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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

strong cultural norms that are education and success oriented along with high IQ's.

edit: before I get people bitching at me http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html

Also, the fact that they (okay, we) are concentrated in large cities like New York where wages for professional jobs are above national averages could drive the numbers up.

That wouldn't explain why the other ethnic groups also prevalent in New York don't have comparable wages there.

As the link states, they've controlled for education (degree earned) and then measured IQ with a vocabulary test; as a result they hypothesize that students who are verbally-inclined might be earning degrees in less profitable fields.

If you look at the data included with the GRE CD, you can see the same trend: those who perform spectacularly on the verbal portion are philosophy majors and the like. How much would you expect their average salary to be? No doubt it's significantly less than for most engineers, who don't verbally perform as well, but hit close to the (low) ceiling of the math portion. Income vs. verbal IQ within the same education class is probably all over the map because of this, and no doubt significantly confounded wrt cause-and-effect.

On the other hand, I would expect there to be a strong benefit to verbal intelligence within each profession.

TLDR: The link hardly proves that a higher IQ does not cause higher income.

Also an emphasis on the importance of family and how that relates to business, e.g. handing down family owned businesses to sons.

Also an emphasis on having your family be genetically related to you; hence your increased willingness to hand down the business, and their more likely ability to take it up.

edit: before I get people bitching at me http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html

this is a great link since we had this argument here before with about half HNers thinking that income somehow correlates to IQ.

however this link doesn't explain why you think jews (as practitioners of judaism, not as a nationality) have higher IQs?

Because people who are practitioners are 90% of the time, also ethnically Jews.

90% of Judaism practitioners have higher IQ because they're jews. Makes sense...

While not all practitioners of the Jewish religion are ethnically Jews (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, etc.) and vice versa, there's certainly a very strong correlation. That's certainly enough to produce an apparent religious-IQ linkage, if indeed there's a ethnic-IQ linkage. (It doesn't, of course, say anything about causation.)

You could similarly link the Hindu religion to dark hair, or other genetic traits common among ethnic groups who have a high percentage of Hindu practitioners. It wouldn't be true all the time, but it would probably show a significant correlation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_intelligence

Wow, I had heard of and thought there might be something to the IQ studies that show Ashkenazi Jews as smarter but now that I see the supposed evidence on that Wikipedia page I'm just laughing. If those 4 studies are the best proof they can come up with then I'm left to believe this is all part of some jewish propaganda.

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