Paul Krugman has his cause and effect wrong

A reader emailed me a link to the latest Paul Krugman op-ed. To summarize the editorial in one sentence, Krugman says that research shows that poverty causes children to become stupid, so in order to prevent children from becoming stupid, we must spend massive billions of government dollars on anti-poverty programs.

Didn't Lyndon B. Johnson try that?

Obviously Krugman and the clueless researchers have the cause and effect wrong. Stupidity causes poverty, and then it's passed down genetically to the children.

* * *

I should make clear that, even though stupidity causes poverty, the opposite is not true, genius does not cause wealth, at least not with the high reliability with which stupidity causes poverty.

* * *

RESPONSE TO A COMMENT BELOW

"Speed" wrote:

uneducated mothers smoke, drink, eat crap and have increased stress (either stereotypical fights with their husbands, or lack of husbands, or cheated and got knocked up, financial problems, etc, etc) All these influence the baby before it is even born.

I agree with the above if you replace "uneducated mothers" with "low intelligence mothers."

This is a vicious circle effect the government has little control over. It's considered the greatest of moral crimes to encourage people of low intelligence to have fewer children. We also can't fix this problem by randomly switching babies in the hospitals.

I am in favor of using the schools to teach middle-class values, but the liberals are opposed to that too because it's "arrogant" to assume our values are better than their values. And it hurts the "self-esteem" of the kids to learn that their parents who drink while pregnant out-of-wedlock and who sell drugs have bad values.

The great thing about my idea to teach middle-class values is that it doesn't cost any extra money. We already have public schools, we just need to better utilize the teachers.

Comments

[tommy]

Krugman couldn't get much more moronic:

None of this is inevitable.

Poverty rates are much lower in most European countries than in the United States, mainly because of government programs that help the poor and unlucky.

Yes, and mean IQ scores aren't much higher among western Europeans than among Americans. Those high IQ western Europeans look especially unimpressive when you consider the much greater low IQ minority population of the United States.

Austria....................102
Belgium...................100
Canada....................97
Denmark..................98
Finland....................97
France.....................98
Germany..................102
Italy........................102
Norway.....................98
Sweden....................101
United Kingdom...........100
United States.............98

Somehow, the much poorer Chinese manage to swing a mean national IQ of 100. I guess we could use more Chinese-style poverty to boost our collective intelligence!

Krugman ought to change his name to Gladwell. File this one under Steve Sailer's "PC Makes You Stupid" category.

[tommy]

Lynn and Vanhanen gave the mean IQ of Turkey as 90 and Germany as 102. According to German researcher, Volkmar Weiss, the mean IQ of Turks born, raised, and educated in Germany is 86 versus 100 for ethnic Germans (as extrapolated from 2006 PISA scores). Krugman had it right! Obviously, the German welfare state has proven enormously successful in closing the gap between Germans and Turks in Deutschland! :-P

[Andrew Yates]

We could award cash for voluntary sterilization. No children, no problem! How is that for leftist rhetoric?

[Gil]

Perhaps the question (when combined with the previous blog about evolution which has turned into an intelligence question) is - should society help the down-and-out? If they are genetically and culturally incapable of a normal life is helping then a waste of time? You'll encourage population growth in a really unproductive segment of society? Perhap as I suggested before should welfare be combined with sterilization?

[speed]

The question of IQ is much more complex than you guys like to believe.

There are socioeconomic - IQ links, that none of you considered. For example, uneducated mothers smoke, drink, eat crap and have increased stress (either stereotypical fights with their husbands, or lack of husbands, or cheated and got knocked up, financial problems, etc, etc) All these influence the baby before it is even born. The most documented connection is the fetus alcohol syndrome. (...more can be said about this, but it'll take too much time)

But the question is if we magically pour more money into their education, would we increase their IQ? I don't believe so. It's a matter of culture. It's just not cool to study. The proof is simple: to escape the ghetto, one only has to study a little engineering, such as computer science. But they don't do that because for them it means social suicide. Yes, they choose to be losers without even realizing it. As far as I'm concerned they choose to be stupid.

-------------

Let me tell you a short story. A friend of mine was living in Harlem on 110th. He liked it, but once he told me he can't live there anymore. "Why?" I asked. He replied that the previous week he saw a mother beat up her young child in the grocery store, and that he's seen several of such incidents, and just doesn't want to be close to such elements. End of story. If they beat up their children, no wonder they are emotionally scared which contributes to their stupidity.

Conclusion: The education starts at home. If you want your kid to be smart, you need to educate him.

[Andrew Yates]

Gil: "should society help the down-and-out?"

Absolutely. Unfortunately, I fear that our rational discussion about society here is too easily misconstrued to be misanthropic.

Pragmatically, if we want to realize positive change, I think that we need to think how we can present ourselves in a way that isn't so dismissively offensive.

I propose the term "responsible life." We could even spin it as a "compromise" between "pro-life" and "pro-choice" and ride the wave of the abortion controversy.

I believe Krugman indirectly addresses your claim that genetics explains poverty.

Krugman:

L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

You:

Reductions in poverty can only come from thinning the ranks of the genetically inferior.

Me:

I guess LBJ's (or Eisenhower's) forced sterilization program was a smashing success.

Krugman:

In Britain, the Labor government that came into office in 1997 made reducing poverty a priority — and despite some setbacks, its program of income subsidies and other aid has achieved a great deal. Child poverty, in particular, has been cut in half by the measure that corresponds most closely to the U.S. definition.

You:

Reductions in poverty can only come from thinning the ranks of the genetically inferior.

Me:

British curtailment of immigration combined with a farsighted Tory-led forced sterilization program have been smashing.

[a young curmudgeon]

"speed": You point towards "Socioeconomic" - IQ links. Care to enlighten how said socioeconomic behavior ever emerged within certain subpopulations to begin with? Probably because they were "oppressed" and kept poor to begin with or something along those lines, right? If only that were true.

Do you really think we never considered how certain "socio-economic" conditions emerge, and how behavior resulting from those conditions influence IQ and vice versa?

Maybe some human groups evolved towards different levels of intelligence because of geographic conditions. (pygmy's versus north European). The higher intelligence gave rise to more advanced cultural surroundings, stimulating an ever higher selective pressure for high-IQ's to survive. Once a critical level of IQ was reached the resulting cultural surroundings (both fellow high IQ humans and the tools and societal structures they created) kept reinforcing the divergence, while the low-IQ (due to geography) group never escaped from the low IQ/low "socioeconomic" conditions trap.

[tommy]

There are socioeconomic - IQ links, that none of you considered.

It's more genetic than you think.

For example, uneducated mothers smoke, drink, eat crap and have increased stress (either stereotypical fights with their husbands, or lack of husbands, or cheated and got knocked up, financial problems, etc, etc) All these influence the baby before it is even born.

You'll have to prove that. I see little evidence that "eating crap" or "increased stress" has any long-term impact on IQ. Certainly drinking during pregnancy may have negative effects, but not every poor mother is an alcoholic or drug addict. In any event, as I watch poor women standing in line ahead of me in the convenience store buying Twinkies with their food stamp card (along with their packs of menthol cigarettes bought separately), I see little evidence that handing out more welfare is going to reduce these harmful behaviors.

[tommy]

Contrary to Krugman's claims, there are actually no more people living in poverty today than there were in 1969 in spite of the dreaded "rightward shift." The rate of poverty in 1969 was 12.1%, the rate in 2006 was 12.3%. Krugman claims poverty has spiraled out of control since 1969, but the rate has fluctuated between around 11.3% and 15.2% ever since. The poverty rate was as low as 11.7% in 1979. It was again 11.3% in 2000 - that was after liberals claimed the poverty rate would explode due to welfare reform during the Clinton administration. Given the large expansion in the U.S. minority population since 1969, the fact that we've maintained such a low poverty rate is a remarkable achievement.

[tommy]

It's worth noting that the poverty rate was already on the decline before Johnson's War on Poverty began:

President Johnson's "War on Poverty" speech was delivered at a time of recovery (the poverty level had fallen from 22.4% in 1959 to 19% in 1964 when the War on Poverty was announced) and it was viewed by critics as an effort to get the United States Congress to authorize social welfare programs. Some economists, including Milton Friedman, have argued that Johnson's policies actually had a negative impact on the economy because of their interventionist nature. Adherents of this school of thought recommend that the best way to fight poverty is not through government spending but through top-down economic growth.

[The Engineer]

Yo, Half Sigma, pick up "Liberal Fascism" here.

I think that it's right up your alley. I'm about 3/4 way through it.

In the past, so called liberals had absolutely no problem using institutions like public schools to encourage the "proper" values.

[Peter]

Lynn and Vanhanen gave the mean IQ of Turkey as 90 and Germany as 102. According to German researcher, Volkmar Weiss, the mean IQ of Turks born, raised, and educated in Germany is 86 versus 100 for ethnic Germans (as extrapolated from 2006 PISA scores).

AIUI, most of the Turkish immigrants who came to Germany were relatively poor people from rural areas in central and eastern Turkey. It's entirely possible that their IQ scores were lower than their more affluent and urban countrymen. Turkey's rich/poor, urban/rural gap is said to be very wide.

Interestingly, I live in one of the relatively few communities in the United States which has a substantial Turkish immigrant population. They must have come from better backgrounds than the ones in Germany, as by all appearances they're pretty well assimilated.

[FreeThinker]

I think you guys, by focusing on Krugman's mixed up causality, are missing the innumerate howler also included in his piece.

"According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black."

Think about it: Over 50% of those born into the bottom quartile end up above it. Krugman presents that as a tragedy but, of course, someone has to be in the lowest quartile. So that means just under 50% of those currrently in the lowest quartile started out above it. If more than 50% born into the lowest quartile were ending up out of it, then a correspondingly high percentage would be ending up in it from above. If that were the case, you can bet Krugman would be howling about the 'downward mobility' endemic to the US economy! This guy is tenured in economics at Princeton! This stuff wouldn't pass a freshman class at a community college.

[Cameron]

Somehow, the much poorer Chinese manage to swing a mean national IQ of 100. I guess we could use more Chinese-style poverty to boost our collective intelligence!

True, Chinese beat most Europeans on intelligence tests, but they loose to most other Asian countries. Poverty may be making them "dumber" than their potential.

[Tired of Smoke Rings]

Stupid, trashy people do stupid, trashy things. They also have stupid trashy children. All the endless chicken and egg arguments are just time wasting intellectual circle jerks. The only significant change in the last fourty or so years has been a breakdown of social structure. People of average and especially above average intellegence have largely made out alright in this moral/social climate. People with sub-normal IQ have tended to follow their worst instincts with predictable and predicted results. Shoveling more cash into the furnace of false compassion will do nothing worthwhile. Perhaps those who disagree with this will spend their own money on faux compassionate, conscience salving fluffery rather than pistol whipping skeptics into chipping in, but I doubt it.

[Mike]

"Poverty rates are much lower in most European countries than in the United States, mainly because of government programs that help the poor and unlucky."

Krugman is basically a socialist. He thinks any problem in our country is amenable to government intervention. What about France, though? They have generous social welfare in that country, but it has done little to the lift the immigrants up from poverty. Frances gdp per capita is like 10,000 dollars less than the US. The US has far more minorities than France yet the US does much better economically. So I think Krugman is a dangerous economist, since he doesn't understand the importance of IQ in making economic decisions.

[Al Fin]

Europe is in a downward demographic spiral. I hope someone is keeping an accurate record of the sub-population growth rates in Europe as they correlate with changing crime rates, poverty, and IQ.

Welfare does not reduce poverty if the people stay on welfare. The real poverty is in the mind. Covering up mental poverty by hiding latent deprivation with welfare payments, is not reducing poverty.

The way poverty is defined by governments, does not necessarily have anything to do with deprivation: hunger, disease, lack of necessities. Yet people conflate "poverty" with deprivation and suffering. Perhaps if Krugman spent the night in Haiti, North Korea, or Zimbabwe he would have a better idea of poverty.

Perhaps if Krugman spent the night in Haiti, North Korea, or Zimbabwe he would have a better idea of poverty.

That won't be necessary. What could he possibly learn by leaving Princeton, NJ and going to see how people in some dirt poor countries really live or for that matter, staying closer to home and driving the 15 minutes to Trenton?
He is a brilliant man. I hope that he is placed in charge of economic and domestic policy in the next adminsitration so there won't be any problems of any kind ever again.

[Sunny Dae]

Wow, commenters on this blog sure are sourpusses. What happened to you people to fill you with hate? Obama will show you that money does solve problems. You should all be ashamed.

[Tired of Smoke Rings]

Sunny,

Feel free to soak up some bile, it would do you good. You could probably do with getting out a little more too. Blank's suggestion of a trip to Trenton would apply to you as well. Seeing as you are so sociable perhaps you should swing by and discuss policy issues with Krugman and you could go there together? BTW I'm sure Obama would be a bag of laughs, fortunately he won't be elected.

[Half Sigma]

I'm pretty sure that Sunny's comment was meant to be facetious.

[Tired of Smoke Rings]

HS,

I will give Sunny the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were kidding. I was kidding too. We are all friends now. However, if SD is the kind of earnest, tounge klucking, pollyanna-ish dope I suspect they are they can still do the bile soak and enjoy the positive results.

Stupid, trashy people do stupid, trashy things. They also have stupid trashy children. All the endless chicken and egg arguments are just time wasting intellectual circle jerks.

I think this is contradicted by the rest of your post. There is no reason why stupid people have to do trashy things. The could equally well fit the old model of "humble but hardworking".

Likewise I dont think there is a logically necessity for stupid people to do stupid things. Lets suppose that they deferred to societal mores that had been built up over centuries that represented a collective wisdom beyond their own. A simple farm girl might not know much but she knows to look for a good provider in a husband and not to put out until she has a ring on her finger.
Her actions, and life outcomes, could be much better if she followed 'conventional morality'.

People of average and especially above average intellegence have largely made out alright in this moral/social climate.

Not obvious to me. Take a look at the VH1 show Celebrity Rehab- these people have rejected conventional morality and everyone of them are basket cases in capable of managing their own affairs.

How about this: "I gave £100,000 to my Jamaican toyboy but now he's gone back to his wife – taking my money with him"

http://www.ligali.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=4193

[Tired of Smoke Rings]

Blank,

It's the combination that is pernicious. You can be dumb as a sack of hammers and stay out of trouble if, as you suggest, you have a social tradition that is healthy. Otherwise you are making it up as you go along and we see how well that works. As for the spectacular parade of boobs that infest pop culture they are outliers.

Note that I qualified my statement, most, not all of the more intellegent folks will muddle through. And yes although they won't end up in jail, on the pipe or eating twinkies three times a day it will screw up aspects of their lives too. In closing I'd have to say that the social break-down we are currently enjoying amounts to a hidden tax. Not in dollars and cents but costly none-the-less, imposed by self absorbed boomers, that will be paid long after the last of them has been euthanised.

[canson]

"Not in dollars and cents but costly none-the-less, imposed by self absorbed boomers, that will be paid long after the last of them has been euthanised."

FYI, Big Guy, "euthanised" is spelled with a Z....

I really don't see any difference between what you and Blank are advocating except for the euthanasia comment at the end.

[Tired of Smoke Rings]

Sorry about the poor spelling. I wasn't going to even use the word, euthanized, and then I changed my mind. Perhaps it would have been better to use this:

Not in dollars and cents but costly none-the-less, imposed by self absorbed boomers, that will be paid long after the last of them has been put down like an incontinent Pekingese.

[tommy]

Krugman is basically a socialist. He thinks any problem in our country is amenable to government intervention. What about France, though? They have generous social welfare in that country, but it has done little to the lift the immigrants up from poverty. Frances gdp per capita is like 10,000 dollars less than the US. The US has far more minorities than France yet the US does much better economically. So I think Krugman is a dangerous economist, since he doesn't understand the importance of IQ in making economic decisions.

This raises an interesting question: how do Europeans define poverty and what happens when you adjust for differences in GDP?

[tommy]

AIUI, most of the Turkish immigrants who came to Germany were relatively poor people from rural areas in central and eastern Turkey. It's entirely possible that their IQ scores were lower than their more affluent and urban countrymen. Turkey's rich/poor, urban/rural gap is said to be very wide.

That could be true and the fact that Turks in Germany appear to be less intelligent than Turks in Turkey would seem to support that. However, it contradicts the idea that more welfare is going to bring everyone up to the white mean.

Interestingly, I live in one of the relatively few communities in the United States which has a substantial Turkish immigrant population. They must have come from better backgrounds than the ones in Germany, as by all appearances they're pretty well assimilated.

Yes, the U.S. has been lucky in that it has attracted better educated Mideasterners and Muslims than Europe has.

[Spungen]

I'm not trying to be difficult, but could you give some examples? Would there be a specific "values" class, the way there is in private religious schools? What sorts of things would it teach? How old do you envision the students being in this class?

If only pregnant girls were treated as scornfully in real life as the girl in Juno.

[Spungen]

But wait, look at this:

"I’d bracket those new studies on brain development in early childhood with a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracked a group of students who were in eighth grade in 1988. The study found, roughly speaking, that in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents."

How do you explain that?

[Half Sigma]

I didn't read the "study" so I have no idea how Krugman is misinterpreting it.

Usually when you examine these "studies" closely, you discover the authors are morons. Like the breastfeeding-IQ studies, for example.

Although I do concede that there will always be a college willing to take a student in, no matter how dumb he is, if he has parents willing to pay full tuition. That doesn't mean he's learning anything useful there, or that society would be better off if tax money was used to put dumb poor kids through the same course of study to learn nothing useful.

[SFG]

FYI, Big Guy, "euthanised" is spelled with a Z....
Actually, I think he has the correct spelling in England... ;)

[tommy]

If only pregnant girls were treated as scornfully in real life as the girl in Juno.

I think I would prefer that teenage mothers and welfare recipients demonstrated more shame than they do today. My mother told me that in her high school the single case of teenage pregnancy that occurred was considered extraordinarily scandalous. My mother and grandmother, both of whom had been very poor at one time or another, also told me that they wouldn't be caught dead paying for groceries with food stamps. Welfare was simply not an option for them. Few of today's unwed teenage mothers and welfare recipients exhibit the slightest embarrassment over their predicament. Some of them are downright proud; they've had a rough life, as they see it, and are therefore entitled to the public's sympathy and taxpayers' assistance.

[Dan Morgan]

I am in favor of using the schools to teach middle-class values.

William F. Buckley used to argue convincingly that the schools have little influence on the values of students. Outside cultural influences, and family life, are just too powerful.

But I suppose that if it even helps a little, or helps a small percentage of students, it is worth trying. Many students in bad schools aren't learning much else in school anyway.

[Sigmund Fraud]

I'm not trying to be difficult, but could you give some examples? Would there be a specific "values" class, the way there is in private religious schools? What sorts of things would it teach? How old do you envision the students being in this class?

This new paper by Heckman et al. about the "economics and the psychology of personality traits" is making the rounds:

The power of traits other than cognitive ability for success in life is vividly demonstrated by the Perry Preschool study. This experimental intervention enriched the early family environments of disadvantaged children with subnormal intelligence quotients (IQs). Both treatments and controls were followed into their 40s. As demonstrated in Figure 1, by age ten, treatment group mean IQs were the same as control group mean IQs. Yet on a variety of measures of socioeconomic achievement, over their life cycles, the treatment group was far more successful than the control group.4 Something besides IQ was changed by the intervention. Heckman et al. (2007) show that it is the personality and motivation of the participants. This paper examines the relevance of personality to economics and the relevance of economics to personality psychology.

Both economists and psychologists estimate preference parameters such as time preference, risk aversion, altruism, and, more recently, social preferences, to explain the behaviors of individuals. [...]

Our focus is pragmatic. Personality psychologists have developed measurement systems for personality traits which economists have begun to use. Most prominent is the “Big Five”personality inventory. [...]

Most economists are unaware of the evidence that certain personality traits are more malleable than cognitive ability over the life cycle and are more sensitive to investment by parents and to other sources of environmental influences at later ages than are cognitive traits. Social policy designed to remediate deficits in achievement can be effective by operating outside of purely cognitive channels.

[Sigmund Fraud]

Other juicy bits from the Heckman et al. paper:

Figure 3 shows that IQ surpasses any single Big Five personality factor in the prediction of the two academic outcomes, college grades (r = .45) and years of education (r = .55). Big Five conscientiousness is by far the best personality predictor of grades (r = .22) and, after openness to experience, the second-best personality predictor of years of education (r = .11).63 Conscientiousness is a slightly better predictor of longevity (r = .09) than is IQ (r = .06). Conscientiousness predicts leadership ratings (r = .20) slightly better than IQ does (r = .17). Conscientiousness predicts job performance (r = .13; corrected r = .22) better than does any other Big Five factor, but not as well as IQ does (r = .21; corrected r = .55). The importance of IQ increases with job complexity, defined as the information processing requirements of the job: cognitive skills are more important for professors, scientists, and senior managers than for semiskilled or unskilled laborers (Schmidt and Hunter 2004).64 In contrast, the importance of conscientiousness does not vary much with job complexity (Barrick and Mount 1991).

Contemporary psychologists (for example Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham 2003; Digman and Takemoto-Chock 1981; Duckworth and Seligman, 2005; Mischel, Shoda, and Peake 1988; Noftle and Robins 2007; Ones et al. 2007; Paunonen and Ashton 2001; Robbins et al. 2006; Salgado 1997; Shoda, Mischel, and Peake 1990; Wolfe and Johnson 1995) and earlier researchers (for example, Hull and Terman 1928; Harris 1940; Wechsler 1940; and Barton Dielman, and Cattell 1972) suggest that self-control, perseverance, and other aspects of conscientiousness as the major personality contributors to success in school and in life. (For a more detailed review of personality, IQ, and academic performance, see Chamorro-Premuzic and Furnham 2005.)65As noted previously, Big Five conscientiousness is conceptually related to risk aversion, leisure preference, and time preference. Aspects of Big Five neuroticism (more helpfully termed by its obverse, Big Five emotional stability) are next in importance. Nyhus and Pons (2005) have shown, for example that emotional stability predicts higher wages, and Salgado (1997) shows that emotional stability and conscientiousness are more predictive of job performance across professions than other Big Five dimensions. As described in more detail below, Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua (2006) and Judge and Hurst (2007) show that among participants in the NLSY 1979 cohort, positive self-evaluations measured in young adulthood (with self-report questions of self-esteem, locus of control, and related traits) predict income in mid-life and, further, enhance the benefits of family socioeconomic status, and academic achievement on mid-life income. Hogan and Holland (2003) have also shown measures emotional stability to be potent and general predictors of job performance (inversely), with predictive validities corrected for range restriction and unreliability of r = .43.

Remember, the Five Factors of personality are:

O Openness
C Conscientiousness
E Extraversion
A Agreeableness
N Neuroticism

So it looks like IQ > C > N when it comes to predicting various life outcomes. I have also seen evidence that suggests Agreeableness is inversely associated with occupational success. (see Nettle in 2007). If nice guys don't finish last, they are evidently less likely to finish first.

Heckman et al. seem to take the position that these other non-IQ personality traits are more easily altered than IQ. I am less sanguine. Other evidence suggests that, like IQ, the Five Factors of personality are highly heritable. (see again Nettle in 2007). But then, how do we explain the difference between the experimental and control groups in the Perry Preschool study?

[Vim]

HS:

Maybe you can clarify something for me. Why do you call low IQ 'stupidity'? I could be wrong but it sounds like you are implying it's a moral failing for which the possessors are responsible. For instance, would you call someone with Down's Syndrome 'stupid'? Would you agree that people are not responsible for their genes?

Furthermore, do you acknowledge that the economic system can have a large effect on what a person of a given IQ contributes to society? For instance a person of IQ 100 contributes more to society under capitalism than under communism. Is it then conceivable to you that there is something that can be done in how American social policy is organized that would improve the amount that people of below average IQ might contribute to society?

Or do you believe this is the end of history and America as it exists today is the pinnacle and nothing more of can be done to empower human beings to use whatever intellect they have?

I think you do agree that something can be done because you say:

"I am in favor of using the schools to teach middle-class values"

But on the other hand:

"Stupidity causes poverty, and then it's passed down genetically to the children."

But how could this be? Are we making the kids smarter by teaching them 'middle-class' values? And once we admit there is AT LEAST ONE way to get low IQ people to contribute more to society, might there be other ways? (Something besides cutting off social support and hoping they die at a faster rate, the leave-grandpa-in-the-woods-and-whatever-happens-is-Gods-fault approach to social policy.)

Well, just because middle class value do work, that doesnt necessarily mean that other putative set of value exist which are also helpful.

If we do have a set of values that we know could help the lower classes, then why not advocate them?

From Matthias Doepke Occupational Choice and the Spirit of Capitalism
For centuries, members of the preindustrial middle class—artisans, craftsmen, and merchants—had to sacrifice consumption and leisure in their youths to acquire skills. In response to this economic environment, the middle class developed a system of values and preferences centered around parsimony, work ethic, and delay of gratification. For the landed upper class, in contrast, neither work ethic nor patience were particularly valuable, because the members of this class could rely on fairly stable rental incomes from their estates. As a result, the landowning elite cultivated refined tastes for leisure and grew less future-oriented.
In an otherwise stationary society, such differences in preferences and values had limited consequences. However, patience and work ethic became key assets—a “spirit of
capitalism”—when opportunities of economic advancement through entrepreneurship
and investment arose at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. In an already stratified society, it was members of the patient, hard-working middle class who made the most of the new opportunities and ultimately gained economic ascendancy over the landed elite. ...

Although we do not focus explicitly on religion, our theory is related to Weber’s view that the spirit of capitalism was linked to the values of the Protestant Reformation. Protestant values, and especially Puritanism, were widespread among the urban uppermiddle classes and may have been instrumental in their economic advancement. According to our theory, Puritanism was successful among these groups precisely because its values were compatible with the economic conditions faced by these groups. The same theory suggests that changing economic conditions should affect the success and popularity of religion. In line with this prediction, religious fervor among the middle classes declined in the late nineteenth century at the same time when the middle-class work ethic started to wane.3

Ok- so who sees popular 'progressive' culture coming out in favor of "parsimony, work ethic, and delay of gratification". They seem much more interesting in declaring Dr. Dre and Naz "genius!" as I saw on a recent MTV advert.

Also problematic is that middle-class values enable capitalism and as Max Weber pointed out have a religious, Puritanical basis. Is Paul Krugan going to come out in favor of capitalism and the Puritan work ethic?

Thats not going to happen. Thomas Sowell pointed out that much of the black under classes troubles are due to them adopting cultural values that are not conducive to success. People found it much more convenient to ignore him and assume that the cause is racism.

[a young curmudgeon]

Vim:

"And once we admit there is AT LEAST ONE way to get low IQ people to contribute more to society, might there be other ways?"

Well, there's AT LEAST one Bill Cosby; but where do we find more of them?

[Vim]

a young curmudgeon:

"Well, there's AT LEAST one Bill Cosby; but where do we find more of them?"

So you at least are saying that America and Western society has done it all and this is the end of all social progress?

[Roy]

Krugman is being dishonest when he credits LBJ's war on poverty for lowering poverty rates. It may have helped, but poverty had decreased by almost 30 percent in the previous 5 years, and had already dropped from almost 40% to just over 20% in the 50s.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html

http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=4308

As an economist, Krugman has to be familiar with the historical data, and the fact that he credits the War on Poverty for the fall just reinforces the fact that he is a dishonest hack.