Excerpts of Megan O’Connor’s column about “the latest chatter in cyberspace,” from today’s edition of Slate .

First excerpt:

Bloggers discuss the Senate’s apology for not passing an anti-lynching law; they also tackle a proposed increase in the retirement age and a new study on virginity pledges.

So, so sorry: The Senate issued a formal apology for its decades-long failure to enact an anti-lynching law, but the fact that only 80 of the 100 senators co-sponsored the bill irked some.

Bloggers focus on the missing 20: Responding to a list of “pro-lynching senators” posted by the liberal Atrios, commenter Samurai Sam writes, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this. It just makes me choke to think we’ve made so little progress in race relations in the past 40 years. Or, more correctly, that the North and both coasts have made the progress and the South and some of the Midwest have not.” …

Listen up, Lefties. Lynching isn’t a federal matter, per se. The Senate has nothing to apologize for because the Senate should never have considered an anti-lynching bill in the first place. Lynching is murder. The only time murder should be a federal offense is when it’s committed in the District of Columbia or on federal property that doesn’t lie within the boundaries of a State. If a State isn’t granting its citizens equal protection of its laws, that’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution which should be dealt with case by case. Just as the U.S. Supreme Court should be striking down anti-business State regulations, as it did before the New Deal.

Second excerpt:

Not-so-golden years: Republican senators are considering a bill that would raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 over the next two decades. The proposal was presented last week as part of a plan to ensure “greater financial solvency” to Social Security.

Supporters think it’s just plain good sense: “Raising the eligibility age for Social Security really should be part of any commonsense solution,” argues The Yellow Line‘s Alan Stewart Carl, a “former democrat and a former republican.” He writes, “In 1940, the average life expectancy was 64 years while right now it’s around 77… If we’re living longer, shouldn’t we be able to work longer?” Commenter Jonathan Cortis agrees: “With a combination of raising the retirement age and raising the cap on social security wages, we may just be able to bring SS back to the PAYGO system FDR envisioned.”

Opponents use the chance to complain about President Bush and Republicans: “What people need to understand is that there is no Social Security ‘shortfall’ at all until 2042,” says The Land of Ding‘s Andrew Dingfelder, a new blogger. ” … The problem is that Bush is spending money like a drunken sailor and giving tax cuts to his wealthy benefactors at the same time.” Other bloggers complain about New York Times‘ columnist John Tierney’s suggestion that Americans spend too much time in retirement: At the liberal Delusions of Grandeur, Emeryroolz writes, “Tierney seems to think it’s INSANE to not want to work until you drop dead? Spoken like a guy who’s never done an honest day’s work in his life.”…

Actually, Tierney said this:

With the help of groups like AARP, the elderly have learned to fight for the right to retire earlier and get bigger benefits than the previous generation – all financed by making succeeding generations pay higher taxes than they ever did themselves.

The result is a system that burdens the young and creates perverse incentives for people to retire when they’re still middle-aged. Once you’ve worked 35 years, more work often yields only a tiny increase in your benefits (sometimes none at all), but you still have to keep paying the onerous Social Security tax, which has more than doubled over the last half century.

If the elderly were willing to work longer, there would be lower taxes on everyone and fewer struggling young families. There would be more national wealth and tax revenue available to help the needy, including people no longer able to work as well as the many elderly below the poverty line because they get so little Social Security.

Getting that kind of system seems politically hopeless at the moment here, but it already exists in Chile. Its pension system has a stronger safety net for the older poor than America’s (relative to each country’s wages) and more incentives for people to work, because Chileans’ contributions go directly into their own private accounts instead of a common pool like Social Security.

But Lefties don’t want to discuss facts and logic. They just want to smear everyone who disagrees with their illogical positions. They want to believe that, under the present Social Security system, manna for the elderly falls from heaven, when it’s actually extracted from the pockets of workers. When it comes to Social Security, Lefties are knee-jerk idiots. And that’s not a smear, that’s an obvious fact.

Third excerpt:

Virginity pledges: Contradicting earlier findings, the Heritage Foundation has published a study concluding that young people who took virginity pledges contracted fewer STDs, were more likely to abstain from sex; and were less likely to become prostitutes. The Times reports that other experts find the results “provocative, but … flawed.”

Bloggers criticize the Heritage Foundation’s motives and ideology. “It’s not surprising that an organization dedicated to pursuing an ideological agenda might abandon good science in the name of politics,” writes Publius of The Third Estate. Journalist Doug Ireland condemns the Times for failing to point out the ideology of the “oh-so-conservative” foundation. “By giving such play and credence today to this mendacious and unscientific Heritage study,” he writes, “the Times is encouraging the myth that abstinence-only sex ed and virginity pledges help stop the spread of AIDS and STDs—when, in fact, the reverse is true. Shameful.” Matthew Yglesias, writing at the American Prospect blog, TAPPED, further criticizes the Times, saying, “The only newsworthy information in the story is that the Bush Department of Health and Human Services has decided for some reason to start contracting out research on controversial questions to an ideological think tank that is non-partisan in name only, rather than to proper independent analysts.”

Harvard’s “independent,” left-wing department of sociology, for instance?

Anyway, I do not doubt that “young people who took virginity pledges contracted fewer STDs, were more likely to abstain from sex; and were less likely to become prostitutes.” Young people who take such pledges are more likely, in the first place, to abstain from sex, etc. Correlation isn’t causation. That’s all that need be said.

But Lefties get exercised about such matters because they don’t want to admit the simple fact that abstinence is the best insurance against contracting a sexually transmitted disease. The “anything goes” cult — of which the Left has long been the leading proponent — is responsible for the decline of moral standards and for the rise of STDs. Now, there’s causation for you.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution points to a paper by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. and graduate student Paul Torelli, “An Empirical Analysis of ‘Acting White’.” The Washington Post‘s Richard Morin summarizes:

As commonly understood, acting white is a pejorative term used to describe black students who engage in behaviors viewed as characteristic of whites, such as making good grades, reading books or having an interest in the fine arts.

The phenomenon is one reason some social thinkers give to help explain at least a portion of the persistent black-white achievement gap in school and in later life. Popularity-conscious young blacks, afraid of being seen as acting white, steer clear of behaviors that could pay dividends in the future, including doing well in school, Fryer said. At the same time, the desire to be popular pushes many whites to excel in the classroom, enhancing their future prospects….

Among white teens, Fryer and Torelli found that better grades equaled greater popularity, with straight-A students having far more same-race friends than those who were B students, who in turn had more friends than C or D students. But among blacks and especially Hispanics who attend public schools with a mix of racial and ethnic groups, that pattern was reversed: The best and brightest academically were significantly less popular than classmates of their race or ethnic group with lower grade point averages [emphasis mine: ED].

“For blacks, higher achievement is associated with modestly higher popularity until a grade point average of 3.5 [a B+ average], then the slope turns negative,” Fryer and Torelli wrote in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. A black student who’s gotten all A’s has, on average, 1.5 fewer same-race friends than a straight-A white student. Among Hispanics, there is little change in popularity until a student’s average rises above a C+, at which point it plummets. A Hispanic student with all A’s is the least popular of all Hispanic students, and has three fewer friends than a typical white student with a 4.0 grade point average….

They also found that more blacks “acted white” [i.e., denigrated scholarly achievement: ED] in schools where less than 20 percent of the students were African American, while hardly any did in predominantly black schools or in private schools. “These findings suggest the achievement gap is not about cultural dysfunctionality,” Fryer said, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, the phenomenon may be more prevalent among blacks living in the more affluent suburbs than among those living in the inner city. (There were no majority-Hispanic schools in the study.)

Why is “acting white” absent in mostly black schools?

That’s easy, said Fryer, who is African American. He recalled his own experience growing up and attending predominantly black schools in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Dallas. “We didn’t act white — we didn’t know what that was,” he said, stressing that he prefers data to anecdote. “There were no white kids around.”

Now we turn to Randall Parker, writing at FuturePundit, who links to and discusses “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence,” by three researchers at the University of Utah, anthropologist Henry Harpending, Gregory Cochran (a Ph.D. physicist turned genetic theorist), and Jason Hardy. Parker’s take:

Ashkenazi Jews pose two mysteries for biological science. First, why do they have so many genetic diseases that fall into just a few categories of metabolic function….The second mystery is why are Jews so smart?…

Nicholas Wade of the New York Times has written one of the two news stories about [the University of Utah paper] to date. The proposed hypothesis holds that Jews developed their genetic diseases as a side effect of strong selective pressures for higher intelligence during the Middle Ages as they were forced to work mainly in occupations that required greater cognitive ability.…

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

The Economist has the other article about this research paper. The distribution of the Jewish genetic diseases is clustered too much into a few areas of genetic functionality This concentration of mutations argues for selective pressures as the logical expanation for rate of occurrence of these mutations in Ashkenazi Jews.

What can, however, be shown from the historical records is that European Jews at the top of their professions in the Middle Ages raised more children to adulthood than those at the bottom. Of course, that was true of successful gentiles as well. But in the Middle Ages, success in Christian society tended to be violently aristocratic (warfare and land), rather than peacefully meritocratic (banking and trade).

Put these two things together—a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity—and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence. The questions are, do such genes exist, and what are they if they do? Dr Cochran thinks they do exist, and that they are exactly the genes that cause the inherited diseases which afflict Ashkenazi society.

Cochran, Harpending, and Hardy claim higher intelligence increased reproductive fitness for Jews in medieval Europe who were legally prevented from performing in occupations that had lower need for intelligence. Simultaneously Jews were allowed to work in more cognitively demanding occupations involving money handling even as the Catholic Church banned Christians from many of those same occupations….

If this hypothesis is correct (and I believe it is) then it is problematic for efforts to raise human intelligence. How many of the intelligence raising genetic variants bring undesirable side effects? Some scientists speculate that assortive mating of high IQ people is contributing to a rising incidence of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. As smart people become more likely to breed with other smart people the odds increase that pairs of autosomal recessives or other problematic combinations of intelligence boosting genes will given to offspring….

Step back and look at Jewish and European history from the context of this hypothesis. A few things come to mind. First off, Middle Ages bans on Christian money lending created an environmental niche in which high IQ was selected for in Jews. This led to a few important historical consequences. First off, it led to financial and reproductive success of urban Jews and hence resentment against them by both elites and masses in Europe. This resentment of course led to pogroms and Hitler’s “Final Solution”. There’s an old Japanese saying that comes to mind: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. Well, smart Jews stood out and the response of jealousy and resentment against the more successful “other” is a recurring theme in human history….

The bottom line:

• The second paper adds to the body of evidence that intelligence is strongly determined by genetic inheritance and, therefore, highly correlated with race.

• Both papers underscore the destructive potential of envy. The less able — who too often seek the social, economic, and even corporal abasement of the more able — do so at their own expense. For it is the accomplishments of the more able that, by and large, fuel economic growth. And economic growth benefits the less able as well as the more able.

TheFreeDictionary.com reminds us that today is the 109th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896):

In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, several black and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to the repeal of that law. They eventually persuaded Homer Plessy, an octoroon (someone of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent), to test it. Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covington. The railroad company had been informed already as to Plessy’s racial lineage, and after Plessy had taken a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it and sit instead in the blacks-only car. Plessy refused and was arrested immediately….

Announced on May 18, 1896, the 7-1 decision, with one abstention, upheld the Louisiana statute.

Segregation of the type considered by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson suffers two fundamental flaws:

• It allows for no subtlety, as in the case of Plessy, who — as an octoroon — may have been no less “white” than many “whites” who rode in “whites only” railway cars.

• It declares an entire group of otherwise law-abiding persons “off limits” to society, rather than allow the members of that group to be considered on individual merit.

The second point goes to the heart of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in the case (as quoted in Wikipedia):

[I]n the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

I agree with Harlan, up to that point. The law should be racially neutral. By the same token, the law should not tell private parties whom they must employ and with whom they must trade and associate. As I wrote recently,

we would be much better off, socially and economically, if government intervention were limited to the equal protection of everyone’s life, liberty, and property. Such a regime would enable persons of ability — regardless of race or gender — to prove their worth and earn the trust of others. That is true progress.

UPDATED BELOW

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Mexico’s Fox Defends Comment on Blacks

MEXICO CITY – President Vicente Fox refused to apologize Monday for saying Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won’t….

Lisa Catanzarite, a sociologist at Washington State University, disputed Fox’s assertion. She said there is intense competition for lucrative working class jobs like construction and that employers usually prefer to hire immigrants who don’t know their rights.

“What Vicente Fox called a willingness to work … translates into extreme exploitability,” she said.

No, it translates into a willingness to work. No one forces Mexicans to cross the border to work — and work hard — for low wages.

Here’s the acid test: Given a choice between hiring an anonymous group of Mexicans and an anonymous group of American blacks to do the same job at the same hourly rate, which group would you choose? I think most employers would choose the Mexicans.

That’s not to say American blacks are lazy, but that they’re less likely to perform well at low-wage work because the welfare system removes the incentive to perform well. Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, don’t have full access to the welfare system. It’s another example of the perverse consequences of the regulatory-welfare state, which destroys income and wealth.

UPDATE: So Fox has “regretted” his statement. But he hasn’t withdrawn it.

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution points to a paper in this month’s Journal of Law and Economics by Nobel-prize-winning economist James Heckman and colleagues. Heckman et al. conclude their thorough analysis of “Labor Market Discrimination and Racial Differences in Premarket Factors” with this:

Gaps in [IQ] test scores of the magnitude found in recent studies were found in the earliest tests developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the results of testing were disseminated and a stereotype threat could have been “in the air.” The recent emphasis on the stereotype threat as a basis for black white test scores ignores the evidence that tests are predictive of schooling attainment and market wages. It diverts attention away from the emergence of important skill gaps at early ages, which should be a target of public policy.

Effective social policy designed to eliminate racial and ethnic inequality for most minorities should focus on eliminating skill gaps, not on discrimination in the workplace of the early Twenty-First Century. Interventions targeted at adults are much less effective and do not compensate for early deficits. Early interventions aimed at young children hold much greater promise than strengthened legal activism in the workplace.

Back in December, I anticipated Heckman and company’s findings and offered a policy solution aimed specifically at skill gaps:

[I]ntelligence (and hence income) is a heritable trait, one that remains differentiated along racial lines (a consistent but controversial finding discussed here, for example). Thus the findings give further evidence, if any were needed, that affirmative action policies — whether government-prescribed or voluntarily adopted — tend to undermine the quality of workplaces and educational institutions. (I am speaking here of the quality of effort and thought, not the value of workers and students as human beings.)

The premise of affirmative action finds expression in a 1986 speech to the Second Circuit Judicial Conference by Justice Thurgood Marshall, where he

urged Americans to “face the simple fact that there are groups in every community which are daily paying the cost of the history of American injustice. The argument against affirmative action is… an argument in favor of leaving that cost to lie where it falls. Our fundamental sense of fairness, particularly as it is embodied in the guarantee of equal protection under the laws, requires us,” Marshall said, “to make an effort to see that those costs are shared equitably while we continue to work for the eradication of the consequences of discrimination. Otherwise,” Marshall concluded, “we must admit to ourselves that so long as the lingering effects of inequality are with us, the burden will [unfairly] be borne by those who are least able to pay.” [From “Looking Ahead: The Future of Affirmative Acton after Grutter and Gratz,” by Professor Susan Low Bloch, Georgetown University Law Center.]

In sum, affirmative action is a way of exacting reparations from white Americans for the sins of their slave-owning, discriminating forbears — even though most of those forbears didn’t own slaves and many of them didn’t practice discrimination. Those reparations come at a cost, aside from the resentment toward the beneficiaries of affirmative action and doubt about their qualifications for a particular job or place in a student body. As I wrote here:

Because of affirmative action — and legal actions brought and threatened under its rubric — employers do not always fill every job with the person best qualified for the job. The result is that the economy produces less than it would in the absence of affirmative action….

[A]ffirmative action reduces GDP by about 2 percent. That’s not a trivial amount. In fact, it’s just about what the federal government spends on all civilian agencies and their activities — including affirmative action….

Moreover, that effect is compounded to the extent that affirmative action reduces the quality of education at universities, which it surely must do. But let us work with 2 percent of GDP, which comes to about $240 billion a year, or more than $6,000 a year for every black American.

Thus my modest proposal to improve the quality of education and the productivity of the workforce: End affirmative action and give every black American an annual voucher for, say, $5,000 (adjusted annually for inflation). The vouchers could be redeemed for educational expenses (tuition, materials, books, room and board, and mandatory fees). Recipients who didn’t need or want their vouchers could sell them to others (presumably at a discount), give them away, or bequeath them for use by later generations. The vouchers would be issued for a limited time (perhaps the 25 years envisioned by Justice O’Connor in Grutter), but they would never expire.

That settles affirmative action, reparations, and school vouchers (for blacks), at a stroke.

Next problem.

This explains it best:

Why are so many white people so irrationally invested in their regional mythology? However inept the [Confederate] flag’s defenders are at articulating it, the reason does in fact transcend race. The South’s ferocious sectional pride is the flip side of an inferiority complex, a chip-on-the-shoulder legacy of its savage defeat by a civilization it rejected long before the Civil War….The North’s scorched-earth war strategy was indeed designed to annihilate not just the South’s army but its entire civilization. As the Union general Philip Henry Sheridan declared, ”The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”…

The perversely empowering allure of victimhood calls out even to the South’s most critical daughters. Some years ago, I was looking into a potential elementary school for my younger child. It was a highly recommended prospect, located on the politically correct Upper West Side of Manhattan and named after one of General Sheridan’s colleagues. Halfway through the school’s guided tour, I decided ”no way,” explaining to a fellow Southern mom who was there, ”Do you really think you could tell the folks back home that you’re sending your child to the William Tecumseh Sherman School?” [From a review in The New York Times by Diane McWhorter of John M. Coski’s history, The Confederate Battle Flag.]

I am not a native son of the South, but my sympathies are very much with those Southerners — and their intellectual allies in all regions — who invoke States’ rights in the name of liberty, not out of racial hatred.

First comes Michael Bérubé, a professional academic who is evidently bereft of experience in the real world. His qualifications for writing about affirmative action? He teaches undergraduate courses in American and African-American literature, and graduate courses in literature and cultural studies. He is also co-director of the Disability Studies Program, housed in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State.

Writing from the ivory tower for the like-minded readers of The Nation (“And Justice for All“), Bérubé waxes enthusiastic about the benefits of affirmative action, which — to his mind — “is a matter of distributive justice.” Bérubé, in other words, subscribes to “the doctrine that a decision is just or right if all parties receive what they need or deserve.” Who should decide what we need or deserve? Why, unqualified academics like Bérubé, of course. Fie on economic freedom! Fie on academic excellence! If Bérubé and his ilk think that a certain class of people deserve special treatment, regardless of their qualifications as workers or students, far be it from the mere consumers of the goods and services of those present and future workers to object. Let consumers eat inferior cake.

Bérubé opines that “advocates of affirmative action have three arguments at their disposal.” One of those arguments is that

diversity in the classroom or the workplace is not only a positive good in itself but conducive to greater social goods (a more capable global workforce and a more cosmopolitan environment in which people engage with others of different backgrounds and beliefs).

Perhaps Bérubé knows the meaning of “capable global workforce.” If he does, he might have shared it with his readers. As for a workplace that offers a “cosmopolitan environment” and engagement “with others of different backgrounds and beliefs” I say: where’s the beef? As a consumer, I want value for my money. What in the hell does diversity — as defined by Bérubé — have to do with delivering value? Perhaps that’s one reason U.S. jobs are outsourced. (I have nothing against that, but it shouldn’t happen because of inefficiency brought about by affirmative action.) Those who seek a cosmopolitan environment and engagement with others of different backgrounds and beliefs can have all of it they want — on their own time — just by hanging out in the right (or wrong) places.

Alhough Bérubé seems blind to the economic cost of affirmative action, he is willing to admit that the practice has some shortcomings:

Affirmative action in college admissions has been problematic, sometimes rewarding well-to-do immigrants over poor African-American applicants–except that all the other alternatives, like offering admission to the top 10 or 20 percent of high school graduates in a state, seem to be even worse, admitting badly underprepared kids from the top tiers of impoverished urban and rural schools while keeping out talented students who don’t make their school’s talented tenth. In the workplace, affirmative action has been checkered by fraud and confounded by the indeterminacy of racial identities–and yet it’s so popular as to constitute business as usual for American big business, as evidenced by the sixty-eight Fortune 500 corporations, twenty-nine former high-ranking military leaders and twenty-eight broadcast media companies and organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action programs in the recent Supreme Court cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

Stop right there, professor. Affirmative action is “popular” because it’s the law and it’s also a politically correct position that boards of directors, senior corporate managers, and government officials, and military leaders can take at no obvious cost to themselves. Further, those so-called leaders are sheltered from the adverse consequences of affirmative action on the profitability and effectiveness of their institutions by imperfect competition in the private sector and bureaucratic imperatives in the government sector.

As I wrote in “Race, Intelligence, and Affirmative Action,” here’s how affirmative action really operates in the workplace:

If a black person seems to have something like the minimum qualifications for a job, and if the black person’s work record and interviews aren’t off-putting, the black person is likely to be hired or promoted ahead of equally or better-qualified whites. Why?

• Pressure from government affirmative-action offices, which focus on percentages of minorities hired and promoted, not on the qualifications of applicants for hiring and promotion.

• The ability of those affirmative-action offices to put government agencies and private employers through the pain and expense of extensive audits, backed by the threat of adverse reports to higher ups (in the case of government agencies) and fines and the loss of contracts (in the case of private employers).

• The ever-present threat of complaints to the EEOC (or its local counterpart) by rejected minority candidates for hiring and promotion. Those complaints can then be followed by costly litigation, settlements, and court judgments.

• Boards of directors and senior managers who (a) fear the adverse publicity that can accompany employment-related litigation and (b) push for special treatment of minorities because they think it’s “the right thing to do.”

• Managers down the line learn to go along and practice just enough reverse discrimination to keep affirmative-action offices and upper management happy.

As if in answer to Bérubé’s reflexive defense of affirmative action, now comes Richard Sander, another academic, but one who actually looks at the numbers. Sander, a professor of law at UCLA who has published “A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” is without a doubt a liberal of the modern persuasion and a proponent of diversity. He is nevertheless critical of affirmative action as it is practiced at law schools. Here’s the gist of his analysis, as reported at FindLaw:

The Heavy Weight Placed on Race in Admissions in Virtually All Schools – the Cascade Effect
Professor Sander lays the foundation for his critique by describing the kind of race-based affirmative action that law schools use today. Under the Bakke and Grutter Supreme Court precedents, public (as well as private) law schools are prohibited from making use of quotas, two-track admissions schemes, or fixed points added to the numerical indices of minorities….

Professor Sander argues that, in fact, the Michigan law school program, despite its seeming flexibility and inscrutability, employs race in just as ambitious (critics would say aggressive) a way as did the Michigan undergraduate plan [which the U.S. Supreme Court found unconstitutional in Gratz]….

Moreover, and more important, Sander argues, the way race is used at the Michigan law school is the same way race is used in many if not most law school affirmative action programs. Indeed, Sander says that he has “been unable to find a single law school in the United States whose admissions operate the way Justice O’Connor describes in Grutter” – that is, where race is used as a flexible plus factor that does not effectively dominate over all other diversity criteria. The system of aggressive racial preferences is not, Sander says, confined to the “elite” law schools. Rather, “it is a characteristic of legal education as a whole.”

According to Sander, law school affirmative action across law schools is characterized by a “cascade” effect. As the elite schools “snap up” the blacks who otherwise would have been admitted to and have attended the next tier of schools, that next tier of schools snaps up the blacks who would have otherwise attended the tier below. And so forth.

The Mismatch Effect

This systematic cascade phenomenon is important, because when race is being used so weightily in schools all the way down the ladder, the result is that the African Americans who are admitted to each school under an affirmative action program are significantly less numerically qualified than are their white competitor students at that school, who were admitted outside the affirmative action plan. Sander calls this phenomenon the “mismatch” effect – black beneficiaries of affirmative action are “mismatched” at schools whose non-affirmative action students possess better credentials and skills.

Because of the pronounced mismatch effect that extends down the law school hierarchy, blacks tend to suffer poor grades in law school. According to the data Sanders adduces, the median black law student’s GPA at the end of the first year of law school places him at the 7^th or 8^th percentile of his class. Put another way, more than 50% of black law students are in the bottom one-tenth of their law school class (in terms of grades) at the end of the first year.

The Long-Term Costs of the Mismatch Effect – Bar Passage and Job Placement

This poor academic performance in law school, in turn, creates two distinct costs for African Americans. First, Sanders argues, the poor grades lead to a very poor bar passage rate. As he points out, “only 45% of black law students in the 1991 cohort completed law school and passed the bar on their first attempt.” That number is far worse than the comparable number for whites.

Sanders goes on to argue that many of these blacks with poor grades would have had better grades – and have ended up with a higher chance of passing the bar – if they had been at law schools more commensurate with their academic skills. Sander’s data suggests to him that black students at any law school who have the same law school grades as white students at that school pass the bar in the same percentages. In other words, blacks with good law school grades don’t fail the bar any more than whites with the same grades.

The problem, Sanders suggests, is that law schools have “mismatched” blacks in schools where they are unlikely to get good grades. By placing black students in environments where their grades will be higher – less competitive law schools — the system could improve their overall bar pass rate….

From all this, Sander argues that if race-based law school affirmative action were eliminated or reduced, the black bar passage rate would actually go up. According to his calculations, in the absence of preferential admissions, this rate would rise to 74% from the 45% he observed….

If affirmative action were eliminated, most black law students wouldn’t be ousted from law school entirely – they would simply attend law schools that “match” their numerical credentials more tightly. In other words, elimination of affirmative action would simply eliminate the mismatch effect – blacks would simply be attending less competitive and less prestigious schools than they are currently attending. And of those blacks who would be displaced from the bottom of the legal academic system altogether (i.e., those who need affirmative action simply to get into the least competitive schools), many of them today do not end up passing the bar and entering the legal profession in any event….

Sander says that blacks at better schools, but with poor grades, get worse jobs than they would if they were at lesser schools and had better grades. In other words, Sander argues, at all but the most elite schools, grades matter more than the school from which one graduates for black law job applicants. The upside of attending a better school is more than outweighed – in terms of employment options – by the downside of getting weak grades at that school, compared to the better grades that could have been obtained at a less competitive school….

So whether one focuses on passing the bar, or getting a good job, Sander says, there is a case that race-based affirmative action hurts, rather than helps, black law students.

Sander’s article has drawn howls of outrage from politically correct academicians, not to mention a long critique, to which Sander has responded at length. But Sander’s fact-based argument make eminent sense, not only for the effects of reverse discrimination at law schools but also for the effects of reverse discrimination generally, in the academy and in the workplace.

As is often the case, a government policy meant to help a particular group of people actually harms that group of people — and many others, as well. The effects of affirmative action illustrate the truth of the adage that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Instead of forcing universities and employers to accept and hire unqualifed blacks, it would be better — for everyone — simply to give education vouchers to blacks. Such a program would eliminate the costly effects of affirmative action, make blacks more productive, and lift them economically.

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

In “Affirmative Action: A Modest Proposal,” I began by writing about the findings of a study which

shows that the income of a Korean orphan who was adopted in the U.S. between 1970 and 1980, through a process of random selection, is about the same regardless of the income of the adoptive parents. On the other hand, the income of the biological children of the same parents is highly correlated with the parents’ income; that is, low -income parents tend to produce low-income children, whereas high-income parents tend to produce high-income children….

I went on to say this:

…The obvious implication of these findings is that intelligence (and hence income) is a heritable trait, one that remains differentiated along racial lines (a consistent but controversial finding discussed here, for example). Thus the findings give further evidence, if any were needed, that affirmative action policies — whether government-prescribed or voluntarily adopted — tend to undermine the quality of workplaces and educational institutions. (I am speaking here of the quality of effort and thought, not the value of workers and students as human beings.)

A reader objects — sort of. He begins by saying:

[T]here’s a flaw in your guest blogger’s logic. He takes the adoption study as evidence that intelligence is a heritable trait and thus passed through racial lines (fine). He then says since affirmative action rewards racial minorities who may be less qualified (fine), that affirmative action tends to undermine quality of work.

[H]is conclusion may be correct, but is only tenuously related to the first premise. he seems to be saying that, on average, if you give preference to minorities, the quality of work will suffer, because on average minorities are less intelligent….

Let’s stop right there and take things one step at a time. What I said is that intelligence “is a heritable trait, one that remains differentiated along racial lines (a consistent but controversial finding discussed here, for example).” There is less controversy about the persistence of the racial differential and more controversy about race, per se, being the underlying cause of that differential. For a sample of the controversy, go to the linked article and follow the many links in the article. One of those links leads to a statement by Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous The Bell Curve, who says in a footnote:

Intelligence is known to be substantially heritable in human beings as a species, but this does not mean that group differences are also heritable. Despite our explicit treatment of the issue, it is perhaps the single most widespread source of misstatement about The Bell Curve.

How is it that intelligence is “substantially heritable” and yet “group differences” may not be heritable? Here is Professor Richard E. Nisbett of the University of Michigan, a noted opponent of the notion of inherent racial disparity:

Estimates of heritability within a given population tell us nothing about the degree to which differences between populations are genetically determined. The classic example is an experiment in which a random mix of wheat seeds is grown on two different plots of land. Within either plot, the environment is kept uniform, so the height of the different plants is largely or entirely genetically-determined. Yet the average difference between the two plots is still entirely environmental, because the mix of genotypes in each plot is identical….

In other words, there’s a school of thought that a racial group that starts out “behind” because of environmental causes (e.g., nutrition and exposure to education and other experiences that “stretch” the mind) stays behind, even as the average intelligence of all racial groups seems to advance over time (a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect). In any event, inter-racial differences in intelligence seem to be real and persistent, and racially related genetic causes cannot be ruled out. (Again, refer to this article.)

The distribution of those differences does not follow the pattern supposed by the reader, who goes on to say this:

[I]f I understand the studies correctly, they say that each race has members that represent the full spectrum of intelligence, and that it’s only on average that the scores are lower.

I’m not sure that the reader correctly understands the distribution of intelligence and its implications for the labor market. Let’s say there’s a pool of 200 “typical” black applicants and 1,200 “typical” white applicants for a “typical” job that requires an IQ of 100. (I use 200 blacks and 1,200 whites because the 1:6 ratio reflects the relative numbers of blacks and whites in the U.S. I take an IQ of 100 because that’s about the mean for whites, whereas the mean for blacks is about 85. IQs are assumed to be normally distributed around those means, with a standard deviation of 15 IQ points.) Now, of the “typical” applicants for this “typical” job, only 32 (16 percent) of the blacks would have an IQ of at least 100, whereas 600 (one-half) of the whites would have an IQ of at least 100. Thus the ratio of qualified blacks to qualified whites would be about 1:19 for the “typical” job.

Bump it up a notch and set the intelligence qualification at an IQ of 115. Then, only 5 (2.5 percent) of the 200 black applicants would qualify, whereas 192 (16 percent) of the 1,200 white applicants would qualify — a ratio of about 1:38. In other words, it gets harder and harder to find qualified blacks as jobs require more intelligence (not to mention specific kinds of education and training). So, it’s irrelevant that there are some blacks at the higher end of the spectrum of intelligence. Why? Because there are proportionately few of them, and fewer still who have the requisite education and training for the kinds of jobs that are associated with high intelligence (e.g., astrophysics, computer engineering, advanced mathematics).

To look at it another way, take 200 randomly selected blacks and 200 randomly selected whites: 100 of the blacks and 168 of the whites would have an IQ of at least 85 (a ratio of 1:1.7); 5 of the blacks and 32 of the whites would have an IQ of at least 115 (a ratio of 1:6.4).

The black-white difference in average intelligence is meaningful, despite what the reader seems to think, because it reflects a significant difference in the distribution of intelligence. University slots and jobs that require at least average (white) intelligence can’t be filled in proportion to the number of blacks in the population, or in proportion to the number of black applicants, without tending to dilute the quality of universities and workplaces. (Again, I am speaking of the quality of effort and thought, not the value of workers and students as human beings.)

That leads me affirmative action, about which the reader says:

Thus [because there are some blacks at the high end of the spectrum of intelligence], affirmative action can be structured in such a way as to give special preference to the higher-achieving members of any minority, who face the difficult task of not being stereotyped by the lower scores of their fellow minorities. I.e., If a white person and a black person have the same or nearly the same qualifications, then you pick the black person.

Yes, as I have just shown, there are blacks at the high end of the spectrum of intelligence, and those blacks are courted assiduously by universities and employers. Why? Because universities and employers are anxious to demonstrate their commitment to affirmative action, diversity, racial equality, or whatever you want to call it. What better way to do that than to admit or hire the “best and brightest” blacks, which is a relatively risk-free proposition for universities and employers. What happens to those blacks who aren’t in the higher reaches of the spectrum of intelligence? Well, that’s where affirmative action, as most Americans know it, kicks in.

Here’s how it seems to work at universities: Blacks get preferential treatment for being black, to the extent that universities can concoct and defend affirmative-action plans that allow them to give preferential treatment. Sometimes a university fails (as in Gratz v. Bollinger), and sometimes it succeeds (as in Grutter v. Bollinger). But if there’s a prevailing tendency among the left-dominated universities of the United States, it’s to allow blacks to meet a lower standard of intelligence, thus displacing some whites who would have made better students and, eventually, better employees. So, at universities, affirmative action isn’t just about “picking the black person” who has “the same or nearly the same qualifications.”

What about affirmative action in the workplace? Here, I speak from long experience. (See my credentials.) Affirmative action, in theory, is supposed to be about hiring and promoting regardless of race, among other attributes. As an example, here’s the Department of Labor’s summary of its guidelines for federal contractors and subcontractors:

Each contracting agency in the Executive Branch of government must include the equal opportunity clause in each of its nonexempt government contracts. The equal opportunity clause requires that the contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin….

It doesn’t say “If a white person and a black person have the same or nearly the same qualifications, then you pick the black person,” as the reader would have it. What it says, in effect, is this: Faced with two equally qualified candidates for hiring or promotion, you can’t discriminate against a black person or a person who belongs to any of the other protected groups. To act in the way that the reader suggests would amount to blatant discrimination in favor of black job candidates over white job candidates, and that’s facially illegal, even though universities sometimes get away with similar discrimination in the name of “diversity.”

Nevertheless, what happens, in practice, is what the reader suggests, and then some: If a black person seems to have something like the minimum qualifications for a job, and if the black person’s work record and interviews aren’t off-putting, the black person is likely to be hired or promoted ahead of equally or better-qualified whites. Why?

• Pressure from government affirmative-action offices, which focus on percentages of minorities hired and promoted, not on the qualifications of applicants for hiring and promotion.

• The ability of those affirmative-action offices to put government agencies and private employers through the pain and expense of extensive audits, backed by the threat of adverse reports to higher ups (in the case of government agencies) and fines and the loss of contracts (in the case of private employers).

• The ever-present threat of complaints to the EEOC (or its local counterpart) by rejected minority candidates for hiring and promotion. Those complaints can then be followed by costly litigation, settlements, and court judgments.

• Boards of directors and senior managers who (a) fear the adverse publicity that can accompany employment-related litigation and (b) push for special treatment of minorities because they think it’s “the right thing to do.”

• Managers down the line learn to go along and practice just enough reverse discrimination to keep affirmative-action offices and upper management happy.

The following case, about an employee who was victimized by reverse discrimination, illustrates just about everything I’ve said about the practice of affirmative action in the workplace:

A Federal Aviation Administration employee recently settled an employment discrimination case where he said he was passed over for promotions because of his gender and race.

Michael C. Ryan of Toms River, N.J., who worked at an FAA research and development facility as a GS-14 manager, said that between 1995 and 1997 he was denied eight promotions to GS-15.

After complaining to the FAA, Ryan went to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nine years later, a formal consent order gives Ryan, a 28-year FAA worker, the managerial and supervisory position he wanted. The order also begins a three-year agencywide policy review intended to reform FAA’s affirmative action policies.

Ryan, a white male, said he was qualified for the promotions he applied for at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, N.J., but was passed over by people with less experience because he was not a woman or a minority. During the trial, Ryan’s attorney, Hanan Isaacs, argued that four of the seven minority candidates who were promoted were not selected using merit principles, including one person that Ryan trained who had 13 years less seniority.

According to Isaacs, the 22-day trial showed that the candidates were promoted ahead of Ryan so that minority and women promotion quotas could be met. Isaacs said FAA’s 1988 affirmative action plan, which called for “a workforce that looks like America by 2000,” started to go afoul when it compared the racial and gender composition of technical positions to the general population rather than to the minority composition of the comparable workforce.

Isaacs said that an unwritten but well publicized “50-50″ policy” required FAA managers to promote women and minorities at least 50 percent of the time in order to get career and financial incentives. This type of affirmative action has no end-plan and perpetually discriminates against nonminorities, Isaacs argued.

Ryan was offered a settlement a year ago that would have given him back pay – which could total about $100,000 – and the promotion, but Isaacs said Ryan refused because he wanted to see the agency’s policy change.

John G. Larsen, a FAA senior policy analyst, testified during the trial that the agency was not in compliance with the law after 1992 and that its affirmative action program would “almost always come up with the appearance of under-representation.”

Larsen, a 36-year FAA employee, said that after a 1995 Supreme Court ruling which found that preferential treatment based on race almost always is unconstitutional, even when it is intended to benefit minority groups that suffered injustices in the past, the agency’s affirmative action policies became illegal.

He said the FAA refused to conduct a review requested by the Clinton administration following the ruling that would have brought the agency back into compliance with affirmative action laws. “The culture of the agency was one, in my opinion, that did not entertain challenges or disagreement … and nothing changed,” Larsen said.

The agency did not admit liability in the settlement, but did agree to start a three-step comprehensive review of its programs and policies on hiring and promotion to put them into compliance.

A Justice Department spokesman said the department was happy to resolve the nine-year-old case. He said that with the assistance of the court, the department was able to reach a settlement that is fair to both parties and upholds the FAA’s commitment to ensure a workplace free of unlawful discrimination of any form.

That’s the real, illegal, world of affirmative action. And here is the price tag:

Because of affirmative action — and legal actions brought and threatened under its rubric — employers do not always fill every job with the person best qualified for the job. The result is that the economy produces less than it would in the absence of affirmative action….

[A]ffirmative action reduces GDP by about 2 percent. That’s not a trivial amount. In fact, it’s just about what the federal government spends on all civilian agencies and their activities — including affirmative action….

Moreover, that effect is compounded to the extent that affirmative action reduces the quality of education at universities, which it surely must do. But let us work with 2 percent of GDP, which comes to about $240 billion a year, or more than $6,000 a year for every black American….

So, the reader has it about right when he says, in his closing sentence,

It may be true that in practice affirmative action tends to downgrade quality….

But he glosses over the high price we pay for affirmative action, in dollars and divisiveness. And then he closes with this:

…but this [downgrading of quality] doesn’t follow necessarily from the heritability premise, and I find [the guest blogger’s] attempt to use this to bolster his argument inflammatory and intellectually dishonest.

The downgrading of quality — and the price we pay for that — follows directly from the demonstrable premise that affirmative action — as it is practiced — puts race ahead of quality in the selection of students and workers. Putting race first affects quality because of the unequal distribution of intelligence between the races, as intelligence is usually measured. The cause of the unequal distribution of intelligence may be controversial, but as far as I can tell there is no settled science in the matter. The notion of inherent racial differences in intelligence is still on the table, and it carries with it stark implications for the long-term success of blacks in an economy that increasingly demands more intellectual skills and fewer physical skills.

Therefore, it isn’t “intellectually dishonest” to raise the issue of inherent racial differences in intelligence. Nor is it “inflammatory,” except to those who — unlike me — are unwilling to review dispassionately the evidence on all sides of the issue. But dispassion is hard to come by in any discussion of race or affirmative action. That is why I offered my “modest proposal” — which I mean to be taken seriously. It cuts through all the cant and controversy about race, intelligence, and affirmative action. Here it is, again:

…End affirmative action and give every black American an annual voucher for, say, $5,000 (adjusted annually for inflation). The vouchers could be redeemed for educational expenses (tuition, materials, books, room and board, and mandatory fees). Recipients who didn’t need or want their vouchers could sell them to others (presumably at a discount), give them away, or bequeath them for use by later generations. The vouchers would be issued for a limited time (perhaps the 25 years envisioned by Justice O’Connor in Grutter), but they would never expire.

That settles affirmative action, reparations, and school vouchers (for blacks), at a stroke….

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

Donald Sensing (One Hand Clapping) has been writing about what may become a trend in Europe, namely, demanding that Muslim immigrants assimilate or leave:

Just a few days after prominent, conservative Dutch politician Geert Wilders demanded that Muslim immigrants either assimilate into the mainstream of Dutch culture and politics or leave the country, one of Europe’s leading liberal leaders echoed his words.

[Germany’s] Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called on Muslims to better integrate themselves into German society and warned over what he called a “conflict of cultures.”

The same article covers a 20,000-strong march in Cologne today, “to protest against the use of violence in the name of Islam.” Significantly, the march originated from both a mosque and a cathedral. The marchers “converged in the middle of the city for the event organized by the Islamic-Turkish Union with the slogan ‘Hand in Hand for Peace and Against Terror.'” As Glenn Reynolds said, “It’s a start,” hopefully toward an interfaith alliance against religious terrorism. The Muslim marchers, though, were almost exclusively Turks who hail from the most democratic and liberalized societies in the Islamic world.

There is something to be said for assimilation in America, and not just among Muslims.