Kieran Healy

A useful IQ test

Sick of Battleground God? Take the IQ test at the Center for the Study of Inequality and see how much you know about income inquality, gender and occupational segregation, social mobility and other cool stuff. There are 12 questions. I got one wrong, but I suppose it’s my job to know this stuff.

Well I scored 6 of 12, which puts me right down the middle. Some of my answers were sort of the “I’m hoping it’s this answer” idealism, instead of reality. Considering I’m not in the social science field, I guess the result is not too bad. Still, I wish I had more information on these issues than I had prior to the quiz.

7/12

I thought surely we were worse than Sweden for gender segregation by occupation.

I scored 10 correct, out of 12 possible. I over-estimated the percentage of people who responded “no” when asked if they agree with inter-ethnic marriages. For the other answer, I under-estimated the ratio of US to foriegn wealth. If a proponent of equality demands economic equality across populations, would that proponent be satisfied with abject poverty for all?

6/12 myself.

The answers mostly seemed to be of the form
-thing are OK!
-things are bad.
-no, things are worse.
-Gawd, things are horrible.

I think the question about the equality of opportunity across nations was the only one with a ‘things are OK!’ answer (I got it wrong, BTW). Otherwise, I think it was evenly distributed between the “things are worse” and “things are horrbile” responses.

Depressing.