The Economist is economical about intelligence

 

The Economist is not a reliable guide to human ability. It believes in homo-economicus: all-purpose, equipotential beings without inherent differences, any such adventitious peculiarities to be smoothed away by compensatory education and the amelioration of unfavourable circumstances.

Very occasionally, like a maiden aunt reluctantly acknowledging the existence of sexual arousal, they refer to genetic differences, but soon revert to their standard mantra: with more education, earlier education, and more flexible education those nasty gaps between one person and another, and one group and another, can be washed away. Perhaps so.

As part of a holiday ritual I buy The Economist to take to the beach and find out if it has improved. The issue of June 25th looked promising, in that it had a special report on artificial intelligence, in which they said that the intelligent response to the dislocation caused by this development would be “making education and training flexible enough to teach new skills quickly and efficiently”. Quite so. They should have added “but the intelligent will always learn more quickly and will generalise their learning more widely, and to greater advantage”. Learning speed is correlated with general ability. The US armed forces have all the data, and Linda Gottfredson has dug it up. The Wonderlic data also show that training a person in one simple task in one ability domain does not generalise to improved ability in simple tasks in other ability domains. A task is learned, but the individual is no brighter or faster at learning the next task.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2013/12/the-7-tribes-of-intellect.html

They also champion social skills, which they say will be particularly required when robots strip out many humdrum jobs from the economy. However, social skills and character are largely personality characteristics which are heritable, and not easy to alter. (Heritability estimates for personality variable may be lessened by the poor reliability of self-assessed personality, so the use of better tests may show even higher heritability than the current 40% or so). Some social skills can be trained, and this is currently very popular, because it is cast as “emotional intelligence” and everyone likes being intelligent in some way. Moving in a mysterious way, for example.

Measures of emotional intelligence turn out to contribute little to job success and response to training. Hunter and Schmidt.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2015/12/multiple-emotional-intelligence.html

Being one standard deviation above the norm leads to 60% higher wages. These are OECD results, though they make absolutely no mention of intelligence.

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2013/10/how-illiterate-is-oecd.html

 

The special report on artificial intelligence is worth reading. They point out that advances in technology usually create new jobs of different sorts, usually more complicated and demanding service jobs. Most people keep busy and are in work. The authors don’t mention that the current elite belief that mass immigration is required to provide low skilled workers does not sit well with the promises of artificial intelligence: governments seem to be hell-bent on bringing in people to do jobs which , if the advances of artificial intelligence are to be believed, shortly will not exist.

Although the report is interesting, one needs to fill in the empty spaces. It shows US employment by type of work (US Population Survey, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis). The graph shows that the greatest increase since 1983 is in “non-routine cognitive” jobs, with routine cognitive and manual jobs stagnant, and even non-routine manual jobs increasing. They fail to point out that routine jobs are for those who need training on every step of a simple job, and that these people find departure from routine challenging, because those non-routine problems require higher ability. “Non-routine” jobs are where brighter people flourish because they do not need to be trained on each step of a task, but can grasp the general principles. This is increasingly the case at IQ 115 and above.

It is findings of this sort which make me question the predictions of Frey and Osborne (2013) as to which jobs are at risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence. They list many complicated non-routine jobs as being at risk: typists, technical writers, and accountants and auditors. Typists have already been reduced in number, but highly paid busy people still employ them, because on Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage it is worth while for a highly skilled, highly paid individual to employ one so as to free up their own time. In this way digital secretaries can proliferate in Scottish islands while executives fret in central London: these assistants are not strictly necessary but very useful. Equally, global job clearance centres (oDesk and others) can provide people to spruce up websites, enter data, draw graphs and generally tidy up stuff so that higher paid workers can get on with their higher paid enterprises. Will auditors become redundant? Seems unlikely. More likely that they will extend the scope of the feedback they give their clients. We shall see.

By the way, self driving vehicles, all the rage at the moment, may turn out to be something of a waste of time, except perhaps in slow moving traffic jams. Incidentally, such jams might be better dealt with by road pricing systems: charge by the minute rather than the mile and road users will stagger their journeys or use satnavs and local knowledge to work round traffic jams.

The main point is that driving is too easy. Most people can do it. The better thing would be to automate motor maintenance and repair. Drivers are cheap, mechanics expensive.

Further into the magazine another story caught my eye. “A running start: Poor children fall behind early in life. Better pre-school education could help”. This notes with dismay that “By the time pupils begin primary school, there is a huge gap in achievement between rich and poor”. It further notes that the plus one standard deviation between 10th and 90th income percentiles in school achievement has barely diminished by age 18, equivalent to several extra years of secondary schooling. How to explain this? Perhaps brighter parents earn more and have brighter children, with some drift downwards because of regression to the mean. Perhaps duller parents earn less and have duller children, with some drift upwards because of regression to the mean. This obvious genetic hypothesis is not mentioned. Instead (brace yourself) poor parents don’t talk to their children, because of poverty. “By the age of 6 children of wealthy parents have spent as much as 1,300 more hours in enriching activities than those of poorer families.”

How to test this, avoiding the blindly obvious confounder that the bright and wealthy parents are bringing up their own genetically brighter children? How about something more powerful than necessarily part-time pre-school activities? How about full time adoption?

 

 

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.fr/2014/11/adopt-child-but-discard-illusion.html

 

 

The article then goes into the Perry Pre-school project and a few selected Head Start programs. I sympathise. I could have written such an article 4 years ago, based on my favourite examples of early pre-school intervention, until I knew better.  The general drift of the findings on pre-school intervention is disappointing. Interventions do not have lasting large effects on intelligence, and the welcome general beneficial effects are not often found, apart from the frequently mentioned star projects, which turn out to be outliers. Andrew Sabisky found the paper and the link is below:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aea/jep/2013/00000027/00000002/art00006

Although the trend shows little effect, the outliers need further investigation. Ramey, talking at the ISIR conference in San Antonio, said that they reason he got results with the Abecedarian project whilst others did not, is that he made his teachers understand that if they didn’t get results they would not have a job. They followed protocols carefully, was his argument. He is running replication studies, this time with a full genome on each child, so we should have better results say 25 years from now.

There is nothing malign in offering compensatory education to young children, just significant doubt that it is effective and can be scaled up across entire education systems to smooth away real individual differences.

The Economist has massive reach among influential people in the world’s economies. The magazine, popular as it is with readers wanting to understand the ways that economies work,  is resolutely behind the curve of contemporary research on human ability. One day The Economist may commission articles from people who know something about intelligence, education and genetics. For example, Ian Deary, Robert Plomin, Stuart Ritchie, and Tim Bates for a start. Until then, blogs like this one will be bringing the most recent findings to a small but highly select group: my dear readers. If your friends sometimes read The Economist, can you direct them to this post, in the hope that they can avoid the torrent of misunderstanding purveyed by the mainstream received wisdom? It would be a small mercy.

The Economist is confused about human beings, but if we are to accept their shaky presumptions about the power of pre-school education, then even journalists can be educated, if they can be caught young.