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.
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*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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