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Height is determined by your genes, yet its also affected by your environment during your development. Something similar could be said about Intelligence, though as far as I know, in reductionist terms, intelligence has a greater window for development (most of our life), and a lot more plastic than height (which is highly dependent upon your bone structure. Bones also being categorically different to our neural systems and its comprising elements).
I don't think it'd be outragous to find that your economic situation affects your developmental goals. Given how it affects how much time you spend on, and opportunities for your personal (in this case intellectual) development.
Any sources for this? Last I heard, there's nothing that can improve intelligence besides removing temporary impediments.
I think people do generally tend to attribute far to many disadvantages to poverty when really poverty is just one of the outcomes of underlying disadvantage like low intelligence and emotional and mental health problems.
One fun example might be the anti-usury stance of the Catholics back in the (I'm told) the 12th century. A society that can't charge interest on its debts is a society where people will behave stupidly compared to a society where people can lend money profitably - people will just walk by situations that they can identify as big win-win scenarios and rationally not pursue them. But it isn't linked to individual intelligence as much as how what people are raised to believe.
That doesn't seem like an easy position to defend. In the pre-modern era, the baselines are so small that a 5% growth rate was possible to achieve with even primitive tools. And a smart person could found entire fields of science with a decade of study of common phenomenon. The world was rich with growth opportunities.
It'd have been much easier to grow if they'd had social structures that allowed it. The lawmakers at the time just didn't realise how much damage inefficient and poorly organised financial and property systems were doing to the general wellbeing.
If nothing else, well developed structures around loans would make it easier for the early societies to discover that fossil fuel was a huge source of growth.
Crop failure could be a matter of literal life and death. I can imagine the most forward-thinking community in a country coming together and funding the smartest guy they've ever heard of to figure out how to stop that. Or any of a number of other growth areas.
Search up neuroplasticity.
> there's nothing that can improve intelligence..
Maybe in other mamals and animals in general, lol. But with humans it's a slightly different story. Our brain stays plastic for quite a while, and said plasticity declines into our "elderhood". However, we can still retain plasticity as long as we maintain intensive learning throughout our lives.
Intelligence in humans isn't static, much like ourselves. If it were static, there would be a hard cutoff point where you no longer can/would be extremely hard to learn new things (and it is indeed the case, but much, much later in life), similar to aforementioned non-human mamals and animals.
Learning is a process that can be understood and improved upon through self-reflection. Including the process of understanding itself. The way we learn and hence understand can be improved and hence elevate intelligence (granted you fulfil the requirement for being able to reflect on and compress things, much like healthy human beings can).
Also, what do YOU mean by intelligence?
I think intelligence is a general ability to solve problems. So improving your skill at solving one type of problem doesn't make you more intelligent because it doesn't increase your general ability to solve all types of problem.
Or maybe aptitude tests, job interviews, exams, and presentations measure anxiety levels rather than intelligence?
If so, this is (unfortunately) an idea deeply entrenched in American society. I'm not sure of the exact origins but it may harken back to the Protestant work ethic and asceticism [1]. It's the other side of the coin of "I succeded because of my own hard work" nonsense ie the myth of meritocracy [2].
Such arguments quickly can be reduced to racism and are eerily similar to historical arguments in support of slavery, the Holocaust and any number of other atrocities.
Consider those with lower socioeconomic status tend to skew more to minorities than the general population. This is empirically true. So, if you start with the prmise that lower socioeconomic status is a result of brain function then what you're saying is such brain function is a property of racial or ethnic group ie something intrinsic to the affected people.
That's racism.
The alternative is that socioeconomic status and poor outcomes aren't a function of race but are due to external (ie material) conditions, not inherent characteristics.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/51eog3/whe...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy#:~:text=Ra....
No, such arguments aren't racist, you brought race into this discussion for no reason. Poor people are dumber even in homogeneous societies, the argument doesn't care about race.