Thursday, July 14, 2011

IQ, SES, and incarceration













This graph is taken from a new study of more than 11,000 people. You can see that, while increasing SES  lowers the risk of incarceration only a little bit, increasing IQ lowers the risk sharply.

So much for the liberal claim that social class is everything.  

3 comments:

  1. Someone in that study got a little too excited about getting a copy of Matlab. Is there any reason they needed to show a large convoluted 3D graph for a linear relationship? I think it would have been enough just to write down the empirical coefficients.

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  2. The authors make a big deal about the interaction effect (i.e., how the effect of one variable depends on the level of the other) but your point is well-taken.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You can just write the interaction effect with a coefficient too, particularly with a two-variable model.

    z=a+bx+cy+dxy

    See?

    And yes, you're right about atheists. That's the reason I'm atheist but not anti-religion; it's good for society and individual people, even if I don't believe in God myself. Even among people high-IQ enough to stay out of trouble, I'm willing to believe atheism has negative effects...

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