IQ accounts for most of it.
* You can say that’s a result of them being smarter than the rest of us, but that explanation just doesn’t hold water when you take into account what a small percentage of the population Jewish people are.
* Actually, you can run the numbers and you’d be surprised. Take the average American IQ (100) and standard deviation (15), an estimate for the average Jewish American IQ (115) and standard deviation (15) and the percentage of Jews in the population (say 2%) and just by doing an itegral of a Gaussian function you can calculate the percentage of Jews among people above a certain IQ. The numbers are:
IQ Percent of pop. above that IQ that is Jewish:
120 8.1
130 13.7
140 25.2
145 35.3
Pick a profession in which you think Jews are overrepresented and think about what the minimum IQ to enter that profession is. With something like a leading scientist it is probably around 145, and so you would expect from IQ effects alone that Jews would be 35.3% of leading scientists. This sounds about right. Then there are all the effects of working hard, a culture where parents expect achievement, etc, and so high numbers of Jews in these various positions need not be attributed to nepotism.
