Another nail in the coffin for the blank-slate left: From psychologicalscience.org: Is Success in Our Genes?:
When Belsky and colleagues analyzed measures of genetic variation and educational attainment, they found a link: A high polygenic score—an aggregate measure of variation across a person’s genome—predicted not only educational attainment, but other forms of success as well.
Individuals with higher polygenic scores were more likely to leave home for professional opportunities, they had more prestigious jobs, made more money, and were better at managing their finances. Participants’ genetic profile even predicted the level of education and earnings of their spouses. Together, all of these factors show that children with higher polygenic scores tended to become more economically successful—even if they had grown up in families that were relatively poor.
Intelligence was one factor that partially accounted for the relationship between genes and professional attainment, but other characteristics—such as self-control and interpersonal skills—were also important.
Full study Belsky 2016
Leftism, as it pertains to social policy, is predicated on the dubious notion that differences in individual socioeconomic outcomes are attributable to social factors, not biological ones. If upward mobility is determined heavily by genes, it renders the left’s expensive social programs, as well as their ideology of equality, ineffective and wrong.
High-IQ are the wings that lift people out of poverty and mediocrity. Especially during the 50’s and 60’s in large middle-income families in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Appalachian regions, the smartest children, who tended to be the most ambitious, would leave home at a relativity early age to go to college, sometimes as far away as Massachusetts, California, or New York, to join the ranks of the ‘educated professional class’ to become engineers, lawyers, professors, or journalists, while their less intelligent siblings would get jobs closer to home, often dropping out of high school, taking much longer to move out on their own, and when they moved it was usually not very far.
These smart children, who can be likened to the ‘pioneers’ of the family, grown up and independent, attain a much higher degree of wealth and social status than had they stayed in their original neighborhoods. These ‘pioneers’ start new families, often in the urban areas where they work, and through assortative mating have high-IQ children their own. Fast-forward to the 21st century, a similar trend is observed in foreign countries, especially in China, Australia, and Nigeria, except the smartest are moving to America, and to a lesser extent, Britain. This means a ‘Matthew effect’ kicks in as smarter countries and regions (such as American and Silicon Valley) become progressively smarter, and less intelligent regions become progressively less intelligent due to ‘cognitive flight’.