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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If I had to guess I would say you are right that it stunts everything and that it does limit intelligence. Like ulyssessword said, funding probably limited how many studies have been done on this subject. Just hypothesizing, but maybe there are people that are more psychologically and physically resilient (genetically) so that they are not affected as much or at all by the stress of poverty, making the data messy. It could be there is no effect for certain people.

But I can't imagine why it wouldn't be true on average that, if you had twins where you had one live in poverty and had the other live a middle class life, the wealthier one should be bigger, stronger, and smarter. Unless they're both resilient, then I guess the outcomes could be the same.

But if you have many examples of such cases of twins and take an average, maybe you could see the overall effect poverty has, eliminating the effect of some pairs being resilient/robust to the effects of poverty. Not sure if this has been done, assessing IQ AND health markers of many pairs of twins living at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. It would be interesting to see if pairs with larger differences in IQ had larger differences in health markers as well.