TwoSTDVs on height and sex

OneSTDV (who I'm a huge fan of) believes he has identified an indisputable fact of gender realism, that women rarely date men who are shorter than they are.

The problem with this assertion is that in the US, the average height is 5'10" for men and 5'4" for women'. Contemporary measures of standard deviations for American height vary a bit, from about 2.5 inches to 3 inches. For the sake of argument, we'll error on the high end and call it 3 full inches. If we take a sample with an equal number of American men and women and match them randomly with someone of the opposite sex (presuming the height distributions for both men and women are Gaussian, which is a pretty safe assumption), in only about 8% of couplings will we find a man paired with a woman who is taller than he is.

Consequently, the fact (and it is as much) is sub-optimal for use as a starting block in engaging in HBD-related conversations with those of a PC mindset because even if height was a neutral rather than a desirable trait in men, the vast majority of men would be taller than the women they are with.

Further, tying Game to HBD-realism is inherently flawed, since Game relies on men being able to train themselves to negate the realities of HBD. This is why Game most appeals to (and benefits) men who traditionally, due to the realities of HBD, have difficulty attracting women. Game gives them ways to appear to have higher levels of status than they actually do, by making themselves out to be more popular than they actually are, more self-assured than they actually are, commanding more resources than they actually do, etc. To the extent that Game is effective, it is because human biodiversity does not imply genetic determinism, only predispositions and general patterns that, to varying degrees, can be 'overcome'.

Game functions not on dwelling on biological realities and their inherently limiting factors like HBD does. To the contrary, it relies on the same optimism that OneSTDV describes political liberalism relying on:

Liberalism feels good because anyone can succeed. And this underpins its success; realist ideologies advocate fatalism and no one likes that.

Tracing the growth of "Judeo Christian"

Reacting to Lawrence Auster's visceral reactions towards anyone on the right who is not viewed as sufficiently supportive of Israel, Dennis Mangan remarks that it was not so-called "Judeo-Christian" morality that shaped Western civilization, but simply Christian morality that did.

While Dennis' assertion would have gone undisputed in the fifties when he was a toddling around, time has steadily chipped away at its veracity, and there is no sign of a slow down. The following graph created via Google's Ngram viewer from books published in the US traces the ascension of the phrase over close to the last six decades. Prior to 1955, it was almost non-existent (click on the images for better resolution):


Unlike the hybridization that yokes Christianity to Judaism and American interests to those of Israel, plain old "Christian" is old hat, as it floats along sideways:


Look, both religions' moral foundations are found in the first five books of the Old Testament, and where would Americans be today without the admonition against coveting a neighbor's things? That American Jews concerned with Israel's well being have an enormous amount to gain by marrying the cultural and political aims of white Christian centrists and rightists in the US to their own is merely incidental! Similarly, that mainstream white Christians like Bill O'Reilly and Richard Land are able to pitch for "traditional" (ie, Christian) morality with only blunted disapproval from media gatekeepers who reserve far less vitriol for the promotion of Judeo-Christian morality than they ever could for Christian morality is just an unintended byproduct of the firm biblical basis for the phrase's essential invention in the sixties!

Ignoring threats, or paying them too much attention?

On the passive suggestion of Parapundit's Randall Parker, I'm reading The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman that attempts to describe the future following the abrupt extinction of homo sapiens. It immediately strikes me as disappointingly misanthropic and distractingly quasi-religious (what Half Sigma terms "Gaia worship"). The recurring criticisms I have with this approach--the idea that humans have somehow unfairly intruded onto evolution's domain rather than being a product of it, the exclusive focus on biodiversity at the expense of biomass, and the assertion that while human immigration from the third world into the West is grand, all other forms of immigration (human or otherwise) are inherently bad--are present. Sifting through that, though, the descriptions given about the influence of humans on ecosystems, from what becomes of the salt dumped onto roads by trucks during snowstorms to the fates of potentially feral pets, makes for intriguing reading.

My point is not to give a book review. I'm not even 100 pages in, and, more importantly, reviews are, uh, not a personal strength. I did, however, want to tap readers for thoughts on the following passage (p3), where Weisman asks whether or not humans will realize the point in time where they've crossed the rubicon, dooming the planet as we know it. Seems to me that he gets it exactly backwards:

The truth is, we don't know. Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

To the contrary, are we not 'excessively' worried about all sorts of perceived threats that are, in reality, far less threatening than we imagine them to be? We're afraid to go swimming in the ocean for fear that we might be mistaken shark bait, even though the annual number of shark attacks in the US averages less than 20, and less than 5% of those are fatal. We scurry indoors during a thunderstorm, even though the chance of getting struck by lightning is infinitesimal. We have to fight through the sometimes numbing anxiety of approaching an attractive girl even though realistically the worst that happens is we're politely turned down. We buy home owner's and life insurance policies even though odds are we're going to lose money on the deals, because we fear the worst. We're disgusted by the idea of eating a piece of food that falls on the floor, even as our pets happily show us how silly that worry is. We regularly go through media cycles in which the next big pandemic set to ravage humanity is spotted, with hysterical documentaries close behind, before going out with a whimper ahead of the next big pandemic just over the horizon.

What are the real threats that we systematically tend to ignore? Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, maybe? The fact that business owners will intentionally make economically poor hiring decisions and run their businesses into the ground just to spite a black guy or a lesbian, too, I guess. Uh huh.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense to me. Survival is the primary objective, more important even than reproduction, as the former is a prerequisite of the latter. Better safe than sorry. That veritable aphorism is one that Weisman, as an author, surely benefits from.

Hispanic births decreasing in Arizona, and likely the rest of the US as well

Mark Wethmen, who formerly blogged at Congenial Times (since deleted and then reincarnated, though not obviously related to its previous life), graciously sent me data from the Arizona Department of Health Services showing birth trends by race in the state over the last decade. Consequently, I'm going to take one more shot from the fecundity elixir, and then I'll really put down the bottle, honest.

Like The Undiscovered Jew, Mark has also noticed that since the onset of the economic recession, the number of live births by Hispanic women in Arizona has steadily declined. I added data for blacks, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans:


Even before the recession, Arizona was a top destination for internal migration among whites (primarily those fleeing California), but it was similarly so among Hispanics. Over the last few years, however, it appears that Hispanics have been, in some combination, leaving the state (and the country) at greater rates than non-Hispanics have and experiencing a decline in fertility at faster rates than non-Hispanics have.

In wondering if Arizona might serves as a microcosm for what is occurring in the rest of the country, Mark gathered data on births in 2008 and 2009 by state from the CDC. Looking at where states ranked in terms of the relative sizes of their Hispanic and black populations, he thought crude though the measure may be (the data are on total births and are not broken out by race), it appeared to indicate that Arizona's was part of a larger trend, not merely an outlier.

To add more precision to that observation, I correlated racial composition with the 2008-2009 change in births by state using 2009 Census data. The phenomenon is real. The correlation between the percentage of a state's population that is Hispanic and the change in the number of births in 2009 from 2008 is a moderate but statistically significant inverse .33. Correlation runs in the other direction for whites and blacks (.14 and .10, respectively), but not at any level of statistical reliability.

While skyrocketing foreclosure rates, the massive loss of wealth in baby boomer retirement accounts, and a near-doubling of the unemployment rate are tragedies in their own regard, if the browning of the US becomes a casualty of the 'Great Recession', I think that's worse. At worst, though, I'd guess the process has just decelerated a bit.

Of chimps and men

When I came across the video below (not for the squeamish) via OneSTDV, the following passage from Nick Wade's Before the Dawn sprung to mind (p148-9):

Chimp warfare takes the form of bands of males who patrol the borders of their territory, looking for an individual of the neighboring community who has been rash enough to feed alone. ...

Chimpanzees carefully calculate the odds and seek to minimize risk, a very necessary procedure if one fights on a regular basis. They prefer to attack an isolated individual and then retreat to their own territory. ... [Researchers] find that the chimps will approach as long as they number three or more; parties of two will slink away. Three against one is the preferred odds: two to hold the victim down and a third to batter him to death.

Are we really anything more than naked apes? Our primal natures are, as Frans de Waal argues, a hybridization of chimp and bonobo. Some groups, though, more closely resemble chimps; others have more in common with bonobos.

California may be our future, but Illinois is the present...

... which, given that they top the list among states in the worst financial shape in the country, isn't too comforting. What I'm referring to here, though, is racial composition, exclusively. The following table* ranks each state by its racial disparities with the US on the whole:

State	Variance
1. Illinois	4.1
2. New Jersey	10.3
3. New York	13.4
4. Connecticut	15.7
5. Florida	17.2
6. Virginia	17.9
7. Colorado	20.7
8. North Carolina	21.4
8. Delaware	21.4
10. Rhode Island	25.5
11. Arkansas	26.2
12. Nevada	27.1
13. Washington	27.2
14. Massachusetts	27.6
15. Michigan	27.8
16. Oklahoma	28.0
17. Kansas	30.3
18. South Carolina	30.7
19. Tennessee	30.8
20. Pennsylvania	31.4
21. Oregon	31.5
22. Alaska	32.8
23. Alabama	33.2
24. Utah	34.0
25. Missouri	34.1
26. Georgia	34.6
26. Ohio	34.6
28. Maryland	34.9
29. Indiana	35.4
30. Nebraska	37.1
31. Arizona	37.2
32. Louisiana	38.5
33. Wisconsin	39.1
34. Idaho	40.4
35. Minnesota	40.5
36. Texas	41.6
37. Kentucky	44.4
38. New Hampshire	45.5
39. Wyoming	45.7
40. Mississippi	48.6
41. Iowa	49.6
42. Montana	51.6
43. South Dakota	56.2
44. West Virginia	56.7
45. North Dakota	57.6
46. California	59.2
47. Maine	59.9
48. Vermont	60.0
49. New Mexico	75.6
50. District of Columbia	81.7
51. Hawaii	91.1

The nation's capital isn't at all representative, nor is our putative future, California. Instead, the Midwest's most upstanding, exemplary state, where the level of moral rectitude is matched only by the transparent, civic-mindedness that so accurately describes its political scene, is the veritable "real America" of today. Hawaii and New Mexico are leaders in the realm of the exotic, yet only one is celebrated for being so, while the other is perhaps the state Americans know, think, and care about the least. Why are Maine and West Virginia near the bottom of the list? They're overwhelmingly white, of course, while the nation they belong to no longer is.

* The variation index values are calculated by taking the population of each state that is non-Hispanic white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, and finding the absolute difference with the country as a whole in each of these five categories. For simplicity's sake, presume the US is 70% white, 15% Hispanic, 10% black, 3% Asian, and 2% Native American. The state of Eagleland is 55% white, 25% Hispanic, 5% black, and 15% Asian, and 0% Native American. So Eagleland's variance index value is 39 ([55-70]+[25-15]+[5-10]+[15-3]+[0-2]). Figures are calculated from 2009 US Census data.

Devon's doing less of it now, too

After this, I'm off the fecundity kick for awhile, promise. In the following graph, GSS respondents are broken up into five categories; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average number of children middle-aged adults in each category have are shown by year. To avoid English language fluency issues, only those born in the US are included:


No surprises. There is some expected year-to-year bouncing around due to randomness, but the societal patterns are clear: Those on the left side of the IQ spectrum have more children than those on the right side do, and everybody has been having fewer and fewer of them over the last four decades.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM(0-3)(4-5)(6)(7-8)(9-10), YEAR, BORN(1), AGE(36-62), CHILDS

Calling BS on Timothy Geithner

A few weeks ago, Timothy Geithner was interviewed by NPR's Robert Siegel ahead of a "working dinner" between the US Treasury Secretary and the Chinese vice premier concerning currency policies and intellectual property. In response to a question from Siegel about how responsible the putative undervaluation of the yuan is for the ongoing US trade deficit with China, Geithner offered this response:

Well, the big reason we have a trade imbalance in China is because we're a very large economy. We're about three times as large as China. We're about six times richer than China. So for those reasons, we buy more goods from China than we export to China.

That should immediately set off your BS detector, as it did mine. Yes, our economy is larger than China's, but our economy is larger than any other nation's economy is as well. Relative to the rest of the world, China's economy is enormous.

If the size of the US' economy relative to the size of the economy of the country in question influenced whether or not the US ran a trade surplus or a trade deficit with said country in the way Geithner suggests, if we're running trade surpluses with anybody, it should be with China, the world's second largest economy as measured by GDP. Conversely, we should, using the same logic, be running deficits with--arbitrarily using the small countries beginning with "A"--Albania, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, and Aruba. In reality, we are running surpluses with all of them.

Including all countries with which the US did at least $50 million in trade during 2010, I ran a regression using US trade balances by country and national GDP. The correlation is a very robust inverse .83 (p = 0). That is, the US runs deficits all over the place with large (and generally, though not necessarily, advanced) economies while running surpluses with smaller (and again, generally less advanced) ones. The reality is exactly the opposite of what Geithner says.

What about Americans being more affluent than the Chinese are? Is Geithner correct in asserting that our relative wealth is a big reason for why we're running a perpetual trade deficit with China? Do we tend to run deficits with countries where the populations are poor and surpluses with countries where the populations are rich? No. Correlating US trade balances and purchasing power parity by country reveals no correlation at all between the two (r = .03). We run deficits with many poor countries like Sri Lanka and Ecuador and many wealthy countries like Germany and Japan. And we run surpluses with several poor (Peru, Ghana) and wealthy (the Netherlands, Australia) countries alike.

I'm certainly not an expert on trade balances nor their implications, in either an abstract economic sense or from the perspective of an American patriot, but it's depressingly humorous to me that a top government official who should be an expert on both accounts is able to get away with making assertions that are so blatantly fallacious.

Educational attainment and barrenness in the US

In the comments of a previous post on the relationship between fecundity and educational attainment in the US, Bruce Charlton wondered what percentage of women never had children by educational category, noting that in Europe around one-third of female college graduates are barren.

Fertility in the US is higher than that among those with bachelor's degrees, but at the doctoral level, nearly one in three women never get around to starting a family. There isn't much in the way of surprises (heh) across groups, but the GSS has tracked the same data since its inception back in the early seventies. So, for comparative purposes, the percentages of women of the same age grouping who participated in the survey from 1973 through the end of that decade and reported never having children are also included in the following table, which shows the percentage of women by educational cohort who reported having no children*:

Education	2000s	1970s
No HS	6.2%	12.0%
Less than HS	6.5%	7.0%
HS grad	11.0%	7.3%
Up to associate's	12.8%	7.3%
Up to bachelor's	21.3%	10.0%
Up to master's	21.9%	14.9%
Up to doctorate	31.9%	32.1%

No difference among those who climb to the top of the academic mountain today and those who did so a generation ago (although at that time they represented less than 1% of all women; today they comprise nearly 4% of the female population). A significant change has occured among those who attend college without going as far, however. The percentage of these women who are not having children has almost doubled in three decades, while among the least educated, the proportion who forego kids has been halved.

GSS variables used: YEAR(1973-1980)(2000-2008), SEX(2), AGE(36-62), EDUC(0-8)(9-11)(12)(13-14)(15-16)(17-18)(19-20), CHILDS

* No high school = 0-8 years of education; Some high school = 9-11 years; High school graduate = 12 years, Up to associate's = 13-14 years; Up to bachelor's = 15-16; Up to master's = 17-18 years; Up to doctorate = 19-20 years.

Shocker--Men know (and care) more about what's going on in the world than women do

++Addition2++Writing in November 11, I've added the results from Pew's October 2011 News IQ quiz. More of the same.

++Addition++Writing in April 2011, I've added the results from Pew's March 2011 News IQ quiz. Same old, same old.

---

Steve links to a NYT article that is almost beyond parody where it is suggested that misogyny is behind the gender imbalance in Wikipedia contributions (in terms of content, though I suspect also in terms of financial donations). A commenter does a great job of capturing my sentiments:

Years ago I largely abandoned TV for the Web. The only people who end up discussing politics here are the ones who're actually interested in it, so naturally most discussions are dominated by men. On the rare occasions when I watch TV nowadays, I am shocked by the proliferation of women pretending to pontificate on male subjects there. Not just politics - sports, and even technology. Gadgets, for God's sakes! Years ago I was so used to this phoniness that it seemed natural, but it doesn't anymore. You'd see a 5-member panel discussing the Tea Party on CNN and 3 of the pundits would be women. It cracks me up.

Of course the major media will not touch biological explanations, namely that men are relatively expendable and can afford to pontificate on the most desirable outcome for Egypt, while women have a greater stake in tending to their offspring and thus are drawn to things close to home and away from things a world away (virtually, heh). If the NYT needs evidence for as much, its writers need only to visit the Pew Research Center. Pew frequently conducts "News IQ" surveys, randomly quizzing 1,000 people on current events. The most recent results are from November 2010. As is always the case, men outperformed women by more than a full point on the 12-item test. The average number of questions answered correctly, by sex, since Pew began conducting the surveys nearly four years ago:

	Men	Women
Oct '11	8.5	6.8
March '11	6.3	5.5
Nov '10	5.6	4.5
July '10	6.4	5.2
Jan '10	6.0	4.6
Oct '09	5.9	4.7
April '09	8.3	6.7
Dec '08	6.5	5.7
Feb '08	6.7	5.3
Sept '07	7.6	6.3
April '07*	+19	(17)

* Pew did not break out the average number of questions answered correctly by sex in the first of its political IQ quizzes conducted in April 2007, but did classify demographic groups into three knowledge categories--high, medium, and low. The figures listed in the table are arrived at by taking the percentage of each sex listed as having high knowledge and subtracting it by the percentage with low knowledge.

Then again, the left-leaning (and consequently invaluable, as Pew is also refreshingly honest--though the results are not broken out by race, as even Pew is not that honest) Research Center's telephone interviewers could be sexists intentionally trying to confuse female respondents while guiding male respondents to the correct answers. Or, even more problematically, the entire structure of the Western media establishment could have an incorrigible bias that delivers information in a way that interests men but bores women. Undoubtedly there are misogynists infesting not just Wikipedia, but every organ of the major media in the US! Parenthetically, it is worthwhile for readers to have perspective regarding their own levels of knowledge compared to that of the general population.

Take a minute to complete the quiz. I got all 12 questions correct (although the TARP one was admittedly a reasoned guess), and I suspect most regular readers will be in the same neighborhood. But the median score among those sampled is 5 of 12 questions answered correctly. And it's multiple choice, so a question or two of those five are merely the result of good luck. Most people just don't pay attention to what is going on in anything but the world immediately around them plus popular culture.

Classical music and double-digit IQs

Steve Sailer recently reiterated an observation made by Linda Gottfredson that perhaps the surest way to assess a person's IQ from casual conversation without risking a false positive is by asking the person whether or not he likes classical music. If the answer is "yes", his IQ is in the triple-digits. If he doesn't enjoy it, though, his answer is less suggestive.

The brief post's comment thread is pretty heated but largely anecdotal, so let's turn to the GSS for a little quantitative cooling. As fun as the module is (see the Inductivist's famous post on it), the GSS has only directly inquired about musical preferences once, in 1993. The mean wordsum score for that year among whites was 6.24, so it's reasonable to presume those answering 7-10 of the vocab test questions correctly have triple digit IQs, while those answering 5 or fewer correctly are in double-digit territory.

The median score is consistently 6, however, so placing this middling group firmly in either the XX or XXX camp is unsatisfying. Consequently, only the 0-5 and 7-10 cohorts should be considered. Further, foreign-born respondents are excluded to avoid language fluency issues.

The percentage of XXers who say they like classical music "very much" (the strongest affirmative option) is 8.2%, compared to 23.6% of XXXers. Looks like when the person in question is a XXer, you'll get a false positive about one in twelve times.

Among XXXers, 4.2% report "disliking it very much" (the strongest negative option), and only another 9.5% say they merely "dislike" it, the rest either having mixed feelings towards or appreciating it, bringing the total among XXXers who have no use for classical music to 13.7%. By comparison, 41.2% of XXers feel this way. Gottfredson's tactic appears to be one that doesn't return too many false negatives, either.

2010 NFL regular season wins and stat correlations

With the Superbowl a day away, here are correlations between several favorite stats and wins during the 2010 NFL regular season. This isn't a sports blog, and I'm not making any audacious claims about being able to provide special insights. Just the raw correlations for entire teams here, next to the same for last year for comparative purposes:

Offense	2010	2009
Turnover ratio	.72	.69
Points scored	.71	.88
Team passer rating	.68	.81
3rd down conversion %	.64	.64
Time of possession	.61	.46
1st downs	.51	.70
Total yards gained	.49	.77
Yards gained per pass play	.49	.80
Run attempts	.48	.12*
Total yards gained per play	.43	.81
Run yards gained	.35	.04*
Pass/run ratio	(.31)	.02*
QB hits allowed	(.31)*	(.53)
Pass yards gained	.30*	.68
Sacks allowed	(.26)*	(.53)
Offensive penalty yards	(.11)*	.04*
Pass attempts	(.06)*	.14*
Yards gained per rush play	.05*	.09*
4th down conversion %	(.05)*	.25*
Defense
Points allowed	(.72)	(.68)
Rush yards allowed	(.56)	(.58)
Opponent's passer rating	(.54)	(.47)
Yards allowed per pass play	(.49)	(.57)
Total yards allowed	(.47)	(.56)
1st downs allowed	(.43)	(.45)
Total yards allowed per play	(.32)	(.54)
Sacks made	.30	.41
Run yards allowed per play	(.16)*	(.33)
3rd down conversion % allowed	(.13)*	(.23)*
Passing yards allowed	(.13)*	(.24)
4th down conversion % allowed	.03*	(.30)
Defensive penalty yards	(.01)*	.14*
Special Teams
Average kickoff return yards gained	.23*	.05*
Average kickoff return yards allowed	(.13)*	.15*
Average kickoff (kicking team)	.08*	.32
Field goal % made	.08*	.03*
Average net punt yards (kicking team)	(.08)*	.27*
Total penalty yards committed	(.08)*	.11*

* not statistically significant at 90% confidence

When I heard a sports writer in Chicago predicting that the special teams game would be a "slaughter", as the Bears are among the best and the Packers are notoriously bad, I thought "if the post from last year has anything to say, it's that that doesn't matter."

The most notable difference from a season ago, and a possible deviation from an ongoing trend in the NFL that has seen the passing game become increasingly determinative of success and the run game meaning less and less, is that teams like the Jets, Eagles, Bucs, and Chiefs that could move the ball on the ground fared pretty well. Arguably, these are mostly mediocre teams that ended up with winning records largely due to softness of schedule. But as Steve Sailer has pointed out, 2009 was an extremely pass-friendly season even by recent standards, and 2010 was more in line with the rest of the last decade.

Penalties and turnovers, penalties and turnovers, penalties and turnovers... Or how about "turnovers and turnovers"?

Data from the last two seasons correlates at .90, essentially meaning that over 80% of a stat category and its correlation with its team's number of wins is 'explainable' by looking at what occured the year before. That is, from an obviously limited sample of only two years, the numbers put up by successful teams in '09 were largely the same types of numbers put up by successful teams this season.

Income relative to IQ, by occupation

++Addition++Steve Sailer adds some flavor, pulling from his personal experience in a marketing research firm.

---

With occupational average IQ estimates constructed from median income and, separately, from wordsum scores, the question of which occupations garner earnings higher than the IQ of their practitioners would predict, and which occupations bring in less than IQ would predict, naturally arises. The following table ranks occupations by the income premium they enjoy relative to the average IQ (via wordsum scores) of their practitioners. That is, it is a crude measure of how overpaid (positive) or underpaid (negative) they are relative to their converted IQ averages. The value displayed is simply the difference between the median income-derived IQ estimates and the wordsum-derived IQ estimates used in the preceding two posts. Occupations included have a minimal sample size of ten:

Occupation	Diff
1. Physician	44.1
2. Dentist	29.8
3. Commercial airline pilot	19.3
4. Pharmacist	17.4
5. Attorney	13.4
6. Farmer	10.4
7. Economist	10.3
8. Bricklayer	9.7
9. Telephone installer and repairer	9.6
10. Sheet metal worker	9.0
11. Civil engineer	8.2
12. Butcher	8.2
13. Electrical engineer	7.3
14. Forklift operator	7.0
15. Electrician	6.5
16. Aircraft mechanic	6.2
17. Mechanical engineer	6.1
18. Computer programmer	6.0
19. Truck driver	5.7
20. Roofer	5.3
21. Tool-and-die maker	4.7
22. Firefighter	4.6
23. Architect	4.5
24. Physical therapist	4.0
25. Automobile mechanic	3.4
26. Mail carrier	3.0
27. Dental hygienist	2.9
28. Janitor	2.6
29. Construction worker	2.5
30. Plumber	2.3
31. Registered nurse	2.3
32. Welder	2.2
33. Accountant	1.4
34. Computer systems analyst	1.3
35. Engineering technician	0.8
36. Stockbroker	0.8
37. Sales representative	0.2
38. Carpet and tile installer	0.0
39. Bus driver	(0.1)
40. Licensed practical nurse	(0.4)
41. Furniture upholsterer	(0.9)
42. Painter	(1.3)
43. Chemist	(1.4)
44. Police officer	(1.6)
45. Psychologist	(2.2)
46. Stenographer	(4.1)
47. Taxi driver	(4.4)
48. Insurance agent	(4.5)
49. Security guard	(4.7)
50. Telephone operator	(5.5)
51. Barber	(5.9)
52. Cashier	(6.0)
53. Teacher	(6.4)
54. Dressmaker	(6.8)
55. Child care worker	(7.2)
56. Bank teller	(7.5)
57. Photographer	(7.9)
58. Social worker	(8.0)
59. Real estate agent	(8.6)
60. Artist (fine art)	(8.6)
61. Waiter	(8.7)
62. Maid	(8.9)
63. Actor	(9.4)
64. Receptionist	(10.0)
65. Secretary	(10.3)
66. Retail salesman	(10.3)
67. Clergyman	(10.6)
68. Librarian	(11.6)
69. Author	(12.1)

Advanced medical fields populate the top of the list, an outcome that is not surprising given the amount of time and effort that must be expended by those entering these fields before they are able to begin practicing professionally. The situation is similar for pilots and attorneys. Other occupations near the top of the list, such as butcher, roofer, and sheet metal worker get there due to the physical demands and generally undesirable working conditions they entail.

At the other end are those who make their livings by way of what they write, something bloggers are certainly able to appreciate!

Some occupations in which compensation might initially appear to be low relative to the cognitive abilities of those working in them are influenced by other factors. In the case of teachers, this includes working around 60 fewer days than people in jobs with conventional schedules do. Additionally, teachers enjoy extremely high job security.

If any true average IQ is going to be inflated by measuring it using a vocabulary test like the wordsum, it is going to be for librarians. Still, I suspect librarians tend to be introverted types for which gregariousness is not usually a personality trait that describes them, and their earnings suffer for it.

Finally, who knew economists were overpaid?!