More about Intelligence

Do genes matter? You betcha! See geneticist Gregory Cochran’s “Everything Is Different but the Same” and “Missing Heritability — Found?” (Useful Wikipedia articles for explanations of terms used by Cochran: “Genome-wide association study,” “Genetic load,” and “Allele.”) Snippets:

Another new paper finds that the GWAS hits for IQ – largely determined in Europeans – don’t work in people of African descent.

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There is an interesting new paper out on genetics and IQ. The claim is that they have found the missing heritability – in rare variants, generally different in each family.

Cochran, in typical fashion, ends the second item with a bombastic put-down of the purported dysgenic trend, about which I’ve written here.

Psychologist James Thompson seems to put stock in the dysgenic trend. See, for example, his post “The Woodley Effect“:

[W]e could say that the Flynn Effect is about adding fertilizer to the soil, whereas the Woodley Effect is about noting the genetic quality of the plants. In my last post I described the current situation thus: The Flynn Effect co-exists with the Woodley Effect. Since roughly 1870 the Flynn Effect has been stronger, at an apparent 3 points per decade. The Woodley effect is weaker, at very roughly 1 point per decade. Think of Flynn as the soil fertilizer effect and Woodley as the plant genetics effect. The fertilizer effect seems to be fading away in rich countries, while continuing in poor countries, though not as fast as one would desire. The genetic effect seems to show a persistent gradual fall in underlying ability.

But Thompson joins Cochran in his willingness to accept what the data show, namely, that there are strong linkages between race and intelligence. See, for example, “County IQs and Their Consequences” (and my related post). Thompson writes:

[I]n social interaction it is not always either possible or desirable to make intelligence estimates. More relevant is to look at technical innovation rates, patents, science publications and the like…. If there were no differences [in such] measures, then the associations between mental ability and social outcomes would be weakened, and eventually disconfirmed. However, the general link between national IQs and economic outcomes holds up pretty well….

… Smart fraction research suggests that the impact of the brightest persons in a national economy has a disproportionately positive effect on GDP. Rindermann and I have argued, following others, that the brightest 5% of every country make the greatest contribution by far, though of course many others of lower ability are required to implement the discoveries and strategies of the brightest.

Though Thompson doesn’t directly address race and intelligence in “10 Replicants in Search of Fame,” he leaves no doubt about dominance of genes over environment in the determination of traits; for example:

[A] review of the world’s literature on intelligence that included 10,000 pairs of twins showed identical twins to be significantly more similar than fraternal twins (twin correlations of about .85 and .60, respectively), with corroborating results from family and adoption studies, implying significant genetic influence….

Some traits, such as individual differences in height, yield heritability as high as 90%. Behavioural traits are less reliably measured than physical traits such as height, and error of measurement contributes to nonheritable variance….

[A] review of 23 twin studies and 12 family studies confirmed that anxiety and depression are correlated entirely for genetic reasons. In other words, the same genes affect both disorders, meaning that from a genetic perspective they are the same disorder. [I have personally witnessed this effect: TEA.]…

The heritability of intelligence increases throughout development. This is a strange and counter-intuitive finding: one would expect the effects of learning to accumulate with experience, increasing the strength of the environmental factor, but the opposite is true….

[M]easures of the environment widely used in psychological science—such as parenting, social support, and life events—can be treated as dependent measures in genetic analyses….

In sum, environments are partly genetically-influenced niches….

People to some extent make their own environments….

[F]or most behavioral dimensions and disorders, it is genetics that accounts for similarity among siblings.

In several of the snippets quoted above, Thompson is referring to a phenomenon known as genetic confounding, which is to say that genetic effects are often mistaken for environmental effects. Brian Boutwell and JC Barnes address an aspect of genetic confounding in “Is Crime Genetic? Scientists Don’t Know Because They’re Afraid to Ask.” A small sample:

The effects of genetic differences make some people more impulsive and shortsighted than others, some people more healthy or infirm than others, and, despite how uncomfortable it might be to admit, genes also make some folks more likely to break the law than others.

John Ray addresses another aspect of genetic confounding in “Blacks, Whites, Genes, and Disease,” where he comments about a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

It says things that the Left do not want to hear. But it says those things in verbose academic language that hides the point. So let me translate into plain English:

* The poor get more illness and die younger
* Blacks get more illness than whites and die younger
* Part of that difference is traceable to genetic differences between blacks and whites.
* But environmental differences — such as education — explain more than genetic differences do
* Researchers often ignore genetics for ideological reasons
* You don’t fully understand what is going on in an illness unless you know about any genetic factors that may be at work.
* Genetics research should pay more attention to blacks

Most of those things I have been saying for years — with one exception:

They find that environmental factors have greater effect than genetics. But they do that by making one huge and false assumption. They assume that education is an environmental factor. It is not. Educational success is hugely correlated with IQ, which is about two thirds genetic. High IQ people stay in the educational system for longer because they are better at it, whereas low IQ people (many of whom are blacks) just can’t do it at all. So if we treated education as a genetic factor, environmental differences would fade way as causes of disease. As Hans Eysenck once said to me in a casual comment: “It’s ALL genetic”. That’s not wholly true but it comes close

So the recommendation of the study — that we work on improving environmental factors that affect disease — is unlikely to achieve much. They are aiming their gun towards where the rabbit is not. If it were an actual rabbit, it would probably say: “What’s up Doc?”

Some problems are unfixable but knowing which problems they are can help us to avoid wasting resources on them. The black/white gap probably has no medical solution.

I return to James Thompson for a pair of less incendiary items. “The Secret in Your Eyes” points to a link between intelligence and pupil size. In “Group IQ Doesn’t Exist,” Thompson points out the fatuousness of the belief that a group is somehow more intelligent that the smartest member of the group. As Thompson puts it:

So, if you want a problem solved, don’t form a team. Find the brightest person and let [him] work on it. Placing [him] in a team will, on average, reduce [his] productivity. My advice would be: never form a team if there is one person who can sort out the problem.

Forcing the brightest person to act as a member of a team often results in the suppression of that person’s ideas by the (usually) more extroverted and therefore less-intelligent members of the team.

Added 04/05/17: James Thompson issues a challenge to IQ-deniers in “IQ Does Not Exist (Lead Poisoning Aside)“:

[T]his study shows how a neuro-toxin can have an effect on intelligence, of similar magnitude to low birth weight….

[I]f someone tells you they do not believe in intelligence reply that you wish them well, but that if they have children they should keep them well away from neuro-toxins because, among other things, they reduce social mobility.

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Mugged by Non-Reality

A wise man said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Thanks to Malcolm Pollock, I’ve just learned that a liberal is a conservative whose grasp of reality has been erased, literally.

Actually, this is unsurprising news (to me). I have pointed out many times that the various manifestations of liberalism — from stifling regulation to untrammeled immigration — arise from the cosseted beneficiaries of capitalism (e.g., pundits, politicians, academicians, students) who are far removed from the actualities of producing real things for real people. This has turned their brains into a kind of mush that is fit only for hatching unrealistic but costly schemes which rest upon a skewed vision of human nature.

Kotlikoffian Casuistry

Economist Lawrence Kotlikoff recently opined to this effect in “Is a Loved One Uninsured? So Are You“:

I met former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor shortly after she retired in 2006, years before Obamacare.

We were both speakers at a conference in Washington, D.C. The justice, a person of extraordinary intellect, is generally exceptionally composed. That day she was upset. In her talk on health care she repeatedly asked, “Why can’t a nation as great and prosperous as ours provide health care for all?”

Universal health care wasn’t a Republican issue, so this seemed an unusual question coming from a prominent Republican. During the break, I asked her if someone she knew was uninsured. She said her son. I asked why. She said he couldn’t afford insurance because his child (her grandchild) had a pre-existing condition.

“This means you too are, in effect, uninsured.”

“Precisely. If they need medical care, I will, of course, help pay the bills, which could be enormous.”….

Yes, our current health care system — all of it — is a mess based on its cost and outcomes. But replacing Obamacare with Trumpcare violates the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.” If enacted, it will leave far more of us uninsured or underinsured, which means it will leave all of us uninsured or underinsured.

This, in turn, means we all need to save more for that unexpected call for help from a relative or friend.

Well, Trumpcare is off the board, for now. But Obamacare is by no means here to stay. It will erode by piecemeal legislation, regulatory discretion, and market-driven changes in health-care and insurance.

In the meantime, however, the Jesuitical Professor Kotlikoff can be expected to push for universal health care (whatever that means) by spewing nonsense like that quoted above.

I have questions for Herr Doctor Professor Kotlikoff:

Where is it written in the Constitution that the central government has the power to regulate and provide health care? (Don’t tell me that it’s in the General Welfare Clause; that clause confers no such power on the central government.)

Why is the health of a person who lives at the other end of the country any of my business? I have my own health to care for, and (possibly) the health of persons dear to me. And I (and they) have other needs. If the health of a stranger is my problem, doesn’t that make my other needs his problem? Where’s the limit?

And why limit yourself to the United States? Why not create a global version of Britain’s National Health Service, which has worked out so well for the British?

What’s wrong with expecting people to save more for their own health-care needs, if not for the health-care needs of friends and relatives? Isn’t that called personal responsibility? And hasn’t it been eroded by Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, food stamps, etc., etc., etc.?

And why are you, as an economist, so ignorant of the impoverishing consequences of government spending and regulation? Don’t you know that if government had been minimized — held to its proper role as the defender of Americans from foreign and domestic predators — Americans at all income levels could amply afford market-provided, high-quality health care?

The Internet-Media-Academic Complex vs. Real Life

I spend an inordinate share of my time at my PC. (Unlike smart-phone and tablet users, I prefer to be seated in a comfortable desk chair, viewing a full-size screen, and typing on a real keyboard.) When I’m not composing a blog post or playing spider solitaire, I’m reading items from several dozen RSS feeds.

My view of the world is shaped, for the worse, by what I read. If it’s not about leftist cant and scientific fraud, it’s about political warfare on many levels. But my view of the world is more sanguine when I reflect on real life as I experience it when I’m away from my PC.

When the subject isn’t politics, and the politics of the other person are hidden from view, I experience a world of politeness, competence (even unto excellence), and intelligence. Most of the people in that world are owners of small businesses, their employees, and the employees of larger businesses.

In almost every case, their attitude of friendliness is sincere — and I’ve been around the block enough tines to spot insincerity. There’s an innate goodness in most people, regardless of their political views, that comes out when you’re interacting with them as a “real” human being.

The exception to the rule, in my experience, is the highly educated analyst or academic — regardless of political outlook — who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. And it shows in his abrupt, superior attitude toward others, especially if they are strangers whom he is unlikely to encounter again.

The moral of the story: If government were far less powerful, and if it were kept that way, the political noise level would be much reduced and the world would be a far more pleasant place.

The Left and Violence

Much has been made, and rightly so, of leftists’ physical and verbal violence toward conservatives. That the left is inherently violent when faced with opposition to its ideas and aims is unsurprising to me. Leftism is a state of mind that demands control. Leftists project their authoritarianism onto conservatives, one result of which is the false portrayal of Hitler as a right-wing dictator.

Just think about the means by which leftists attain their ends. First, they rely on government — which is the big kahuna of coercive institutions. After that it’s just a matter of selecting the preferred instrument of coercion: regulation, taxation, redistribution, ~~hate~~-thought-crime legislation, abridgement of property rights and freedom of association, ~~affirmative action~~ racial quotas, and so on.

Leftism is built on control. Control is attained by coercion. Coercion is based on the threat of violence — the ability of the state’s agents to search, seize, summon, compel, fine, and imprison at will — and to use force in doing any of those things.

In sum, leftism depends on violence — or the clear threat of it. Violent outbursts from the left should surprise no one but naifs and leftist hypocrites.

Vera Lynn

Today is Dame Vera Lynn‘s 100th birthday. If you don’t recognize the name, follow the link in the preceding sentence, and this one.

Rock and Roil

Have you noticed the prevalent use of emotive words in “news” headlines and stories? I’m referring to verbs like “rock” and “roil” and nouns like “chaos” that seem to occur with great frequency, especially since the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.

Trump’s pronouncements and policies are said to “rock” the foundations of the republic, and “roil” the political scene. It is only natural that such pronouncements and policies emanate from a White House that is “mired” in “chaos.”

Whatever happened to neutral language in headlines and stories? I submit that it vanished with the pretense of objectivity during the Vietnam War. I’m not ignoring the age of “yellow journalism” around the turn of the twentieth century. But it seems to me that reportage became rather neutral, by comparison, in the several decades leading up to the 1960s. It was then that the media began blatantly to take sides instead of relying on subtle forms of bias: what to cover, what “facts” to present, where to position a story, and so on. The subtlety is still there, but as a mere adjunct to overt bias. Were I writing a headline about it, I would say the the bias has become “shrill” since the ascendancy of Donald Trump.

The advantage of the blatant side-taking is that readers, listeners, and viewers are left in no doubt as to the leanings of the reporters, editors, and publishers of particular media outlets. The disadvantage is that many of those same readers, listeners, and viewers are too gullible to see where they are being led by “rock” and “roil,” and take it for granted that such-and-such a policy is in fact unwise, unconstitutional, and widely resisted among the electorate.

Here’s the (obvious) key to understanding the outpourings of most media outlets: They consist of pro-governement propaganda when Democrats are in power and anti-anti-government propaganda when Republicans are in power.

Time for a Jacksonian Response?

Mr. Trump’s revised executive order on visas has been rejected by two federal courts, despite compelling arguments that the rulings are unconsitutional.

Were I in Mr. Trump’s shoes, I would emulate Andrew Jackson:

On March 3, 1832, Chief Justice Marshall handed down the unanimous opinion of the [U.S. Supreme] Court. The Cherokee Nation was sovereign. Georgia law no longer applied to the Cherokee. Justice Story wrote “The Court has done its duty. Now let the Nation do theirs.” At some point, Andrew Jackson supposedly said “Marshall made the ruling, let him enforce it.”

It’s not certain that Jackson uttered those words, but they seem true to the man’s character. And they would seem true to Mr. Trump’s character, and — in this case — to the Constitution.

Mencken’s Pearl of Wisdom

I am not a big fan of H.L. Mencken (see this), nor of Lee Jussim (see this). But I do follow Jussim’s blog, just to keep track of his intellectual outrages. In a recent, quotation-filled post, Jussim quotes Mencken:

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

Exactly. Thus we have

economic destruction to “save the planet” in the name of a pseudo-science that can’t even depict the pre-1975 and post-1998 past accurately

cries of “white privilege” and “racism” — accompanied by violence and suppression of speech, aimed at law-abiding persons who don’t think the “right” thoughts and say the “right” things (i.e., conservatives)

“gender equality” and “marriage equality” as blanket justifications for the destruction of property rights and freedom of association

“income inequality” as the rallying cry of redistributive schemes that penalize success and stifle the very economic growth that would materially enrich the poor

shackled, inefficient markets because someone, somewhere made a mistake (from which he and others might have learned) or defrauded someone (for which ample publicity and a prison sentence somehow weren’t a sufficient remedy and caution)

massive, costly, authoritarian bureaucracies dedicated to all of those causes, and many more.

It’s all very Orwellian.

Daylight Saving Time Doesn’t Kill…

…it’s “springing forward” in March that kills.

There’s a hue and cry about daylight saving time (that’s “saving” not “savings”). The main complaint seems to be the stress that results from moving clocks ahead in March:

Springing forward may be hazardous to your health. The Monday following the start of daylight saving time (DST) is a particularly bad one for heart attacks, traffic accidents, workplace injuries and accidental deaths. Now that most Americans have switched their clocks an hour ahead, studies show many will suffer for it.

Most Americans slept about 40 minutes less than normal on Sunday night, according to a 2009 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology…. Since sleep is important for maintaining the body’s daily performance levels, much of society is broadly feeling the impact of less rest, which can include forgetfulness, impaired memory and a lower sex drive, according to WebMD.

One of the most striking affects of this annual shift: Last year, Colorado researchers reported finding a 25 percent increase in the number of heart attacks that occur on the Monday after DST starts, as compared with a normal Monday…. A cardiologist in Croatia recorded about twice as many heart attacks than expected during that same day, and researchers in Sweden have also witnessed a spike in heart attacks in the week following the time adjustment, particularly among those who were already at risk.

Workplace injuries are more likely to occur on that Monday, too, possibly because workers are more susceptible to a loss of focus due to too little sleep. Researchers at Michigan State University used over 20 years of data from the Mine Safety and Health Administration to determine that three to four more miners than average sustain a work-related injury on the Monday following the start of DST. Those injuries resulted in 2,649 lost days of work, which is a 68 percent increase over the hours lost from injuries on an average day. The team found no effects following the nation’s one-hour shift back to standard time in the fall….

There’s even more bad news: Drivers are more likely to be in a fatal traffic accident on DST’s first Monday, according to a 2001 study in Sleep Medicine. The authors analyzed 21 years of data on fatal traffic accidents in the U.S. and found that, following the start of DST, drivers are in 83.5 accidents as compared with 78.2 on the average Monday. This phenomenon has also been recorded in Canadian drivers and British motorists.

If all that wasn’t enough, a researcher from the University of British Columbia who analyzed three years of data on U.S. fatalities reported that accidental deaths of any kind are more likely in the days following a spring forward. Their 1996 analysis showed a 6.5 percent increase, which meant that about 200 more accidental deaths occurred immediately after the start of DST than would typically occur in a given period of the same length.

I’m convinced. But the solution to the problem isn’t to get rid of DST. No, the solution is to get rid of standard time and use DST year around.

I’m not arguing for year-around DST from an economic standpoint. The evidence about the economic advantages of DST is inconclusive.

I’m arguing for year-around DST as a way to eliminate “spring forward” distress and enjoy an extra hour of daylight in the winter.

Don’t you enjoy those late summer sunsets? I sure do, and a lot other people seem to enjoy them, too. That’s why daylight saving time won’t be abolished.

But if you love those late summer sunsets, you should also enjoy an extra hour of daylight at the end of a drab winter day. I know that I would. And it’s not as if you’d miss anything if the sun rises an hour later in the winter. Even with standard time, most working people and students have to be up and about before sunrise in winter, even though sunrise comes an hour earlier than it would with DST.

How would year-around DST affect you? The following table gives the times of sunrise and sunset on the longest and shortest days of 2017 for nine major cities, north to south and west to east:

I report, you decide. If it were up to me, the decision would be year-around DST.

Thoughts for the Day

Excerpts of recent correspondence.

Robots, and their functional equivalents in specialized AI systems, can either replace people or make people more productive. I suspect that the latter has been true in the realm of medicine — so far, at least. But I have seen reportage of robotic units that are beginning to perform routine, low-level work in hospitals. So, as usual, the first people to be replaced will be those with rudimentary skills, not highly specialized training. Will it go on from there? Maybe, but the crystal ball is as cloudy as an old-time London fog.

In any event, I don’t believe that automation is inherently a job-killer. The real job-killer consists of government programs that subsidize non-work — early retirement under Social Security, food stamps and other forms of welfare, etc. Automation has been in progress for eons, and with a vengeance since the second industrial revolution. But, on balance, it hasn’t killed jobs. It just pushes people toward new and different jobs that fit the skills they have to offer. I expect nothing different in the future, barring government programs aimed at subsidizing the “victims” of technological displacement.

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It’s civil war by other means (so far): David Wasserman, “Purple America Has All but Disappeared” (The New York Times, March 8, 2017).

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I know that most of what I write (even the non-political stuff) has a combative edge, and that I’m therefore unlikely to persuade people who disagree with me. I do it my way for two reasons. First, I’m too old to change my ways, and I’m not going to try. Second, in a world that’s seemingly dominated by left-wing ideas, it’s just plain fun to attack them. If what I write happens to help someone else fight the war on leftism — or if it happens to make a young person re-think a mindless commitment to leftism — that’s a plus.

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I am pessimistic about the likelihood of cultural renewal in America. The populace is too deeply saturated with left-wing propaganda, which is injected from kindergarten through graduate school, with constant reinforcement via the media and popular culture. There are broad swaths of people — especially in low-income brackets — whose lives revolve around mindless escape from the mundane via drugs, alcohol, promiscuous sex, etc. Broad swaths of the educated classes have abandoned erudition and contemplation and taken up gadgets and entertainment.

The only hope for conservatives is to build their own “bubbles,” like those of effete liberals, and live within them. Even that will prove difficult as long as government (especially the Supreme Court) persists in storming the ramparts in the name of “equality” and “self-creation.”

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I correlated Austin’s average temperatures in February and August. Here are the correlation coefficients for following periods:

1854-2016 = 0.001
1875-2016 = -0.007
1900-2016 = 0.178
1925-2016 = 0.161
1950-2016 = 0.191
1975-2016 = 0.126

Of these correlations, only the one for 1900-2016 is statistically significant at the 0.05 level (less than a 5-percent chance of a random relationship). The correlations for 1925-2016 and 1950-2016 are fairly robust, and almost significant at the 0.05 level. The relationship for 1975-2016 is statistically insignificant. I conclude that there’s a positive relationship between February and August temperatures, but weak one. A warm winter doesn’t necessarily presage an extra-hot summer in Austin.

“They Deserve to Die”?

In “Prosperity Isn’t Everything” I quoted Megan McArdle’s observations about how thing have gotten better and worse for Americans. Here’s some of what she wrote:

By the standards of today, my grandparents were living in wrenching poverty. Some of this, of course, involves technologies that didn’t exist—as a young couple in the 1930s my grandparents had less access to health care than the most neglected homeless person in modern America, simply because most of the treatments we now have had not yet been invented. That is not the whole story, however. Many of the things we now have already existed; my grandparents simply couldn’t afford them. With some exceptions, such as microwave ovens and computers, most of the modern miracles that transformed 20^th century domestic life already existed in some form by 1939. But they were out of the financial reach of most people….

[Not] everything has gotten better in every way, all the time. There are areas in which things have gotten broadly worse….

… Substance abuse, and the police response to it, has devastated both urban and rural communities.
Divorce broke up millions of families, and while the college educated class seems to have found a new equilibrium of stable and happy later marriages, marriage is collapsing among the majority who do not have a college degree, leaving millions of children in unstable family situations where fathers are often absent from the home, and their attention and financial resources are divided between multiple children with multiple women.
Communities are much less cohesive than they used to be, and while the educated elite may have found substitutes online, the rest of the country is “bowling alone” more and more often—which is not merely lonely, but also means they have fewer social supports when they find themselves in trouble.
A weekly wage packet may buy more than it did sixty years ago, but the stability of manufacturing jobs is increasingly being replaced by contingent and unreliable shift work that is made doubly and triply difficult by the instability of the families that tend to do these jobs. The inability to plan your life or work in turn makes it hard to form a family, and stressful to keep one together….

Charles Murray writes candidly but not unsympathetically about the plight of low-income white Americans in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness.

Along comes Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review to pour scorn upon low-income whites. Williamson’s article, which appeared in the print edition of March 28, 2016, was originally titled “The Father-Fuhrer,” a reference to Donald Trump. The online version is called “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” Written before Trump had clinched the GOP nomination, the piece is a transparent attempt to discredit Trump by discrediting a key source of his support: low-income whites in chronically depressed regions of the country.

Here’s a key passage:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs…. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Disgusting.

Scott Grier, writing in The Daily Caller (“National Review Writer: Working-Class Communities ‘Deserve To Die’,” March 12, 2016), seems to share my disgust. He closes with this:

While Williamson blames the people living in run-down white communities for their own woes, he does not apply the same principle to run-down minority communities. In his book and articles on the failures of Detroit, for instance, the National Review writer blames “progressivism” and unions for ruining the predominately African-American city.

Spot on. As I say in “Prosperity Isn’t Everything,”

Let’s begin with social norms, which are the basis of social ties. If you and I observe the same social norms, we’re likely to feel bound in some way, even if we’re not friends or relatives. This, of course, is tribalism, which is verboten among those who view all of mankind as brothers, sisters, and whatevers under the skin — all mankind except smarty-pants Americans of East Asian descent, Israeli Jews and American Jews who support Israel, Southerners (remember the Civil War!), and everyone else who is a straight, non-Hispanic white male of European descent. To such people, the only legitimate tribe is the tribe of anti-tribalism.You may by now understand that I blame leftists for the breakdown of social norms and social ties. But how can that be if, as McArdle says, “the college educated class seems to have found a new equilibrium of stable and happy later marriages”? The college-educated class resides mostly on the left, and affluent leftists do seem to have avoided the rot.

Yes, but they caused it. You could think of it as a non-suicidal act of terror. But it would be kinder and more accurate to call it an act of involuntary manslaughter. Leftists meant to make the changes that caused the rot; they just didn’t foresee or intend the rot. Nor is it obvious that they care about it, except as an excuse to “solve” social problems from on high by throwing money and behavioral prescriptions at them — which is why there’s social rot in the first place.

The good intentions embedded in governmental acts and decrees have stealthily expanded and centralized government’s power, and in the process have sundered civil society….

The undoing of traditional mores began in earnest in the 1960s, with a frontal assault on traditional morality and the misguided expansion of the regulatory-welfare state. The unraveling continues to this day. Traditional morality is notable in its neglect; social cohesion is almost non-existent, except where the bonds of religion and ethnicity remain strong. The social fabric that once bound vast swaths of America has rotted — and is almost certainly beyond repair.

The social fabric has frayed precisely because government has pushed social institutions aside and made dependents of hundreds of millions of Americans. As Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Now for an ironic twist. Were the central government less profligate and intrusive, Americans would become much more prosperous.

Clearly, Kevin Williamson wants to distance himself from people who don’t share his elevated norms. In that respect, he’s no different from a sneering, leftist-voting yuppie. If he were truly conservative, he’d have compassion for the people about whom he writes.

But Williamson has shown himself to be a faux conservative: all economic efficiency and no heart.

Is Consciousness an Illusion?

Scientists seem to have pinpointed the physical source of consciousness. But the execrable Daniel C. Dennett, for whom science is God, hasn’t read the memo. Dennett argues in his latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, that consciousness is an illusion.

Another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, weighs in with a dissenting review of Dennett’s book. (Nagel is better than Dennett, but that’s faint praise.) Nagel’s review, “Is Consciousness an Illusion?,” appears in The New York Review of Books (March 9, 2017). Here are some excerpts:

According to the manifest image, Dennett writes, the world is

full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things” that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It’s the world according to us.

According to the scientific image, on the other hand, the world

is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?)….

In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,

like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.

He says that the manifest image of each species is “a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users.” In spite of the word “illusion” he doesn’t wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are “not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns.” The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology….

You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about….

According to Dennett, however, the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them)….

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the neural machinery….

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

Nagel’s counterargument would have been more compelling if he had relied on a simple metaphor like this one: Most drivers can’t describe in any detail the process by which an automobile converts the potential energy of gasoline to the kinetic energy that’s produced by the engine and then transmitted eventually to the automobile’s drive wheels. Instead, most drivers simply rely on the knowledge that pushing the start button will start the car. That knowledge may be shallow, but it isn’t illusory. If it were, an automobile would be a useless hulk sitting in the driver’s garage.

Some tough questions are in order, too. If consciousness is an illusion, where does it come from? Dennett is an out-and-out physicalist and strident atheist. It therefore follows that Dennett can’t believe in consciousness (the manifest image) as a free-floating spiritual entity that’s disconnected from physical reality (the scientific image). It must, in fact, be a representation of physical reality, even if a weak and flawed one.

Looked at another way, consciousness is the gateway to the scientific image. It is only through the deliberate, reasoned, fact-based application of consciousness that scientists have been able to roll back the mysteries of the physical world and improve the manifest image so that it more nearly resembles the scientific image. The gap will never be closed, of course. Even the most learned of human beings have only a tenuous grasp of physical reality in all of it myriad aspects. Nor will anyone ever understand what physical reality “really is” — it’s beyond apprehension and description. But that doesn’t negate the symbiosis of physical reality and consciousness.

* * *

Race and Social Engineering

It’s well known that the white-black gap in intelligence is persistent. (See, for example, the section headed “Race” in this post, and the graphs of average SAT scores by ethnicity in this one.) But according to this paper, those

group mean differences in cognitive test scores arise from the following racially disparate conditions: family income, maternal education, maternal verbal ability/knowledge, learning materials in the home, parenting factors (maternal sensitivity, maternal warmth and acceptance, and safe physical environment), child birth order, and child birth weight.

You should now ask yourself whether family income, maternal education, etc., are the causes of the intelligence gap or evidence of it. My money is on the latter.

But that won’t keep the social engineers at bay. Segregation is a perennial whipping-boy for those who are still seeking the Great Society, even if it’s voluntary, socioeconomic segregation rather than involuntary, state-mandated segregation. People can’t just be allowed to live among the kinds of people they prefer. No, they must be forced to integrate in the (vain) hope of bettering the groups favored by social engineers.

How can integration be forced? Well, the Obama administration found a way to get the ball rolling. It’s a HUD regulation called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which Wikipedia summarizes as follows:

It requires cities and towns which receive Federal money to examine their housing patterns and look for racial bias. The intention is to promote racial integration….

Under the rule, any jurisdiction that receives money from HUD must analyze its housing occupancy by race, class, English proficiency, and other categories. It must then analyze factors which contribute to any imbalance, and formulate a plan to remedy the imbalance. The plan can be approved or disapproved by HUD. This is done at both the local and regional level. For example, a major city, such as Chicago, will have to analyze any racial disparities within Chicago, and Chicago suburbs will analyze their own racial disparities. In addition, Chicago and the suburbs will have to analyze any disparities as compared with each other. Thereafter, the community has to track progress (or lack thereof). The planning cycle will be repeated every five years. If the Federal Government is not satisfied with a community’s efforts to reduce disparities, then under the disparate impact doctrine, this could be considered illegal discrimination. As a result, federal funds could be withheld, or the community could be sued, using the racial disparity statistics as evidence.

You know about disparate impact, of course. It’s a legalistic contrivance which says, in effect, that outcomes which are attributable to inherent differences between races and genders amount to illegal discrimination. In other words, it’s illegal to pick the best-qualified candidate for a job if the best-qualified candidate is of the “wrong” color or gender. “Disparate impact” effectively outlaws tests of intelligence for jobs that require above-average intelligence because otherwise “not enough” blacks will qualify for such jobs. “Disparate impact” effectively requires the lowering of physical standards for jobs that require strength because otherwise “not enough” women will qualify for such jobs. It’s affirmative action with a vengeance.

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is reverse discrimination with a vengeance. Luckily, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing may not survive the Trump administration.

Why would social engineers seek forced integration, other than for the sheer enjoyment of exerting their power and doing unto others as they wouldn’t do unto themselves? The pretext for social engineering, in this case, is the existence of supportive academic studies (shades of the “doll tests” that influenced Brown v. Board of Education). Several of the studies are cited by Thomas B. Edsall in “Integration Works. Can It Survive the Trump Era?” (The New York Times, February 9, 2017). According to Edsall, the studies purport to show that

segregation, especially neighborhood segregation, exacerbates the racial test score gap….

[T]he higher the level of racial and economic segregation in an area, the larger the achievement gap.

Thus:

Among the scholars cited here, there is virtual unanimity on the conviction that one way to improve the prospects of poor minorities, black and Hispanic, is to desegregate both schools and housing.

It’s utilitarianism upon stilts.* And the stilts — the studies — are of dubious quality. Consider, for example, the one that seems to be the least circular of the lot, and which claims to prove that desegregation raises the measured intelligence of blacks. I’m referring to Rucker C. Johnson’s “Long-Run Impacts of School Desegregation & School Quality on Adult Attainments” (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16664, January 2011). According to the abstract, the study

analyzes the life trajectories of children born between 1945 and 1968, and followed through 2013, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID data are linked with multiple data sources that describe the neighborhood attributes, school quality resources, and coincident policies that prevailed at the time these children were growing up. I exploit quasi-random variation in the timing of initial court orders, which generated differences in the timing and scope of the implementation of desegregation plans during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Event study analyses as well as [two-stage least-squares] and sibling-difference estimates indicate that school desegregation and the accompanied increases in school quality resulted in significant improvements in adult attainments for blacks. I find that, for blacks, school desegregation significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status; desegregation had no effects on whites across each of these outcomes. The results suggest that the mechanisms through which school desegregation led to beneficial adult attainment outcomes for blacks include improvement in access to school resources reflected in reductions in class size and increases in per-pupil spending [emphasis added].

Before I get to the italicized assertions, I must comment on Johnson’s method. Convoluted and speculative are the best words to describe it. Here are some apt quotations directly from Johnson’s paper:

I compiled data on school spending and school segregation, linked them to a comprehensive database of the timing of court-ordered school desegregation, and linked these data to a nationally representative longitudinal dataset that follows individuals from childhood into adulthood. Education funding data come from several sources that are combined to form a panel of per-pupil spending for US school districts in 1967 and annually from 1970 through 2000. School segregation data come from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), and are combined to form a panel used to construct school segregation indices that span the period 1968 through 1988. The school segregation and spending data are then linked to a database of desegregation litigation between 1954 and 2000.

The data on longer-run outcomes come from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that links individuals to their census blocks during childhood. The sample consists of PSID sample members born between 1945 and 1968 who have been followed into adulthood through 2013; these individuals were between the ages of 45 and 67 in 2013. I include all information on them for each wave, 1968 to 2013. Due to the oversampling of black and low-income families, 45 percent of the sample is black.

I match the earliest available childhood residential address to the school district boundaries that prevailed in 1969 to avoid complications arising from endogenously changing district boundaries over time…. Each record is merged with data on the timing of court ordered desegregation, data on racial school segregation, student-to-teacher ratios, school spending at the school district level that correspond with the prevailing levels during their school-age years. Finally, I merge in county characteristics and information on other key policy changes during childhood (e.g., the timing of hospital desegregation, rollout of “War on Poverty” initiatives and expansion of safety net programs…) from multiple data sources. This allows for a rich set of controls.

The comprehensive desegregation court case data I use contains an entire case inventory of every school district ever subject to court desegregation orders over the 1955-1990 period (American Communities Project), and major plan implementation dates in large districts (compiled by Welch/Light). Every court case is coded according to whether it involved segregation of students across schools, whether the court required a desegregation remedy, and the main component of the desegregation plan. The combined data from the American Communities Project (Brown University) and Welch/Light provide the best available data that have ever been utilized to study this topic for several reasons. First, the year of the initial court order (available for all districts) is plausibly more exogenous than the exact year in which a major desegregation plan was implemented because opposition groups to integration can delay major desegregation plan implementation by lengthening the court proceedings or by implementing inadequate desegregation plans…. And, court-ordered desegregation by legal mandate is plausibly more exogenous than other more voluntary forms of desegregation. Second, the date of the initial court order is precisely measured for all districts.

Sixty-nine percent of the PSID individuals born between 1945-1968 followed into adulthood grew up in a school district that was subject to a desegregation court order sometime between 1954 and 1990 (i.e., 9,156 out of 13,246 individuals), with the timing of the court order not necessarily occurring during their school-age years. Eighty-eight percent of the PSID black individuals born between 1945-1968 followed into adulthood grew up in a school district that was subject to a desegregation court order sometime between 1954 and 1990 (i.e., 4,618 out of 5,245 black individuals). The share of individuals exposed to school desegregation orders during childhood increases significantly with birth year over the 1945-1970 birth cohorts analyzed in the PSID sample….

After combining information from the aforementioned 5 data sources, the main sample used to analyze adult attainment outcomes consists of PSID individuals born between 1945-1968 originally from 8 school districts that were subject to desegregation court orders sometime between 1954 and 1990; this includes 9,156 individuals from 3,702 childhood families, 645 school districts, 448 counties, representing 39 different states. I restrict the estimation sample to individuals who grew up in school districts that were ever subject to court-ordered desegregation, since school districts of upbringing that were never under court order are arguably too different to provide a credible comparison group.

That’s just a small sample of Johnson’s statistical gyrations. Given the complexity of his sources, assumptions, and statistical manipulations, there was ample opportunity for cherry-picking to arrive at the desired result: integration is good for blacks and doesn’t harm whites.

If Johnson has shown anything, it’s that throwing money at the problem is the way to get results. That’s all integration means in the context of his study; it has nothing to do with whatever beneficial effects might arise from the commingling of blacks and whites. (About which, see below.)

And throwing money at the problem most certainly harms whites because most of the money undoubtedly cames from whites. How many white children are denied a chance to go to college, or to a better college, because of the school taxes levied on their parents? Johnson doesn’t bother to consider that question, or any other reasonable question about the deprivations visited upon whites because of higher school taxes.

Moreover, throwing money at the problem doesn’t really work:

Academic performance and preparation for college success are widely shared goals, and so it is useful for the public and policymakers to know how they have varied over time at the state level. The present paper estimates these trends by adjusting state average SAT scores for variation in student participation rates and demographic factors known to be associated with those scores.

In general, the findings are not encouraging. Adjusted state SAT scores have declined by an average of 3 percent. This echoes the picture of stagnating achievement among American 17-year-olds painted by the Long Term Trends portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of tests administered to a nationally representative sample of students since 1970. That disappointing record comes despite a more-than-doubling in inflation-adjusted per pupil public-school spending over the same period (the average state spending increase was 120 percent). Consistent with those patterns, there has been essentially no correlation between what states have spent on education and their measured academic outcomes. In other words, America’s educational productivity appears to have collapsed, at least as measured by the NAEP and the SAT.

That is remarkably unusual. In virtually every other field, productivity has risen over this period thanks to the adoption of countless technological advances—advances that, in many cases, would seem ideally suited to facilitating learning. And yet, surrounded by this torrent of progress, education has remained anchored to the riverbed, watching the rest of the world rush past it.

Not only have dramatic spending increases been unaccompanied by improvements in performance, the same is true of the occasional spending declines experienced by some states. At one time or another over the past four decades, Alaska, California, Florida, and New York all experienced multi-year periods over which real spending fell substantially (20 percent or more of their 1972 expenditure levels). And yet, none of these states experienced noticeable declines in adjusted SAT scores—either contemporaneously or lagged by a few years. Indeed, their score trends seem entirely disconnected from their rising and falling levels of spending. [Andrew J. Coulson, “State Education Trends Academic Performance and Spending over the Past 40 Years,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis Number 746, March 18, 2014]

Similar findings emerged from an earlier study by Dan Lips, Shanea J. Watkins, and John Fleming, “Does Spending More on Education Improve Academic Achievement?” (The Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder Number 2179, November 8, 2008). The answer to the question posed by the title is “no.”

Johnson’s expedition through a maze of data sets somehow miraculously arrives at a conclusion that isn’t supported by following the much more direct route of the Cato and Heritage studies: Throwing money at public schools has had almost no effect on the academic performance of students. Johnson report of exceptional results for a select set of public schools that had been integrated is incredible, in the proper meaning of the word: ” So implausible as to elicit disbelief; unbelievable.”

Don’t try to tell me that court-ordered integration has been worth the cost — in money and liberty — because it has fostered brotherly and sisterly love between whites and blacks. The opposite effect is the more likely one. Rather than repeat myself, I refer you to “Genetic Kinship and Society,” especially the discussions of Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century“ and Byron M. Roth’s The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature. A clear implication of those analyses is that conflict — political, if not violent — is bound to result from racial-ethnic-cultural commingling, especially if it’s forced.

Forced integration is on a moral par with with forced segregation. Don’t let the social engineers tell you otherwise.
_________
*This is an allusion to Jeremy Bentham’s characterization of natural rights as “simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.” It is a characterization with which I agree.

* * *

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