one of the biggest tragedies in american life is that a poor person 40 years ago had more access to physically fit partners than even the higher tiers now.
Because exercise was not something that normal people did until recently. It started with the boomers, but became more common with Gen X and Millennials.
Most people probably don’t exercise now, but the desirable, successful people usually have something figured out.
The comment I am responding to is probably correct about the lower classes (who are much fatter now), but probably not as accurate about the PMC. Fitness is a way that higher class people differentiate themselves. There are many exceptions though.
Among PMC we probably agree re: less exercise in the further past (40 years ago).
Not sure about 15 or 20 years ago vs today, however, for that group overall. [Where for the top 5%-10% I'd probably still agree.]
Re: everyone else, the overall trend has to become more sedentary, so it seems likely that there is less exercise overall now than in the past, not more.
If by exercise you mean physical activity, e.g., carrying boxes around, you're right. If by exercise you mean disrupting homeostasis with barbell squats or hill sprints, though...
They may even be forced to consider disabled people, or, horror, a person of color! We must put laws in place to fix this! I recommend that we only allow men over six feet tall to become officers in any organization, public or private, and women have a height limit of five foot seven inches. Of course all will need fluency in Latin and be able to bench press 250 lbs. Anything less would be unreasonable.
Now we come to humane ways to euthanize all those dreadful disabled and LGBT people, ...
Ah, thanks again! Sorry, I'd forgotten I had flubbed in two places - I'd corrected it in the main body of the post, and totally whiffed on the byline. My sincere thanks for following up again :-)
To be very fair, I think it’s because in India you generally call it inter-caste, and that’s a very widely used term, I’ve actually never heard the term intra-caste! (And in any case, mistakes means it’s more probably human and not AI so :))
You haven't really thought this through. In a world with the tech of 100 years ago, you'd already have seen a collapse due to reproductive failure. Tech is a bandaid, not a cure. When the kids that today's 20-30 year olds are failing to have don't show up in 25 years, you'll be screwed.
It might be fine if an ever-growing economy doesn't require an ever-growing or static population. Eric Drexler substacks about AI nanoengineering; it's interesting.
Is age not related here in some way? Your salary at 22 maybe far different at 55, and it also seems like it’d be correlated to high marriage rates as income goes up.
Yeah, age is definitely related to marriage rates.
Two thoughts:
Age at first marriage has been steadily creeping upwards for both men and women for decades.
It's gone from something like 22 (f) 25 (m) in the fifties to 30(f) and 31(m) in the US and UK today. And by early thirties you're generally established in your career trajectory, so this is less of an issue.
Second thought:
Age gaps used to be a lot more common, and a way of establishing yourself as a man, then getting married to a younger wife, in a way that preserved fertility. This was probably better on both sides - the women didn't have to speculate on his career trajectory (which nobody wants to do), and got a proven man, and the man got better chances at kids due to having a younger wife.
A big part of marriages shifting to the early thirties is precisely so women can choose a man who's proven his career trajectory, and this is "marriage as capstone" vs "marriage as foundation" for both of them.
However, our cultural mores have shifted on age gaps too since the fifties, and that's why the median age gap has closed so much (going from a 3 year gap to a 1 year gap is actually a very significant difference writ over all of society, and hides a lot of variance being eliminated at the tails).
But this is actually a problem.
If a woman waits til 30 / 31 to have her first kid, she's burned through ~60% of her cumulative fertility:
That graph is from Geruso's Age and Infertility revisted paper, which measures modern fertility and gets substantially less optimistic numbers than we thought we had in the past.
You might ask - why are the Geruso age-by-fertility numbers different than the ones you've heard about historically? Broadly, because all modern fertility numbers before Geruso came from fairly positively selected populations,¹ or from a single paper in the eighties, Menken et al’s Age and Infertility (1986), in which he surveys Hutterites in the 1920’s, Geneva bourgeoisie in 1600-49, Canadians 1700-30, Normandy 1760-90, Norway 1874-76, Iran 1940-50, and Americans in the 1930’s.
So, limited data from vastly different time periods than today, in a profoundly different environmental, pollution, and diet regime.
So to get a better read on it, Geruso combines nationally representative data from 62 low and middle income countries that span Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, with a 2.8M women sample size, and then use that to calculate a true “fecundability” curve using only women who are married, not on contraceptives, not currently pregnant or breastfeeding, and having periods.
His numbers are a lot closer to the truth than the other ones, IMO, and they paint a really grim picture of the fertility impacts of waiting until you're thirty to start thinking about marriage or babies. (And there's decent arguments his numbers are STILL too high, given obesity trends and worse diets in developed countries).
So the current age / marriage trends are kind of boning everybody in the world on the "fertility crisis" front.
Hmm, I’d still assume going from a median to high earner is probably common between 30-55. And the age gap closing seems to support that the marriage rates are likely more related to age rather than a caste per se? I read the Geruso paper, but it mentions that the US is an outlier in that our birth rate is largely due to childlessness rather than fertility, so I’m not sure it’s relevant here.
> I read the Geruso paper, but it mentions that the US is an outlier in that our birth rate is largely due to childlessness rather than fertility, so I’m not sure it’s relevant here.
Yes, that's "total maternity rate," or TMR (versus the more commonly reported total fertility rate, TFR). But actually, this is a hugely important factor in EVERY country's declining fertility - and indeed, if you look at the countries with the lowest fertility (China, Korea, Singapore, etc), it is because the TMR rate there is lower than in places with relatively better fertility:
So I actually disagree with Geruso on that point - it's actually pretty important and a big differentiator in terms of driving the final TFR numbers. And part of what drives lower TMR is women not wanting to have children while young, because they want to get a degree / grad degree and establish themselves in a career, then do "marriage as capstone," and by the time they do this, they're older and in the aggregate, many of them literally *cannot* have children. Have you heard the statistic that more women over 40 have children now than teenagers? That's how biased that is, and the odds at 40 are *terrible,* so prospectively there are many women in that age tranche who tried and couldn't.
Look at the differences in "probability of live birth" per year and birth defects by age tranche here:
Some people will say “this is bad” so I’m going to remind them that for most of the last 5,000 years, we still had castes and 99.9% of people were in the “subsistence farming” caste.
Women sort because hypergamy. Men because they are defending against gold digging. And comms also tend to work better with roughly matching cognitive capacities.
Yes, the top 5% in everything is concentrated into a few cities, and they have no idea how an overwhelming supermajority of the country thinks, wants, behaves, or makes decisions, nor do they have any idea how things work on the ground outside their tiny little blue bubbles.
Almost everyone who is a part of the PMC has a “food comes from the store so why do we need farmers” level understanding of most of society.
If you jump several social classes like i did, your social circle is a lot more integrated. But yeah, even my old friends recognize they are among a different cast when they come around my friends from grad school or work colleagues. But everyone is nice enough to (usually) get along, despite the initial discomfort.
Over time, the Indian and US caste systems are going to converge into something similar.
Indian ‘jati’ boundaries are becoming porous and clustering into 4-5 sub groups (different from the varna system), primarily as a result of affirmative action.
There are 4 broad categories — General (or upper caste), Other Backward Castes (OBC or an amorphous middle category), Schedule Castes (SC or “Dalits”), Scheduled Tribes (ST).
Interestingly these cut across religion. There are upper and lower caste Muslims and Sikhs.
Inter-marriage across jati lines within these broad categories is somewhat acceptable. Particularly among the upper castes.
Brahmins for example have the highest inter-caste marriage rates.
These forces are only intensifying with urbanization, internet, and capitalism.
Cremieux or however you spell it, was very dismissive of the paper showing 0.3 IQ income link, even deleted my comment referencing it. Heretical Insights, too - absolute fraud such as "top coding" and "winsorizing" to make it appear that income is due to merit. Above a very modest IQ floor, there is no correlation at all between intelligence and income, and the most intelligent are more likely to be in financial distress than average IQ people.
The PMC didn't get their money and control through superior merit. There may be fewer 145+ IQs even among MDs and professors than among the general population. You won't find many wealthy people in the ultra high IQ societies. .This is not because intelligence isn't extremely valuable, it's due to collusion among inferior people against their betters.
This article blithely assumes the opposite, that better people do better, that there is a meritocracy rather than a midwit racketeer kakocracy.
If you aren't excluded by those people, if they pay you lots of money, if they see you as no threat, as being on their side, you are of them and should expect hate from the better people whom they exclude.
> Above a very modest IQ floor, there is no correlation at all between intelligence and income, and the most intelligent are more likely to be in financial distress than average IQ people.
I always enjoy your comments, Enon. I'd be interested in seeing this study, because I thought the Swedish / Finnish / American studies found pretty strong relationships between the two, with pretty high N and good methodologies:
I'll also note that in my own time in finance and FAANGs, I've never been around a higher concentration of genuinely smart and talented people. The median person on my teams had a T20 Phd, and there's definitely a relationship there in terms of smarts - but it's probably fair to say that it's primarily selection effects, and I think you'd contend there's just as many (maybe more) genuinely smart people outside of them.
And I really have no way to measure that contention or test it either way.
I will note however, that business and career success are typically driven by a constellation of attributes, not solely IQ. You typically need ambition, an appetite for taking calculated risks, high conscientiousness, decent social / political skills, and probably a good amount of luck, too. And obviously high performance on any constellation of skills will be rarer than high performance on only one, and maybe this might explain the divide you're pointing to.
> You won't find many wealthy people in the ultra high IQ societies.
On this point, I just did a post on billionaires, and concluded that China was pretty close to the US billionaire rate, with much lower GDP's per capita (arguing that if they attained a similar per capita GDP, they'd be vastly oustripping us on that front). Did you happen to read that one? What did you think?
I feel like business success is about identifying and buying/stealing what the top IQ people do. So the smart guy invents a process, the less intelligent yet savvy businessman notices it and sells it out from under the smart guy. The businessman invests in lawyers and the smart guy in his laboratory so the businessman wins in court.
> I feel like business success is about identifying and buying/stealing what the top IQ people do.
I see how it's easy to see this pattern in the broader world - but having been on both sides of this equation (I've invented enough to have written a patent, at least), it kind of abstracts away a lot of important stuff on the business end.
There's a saying in the business world - "ideas are worthless, execution is everything."
The reason it's a saying is that *everyone* has ideas, and thinks those ideas are worth millions / billions, but essentially nobody with those ideas has the skills or capital to actually iterate the product until it's manufacturable, produce that idea at scale, get it shipped where it needs to be, get it onto shelves or into online markets, and to bring it to enough consumers' attention (without wasting all your money on marketing) that you actually sell it and make money.
The amount of effort on the invention end is maybe 10% of the amount of effort to get to "has successfully sold *bignum* products in a way that produces net income instead of net losses."
And yes, this counts years of effort and capex in building a lab / prototypes on the inventors' side, and the whole bit.
It is genuinely a much harder problem to create a successful business around a product or service than to invent a product or service - hence, "ideas are worthless."
And this is also why an inventor with an idea, even an inventor with a working prototype, struggles a lot to find a business partner. It feels unequal to have put in ALL the work up to this point, often years, and have the business guy snort and offer you 10% of each product sold, and he thinks that's *generous!* What a dick! He hasn't contributed *anything* and he wants 90%?? All business people are scum!
Now you DO point to a bad faith pattern - using lawfare and greater capital reserves to outright steal IP. This probably happens, and is reprehensible when it does happen!
But another thing that happens here is that an inventor will come with an idea that the company has already been working on, the company passes, and then a few months or a year later - the inventors product comes out! With zero attribution or royalties!
But they didn't steal the IP - the inventor kept the prototype, and the company people can't have inspected it in enough detail in the ten minutes he was demoing it to have known and communicated vital details to their production teams.
What did happen? Idea space is often a field where new ideas get enabled by the conjunction of two recent technological developments, and the inventor's idea was low hanging fruit to more than one inventor. Employees in the company saw the same opportunity, and entirely independently invented the thing. And I would personally bet that this happens probably ten times more often than outright IP theft / lawfare.
But from the inventors point of view? Sure does LOOK like a big well resourced company "stealing their idea" that they worked hard on!
I think you're broadly right but the 'fair share' argument is getting less and less true as we move past the heyday of the society Boomers destroyed. I guess...after the 90s? Lawfare and financialization are the drivers of business more and more and those reward owning existing 'logistics' over IQ. Lawyers on retainer have done more to crush high IQ inventions than any lack of business sense on the inventor's part. I mean in the sense of outright ruining people whose inventions would cut into your marketshare, which I think is worse than stealing because at least theft would still get it into the consumer's hands.
And networking for funding is getting more and more insular, high stakes winner take all, and nepotistic. It's all about who you know and who pays the lawyers nowadays. In the 90's if you invented a new insulin you might have gotten away with getting it onto market. In the 2020's if you invented a new insulin you would be smashed into the dirt.
By the way I 100% agree the business end is incredibly difficult and beyond most people. But in our low trust society my beef is that the business end stays owned once formed. As in, if you successfully launched an IPO or whatever once you can launch 1000 IPOs with little extra work. Famously, if you became a CEO once you can become a CEO 100 times no matter how shitty you are (that chick at heward packard). So right now the effort of the businessman lets him override the work of 1000 inventors despite only accomplishing his work once.
from p.494 "Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress" Jay L. Zagorsky, Intelligence 35 (2007) 489–5 | NLSY79 2004 www.bls.gov/nls data on individuals born 1957-1964
which show 0.3 & 0.16 correlations between IQ and income and net worth respectively.
No doubt men in finance, quants especially, aren't dumb, but they're probably not much over 120IQ average. See the 2nd chart here: https://enonh.substack.com/p/real-measures-of-intelligence , with professors at 115, MDs at 120. Another source had 1950s Cambridge professors at just over 120. All of these have pretty small right-tail s.d.s, about 10 - 12, with 90th percentiles around 133. The difference between a 150 IQ and a 120 IQ is substantially bigger than between a professor (115) and a janitor (92). (Average - about 20% of janitors are smarter than 20% of professors.). The ~120 IQ PMC types aren't giving the 150+IQs proper respect. The gap is literally the same as between an an adult and the same person age 10. You can't expect them to apply, cap in hand and eyes lowered, among a line of 200 applicants to be peons, then string them along for interview after interview, then ghost them. Impudent wretches! I'll box their ears!
Yeah, really interesting graphs (although restricted in range on both axes, but that's probably a sample size issue), thanks for sharing.
On finance / quants, most of us had physics or math Phd's, which seemed to have a fatter / higher kurtosis right tail than any of the others in the occupation graph. I'm assuming these are population distributions that they've chunked into quartiles? I think between that and the selection effects (the interviews are pretty rigorous), you're probably looking at a pretty high concentration of far right tail people.
> The ~120 IQ PMC types aren't giving the 150+IQs proper respect. The gap is literally the same as between an an adult and the same person age 10. You can't expect them to apply, cap in hand and eyes lowered, among a line of 200 applicants to be peons, then string them along for interview after interview, then ghost them. Impudent wretches! I'll box their ears!
I completely agree! Most corporations, like schools, aren't places for actually smart people. And yes, below the tippy top most hiring managers aren't all that bright (and steadfastly resist any measurements that show their direct reports could be as smart / smarter than them) - but you know, aren't there plenty of other places to use a standout IQ that doesn't require you being a team player? Day trading, sports betting, bug bounties, cybersecurity consulting, even poker? I mean, I personally played poker as my sole source of income for several years, and know other smart-but-prickly people in those other domains pulling in pretty healthy incomes as solo operations.
You're not always beholden to midwit HR processes and hiring managers, is my point, there are typically a number of domains where you can apply a standout talent without needing managers or corporations at all!
What rubbed me the wrong way about the assortive mating article was the class / wealth equivocation. Burnham's thesis, about the then-emerging PMC, with which I agree, was that they were usurping the place of the old owner class. Your article on billionaires didn't have that aspect to it at all. I met Dell and Musk in the mid ‘80s before they were rich, it's very unlikely for there ever to be a large enough number of such people to make a class.
OTOH, I attended an elite boarding school around the same time with a mix of the old families and the NYC parvenus. I was in the former category, the family business, Merrow Machine, was almost 150 years old even then; Harris Brisbane Dick's (still perhaps the biggest Metropolitan Museum of Art donor in exhibit count), grandparents' oil portraits, which I later inheirited, were still at my grandparents’ old farmhouse.
The NYC kids were mostly just ghastly oiks. Taki went to the same school thirty years earlier, never mentions the place, I understand why. These are the same people making up the new “upper” class, the $500k/yr. types you mention. They have utterly shut out the old families, as well as the highest-intelligence people. The way things have been going the past twenty years, I'll be lucky to get $500k in my lifetime, and I want vengeance.
These types are closely allied to the progressives; really, they're the same people. Most don't know the Quakers were endogamous for centuries and controlled most of British banking. Around 1900 the Quaker banking cartel merged to form Barclays, which still by far has the greatest share of the global network of corporate control (more than the rest of Britain combined, or Switzerland). Around the same time, the Quakers dropped endogamy and lowered barriers to joining. Within a generation, control of both religion and business had slipped out of their hands, and by 1970 or even before, they had virtually ceased to exist, replaced by draft-dodging Boomers and socialists in the Quaker meetings and PMC types in Barclays. Today there are probably fewer than 5,000 descended from the silent meeting members of 1900 who are still members. I'm one.
Reading about the people who replaced my people prospering and forming a hereditary ruling class while I have neither money nor children — well, you can imagine how I feel about that. Not a problem with your writing but with some of the people it's about.
> Reading about the people who replaced my people prospering and forming a hereditary ruling class while I have neither money nor children — well, you can imagine how I feel about that. Not a problem with your writing but with some of the people it's about.
Yeah, I'd be put out in your shoes, too, Enon. I'm sorry to hear that this has been unfolding this way, and that you're bearing the brunt of that.
As somebody who's also lived a high variance life, I'd urge you to consider that things can change significantly for the better, and do so more quickly than you'd think.
It's never the time to despair until you're actually in the ground - instead, I've found it helpful to try to increase your "luck surface," or the amount of your interactions with the parts of the world that tie into high variance good outcomes. As I mentioned before, there are many routes to utilizing your talents to make money, and they don't need to involve HR or corporations at all.
Increasing luck surface boils down to trying to interact more with the people in the careers and lifestyles and milieus that you would like to be a part of - whether digital or real life.
You should still absolutely follow whatever rational, thought-out steps you can think of to get there, too - but increasing that luck surface often pays off further and faster than the step-by-steps, in my own experience, because so much of the world is gated by person-to-person trust and relationships and vouching.
> I met Dell and Musk in the mid ‘80s before they were rich, it's very unlikely for there ever to be a large enough number of such people to make a class.
Actually, billionaires collectively are more than enough! Even at the severely under-estimated Forbes number of 3k, and certainly at the more realistic 7k+.
After all, we (all of us, H Sap) went through a population bottleneck of only ~1300 people in our remote past.
Dunbar's number is 150, yes, and that's the amount of people you can hold the social relationships in your head for, but there's a larger "recognition number" of ~1500 that is an attractor for the larger tribal ethno-linguistic group size. The Hadza, for example, at 1k - 1300, or the Ju'hoansi / San, at 1200. Historically we see this ~1500 figure in lots of hunter gatherers as the largest aggregate, and you actually really only need ~500 to have sufficient genetic diversity to not run into problems (such as the Ache).
This argues billionaires could actually become several entirely endogamous classes if they wanted to - there's more than enough of them to have several ~500 population "megabands" and still aggregate up to several larger tribes, and to have 4 or 5 of those larger tribes split by whatever criteria they felt like.
Apologies for the paleoanthropological tangent, I find those hard to resist.
> What rubbed me the wrong way about the assortive mating article was the class / wealth equivocation.
Yes, this came up on an ACX Open Thread once - somebody asked what ever happened to WASPs? Once such a broad trend in our culture overall, and a fixture in the echelons of power, now never even mentioned. And myself and a number of others chimed in that we thought that sociocultural slot was now just the PMC.
And you're reminding us that there's likely something genuinely lost there - WASPs at least had a distinct culture, and a history of familial achievement. The modern PMC are just "progressive" with no unifying culture or beliefs at all, beyond the standard ever-mercurial groupthink battle lines. The only values now are T20 education and working the right small set of jobs in the same small set of companies, and that's both the price of admission and pretty much all there is when you get there. The center is bare, with no values, and no historical context or meaning - just the churning output of overpowered optimization engines following a simple script, and ensuring that their offspring follow the same optimized path and script, towards no other end than itself.
It certainly seems like something has been lost there!
There are enough billionaires, but they, or rather their children, would need to socialize more exclusively with each other. There would need to be clubs and schools and so forth just for them. Exclusion is necessary for the formation of any group, society, even species. Mixing with other groups has to be severely limited, there's a bunch of laws in Leviticus to that effect. Medieval royals could do it, though, even surrounded by lesser aristocrats.
Billionaires seem to usually have a mindset that prevents dynasties and alliances, for some reason. They're more competitive-minded than monarchs that were constantly at war with each other. Monarchs were already related toveach other and part of an existing class, though.
142, here, Mensa and Colloquy, not high enough for the triple 9 societies. Ah, IQ != merit. Merit's creating and delivering value, which you can do with a high IQ, or not.
High IQ comes with advantages and disadvantages. Evolutionary traits aren't usually just boosts to your fitness, but trade offs. There is good reason for the average IQ to be the average IQ.
I say IQ, shorter to type than intelligence. It means more likely right on any problem, can solve more difficult problems. What disadvantages to being right?
“There is good reason for the average IQ to be the average IQ.”
Which average? 104 China, 59 Equitorial Guinea? (IIRC) That there are reasons things are as they are is tautological, does not mean there are insuperable barriers to becoming better.
See my posts on intelligence:
real measures…, grade-skip tables…, nobody wants geniuses, and my latest post on worldwide distribution of high IQs / 83% of 145+ IQs missing in US. IIRC Benbow's SMPY papers showed no max IQ to increased accomplishment, but also Hollingsworth and Terman ~ 90 years ago.
He is correct about more likely right on any given problem.
You are of course correct that the groupthink “luxury beliefs” are an important set where these on-average higher IQ progressives are wrong.
But note that if you understand Rob Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs, on those specifics these people predominately get the “problem” correct for *themselves*, they just are perfectly fine making false claims about what it is appropriate for *others* to do.
Yes, higher intelligence does mean more likely to be right on any given problem, by definition. See the latter part of my post on real measures of intelligence for how to calculate just how much more likely to be right. E.g., for a question that the average person gets right 50% of the time, someone with -1 s.d. will have a 25% chance and with +1 s.d. will have 75% chance. (roughly, assuming a 10-point W-score s.d., actual s.d.s vary by age from about 9-14 points.
Intelligence, or to be precise, a Rasch measure of intelligence, is literally defined by the difficulty score (on the same scale as ability) of the questions one has a 50% rate of answering correctly.
The title feels like clickbait to me - correlation in mating has always existed, and the data presented here doesn't seem to imply anything stronger than that. I'm curious as to whether OP knows what 'caste' means.
The heatmap seems to be the nail in the coffin:
- The majority of women from rich (500k+) families marry roughly average (100-250k) men. Given the sheer qualitative differences in lifestyle between those categories, this alone indicates a mating pattern that's shockingly egalitarian.
- Roughly a third of women from the poorest class category marry men from that same roughly average 100-250k range. In a caste system, this would be completely unthinkable.
- Only a tiny fraction of women from the top class marry men with the same economic standing as their fathers. If we had a caste system, this definitely wouldn't be the case.
As for education as the caste proxy, the correlations shown are quite weak. Most PhDs don't marry PhDs. I'd imagine things look even rougher when you account for the fact that a physics doctorate and a softer doctorate have nearly nothing in common in terms of motivation, culture, or economic prospects.
All fair critiques - you're inspiring me to do a follow up post adding wealth and occupational prestige, because I think the matching is tighter than you're suggesting, and some additional matching criteria will help surface whether that's true either way.
Also there's a decent chance that the matching gets more permissive at the top percentile because matching is an intrinisically hard problem, and pace the "effort exerted" graph, you need to exert more effort and optimization to achieve a given standard - that top percentile is already exerting more effort than anyone else.
If say, a common pattern were most top 1% earners to be men who go on to have multiple daughters, then those daughters simply won't have enough similar men to pair with, and would have to relax standards to pair at all.
But I think there's still more to be surfaced here that would be interesting, I appreciate your critiques!
A lot of professional class urban monoculture people in the United States like to brag about their multicultural backgrounds (i.e. mixed race, mixed nationality, mixed religion), but rarely do you hear anyone brag about being from a "mixed-class" background. We really don't have a term for it because it doesn't happen too often, or at least it's not immediately visible when it does. We also don't have a better term than "rags-to-riches" to describe someone raised in a house that went from working class to professional class during the person's childhood, or maybe even after they moved out of the house (in the event of very young parents). Having "one foot in the working class world and one foot in the professional class world" isn't really a cultural idea, even though a fair number of people live this way, and it allows them to move easily between class realms in a way that academic/journalistic elites call "code-switching", but only in reference to more visible distinctions, such as race.
I noticed in undergrad (a very diverse college) that all my closest friends ended up being students on Financial Aid, even though this was 1/3 of the college.
Within that, my closest friends were roughly from the same suburban background as me, in the same region of my home state.
When you meet a LOT of people, you notice more acutely when you naturally click with someone similar. Elite people do more "networking" in order to both practice connections, while also solidifying a sense of fraternity.
Working class people bond over the struggle of their work, which is a different kind of solidarity- also class based.
A comment about the BMI differences by group. The designed minimum normal BMI is 18.5, but a highly overweight person might have a BMI over 50, so for a BMI average of 25 or less, you need 4 or more nearly underweight people to balance out a highly morbidly obese person. So it's not surprising that the level of variance in BMIs in the groups is not that different because there's a very high floor, but an even higher ceiling.
We don't have easy data for body fat percentage, but that is a better metric for healthy weight since muscle is more dense than fat. A healthy body fat for men is 18% or less. Personally, I'm 5'6" and 195" (BMI = 31.5, Obese) but there's no way my body fat is over 18%, probably more in the 14-15 percent range. It's certainly possible that people in higher tiers have higher BMIs on average because they're more likely to lift weights and have muscle, even the women.
As a fellow "overweight with abs" guy, yeah, BMI def does us a disservice, but if you look at the waist circumference crosstab with BMI, you can see that we're surpassingly rare, and most people are legit just fat, we're <2% of the pop:
Median is a much more meaningful number for this metric than the mean.
Separately your English on the subject throughout the piece is very “loose”, as you seem to imply that almost all people in the group are obese the way you write about it when of course there’s a distribution.
I’m not sure that we needed this level of analysis to show us that fit, educated, wealthy, tall men don’t marry poor uneducated obese women that smoke. You learn this in high school.
But you know, I think it is actually telling to see that essentially all of the quintiles stay in their lane and mate homogamously to such an extreme degree.
I've seen this presaged in other data and stories, and one thing I always wondered was "wait, what about the hot secretaries and influencers who "hot their way to the top?" Don't men actually value beauty enough to step down on wealth or education in those cases??"
And the answer is NO! *If* it happens, it's basically rounding error, and <7% at the very most!
This is not how I would have bet!
I actually thought that men would reach down for enough beauty, but apparently that isn't true, or at least not true enough to see it at above a ~7% fidelity.
I like that you have this extremely intricate, excessive, unnecessarily detailed investigation and statistical analysis of the socioeconomics of dating and are trying to account for the subjectivity of beauty and “hot secretaries and influencers that hot their way to the top” while ignoring the fact that not only is this heteronormative but also how many men get to the top - by fitting a subjective mold that allows them access to opportunities they’d otherwise not have.
“I actually thought that men would reach down for enough beauty, but apparently that isn't true, or at least not true enough to see it at above a ~7% fidelity.”
Since your stats don’t show the class differences for one income families, you cannot know that the 93% (7% fidelity) number is accurate.
I‘d not realized - or else long since forgotten - there was such data beyond small surveys.
That is indeed better than I thought from my (admittedly casual) reading of your post.
The obvious question, then, is why you are not using the same metric for the man’s SES as for the woman’s.
And whether you are using parent’s income as of when the person is 18 or 21, as opposed to later in life (the parent’s entire history). But admittedly, this second would likely be only a small improvement.
one of the biggest tragedies in american life is that a poor person 40 years ago had more access to physically fit partners than even the higher tiers now.
Maybe thinner, but there was way more smoking and probably less exercise.
Why probably less exercise?
Because exercise was not something that normal people did until recently. It started with the boomers, but became more common with Gen X and Millennials.
Most people probably don’t exercise now, but the desirable, successful people usually have something figured out.
The comment I am responding to is probably correct about the lower classes (who are much fatter now), but probably not as accurate about the PMC. Fitness is a way that higher class people differentiate themselves. There are many exceptions though.
Among PMC we probably agree re: less exercise in the further past (40 years ago).
Not sure about 15 or 20 years ago vs today, however, for that group overall. [Where for the top 5%-10% I'd probably still agree.]
Re: everyone else, the overall trend has to become more sedentary, so it seems likely that there is less exercise overall now than in the past, not more.
If by exercise you mean physical activity, e.g., carrying boxes around, you're right. If by exercise you mean disrupting homeostasis with barbell squats or hill sprints, though...
it's genuinely why I resist when people tell me "life is always improving just look at the number going up we are so rich we are just spoiled"
Back when mental health was treated with whiskey and orgasms.
Haha - that is one of the biggest tragedies?
Yeah. Think about what motivates people
They may even be forced to consider disabled people, or, horror, a person of color! We must put laws in place to fix this! I recommend that we only allow men over six feet tall to become officers in any organization, public or private, and women have a height limit of five foot seven inches. Of course all will need fluency in Latin and be able to bench press 250 lbs. Anything less would be unreasonable.
Now we come to humane ways to euthanize all those dreadful disabled and LGBT people, ...
"inter" means "between", "intra" means "within" (just trying to be helpful, I liked your post)
Thanks much for catching that! Silly mistake on my part, changed it.
Oof. Low caste behavior.
This is usually due to the browser caching an older copy, if you refresh (or clear cache and refresh) you might see it?
Ah, thanks again! Sorry, I'd forgotten I had flubbed in two places - I'd corrected it in the main body of the post, and totally whiffed on the byline. My sincere thanks for following up again :-)
It still says “2) strict intermarriage” near the beginning, when I’m pretty sure you either mean intra or else proscription of intermarriage.
At first I thought “93 % inter caste? That’s really good and egalitarian.” Then I realized the author was confusing “inter” and “intra.”
Yeah sort of hurting the credibility right up front even though I’m fascinated and here for this.
To be very fair, I think it’s because in India you generally call it inter-caste, and that’s a very widely used term, I’ve actually never heard the term intra-caste! (And in any case, mistakes means it’s more probably human and not AI so :))
None of these castes reproduce above replacement, so all the striving is for nothing.
You haven't really thought this through. In a world with the tech of 100 years ago, you'd already have seen a collapse due to reproductive failure. Tech is a bandaid, not a cure. When the kids that today's 20-30 year olds are failing to have don't show up in 25 years, you'll be screwed.
“As it is, it's fine to have fewer humans in the future if they (and the other ethically significant life on Earth) have better lives.”
It might be fine, if almost every wealthy country on the planet didn’t have Ponzi-like old age benefits that depend on an ever-growing economy.
It might be fine if an ever-growing economy doesn't require an ever-growing or static population. Eric Drexler substacks about AI nanoengineering; it's interesting.
Yes, there is a non-zero possibility that AI will bail us out and deliver not just improved economic growth but massive productivity growth.
I believe the former is likely, but the latter is not.
This would only be true if there were no Non-Whites in this country.
Is age not related here in some way? Your salary at 22 maybe far different at 55, and it also seems like it’d be correlated to high marriage rates as income goes up.
Yeah, age is definitely related to marriage rates.
Two thoughts:
Age at first marriage has been steadily creeping upwards for both men and women for decades.
It's gone from something like 22 (f) 25 (m) in the fifties to 30(f) and 31(m) in the US and UK today. And by early thirties you're generally established in your career trajectory, so this is less of an issue.
Second thought:
Age gaps used to be a lot more common, and a way of establishing yourself as a man, then getting married to a younger wife, in a way that preserved fertility. This was probably better on both sides - the women didn't have to speculate on his career trajectory (which nobody wants to do), and got a proven man, and the man got better chances at kids due to having a younger wife.
A big part of marriages shifting to the early thirties is precisely so women can choose a man who's proven his career trajectory, and this is "marriage as capstone" vs "marriage as foundation" for both of them.
However, our cultural mores have shifted on age gaps too since the fifties, and that's why the median age gap has closed so much (going from a 3 year gap to a 1 year gap is actually a very significant difference writ over all of society, and hides a lot of variance being eliminated at the tails).
But this is actually a problem.
If a woman waits til 30 / 31 to have her first kid, she's burned through ~60% of her cumulative fertility:
https://imgur.com/lpADyJs
That graph is from Geruso's Age and Infertility revisted paper, which measures modern fertility and gets substantially less optimistic numbers than we thought we had in the past.
You might ask - why are the Geruso age-by-fertility numbers different than the ones you've heard about historically? Broadly, because all modern fertility numbers before Geruso came from fairly positively selected populations,¹ or from a single paper in the eighties, Menken et al’s Age and Infertility (1986), in which he surveys Hutterites in the 1920’s, Geneva bourgeoisie in 1600-49, Canadians 1700-30, Normandy 1760-90, Norway 1874-76, Iran 1940-50, and Americans in the 1930’s.
So, limited data from vastly different time periods than today, in a profoundly different environmental, pollution, and diet regime.
So to get a better read on it, Geruso combines nationally representative data from 62 low and middle income countries that span Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, with a 2.8M women sample size, and then use that to calculate a true “fecundability” curve using only women who are married, not on contraceptives, not currently pregnant or breastfeeding, and having periods.
His numbers are a lot closer to the truth than the other ones, IMO, and they paint a really grim picture of the fertility impacts of waiting until you're thirty to start thinking about marriage or babies. (And there's decent arguments his numbers are STILL too high, given obesity trends and worse diets in developed countries).
So the current age / marriage trends are kind of boning everybody in the world on the "fertility crisis" front.
Age is a massive confounder that deeply tempers your conclusion.
Hmm, I’d still assume going from a median to high earner is probably common between 30-55. And the age gap closing seems to support that the marriage rates are likely more related to age rather than a caste per se? I read the Geruso paper, but it mentions that the US is an outlier in that our birth rate is largely due to childlessness rather than fertility, so I’m not sure it’s relevant here.
> Hmm, I’d still assume going from a median to high earner is probably common between 30-55.
There's a little bit of age spread, but not very much - here's the mean and median age by tier here:
https://imgur.com/a/FWPI1nH
> I read the Geruso paper, but it mentions that the US is an outlier in that our birth rate is largely due to childlessness rather than fertility, so I’m not sure it’s relevant here.
Yes, that's "total maternity rate," or TMR (versus the more commonly reported total fertility rate, TFR). But actually, this is a hugely important factor in EVERY country's declining fertility - and indeed, if you look at the countries with the lowest fertility (China, Korea, Singapore, etc), it is because the TMR rate there is lower than in places with relatively better fertility:
https://imgur.com/GpsJe4v
So I actually disagree with Geruso on that point - it's actually pretty important and a big differentiator in terms of driving the final TFR numbers. And part of what drives lower TMR is women not wanting to have children while young, because they want to get a degree / grad degree and establish themselves in a career, then do "marriage as capstone," and by the time they do this, they're older and in the aggregate, many of them literally *cannot* have children. Have you heard the statistic that more women over 40 have children now than teenagers? That's how biased that is, and the odds at 40 are *terrible,* so prospectively there are many women in that age tranche who tried and couldn't.
Look at the differences in "probability of live birth" per year and birth defects by age tranche here:
https://imgur.com/sCqfS6z
Some people will say “this is bad” so I’m going to remind them that for most of the last 5,000 years, we still had castes and 99.9% of people were in the “subsistence farming” caste.
Women sort because hypergamy. Men because they are defending against gold digging. And comms also tend to work better with roughly matching cognitive capacities.
Yes, the top 5% in everything is concentrated into a few cities, and they have no idea how an overwhelming supermajority of the country thinks, wants, behaves, or makes decisions, nor do they have any idea how things work on the ground outside their tiny little blue bubbles.
Almost everyone who is a part of the PMC has a “food comes from the store so why do we need farmers” level understanding of most of society.
If you jump several social classes like i did, your social circle is a lot more integrated. But yeah, even my old friends recognize they are among a different cast when they come around my friends from grad school or work colleagues. But everyone is nice enough to (usually) get along, despite the initial discomfort.
That's pretty interesting, and yeah, it seems to be fairly rare.
But the most salient question surely has to be: has anyone from the different castes in your mixed friend group dated each other?
Lol thats would never happen in a million years
Over time, the Indian and US caste systems are going to converge into something similar.
Indian ‘jati’ boundaries are becoming porous and clustering into 4-5 sub groups (different from the varna system), primarily as a result of affirmative action.
There are 4 broad categories — General (or upper caste), Other Backward Castes (OBC or an amorphous middle category), Schedule Castes (SC or “Dalits”), Scheduled Tribes (ST).
Interestingly these cut across religion. There are upper and lower caste Muslims and Sikhs.
Inter-marriage across jati lines within these broad categories is somewhat acceptable. Particularly among the upper castes.
Brahmins for example have the highest inter-caste marriage rates.
These forces are only intensifying with urbanization, internet, and capitalism.
Cremieux or however you spell it, was very dismissive of the paper showing 0.3 IQ income link, even deleted my comment referencing it. Heretical Insights, too - absolute fraud such as "top coding" and "winsorizing" to make it appear that income is due to merit. Above a very modest IQ floor, there is no correlation at all between intelligence and income, and the most intelligent are more likely to be in financial distress than average IQ people.
The PMC didn't get their money and control through superior merit. There may be fewer 145+ IQs even among MDs and professors than among the general population. You won't find many wealthy people in the ultra high IQ societies. .This is not because intelligence isn't extremely valuable, it's due to collusion among inferior people against their betters.
This article blithely assumes the opposite, that better people do better, that there is a meritocracy rather than a midwit racketeer kakocracy.
If you aren't excluded by those people, if they pay you lots of money, if they see you as no threat, as being on their side, you are of them and should expect hate from the better people whom they exclude.
> Above a very modest IQ floor, there is no correlation at all between intelligence and income, and the most intelligent are more likely to be in financial distress than average IQ people.
I always enjoy your comments, Enon. I'd be interested in seeing this study, because I thought the Swedish / Finnish / American studies found pretty strong relationships between the two, with pretty high N and good methodologies:
https://imgur.com/a/0HKd2YJ
I'll also note that in my own time in finance and FAANGs, I've never been around a higher concentration of genuinely smart and talented people. The median person on my teams had a T20 Phd, and there's definitely a relationship there in terms of smarts - but it's probably fair to say that it's primarily selection effects, and I think you'd contend there's just as many (maybe more) genuinely smart people outside of them.
And I really have no way to measure that contention or test it either way.
I will note however, that business and career success are typically driven by a constellation of attributes, not solely IQ. You typically need ambition, an appetite for taking calculated risks, high conscientiousness, decent social / political skills, and probably a good amount of luck, too. And obviously high performance on any constellation of skills will be rarer than high performance on only one, and maybe this might explain the divide you're pointing to.
> You won't find many wealthy people in the ultra high IQ societies.
On this point, I just did a post on billionaires, and concluded that China was pretty close to the US billionaire rate, with much lower GDP's per capita (arguing that if they attained a similar per capita GDP, they'd be vastly oustripping us on that front). Did you happen to read that one? What did you think?
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/3k-it-is-to-laugh-just-how-many-billionaires?r=17hw9h
I feel like business success is about identifying and buying/stealing what the top IQ people do. So the smart guy invents a process, the less intelligent yet savvy businessman notices it and sells it out from under the smart guy. The businessman invests in lawyers and the smart guy in his laboratory so the businessman wins in court.
> I feel like business success is about identifying and buying/stealing what the top IQ people do.
I see how it's easy to see this pattern in the broader world - but having been on both sides of this equation (I've invented enough to have written a patent, at least), it kind of abstracts away a lot of important stuff on the business end.
There's a saying in the business world - "ideas are worthless, execution is everything."
The reason it's a saying is that *everyone* has ideas, and thinks those ideas are worth millions / billions, but essentially nobody with those ideas has the skills or capital to actually iterate the product until it's manufacturable, produce that idea at scale, get it shipped where it needs to be, get it onto shelves or into online markets, and to bring it to enough consumers' attention (without wasting all your money on marketing) that you actually sell it and make money.
The amount of effort on the invention end is maybe 10% of the amount of effort to get to "has successfully sold *bignum* products in a way that produces net income instead of net losses."
And yes, this counts years of effort and capex in building a lab / prototypes on the inventors' side, and the whole bit.
It is genuinely a much harder problem to create a successful business around a product or service than to invent a product or service - hence, "ideas are worthless."
And this is also why an inventor with an idea, even an inventor with a working prototype, struggles a lot to find a business partner. It feels unequal to have put in ALL the work up to this point, often years, and have the business guy snort and offer you 10% of each product sold, and he thinks that's *generous!* What a dick! He hasn't contributed *anything* and he wants 90%?? All business people are scum!
Now you DO point to a bad faith pattern - using lawfare and greater capital reserves to outright steal IP. This probably happens, and is reprehensible when it does happen!
But another thing that happens here is that an inventor will come with an idea that the company has already been working on, the company passes, and then a few months or a year later - the inventors product comes out! With zero attribution or royalties!
But they didn't steal the IP - the inventor kept the prototype, and the company people can't have inspected it in enough detail in the ten minutes he was demoing it to have known and communicated vital details to their production teams.
What did happen? Idea space is often a field where new ideas get enabled by the conjunction of two recent technological developments, and the inventor's idea was low hanging fruit to more than one inventor. Employees in the company saw the same opportunity, and entirely independently invented the thing. And I would personally bet that this happens probably ten times more often than outright IP theft / lawfare.
But from the inventors point of view? Sure does LOOK like a big well resourced company "stealing their idea" that they worked hard on!
I think you're broadly right but the 'fair share' argument is getting less and less true as we move past the heyday of the society Boomers destroyed. I guess...after the 90s? Lawfare and financialization are the drivers of business more and more and those reward owning existing 'logistics' over IQ. Lawyers on retainer have done more to crush high IQ inventions than any lack of business sense on the inventor's part. I mean in the sense of outright ruining people whose inventions would cut into your marketshare, which I think is worse than stealing because at least theft would still get it into the consumer's hands.
And networking for funding is getting more and more insular, high stakes winner take all, and nepotistic. It's all about who you know and who pays the lawyers nowadays. In the 90's if you invented a new insulin you might have gotten away with getting it onto market. In the 2020's if you invented a new insulin you would be smashed into the dirt.
By the way I 100% agree the business end is incredibly difficult and beyond most people. But in our low trust society my beef is that the business end stays owned once formed. As in, if you successfully launched an IPO or whatever once you can launch 1000 IPOs with little extra work. Famously, if you became a CEO once you can become a CEO 100 times no matter how shitty you are (that chick at heward packard). So right now the effort of the businessman lets him override the work of 1000 inventors despite only accomplishing his work once.
“Lawfare and financialization are the drivers of business more and more…”
The performance and weighting of the Big Tech megacaps in the S&P 500 are pretty powerful evidence that your claim is in fact wrong.
My understanding is that OpenAI, one of the biggest of big Techs, is being overinflated by financialization as we speak.
Venture capitalists have a saying, that their job is firing or sidelining founders and inventors.
Here are the scatterplots of income and net worth vs. IQ:
https://substack.com/profile/19268335-enon/note/c-182881971
https://substack.com/profile/19268335-enon/note/c-182880759
from p.494 "Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress" Jay L. Zagorsky, Intelligence 35 (2007) 489–5 | NLSY79 2004 www.bls.gov/nls data on individuals born 1957-1964
which show 0.3 & 0.16 correlations between IQ and income and net worth respectively.
No doubt men in finance, quants especially, aren't dumb, but they're probably not much over 120IQ average. See the 2nd chart here: https://enonh.substack.com/p/real-measures-of-intelligence , with professors at 115, MDs at 120. Another source had 1950s Cambridge professors at just over 120. All of these have pretty small right-tail s.d.s, about 10 - 12, with 90th percentiles around 133. The difference between a 150 IQ and a 120 IQ is substantially bigger than between a professor (115) and a janitor (92). (Average - about 20% of janitors are smarter than 20% of professors.). The ~120 IQ PMC types aren't giving the 150+IQs proper respect. The gap is literally the same as between an an adult and the same person age 10. You can't expect them to apply, cap in hand and eyes lowered, among a line of 200 applicants to be peons, then string them along for interview after interview, then ghost them. Impudent wretches! I'll box their ears!
I'll reply further later.
Yeah, really interesting graphs (although restricted in range on both axes, but that's probably a sample size issue), thanks for sharing.
On finance / quants, most of us had physics or math Phd's, which seemed to have a fatter / higher kurtosis right tail than any of the others in the occupation graph. I'm assuming these are population distributions that they've chunked into quartiles? I think between that and the selection effects (the interviews are pretty rigorous), you're probably looking at a pretty high concentration of far right tail people.
> The ~120 IQ PMC types aren't giving the 150+IQs proper respect. The gap is literally the same as between an an adult and the same person age 10. You can't expect them to apply, cap in hand and eyes lowered, among a line of 200 applicants to be peons, then string them along for interview after interview, then ghost them. Impudent wretches! I'll box their ears!
I completely agree! Most corporations, like schools, aren't places for actually smart people. And yes, below the tippy top most hiring managers aren't all that bright (and steadfastly resist any measurements that show their direct reports could be as smart / smarter than them) - but you know, aren't there plenty of other places to use a standout IQ that doesn't require you being a team player? Day trading, sports betting, bug bounties, cybersecurity consulting, even poker? I mean, I personally played poker as my sole source of income for several years, and know other smart-but-prickly people in those other domains pulling in pretty healthy incomes as solo operations.
You're not always beholden to midwit HR processes and hiring managers, is my point, there are typically a number of domains where you can apply a standout talent without needing managers or corporations at all!
What rubbed me the wrong way about the assortive mating article was the class / wealth equivocation. Burnham's thesis, about the then-emerging PMC, with which I agree, was that they were usurping the place of the old owner class. Your article on billionaires didn't have that aspect to it at all. I met Dell and Musk in the mid ‘80s before they were rich, it's very unlikely for there ever to be a large enough number of such people to make a class.
OTOH, I attended an elite boarding school around the same time with a mix of the old families and the NYC parvenus. I was in the former category, the family business, Merrow Machine, was almost 150 years old even then; Harris Brisbane Dick's (still perhaps the biggest Metropolitan Museum of Art donor in exhibit count), grandparents' oil portraits, which I later inheirited, were still at my grandparents’ old farmhouse.
The NYC kids were mostly just ghastly oiks. Taki went to the same school thirty years earlier, never mentions the place, I understand why. These are the same people making up the new “upper” class, the $500k/yr. types you mention. They have utterly shut out the old families, as well as the highest-intelligence people. The way things have been going the past twenty years, I'll be lucky to get $500k in my lifetime, and I want vengeance.
These types are closely allied to the progressives; really, they're the same people. Most don't know the Quakers were endogamous for centuries and controlled most of British banking. Around 1900 the Quaker banking cartel merged to form Barclays, which still by far has the greatest share of the global network of corporate control (more than the rest of Britain combined, or Switzerland). Around the same time, the Quakers dropped endogamy and lowered barriers to joining. Within a generation, control of both religion and business had slipped out of their hands, and by 1970 or even before, they had virtually ceased to exist, replaced by draft-dodging Boomers and socialists in the Quaker meetings and PMC types in Barclays. Today there are probably fewer than 5,000 descended from the silent meeting members of 1900 who are still members. I'm one.
Reading about the people who replaced my people prospering and forming a hereditary ruling class while I have neither money nor children — well, you can imagine how I feel about that. Not a problem with your writing but with some of the people it's about.
> Reading about the people who replaced my people prospering and forming a hereditary ruling class while I have neither money nor children — well, you can imagine how I feel about that. Not a problem with your writing but with some of the people it's about.
Yeah, I'd be put out in your shoes, too, Enon. I'm sorry to hear that this has been unfolding this way, and that you're bearing the brunt of that.
As somebody who's also lived a high variance life, I'd urge you to consider that things can change significantly for the better, and do so more quickly than you'd think.
It's never the time to despair until you're actually in the ground - instead, I've found it helpful to try to increase your "luck surface," or the amount of your interactions with the parts of the world that tie into high variance good outcomes. As I mentioned before, there are many routes to utilizing your talents to make money, and they don't need to involve HR or corporations at all.
Increasing luck surface boils down to trying to interact more with the people in the careers and lifestyles and milieus that you would like to be a part of - whether digital or real life.
You should still absolutely follow whatever rational, thought-out steps you can think of to get there, too - but increasing that luck surface often pays off further and faster than the step-by-steps, in my own experience, because so much of the world is gated by person-to-person trust and relationships and vouching.
> I met Dell and Musk in the mid ‘80s before they were rich, it's very unlikely for there ever to be a large enough number of such people to make a class.
Actually, billionaires collectively are more than enough! Even at the severely under-estimated Forbes number of 3k, and certainly at the more realistic 7k+.
After all, we (all of us, H Sap) went through a population bottleneck of only ~1300 people in our remote past.
Dunbar's number is 150, yes, and that's the amount of people you can hold the social relationships in your head for, but there's a larger "recognition number" of ~1500 that is an attractor for the larger tribal ethno-linguistic group size. The Hadza, for example, at 1k - 1300, or the Ju'hoansi / San, at 1200. Historically we see this ~1500 figure in lots of hunter gatherers as the largest aggregate, and you actually really only need ~500 to have sufficient genetic diversity to not run into problems (such as the Ache).
This argues billionaires could actually become several entirely endogamous classes if they wanted to - there's more than enough of them to have several ~500 population "megabands" and still aggregate up to several larger tribes, and to have 4 or 5 of those larger tribes split by whatever criteria they felt like.
Apologies for the paleoanthropological tangent, I find those hard to resist.
> What rubbed me the wrong way about the assortive mating article was the class / wealth equivocation.
Yes, this came up on an ACX Open Thread once - somebody asked what ever happened to WASPs? Once such a broad trend in our culture overall, and a fixture in the echelons of power, now never even mentioned. And myself and a number of others chimed in that we thought that sociocultural slot was now just the PMC.
And you're reminding us that there's likely something genuinely lost there - WASPs at least had a distinct culture, and a history of familial achievement. The modern PMC are just "progressive" with no unifying culture or beliefs at all, beyond the standard ever-mercurial groupthink battle lines. The only values now are T20 education and working the right small set of jobs in the same small set of companies, and that's both the price of admission and pretty much all there is when you get there. The center is bare, with no values, and no historical context or meaning - just the churning output of overpowered optimization engines following a simple script, and ensuring that their offspring follow the same optimized path and script, towards no other end than itself.
It certainly seems like something has been lost there!
Thanks.
There are enough billionaires, but they, or rather their children, would need to socialize more exclusively with each other. There would need to be clubs and schools and so forth just for them. Exclusion is necessary for the formation of any group, society, even species. Mixing with other groups has to be severely limited, there's a bunch of laws in Leviticus to that effect. Medieval royals could do it, though, even surrounded by lesser aristocrats.
Billionaires seem to usually have a mindset that prevents dynasties and alliances, for some reason. They're more competitive-minded than monarchs that were constantly at war with each other. Monarchs were already related toveach other and part of an existing class, though.
142, here, Mensa and Colloquy, not high enough for the triple 9 societies. Ah, IQ != merit. Merit's creating and delivering value, which you can do with a high IQ, or not.
High IQ comes with advantages and disadvantages. Evolutionary traits aren't usually just boosts to your fitness, but trade offs. There is good reason for the average IQ to be the average IQ.
I say IQ, shorter to type than intelligence. It means more likely right on any problem, can solve more difficult problems. What disadvantages to being right?
“There is good reason for the average IQ to be the average IQ.”
Which average? 104 China, 59 Equitorial Guinea? (IIRC) That there are reasons things are as they are is tautological, does not mean there are insuperable barriers to becoming better.
See my posts on intelligence:
real measures…, grade-skip tables…, nobody wants geniuses, and my latest post on worldwide distribution of high IQs / 83% of 145+ IQs missing in US. IIRC Benbow's SMPY papers showed no max IQ to increased accomplishment, but also Hollingsworth and Terman ~ 90 years ago.
IQ is positively correlated with luxury beliefs that are absolutely false, it does not mean more likely right on any problem.
He is correct about more likely right on any given problem.
You are of course correct that the groupthink “luxury beliefs” are an important set where these on-average higher IQ progressives are wrong.
But note that if you understand Rob Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs, on those specifics these people predominately get the “problem” correct for *themselves*, they just are perfectly fine making false claims about what it is appropriate for *others* to do.
Yes, higher intelligence does mean more likely to be right on any given problem, by definition. See the latter part of my post on real measures of intelligence for how to calculate just how much more likely to be right. E.g., for a question that the average person gets right 50% of the time, someone with -1 s.d. will have a 25% chance and with +1 s.d. will have 75% chance. (roughly, assuming a 10-point W-score s.d., actual s.d.s vary by age from about 9-14 points.
Intelligence, or to be precise, a Rasch measure of intelligence, is literally defined by the difficulty score (on the same scale as ability) of the questions one has a 50% rate of answering correctly.
The title feels like clickbait to me - correlation in mating has always existed, and the data presented here doesn't seem to imply anything stronger than that. I'm curious as to whether OP knows what 'caste' means.
The heatmap seems to be the nail in the coffin:
- The majority of women from rich (500k+) families marry roughly average (100-250k) men. Given the sheer qualitative differences in lifestyle between those categories, this alone indicates a mating pattern that's shockingly egalitarian.
- Roughly a third of women from the poorest class category marry men from that same roughly average 100-250k range. In a caste system, this would be completely unthinkable.
- Only a tiny fraction of women from the top class marry men with the same economic standing as their fathers. If we had a caste system, this definitely wouldn't be the case.
As for education as the caste proxy, the correlations shown are quite weak. Most PhDs don't marry PhDs. I'd imagine things look even rougher when you account for the fact that a physics doctorate and a softer doctorate have nearly nothing in common in terms of motivation, culture, or economic prospects.
All fair critiques - you're inspiring me to do a follow up post adding wealth and occupational prestige, because I think the matching is tighter than you're suggesting, and some additional matching criteria will help surface whether that's true either way.
Also there's a decent chance that the matching gets more permissive at the top percentile because matching is an intrinisically hard problem, and pace the "effort exerted" graph, you need to exert more effort and optimization to achieve a given standard - that top percentile is already exerting more effort than anyone else.
If say, a common pattern were most top 1% earners to be men who go on to have multiple daughters, then those daughters simply won't have enough similar men to pair with, and would have to relax standards to pair at all.
But I think there's still more to be surfaced here that would be interesting, I appreciate your critiques!
Immediate subscribe after the 'give me castetity' bit.
A lot of professional class urban monoculture people in the United States like to brag about their multicultural backgrounds (i.e. mixed race, mixed nationality, mixed religion), but rarely do you hear anyone brag about being from a "mixed-class" background. We really don't have a term for it because it doesn't happen too often, or at least it's not immediately visible when it does. We also don't have a better term than "rags-to-riches" to describe someone raised in a house that went from working class to professional class during the person's childhood, or maybe even after they moved out of the house (in the event of very young parents). Having "one foot in the working class world and one foot in the professional class world" isn't really a cultural idea, even though a fair number of people live this way, and it allows them to move easily between class realms in a way that academic/journalistic elites call "code-switching", but only in reference to more visible distinctions, such as race.
there are serious social dynamics to this.
I noticed in undergrad (a very diverse college) that all my closest friends ended up being students on Financial Aid, even though this was 1/3 of the college.
Within that, my closest friends were roughly from the same suburban background as me, in the same region of my home state.
When you meet a LOT of people, you notice more acutely when you naturally click with someone similar. Elite people do more "networking" in order to both practice connections, while also solidifying a sense of fraternity.
Working class people bond over the struggle of their work, which is a different kind of solidarity- also class based.
The great gatsby is probably relevant here.
With all due respect, I didn't need the stats to tell me any of this. It's just that I am not blind.
The stats merely confirmed what I already know.
> The stats merely confirmed what I already know.
Lol, yup.
Maybe the real treasure has always been the Jupyter notebooks we made along the way...
A comment about the BMI differences by group. The designed minimum normal BMI is 18.5, but a highly overweight person might have a BMI over 50, so for a BMI average of 25 or less, you need 4 or more nearly underweight people to balance out a highly morbidly obese person. So it's not surprising that the level of variance in BMIs in the groups is not that different because there's a very high floor, but an even higher ceiling.
We don't have easy data for body fat percentage, but that is a better metric for healthy weight since muscle is more dense than fat. A healthy body fat for men is 18% or less. Personally, I'm 5'6" and 195" (BMI = 31.5, Obese) but there's no way my body fat is over 18%, probably more in the 14-15 percent range. It's certainly possible that people in higher tiers have higher BMIs on average because they're more likely to lift weights and have muscle, even the women.
Everything is selection effects! At least 30% people of the guys on my hurling team fit the same mold as me.
Yeah, I actually looked at the distributions of BMI and waist circumference:
https://imgur.com/S6BPlv0
https://imgur.com/a/6gKOprf
As a fellow "overweight with abs" guy, yeah, BMI def does us a disservice, but if you look at the waist circumference crosstab with BMI, you can see that we're surpassingly rare, and most people are legit just fat, we're <2% of the pop:
https://imgur.com/a/VgY66Er
Are you reporting mean BMI or median?
Median is a much more meaningful number for this metric than the mean.
Separately your English on the subject throughout the piece is very “loose”, as you seem to imply that almost all people in the group are obese the way you write about it when of course there’s a distribution.
The median is a MUCH more appropriate number to use here for BMI than the mean.
I’m not sure that we needed this level of analysis to show us that fit, educated, wealthy, tall men don’t marry poor uneducated obese women that smoke. You learn this in high school.
Too true, too true!
But you know, I think it is actually telling to see that essentially all of the quintiles stay in their lane and mate homogamously to such an extreme degree.
I've seen this presaged in other data and stories, and one thing I always wondered was "wait, what about the hot secretaries and influencers who "hot their way to the top?" Don't men actually value beauty enough to step down on wealth or education in those cases??"
And the answer is NO! *If* it happens, it's basically rounding error, and <7% at the very most!
This is not how I would have bet!
I actually thought that men would reach down for enough beauty, but apparently that isn't true, or at least not true enough to see it at above a ~7% fidelity.
I like that you have this extremely intricate, excessive, unnecessarily detailed investigation and statistical analysis of the socioeconomics of dating and are trying to account for the subjectivity of beauty and “hot secretaries and influencers that hot their way to the top” while ignoring the fact that not only is this heteronormative but also how many men get to the top - by fitting a subjective mold that allows them access to opportunities they’d otherwise not have.
“I actually thought that men would reach down for enough beauty, but apparently that isn't true, or at least not true enough to see it at above a ~7% fidelity.”
Since your stats don’t show the class differences for one income families, you cannot know that the 93% (7% fidelity) number is accurate.
> Since your stats don’t show the class differences for one income families, you cannot know that the 93% (7% fidelity) number is accurate.
They should tho, because I used wife's father's income as the metric for what SES she is, not her own personal income.
One more time, wife’s father’s current income? Their income at the time of the marriage??
How are you addressing the fact that incomes vary over time?
> How are you addressing the fact that incomes vary over time?
You take the average of the 5 highest years of father's income.
Thanks.
I‘d not realized - or else long since forgotten - there was such data beyond small surveys.
That is indeed better than I thought from my (admittedly casual) reading of your post.
The obvious question, then, is why you are not using the same metric for the man’s SES as for the woman’s.
And whether you are using parent’s income as of when the person is 18 or 21, as opposed to later in life (the parent’s entire history). But admittedly, this second would likely be only a small improvement.
Take Zuckerberg's wife. Please.