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Edited Date/Time
1/17/2012 9:26pm
Presidential candidate with IQ of 133?
WASHINGTON --In a published report, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania has detailed findings of a four month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the Lovenstein Institute has published its research to the education community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ" report among others.
According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over the past 60 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all rated based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking. The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points:
147 Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
132 Harry Truman (D)
122 Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
174 John F. Kennedy (D)
126 Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
155 Richard M. Nixon (R)
121 Gerald R. Ford (R)
176 James E. Carter (D)
105 Ronald W. Reagan (R)
98 George H. W. Bush (R)
182 William J. Clinton (D)
91 George W. Bush (R)
http://lovenstein.org/report/
Can anyone tell if this is legit?
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Last time I wrote about whether the most powerful person in the world should also be smart. This seems to have struck a chord with a number of people. I claimed that when considering presidential job applications, an Ivy League degree might be a good thing to look for. Matthew Atkinson, my colleague at UCLA took this a step further and analyzed Presidential IQ and success. He sent me this diagram.
IQ and presidential success chart
This plots Presidential IQ against Presidential success. First let me talk about what we see here and then I'll give my two cents on what to make of it.
IQ is on the horizontal access and Presidential success is on the vertical axis. You can see that as IQ increases, Presidential success generally increases too. The Presidents for which there is consensus about their IQ are marked in red.
You may be thinking that it doesn't really look like much of a pattern - it is true that the relationship is far from perfect. Look at Andrew Jackson, for example: not on the high end of Presidential IQ, but among the most successful. In social sciences, we very rarely find relationships that are very exact. Political science is not physics. We cannot predict Presidential behavior like we can the behavior of an atom. The reason that the Presidents appear all over the plot is that, obviouisly, things other than IQ determine their succes. But you can see a general pattern here. It is clear that, generally, as IQ increases, so does success. In fact, Matthew has labeled the plot to show that, in cases where there is consensus about the IQ of Presidents, the correlation is quite high: .59.
Making this particularly fun is that he has plotted John McCain and Barack Obama. This shows how we would expect them to do, based on IQ alone. Time magazine claims to know McCain's IQ to be 133, based on old Navy records. That means that if McCain's success were to be predicted only by IQ, he would be very much in the middle, near some rather undistinguished company, by Presidential standards, like Chester A. Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes, and George H.W. Bush.
What does this mean for Obama? Nobody knows because we don't know his IQ. Matthew has plotted him at three different levels. I'm sure some of you are convinced of his genius - you probably think that a 148 is far too low. However, if we put him there, it predicts he will be as successful as Presidents like John F. Kennedy, John Adams, and James Madison. But he just might not be that smart - we just don't know. Maybe you believe that Obama is closer to McCain, or even below him. These possibilities are plotted in the diagram too. We really just don't know.
There are some things we might want to consider when discussing whether big brains make for good Presidents.
Most obviously is that we really do not have an adequate measure of Presidential IQ. Matthew gathered his IQ scores from the work of the UC Davis pyschologist Dean Keith Simonton. Simonton, of course, never gave an IQ test to any President. In fact, in being based on old Navy records, McCain's score might be the most accurate score that we have. For all other President's, Simonton scored IQ by combining the work of scholars that have studied Presidential biography. That the scores are based on presidential biography gives me pause because it might be that biographers think that Presidents have high IQ's because they were successful in office. For example, do we think FDR was smart because he was a successful President or was he a successful President because he was smart? It is probably a little of both, which means that the causal relationship between intelligence and Presidential success might be overstated. If IQ measures innate intelligence, being President cannot cause a President to have a higher IQ, it can merely change our perception of their IQ, which in turn makes their success look more related to IQ.
It is also worth mentioning that IQ, like many measures of aptitude, is not without its limitations and one should be cautious in trying to predict individual success with such a measure. However, Matthew put it this way:
"Most presidents have had IQs around 130. Having an IQ over 140 may on average be worth about 10 points (give or take) in the presidential success rankings. IQ alone certainly is not enough to turn a Herbert Hoover (128) into a Teddy Roosevelt or a Lincoln. But perhaps if Hoover's IQ were over 140, he would have handled a difficult situation better and in turn be remembered as average rather than something of a bust."
Matthew also looked at the relationship between IQ and Presidential success while statistically controlling for previous experience. The result...IQ has a strong relationship with success. Previous experience does not appear to have any observable relationship with success.
I should also add, and this is the realm of pure speculation, that maybe the relationship between IQ and Presidential potential is curve-linear, meaning that maybe, if a person gets too smart, it begins to hurt their Presidential capabilities. Think about the smartest person you know - perhaps a college professor - would you really want that person to be President?
Those are generally the most coveted selections. At 894 of 897 you take what you are offered generally.
But 133? That's not very special. Slightly above the upper end of average intelligence, if I remember correctly. However, it's no wonder he looks like a genius next to two-digit GW.
Pit Row
Over 140 - Genius or almost genius
120 - 140 - Very superior intelligence
110 - 119 - Superior intelligence
90 - 109 - Average or normal intelligence
80 - 89 - Dullness
70 - 79 - Borderline deficiency in intelligence
Under 70 - Feeble-mindedness
The only path to the academies that I know of that do not require competing in the appointment process is if you are the child of a CMH holder.
Also, your academy performance does not impact your future training path. After the academy, you go to flight school.......which means you meet the physical requirements (eyesight nocks out about 2/3 of the people right off the bat). Before the navy flight school, you have to have a civilian pilot's license for single seat. After the first part of flight training, then you get assigned your career path (fixed wing, rotor wing, jet, prop, whatever), then after that..........you get your final path (fighter, cargo hauler, whatever). Or so it's been explained to me.
Even if he was at the bottom of his Academy class......he still had to be on the ball to make it into the flight program. And he did well enough in that to go onto fighters.
I don't know.........I've met and worked with officers from the top of their class from a service academy that were a waste of 2 pair of boots.......and I've worked with officers that were commisioned out of ROTC from po dunk shit colleges nobody ever heard of........who were phenomenal leaders. I don't put much into it one way or the other......besides the fact that just graduating from the academy, and flight school is a hell of an accomplishment in and of itself and more than most people do in their lives.......but I discount it as either a positive or a negative regarding his ability to be a president.
We've had great presidents that never saw the military, and we've had shitty presidents that had plenty of military service. While I prefer a vet (a real one, like Bob Dole), I don't discount an individual based on that alone.
I've never seen Genius listed anywhere close to 140 before. It's usually in the 170-180 range.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/IQ_scale_rates
I understand that it is possible to pursue a career as a civilian.......but it's extremely hard to get a job flying at an entry level that will allow you to accumulate the flight time needed to move up.
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