kid is going to inherit that money no matter how dumb or inept that kid is. Moreover, we have an economy in which money makes money, and all you need is to have a good financial adviser which your parents chose, and, if you inherited a few million dollars, you will stay rich your entire life, AND so will your kids.
The argument that rich people are smarter tends to be a circular one: How do we know that they’re smart? Because they made a lot of money. How do we know that making lots of money shows that they’re smart? Because smart people make lots of money.
Very wealthy people, especially those with inherited money, rarely demonstrate intelligence, except using indicators which can be increased through paying money.
How many super wealthy people have actually demonstrated innovative thought and creativity? Don’t tell me about Bill gates or other of these Dot Com millionaires, since almost all of them made their money through the sale of other people’s ideas. Almost none of them was selling an original idea of their own.
Moreover, having a single idea within you lifetime is not the sign of a genius. I have worked at half a dozen universities, and, to get a PhD, you have to have a major idea, but then, to get tenure, one must have at least three original ideas a year, AND be able to convince other people to put money down for those ideas.
Convincing people to buy a crappy overpriced product is nothing compared to convincing a grant agency to fund a research project. Yet these people, who are churning out original ideas at that rate, and getting them funded, would be considered less “intelligent” than some dolt who is getting $10 million a year from the billions of dollars that his father made, if we use wealth as an indicator of intelligence.
Finally, claiming that the wealth of a person indicates their intelligence is, essentially, claiming that the more one cares about anything else except money, the dumber a person is. If Einstein had REALLY been smart, he would have been a billionaire. The people who figured out how to send a person to the moon? A bunch of dummies, since none of them ever made more than a upper middle class salary, if that. The people who figured out how to make a flat screen with color? Must be pretty stupid, but the corporate CEOs who made lots of money off of that invention are the true geniuses. Jonas Salk may have created a vaccine for polio, but he couldn’t have been as smart as any of the thousands of millionaires in the USA.
Of course I’m being sarcastic, but I am simply demonstrating how ridiculous it is to use income as an indicator of “intelligence”.
As for how hereditary intelligence is? Nobody is all that sure. However, no matter how hereditary it is, it is always shaped by environment. Let us take, for an example, a trait that we all agree is extremely hereditary - height. Take the child of two basketball players, and raise them with limited access to good nutrition, and that kid will likely not even hit the average of our present society. They will likely bee one of the tallest kids among all the malnourished kids, but they would likely not be taller than middle class kids of average height.
The hereditary parts of intelligence would be no different. If the environment in which a kid grows up is not conducive to the development of their intelligence, they would likely demonstrate more intelligence than other kids who grew up in similar conditions, but they may also compare badly to average kids who grew up in conditions which were more conducive to developing intelligence.
We do not know, though, when it is set, since the brain is plastic, and human beings can be taught new things at least into the 70s.