It jumped out at me because I’m a statistician. The article is by Emily Eakin in the Saturday 14th NYTimes talking about a forthcoming book by Dalton Conley, a sociologist and director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University. The book apparently says that differences in individual success in life has less to do with family than with individual differences within families. Conley uses 1990 census data.
Without having heard about Conley’s research we would assume from everything in popular culture that a’s will do much better in life than d’s.
My reading of the Eakin article is that c’s do better in life than b’s. Something quite astounding.
If this is true in America then America is the most meritocratic society in the history of the planet and well deserving of our great wealth.
While we are on the subject of chi-square tests, the first Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health had a chi-square test that showed urban non-smokers had higher lung cancer rates than rural smokers. That table was never shown again because, as a statistics TA, I sent my simple chi-square test to the local S.F. Chronicle science reporter who wrote it up. The subsequent Surgeons General’s reports had statisticians on their review boards and kept that data quashed.