That Drinking Study

11:14am

The Times yesterday ran a piece on a study of drinking.

INTELLIGENT people are at higher risk of suffering from alcohol problems than their less gifted friends, a study by the Medical Research Council has found.

Women, in particular, are more likely to drink heavily in their thirties if they are bright.

Yes, the obvious joke has already been made: that if you actually understand what's going on around you you'll take to drink. And no, not an observation that is made in the paper.

I wish I could post the paper up here but that's verboeten: there were two things that really stood out for me. One is that the level top level of drinking described was over 50 units a week. This is still below the level (over 65 a week) which creates larger health problems than being a teetotaller. So there's a possibility that our link between intelligence and heavy drinking is simply that the intelligent know what levels of heavy drinking are in fact dangerous to health: as opposed to the less intelligent who listen to what they are told and believe the much lower numbers bandied about.

However, the thing that really leapt out at me was the very strong correlation between IQ (as they measure it, it wasn't a traditional IQ test) and both social class and earnings. Whether looking at the social class (perhaps economic class is better, professional, skilled non-manual, skilled manual etc) of the individuals themselves as they hit 30, their earnings, or the same classification of their parents, there was a very strong link between how high the IQ and how high up the tree they were.

Those doing unskilled jobs had an average IQ of 92.8, those doing professional 107.3 (again, note, these are not standard IQ tests, so they don't map onto the usual distribution), the results for incomes very much the same and so again the results for the economic class of their parents. And note that those IQ numbers had been measured when the children were 10.

All of which is terribly interesting to those wanting to opine upon social mobility. From one side we could say that the bright are at the top, the bright are getting to the top and that's just fine. On the other we might (as is the current mantra) say that as with the Jesuits, once the kid's got to the age of 10 then there's no catching up possible given the benefits of a pushy middle class/professional background and that thus efforts should be concentrated on such things as Sure Start etc.

Ammunition for both sides except for one thing. If measuring intelligence at the age of 10 is indeed such a useful guide, why not do that measuring to see how children should be educated? Sure, try as hard as we can to overcome the deprivation before that date but if it's fixed by then it's fixed. OK, we could add a year just for luck, but at that point measure and then push people into the appropriate academic or vocational education streams. Why not? We could even call it the 11 plus, or has someone already used that moniker?