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Why do you think people are poor?

harpers.org

1–10 of 292 posts

Re: Why do you think people are poor?

#7
post #2

[September 1997] [Edit] and still relevant...just pointing out the date.

Thanks for pointing that out. As i was reading the article i was having flashbacks to Bunny Colvin attempting to 'socialize' his students in Season 4 of The Wire. It's reassuring to know that the study and science probably inspired the television show, and not the other way around.

Re: Why do you think people are poor?

#8
New York Times obituary of Earl Shorris, the author of this 1997 article, who died this year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/us/earl-shorris-who-fought...

New York Daily News obituary:

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/06/rememberi...

Obituary in The Nation:

http://www.thenation.com/article/168212/remembering-earl-sho...

A list of his articles published in Harper's:

http://harpers.org/subjects/EarlShorris

Re: Why do you think people are poor?

#9
post #5

Surely genetics plays a huge role, one that's ignored in this article.

Does it now? Cite your sources, please.

This shouldn't be in the least bit controversial; it's well known that a great many human characteristics are extremely heritable, and it would be absolutely shocking if none of these characteristics turned out to be helpful or harmful in becoming rich or poor.

But since you want sources, here we go:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21826061 "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic."

The other half, that intelligence is correlated with income, should be fairly obvious from everyday experience, but nonetheless here's a nice graph

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yzQUAtWS_U4/TZYCh68KW8I/AAAAAAAAAd...

Next up I will provide citations for the fact that the sky is blue, since we seem to be on a prove-the-bloody-obvious kick today:

"Human color vision and the unsaturated blue color of the daytime sky", Glenn S. Smith, American Journal of Physics, Volume 73, Issue 7, pp. 590-597 (2005).

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