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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28225 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Whereas only 5% of prime age males weren't employed in 1968, today it's nearly 14%.

For your consideration: the US army doesn't enlist anyone scoring below 10-th percentile on their IQ test. That's 10% of men that the US army considers untrainable, despite having vastly more control over a soldier's life than another employer. Based solely on that, I would expect that there should be at least 10% of men who ought to not be employed.

Where were those men in 1968? Probably institutionalized, and thus not counted in LFPR.
There has been a massive de-institutionalization in the 70s.

Bottom 10% on AFQT is not the same as bottom 10% on IQ test. This would be more like bottom 20% on IQ test. Countries with mean IQs of 85-90 still find uses for these people; otherwise unemployment rates would be much higher. In the US, a high minimum wage and other regulation creates an incentive to choose smarter workers. If you have to pay $15/hour, you're gonna want the smarter worker/.

I am skeptical that IQ tests measure what we think they measure in developing countries. Even those tests that pertain to be context-free and that don't require one to be able to read. It takes intelligence and cunning to hunt and forage, or to run a homestead farm, or to navigate life in a shanty-town. I think that an American with IQ of 70 and a Papua New Guinean with an IQ of 70 differ greatly in how well they can take care of themselves.

The US Army doesn't specify the IQ cutoff; some people estimate it at 83 (that's what I remember from McNamamara's Folly. Standard deviation of IQ is 15, mean 100, so below 83 is 11.5%.

The US Army by law restricts the employment of the next 20 percentiles (11th--31st) to be no higher than 20% of the applicant pool:

The number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in any armed force during any fiscal year whose score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the tenth percentile and below the thirty-first percentile may not exceed 20 percent of the total number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in such armed force during such fiscal year.

The corresponding IQs would be in the 83-93 range.

5% of the population was not institutionalized in 1968. That doesn’t pass the sniff test.

I appreciate the reality check. I asked Perplexity AI for an estimate of the total number of institutionalized people in US in 1960s, including prisons, mental institutions and institutions for the mentally impaired. The peak for mental institutions was half-a-million a decade earlier (so about 0.3% of the population), the prison population was less than it is now, but as for the mentally disabled:

The search results do not provide specific numbers for institutions housing people with intellectual disabilities (then referred to as "mental retardation") in the 1960s. However, these institutions were common at the time, often housing large numbers of individuals.

I know several institutions for the mentally disabled within my area. They range from assisted living to full-on can't-go-outside-without-an-escort (for those who are mobile). They tend to be out of the way, and people who don't have family members (or family members of their close friends) tend not to think about these places.

So I am going to guess that a large portion of the bottom-10%-IQ were indeed in some form of institution that would take them out of consideration of the labor force participation metric.

I would be open to evidence that it was common for mentally challenged men to get hired and work. Maybe with a lower minimum wage, it makes sense. My friend's sister, for example, works at a doggie day-care for like half the federal minimum wage, something like 20 hours a week.

Note that there were more actually literally retarded people at the time due to a higher rate of birth defects.

My guess is that it was pretty common for actually literally retarded people living mostly with relatives to do some unskilled grunt work(eg field hand, heavy laborer- there was still a lot of unmechanized agriculture and ditch digging going on). McNamara’s morons had to come from somewhere, and I’m guessing looking into it might give us a better idea- it seems unlikely the military was recruiting from long term care homes. But we really don’t know.

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