Increasing inequality in general intelligence and socioeconomic status as a result of immigration in Denmark 1980-2014
Open Differential Psychology , March 3, 2015, ISSN: 2446-3884
We argue that if immigrants have a different mean general intelligence (g) than their host country and if immigrants generally retain their mean level of g, then immigration will increase the standard deviation of g. We further argue that inequality in g is an important cause of social inequality, so increasing it will increase social inequality. We build a demographic model to analyze change in the mean and standard deviation of g over time and apply it to data from Denmark. The simplest model, which assumes no immigrant gains in g, shows that g has fallen due to immigration from 97.1 to 96.4, and that for the same reason standard deviation has increased from 15.04 to 15.40, in the time span 1980 to 2014.
