Lewis Terman's genius study, as you will recall from the chapter about Chris Langan, was an investigation into how some children with really high IQs who were born between 1903 and 1917 turned out as adults. And the study found that there was a group of real successes and there was a group of real failures, and that the successes were far more likely to have come from wealthier families. In that sense, the Terman study underscores the argument Annette Lareau makes, that what your parents do for a living, and the assumptions that accompany the class your
parents belong to, matter.

There's another way to break down the Terman results, though, and that's by when the Termites were born. If you divide the Termites into two groups, with those born between 1903 and 1911 on one side, and those between 1912 and 1917 on the other, it turns out that the Terman failures
are far more likely to have been born in the earlier group.

The explanation has to do with two of the great cataclysmic events of the twentieth century: the Great Depression and World War II.