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Notes -
Doesn’t Ron Desantis disprove your rule that non-elites can’t achieve high office or even Joe Biden?
Desantis has like 400k networth now. Yes he has has the elite degrees. This just says the filter for entering the elites may be earlier. He no doubt got great SAT scores early then got into elite schools. Paid for it looks like from ROTC money.
The thing with the filter being earlier it could mean one of two things.
Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have money or elite academics early.
But that's the point there; you can say "DeSantis and Biden came from ordinary backgrounds" but when you look at them, yeah ordinary backgrounds but DeSantis was smart enough to get into the good university etc.
Biden, looking him up on Wikipedia, has a law degree. He's not an ex-coal miner like Keir Hardie. Indeed, he even was an adjunct professor, and even if we presume this was an easy gig, again it's not "and Joe is blue-collar salt of the earth background" as per the potted bio notion of his life:
And seemingly the family background was affluent, but then became what would be called elsewhere "distressed gentlefolk" until his father later got back on his feet:
He got into local politics, got elected to the Senate, and carved out a career as a good reliable old-style party hack with a solid reputation as the guy who didn't step out of line and knew how to wheel and deal. That was his major selling point both as Obama's VP and as President: "he's not gonna rock the boat".
I've seen the same thing in the Irish, and British, Labour Parties: the guys from the working-class, trade union background were slowly eased out or replaced by the middle-class striver types, who went to university and have affluent middle to upper-middle class family backgrounds and family members.
The last genuine working-class Labour leader for Ireland was Frank Cluskey from 1977-81. The current leaderette (I don't like her and never have) is Ivana Bacik. My personal fave of this trend is Ruairi Quinn, our first openly atheist minister, party leader from 1997-2002, so fierily socialist as a student radical that his nickname was Ho Chi Quinn, and... his brother and cousin are (or were) prominent businessmen, so none of the proletariat tendency there.
If coal miners became politicians today it would mean our entire meritocracy and educational system has failed.
I think it’s reasonable to say the leaders of our complex society should be IQ 130 and probably around a 1500 SAT score. The entire filter for our system would be failing if that kid isn’t getting selected into a top 25 university today.
It’s also been said of unions that the leaders no longer come from the workers but from outside of it. Back in the day poor immigrant kids who were smart might not have been caught up into our systems filters for leadership and would have taken the mill job. Their intelligence would have led them to leadership. But now they are filtered out earlier.
It just feels like going backwards and a thing for poor countries to not identify their most talented individuals early. Do we want 1500 SAT kids working at Wal-Mart for 20 years so they can be good working class people?
many such cases. https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/scores/1500-sat-score-is-this-good
Not sure on your point. I wasn’t saying that can get you into any school. But it does seem to be a reasonable IQ level for top American public offices.
Also every school in the top 17 except Cal Tech has per class enrollment of over 1k. So I’m fairly sure being the 20k best SAT score makes you competitive far earlier than the 17th school.
The 20th school is Notre Dame. In the fictional world of the West Wing the POTUS went to Notre Dame which seems to be a reasonable place approximately to start the academic achievement area for smart enough to handle the intellectual rigor of top office.
I guess my point was, 1500 isnt all that special. Theres a lot of other kids with that score, and only a limited number of spots at top universities. Plus, the US system puts a lot more emphasis on things like sports, extracurriculars, legacies, and DEI than raw test scores. So a whole lot of smart kids dont get in to top schools (eg, me) while a lot of not-that-smart kids do.
Special - No.
But IQ 130 level does seem to be the line for smart enough for upper management in the US. Elon Musks had lower SAT scores but when it was harder so he’s probably about 140. A lot of Presidents seem to be around 130. We probably have 600k-1.5 million people around that level. For the pure IQ it seems a good place for the filter. Then other characteristics and experiences matter.
It also does seem to be the area where you start to be filtered into the top schools. And if not your like Honors College at big state school where they don’t have numbers to filter on whether you have the right DEI experience and activities.
Do you have any evidence for your claim that "a lot of presidents seem to be around 130?" I would peg most of them around 115. Smarter than average, but still close enough to average that they can relate to regular people and build up their social skills. I think a lot of very-smart individuals suffer from being alienated from other kids their age and grow up with poor social skills as a result. Or at least, that's what I tell myself... :/
edit: see for example JFK's Harvard application essay: https://archive.is/ss2qE which seems like something a bad student would grind out to try and salvage a C from a class where he understood nothing. Though, as that article notes, he did seem to understand the social importance of going to an elite university, in a way few teenagers fully grasp.
I just have the IQ charts which were trending on Twitter recently. They all seem to indicate 130 area. Kennedy fwiw seems to rank highly. I do not know how to interpret grades from the ‘30s. Seems like most of our Presidential candidates went to Harvard/Yale etc which even for a rich kid isn’t that easy to buy your way in if you are sub 120 IQ.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/05/27/poindexter-in-chief-presidential-iqs-and-success-in-the-oval-office
https://thoughtcatalog.com/january-nelson/2021/06/presidents-ranked-by-iq/
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