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Danial Goleman – Are rich people smarter?

Summary:
Its worth a country investing in a good education for its people because it can create a more productive country and everyone benefits. More entrepreneurs, more skilled workers, more higher pay meaning more taxes collected reducing the burden on everyone else, more people in work and paying taxes, less crime, and so on.  The influence of the environment In this domain, rigorous experiments have been performed, not on people but on animals. This is how the development of the brains of respectively “rich” and “poor” mice has been studied. The “rich” mice lived in small groups in cages with plenty of toys, and “poor” mice lived in bigger numbers in empty cages. The neural networks in rich mice developed much faster and their brains became notably heavier than those from their poor

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Its worth a country investing in a good education for its people because it can create a more productive country and everyone benefits. More entrepreneurs, more skilled workers, more higher pay meaning more taxes collected reducing the burden on everyone else, more people in work and paying taxes, less crime, and so on. 

The influence of the environment


In this domain, rigorous experiments have been performed, not on people but on animals. This is how the development of the brains of respectively “rich” and “poor” mice has been studied. The “rich” mice lived in small groups in cages with plenty of toys, and “poor” mice lived in bigger numbers in empty cages. The neural networks in rich mice developed much faster and their brains became notably heavier than those from their poor counterparts. The rich mice became much smarter in finding their way out of a maze. In monkeys as well, it was found that the environment has a strong influence on brain development and intelligence (1).
In humans the impact of environmental factors is even stronger, this is what is shown in a recent study involving sugar cane planters in India. These small scale peasants receive more than half of their income in one go, shortly after harvest. For part of the year they are relatively rich and they are rather poor during the other part. It appears that these peasants have more mediocre results in cognitive tests during their “poor” periods. They lose up to 13 I.Q. points, the equivalent of a sleepless night or alcoholism. Yet these are the same people, with the same brains.
Furthermore there is the Flynn effect. After the 2nd World War US citizens got an average of 100 in I.Q. tests. In 2002 the same tests, which normally involve finding solutions to abstract problems, yielded and average of 118. This is a substantial increase. This effect has been seen in all industrialised countries, including Belgium. The increase was of 3 to 5% per decade. Nowadays this effect is closer to stagnation, and in some cases in regression.

Intelligence is not a static quantity, it can (strongly) fluctuate within the same person. Furthermore the environments are susceptible to change through time. A part of the intellectual ability is determined by genetic factors, but the surrounding environment also exerts a very big influence on the intelligence.

Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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