Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV)

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Loquitur Veritatem

UPDATED 04/19/15 WITH THE ADDITION OF TWO ENTRIES

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

* * *

Paul Mirengoff explores the similarities between Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama; for example:

We see with Chamberlain the same curious dynamic present in the Obama presidency. At home, a tough-as-nails administration/political machine that takes no prisoners and rarely compromises; abroad, a feckless operation with a pattern of caving to belligerent adversaries. [“Neville Chamberlain and Barack Obama: The Similarities Run Deep,” Powerline Blog, April 15, 2014]

See also John Hinderaker’s Powerline post, “Daniel Pipes: The Obama Doctrine Serves Up One Disaster After Another” (April 6, 2015), and a piece by Eileen F. Toplansky,”Obama’s Three Premises” (American Thinker, April 20, 2015).

What is Obama up to? For my take, see “Does Obama Love America?”

* * *

If it were possible to convince a climate alarmist that he is wrong, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is the man for the job:

“What Evidence,” asks Ronald Bailey’s headline (www.reason.com, April 3, 2015), “Would Convince You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”

The answer: a rational, scientific case rooted in established theory and data would convince me that manmade climate change is a problem. That it is real is not in doubt, for every creature that breathes out emits CO2 and thus affects the climate.

The true scientific question, then, is not the fatuous question whether “Man-Made Climate Change Is Real” but how much global warming our sins of emission may cause, and whether that warming might be more a bad thing than a good thing.

However, Mr Bailey advances no rational case. What, then, are the elements of a rational, scientific case that our influence on the climate will prove dangerous unless the West completes its current self-shutdown?… [“How to Convince a Climate Skeptic He’s Wrong,” Watts Up With That, April 9, 2015]

There follows a step-by-step dismantling of Mr. Bailey’s case for alarmism. Lord Monckton ends with this:

[I]f Mr Bailey does me the courtesy of reading the above, he will realize that temperatures are not rising by much, glacial ice-melt (if occurring) is on too small a scale to raise sea level by much, global sea ice extent shows little change in two generations, ditto northern-hemisphere snow cover, there has been little increase in rainfall and (according to the IPCC) little evidence for “stronger rainstorms”, and the ocean warming is so small that it falls within the considerable measurement error.

The evidence he adduces is questionable at best on every count. The Temple of Thermageddon will have to do better than that if it wants to convince us in the teeth of the evidence….

…[N]o rational scientific or economic case can be made for taking any action whatsoever today in a probably futile and certainly cost-ineffective attempt to make global warming that is not happening as predicted today go away the day after tomorrow.

The correct policy to address what is likely to prove a non-problem – and what, even if it were every bit as much of a problem as the tax-gobblers would wish, could not by even their most creative quantitative easing be cost-effectively solved by any attempt at mitigation – is to have the courage to do nothing now and adapt later if necessary.

The question is why, in the teeth of the scientific and economic evidence, nearly all of the global governing class were so easily taken in or bought out or both by the strange coalescence of powerful vested interests who have, until now, profited so monstrously by the biggest fraud in history at such crippling expense in lives and treasure to the rest of us, and at such mortal threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of science itself. [Ibid.]

My own modest effort to quell climate alarmism is summarized in “AGW: The Death Knell.”

* * *

Steve Sailer has some fun with the latest bit of experimental hocus-pocus by the intelligence-isn’t-heritable crowd, as interpreted by a reporter for The Washington Post:

In the last few years, there appears to have been a decision to blame racial differences in intelligence on differences in income level, although, of course, that’s not very plausible. That’s what people said way back in 1965, but then the federal Coleman Report of 1966 showed that affluent black students weren’t setting the world on fire academically on average, and vast amounts of data have accumulated validating the Coleman Report ever since.

But a half century later we’re back to asserting the same untested theories as in 1965….

Allow me to point out that a national newspaper has asked a couple of guys who know what they are talking about to punch holes in the latest bit of goodthink and, as of press time, the American public hasn’t dug up Hitler’s DNA and elected it President. So maybe we’re actually mature enough to discuss reality rather than lie all the time?…

Six decades from now, the Education Secretary of the hereditary Bush-Clinton Administration will be declaring the key periods for federal intervention are the eight months and 29 days before birth … but not a day sooner! [“Charles Murray and James Thompson Asked Their Opinions in ‘Post’ Article on Brain Size; World Hasn’t Ended, Yet,” The Unz Review, April 15, 2015]

Along the way, Sailer links to Dr. James Thompson’s post about the article in question. There’s a followup post by Thompson, and this one is good, too. See also this post by Sailer.

Gregory Cochran has a related post (“Scanners Live in Vain,” West Hunter, March 31, 2015), where he says this about the paper and the reporting about it:

There is a new paper out in Nature Neuroscience, mainly by Kimberly Noble, on socioeconomic variables and and brain structure: Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. They found that cortex area went up with income, although more slowly at high incomes. Judging from their comments to the press, the authors think that being poor shrinks your brain.

Of course, since intelligence is highly heritable, and since people in higher social classes, or with high income, have higher average IQs (although not nearly as high as I would like), you would expect their kids to be, on average, smarter than kids from low-income groups (and have larger brains, since brain size is correlated with IQ) for genetic reasons. But I guess the authors of this paper have never heard of any of that – which raises the question, did they scan the brains of the authors? Because that would have been interesting. You can actually do microscopic MRI.

Even better, in talking to Nature, another researcher, Martha Farah, mentions unpublished work that shows that the brain-size correlation with SES is already there (in African-American kids) by age one month!

Of course, finding that the pattern already exists at the age of one month seriously weakens any idea that being poor shrinks the brain: most of the environmental effects you would consider haven’t even come into play in the first four weeks, when babies drink milk, sleep, and poop. Genetics affecting both parents and their children would make more sense, if the pattern shows up so early (and I’ll bet money that, if real, it shows up well before one month); but Martha Farah, and the reporter from Nature, Sara Reardon, ARE TOO FUCKING DUMB to realize this.

And John Ray points to this:

Quick thinkers are born not made, claim scientists.

They have discovered a link between our genes and the ability to remain mentally on the ball in later life.

It is the first time a genetic link has been shown to explain why some people have quick thinking skills.

Researchers identified a common genetic variant – changes in a person’s genetic code – related to how quickly a person is able to process new information. [Jenny Hope, “Quick Thinkers Are Born Not Made: The Speed at Which We Process New Information Is Written in Our Genes,” DailyMail.com, April 16, 2015]

Dr. Ray links to the underlying studies, here.

I’ve probably said more than I should say about the heritability of intelligence in “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications,” “Evolution and Race,” “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ,” and “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.”

* * *

Speaking of equality, or the lack thereof, Daniel Bier explains “How Piketty Manufactured Rising [Wealth] Inequality in 6 Steps” (Foundation for Economic Education, April 9, 2015):

Piketty’s chart on US wealth inequality displayed a trend that none of its original sources showed. Worst of all, he didn’t tell his readers that he had done any of this, much less explained his reasoning.

But now Magness has deconstructed the chart and shown, step by step, how Piketty tortured his sources into giving him the result he wanted to see….

If your methods can produce opposite results using the same sources, depending entirely on your subjective judgment, you’re not doing science — you’re doing a Choose Your Own Adventure story where you start from the conclusion and work backwards.

Now that you’ve seen how it’s done, you too can “piketty” your data and massage your narrative into selling 1.5 million books — that almost no one will actually read, but will be widely cited as justification for higher taxes nonetheless.

Committed leftists will ignore Piketty’s step back from extreme redistributionism, which I discussed in “Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIII).”

* * *

Committed leftists will lament the predicate of “Has Obamacare Turned Voters Against Sharing the Wealth?” (The New York Times, April 15, 2015). The author of the piece, Thomas B. Edsall (formerly of The Washington Post), clearly laments the possibility. (I do not, of course.) Edsall’s article is full of good news (for me); for example:

In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed by Gallup said that the federal government should guarantee health care coverage for all citizens of the United States. By late 2014, however, Gallup found that this percentage had fallen 24 points to 45 percent, while the percentage of respondents who said health care is not a federal responsibility nearly doubled to 52 percent.

Edsall’s main worry seems to be how such a mood shift will help Republicans. Evidently, he doesn’t care about taxpayers, people who earn their income, or economic growth, which is inhibited by redistribution from “rich” to “poor.” But what else is new? Edsall is just another representative of the elite punditariat — a member of the “top” part of the left’s “top and bottom” coalition.

Edsall and his ilk should be worried. See, for example, “The Obamacare Effect: Greater Distrust of Government” (the title tells the tale) and “‘Blue Wall’ Hype” which debunks the idea that Democrats have a lock on the presidency.

* * *

The question of nature vs. nurture, which I touched on three entries earlier, is closely related to the question of innate ability vs. effort as the key to success in a field of endeavor. “Scott Alexander” of Slate Star Codex has written at length about innate ability vs. effort in two recent posts: “No Clarity Around Growth Mindset…Yet” and “I Will Never Have the Ability to Clearly Explain My Beliefs about Growth Mindset.” (That should be “to explain clearly.”)

This is from the first-linked post:

If you’re not familiar with it, growth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does.

This is all twaddle, as “Alexander” shows, more or less, in his two very long posts. My essay on the subject is a lot shorter and easier to grasp: “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality.”

* * *

ENTRIES ADDED 04/19/15:

Obamacare, not unsurprisingly to me, has led to the rationing of health care, according to Bob Unruh’s “Obamacare Blocks Patients Paying for Treatment” (WND, March 6, 2014). And Aleyne Singer delivers “More Proof Obamacare Is Increasing Coverage but Not Access to Health Care” (The Daily Signal, December 9, 2014).

None of this should surprise anyone who thought about the economics of Obamacare, as I did in “Rationing and Health Care,” “The Perils of Nannyism: The Case of Obamacare,” “More about the Perils of Obamacare,” and “Health-Care Reform: The Short of It.”

* * *

Ben Bernanke asks “Why Are Interest Rates So Low?” (Ben Bernanke’s Blog, March 30, 2015). His answer? In so many words, business is bad, which means that the demand for capital financing is relatively weak. But in a followup post, “Why Are Interest Rates So Low, Part 2: Secular Stagnation” (Ben Bernanke’s Blog, March 31, 2015), Bernanke argues that the problem isn’t secular stagnation.

I agree that interest rates are low because the economy remains weak, despite some recovery from the nadir of the Great Recession. But, unlike Bernanke, I don’t expect the economy to make a full recovery — and I’m talking about real growth, not phony unemployment-rate recovery. Why Not? See “Obamanomics in Action” and “The Rahn Curve Revisited.” The economy will never grow to its potential as long as the dead hand of government continues to press down on it.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (X)

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Loquitur Veritatem

Links to the other posts in this occasional series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

How Much Are Teachers Worth?

David Harsanyi writes:

“The bottom line,” says the Center for American Progress, “is that mid- and late-career teachers are not earning what they deserve, nor are they able to gain the salaries that support a middle-class existence.”

Alas, neither liberal think tanks nor explainer sites have the capacity to determine the worth of human capital. And contrasting the pay of a person who has a predetermined government salary with the pay earned by someone in a competitive marketplace tells us little. Public-school teachers’ compensation is determined by contracts negotiated long before many of them even decided to teach. These contracts hurt the earning potential of good teachers and undermine the education system. And it has nothing to do with what anyone “deserves.”

So if teachers believe they aren’t making what they’re worth — and they may well be right about that — let’s free them from union constraints and let them find out what the job market has to offer. Until then, we can’t really know. Because a bachelor’s degree isn’t a dispensation from the vagaries of economic reality. And teaching isn’t the first step toward sainthood. Regardless of what you’ve heard. (“Are Teachers Underpaid? Let’s Find Out,” Creators.com, July 25, 2014)

Harsanyi is right, but too kind. Here’s my take, from “The Public-School Swindle“:

[P]ublic “education” — at all levels — is not just a rip-off of taxpayers, it is also an employment scheme for incompetents (especially at the K-12 level) and a paternalistic redirection of resources to second- and third-best uses.

And, to top it off, public education has led to the creation of an army of left-wing zealots who, for many decades, have inculcated America’s children and young adults in the advantages of collective, non-market, anti-libertarian institutions, where paternalistic “empathy” supplants personal responsibility.

Utilitarianism, Once More

EconLog bloggers Bryan Caplan and Scott Sumner are enjoying an esoteric exchange about utilitarianism (samples here and here), which is a kind of cost-benefit calculus in which the calculator presumes to weigh the costs and benefits that accrue to other persons. My take is that utilitarianism borders on psychopathy. In “Utilitarianism and Psychopathy,” I quote myself to this effect:

Here’s the problem with cost-benefit analysis — the problem it shares with utilitarianism: One person’s benefit can’t be compared with another person’s cost. Suppose, for example, the City of Los Angeles were to conduct a cost-benefit analysis that “proved” the wisdom of constructing yet another freeway through the city in order to reduce the commuting time of workers who drive into the city from the suburbs.

Before constructing the freeway, the city would have to take residential and commercial property. The occupants of those homes and owners of those businesses (who, in many cases would be lessees and not landowners) would have to start anew elsewhere. The customers of the affected businesses would have to find alternative sources of goods and services. Compensation under eminent domain can never be adequate to the owners of taken property because the property is taken by force and not sold voluntarily at a true market price. Moreover, others who are also harmed by a taking (lessees and customers in this example) are never compensated for their losses. Now, how can all of this uncompensated cost and inconvenience be “justified” by, say, the greater productivity that might (emphasize might) accrue to those commuters who would benefit from the construction of yet another freeway.

Yet, that is how cost-benefit analysis works. It assumes that group A’s cost can be offset by group B’s benefit: “the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”

America’s Financial Crisis

Timothy Taylor tackles the looming debt crisis:

First, the current high level of government debt, and the projections for the next 25 years, mean that the U.S. government lacks fiscal flexibility….

Second, the current spending patterns of the U.S. government are starting to crowd out everything except health care, Social Security, and interest payments….

Third, large government borrowing means less funding is available for private investment….

…CBO calculates an “alternative fiscal scenario,” in which it sets aside some of these spending and tax changes that are scheduled to take effect in five years or ten years or never…. [T]he extended baseline scenario projected that the debt/GDP ratio would be 106% by 2039. In the alternative fiscal scenario, the debt-GDP ratio is projected to reach 183% of GDP by 2039. As the report notes: “CBO’s extended alternative fiscal scenario is based on the assumptions that certain policies that are now in place but are scheduled to change under current law will be continued and that some provisions of law that might be difficult to sustain for a long period will be modified. The scenario, therefore, captures what some analysts might consider to be current policies, as opposed to current laws.”…

My own judgement is that the path of future budget deficits in the next decade or so is likely to lean toward the alternative fiscal scenario. But long before we reach a debt/GDP ratio of 183%, something is going to give. I don’t know what will change. But as an old-school economist named Herb Stein used to say, “If something can’t go on, it won’t.” (Long Term Budget Deficits,” Conversable Economist, July 24, 2014)

Professional economists are terribly low-key, aren’t they? Here’s the way I see it, in “America’s Financial Crisis Is Now“:

It will not do simply to put an end to the U.S. government’s spending spree; too many State and local governments stand ready to fill the void, and they will do so by raising taxes where they can. As a result, some jurisdictions will fall into California- and Michigan-like death-spirals while jobs and growth migrate to other jurisdictions…. Even if Congress resists the urge to give aid and comfort to profligate States and municipalities at the expense of the taxpayers of fiscally prudent jurisdictions, the high taxes and anti-business regimes of California- and Michigan-like jurisdictions impose deadweight losses on the whole economy….

So, the resistance to economically destructive policies cannot end with efforts to reverse the policies of the federal government. But given the vast destructiveness of those policies — “entitlements” in particular — the resistance must begin there. Every conservative and libertarian voice in the land must be raised in reasoned opposition to the perpetuation of the unsustainable “promises” currently embedded in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and their expansion through Obamacare. To those voices must be added the voices of “moderates” and “liberals” who see through the proclaimed good intentions of “entitlements” to the economic and libertarian disaster that looms if those “entitlements” are not pared down to their original purpose: providing a safety net for the truly needy.

The alternative to successful resistance is stark: more borrowing, higher interest payments, unsustainable debt, higher taxes, and economic stagnation (at best).

For the gory details about government spending and economic stagnation, see “Estimating the Rahn Curve: Or, How Government Spending Inhibits Economic Growth” and “The True Multiplier.”

Climate Change: More Evidence against the Myth of AGW

There are voices of reason, that is, real scientists doing real science:

Over the 55-years from 1958 to 2012, climate models not only significantly over-predict observed warming in the tropical troposphere, but they represent it in a fundamentally different way than is observed. (Ross McKittrick and Timothy Vogelsang, “Climate models not only significantly over-predict observed warming in the tropical troposphere, but they represent it in a fundamentally different way than is observed,” excerpted at Watt’s Up With That, July 24, 2014)

Since the 1980s anthropogenic aerosols have been considerably reduced in Europe and the Mediterranean area. This decrease is often considered as the likely cause of the brightening effect observed over the same period. This phenomenon is however hardly reproduced by global and regional climate models. Here we use an original approach based on reanalysis-driven coupled regional climate system modelling, to show that aerosol changes explain 81 ± 16 per cent of the brightening and 23 ± 5 per cent of the surface warming simulated for the period 1980–2012 over Europe. The direct aerosol effect is found to dominate in the magnitude of the simulated brightening. The comparison between regional simulations and homogenized ground-based observations reveals that observed surface solar radiation, as well as land and sea surface temperature spatio-temporal variations over the Euro-Mediterranean region are only reproduced when simulations include the realistic aerosol variations. (“New paper finds 23% of warming in Europe since 1980 due to clean air laws reducing sulfur dioxide,” The Hockey Schtick, July 23, 2014)

My (somewhat out-of-date but still useful) roundup of related posts and articles is at “AGW: The Death Knell.”

Crime Explained…

…but not by this simplistic item:

Of all of the notions that have motivated the decades-long rise of incarceration in the United States, this is probably the most basic: When we put people behind bars, they can’t commit crime.

The implied corollary: If we let them out, they will….

Crime trends in a few states that have significantly reduced their prison populations, though, contradict this fear. (Emily Badger, “There’s little evidence that fewer prisoners means more crime,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, July 21, 2014)

Staring at charts doesn’t yield answers to complex, multivariate questions, such as the causes of crime. Ms. Badger should have extended my work of seven years ago (“Crime, Explained“). Had she, I’m confident that she would have obtained the same result, namely:

VPC (violent+property crimes per 100,000 persons) =

-33174.6

+346837BLK (number of blacks as a decimal fraction of the population)

-3040.46GRO (previous year’s change in real GDP per capita, as a decimal fraction of the base)

-1474741PRS (the number of inmates in federal and State prisons in December of the previous year, as a decimal fraction of the previous year’s population)

The t-statistics on the intercept and coefficients are 19.017, 21.564, 1.210, and 17.253, respectively; the adjusted R-squared is 0.923; the standard error of the estimate/mean value of VPC = 0.076.

The coefficient and t-statistic for PRS mean that incarceration has a strong, statistically significant, negative effect on the violent-property crime rate. In other words, more prisoners = less crime against persons and their property.

The Heritability of Intelligence

Strip away the trappings of culture and what do you find? This:

If a chimpanzee appears unusually intelligent, it probably had bright parents. That’s the message from the first study to check if chimp brain power is heritable.

The discovery could help to tease apart the genes that affect chimp intelligence and to see whether those genes in humans also influence intelligence. It might also help to identify additional genetic factors that give humans the intellectual edge over their non-human-primate cousins.

The researchers estimate that, similar to humans, genetic differences account for about 54 per cent of the range seen in “general intelligence” – dubbed “g” – which is measured via a series of cognitive tests. “Our results in chimps are quite consistent with data from humans, and the human heritability in g,” says William Hopkins of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, who heads the team reporting its findings in Current Biology.

“The historical view is that non-genetic factors dominate animal intelligence, and our findings challenge that view,” says Hopkins. (Andy Coghlan, “Chimpanzee brain power is strongly heritable,” New Scientist, July 10, 2014)

Such findings are consistent with Nicholas Wade’s politically incorrect A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. For related readings, see “‘Wading’ into Race, Culture, and IQ’.” For a summary of scholarly evidence about the heritability of intelligence — and its dire implications — see “Race and Reason — The Achievement Gap: Causes and Implications.” John Derbyshire offers an even darker view: “America in 2034” (American Renaissance, June 9, 2014).

The correlation of race and intelligence is, for me, an objective matter, not an emotional one. For evidence of my racial impartiality, see the final item in “My Moral Profile.”

Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Loquitur Veritatem

This is the third (and probably last) post in a series. The first two posts are “Race and Reason: The Derbyshire Debacle” and “Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action.” The purpose of the series, as suggested by the titles of the posts, is to inject reason (and facts) into the discussion of race. It has been done before, of course, but it cannot hurt to add another voice to the chorus of race-realism.

Yes, I am a race-realist. I believe (based on fact) that the socioeconomic divide between blacks and other racial-ethnic groups in America is primarily a product of genetic and cultural differences that work to the general disadvantage of blacks.

I know that some readers will quickly reject what I have to say, and a lot of them will do so as soon as they reach the end of the preceding paragraph. Why? Because the facts that I present will not comport with their view of the way the world ought to be. What is the “ought to be”? Briefly, it is an imaginary world in which all races are equal in ability, and in which cultural differences hove no bearing on economic achievement. If that is your view of the world, and if you are unwilling to consider a different, fact-based view, you may stop reading now and return to the land of unreality. Before you do that, however, I want you to be aware of one important thing: My own racial views are neutral; that is, I am unprejudiced toward blacks as blacks, though I am greatly opposed to pro-black policies (as opposed to race-neutral ones), which have been harmful to black Americans as well as their countrymen. For evidence of my race-neutrality, see the note at the bottom of this post.

Then there are those readers who might agree with the facts that I present here, but who prefer to ignore them because they might “feed racism” and be used as an excuse to treat blacks as second-class citizens. Racists need no help from me or anyone else who presents the facts about the causes of the socioeconomic divide in America. Racists are immune to facts and see the world as they think it ought to be, which is free of blacks or with blacks shunted to second-class citizenship. The socioeconomic gap between blacks and other Americans cannot be shrunk by ignoring the reasons for the gap. The gap can be shrunk (though never closed) only by understanding its real causes and adopting policies that address those causes.

A note about usage: It is my practice in this blog to put “liberal” (and its variants) in quotation marks when referring to modern liberalism, which is quite a different thing than classical liberalism. The difference, of course, is that modern liberals espouse statism. In particular, they believe that what is adjudged “good” by academic-political elites should be imposed on everyone by the state. And liberty — despite its etymological relationship to the word liberal — be damned. Thus the sarcastic quotation marks, or sneer quotes. In any event, I have, in this post, omitted the quotation marks for the sake of typographical neatness. Rest assured, however, that where I use “liberal” and its variants in this post I am referring to statists and statism.

Continued below the fold. Continue reading →

Nature Is Unfair

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

The Almighty is not a liberal… The Almighty is the driving force for the entire universe and the universe is not a very liberal place. That is what the modern world seems not to understand….

Simon Mawer, The Gospel of Judas

* * *

Matt Ridley‘s recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “A Truce in the War Over Smarts and Genes,” is about the heritability of intelligence. The article, which is behind WSJ’s paywall, is available on Ridley’s personal website, The Rational Optimist, under the title “Goldilocks Heritability.” Here are some relevant bits:

Hardly any subject in science has been so politically fraught as the heritability of intelligence. For more than a century, since Francis Galton first started speculating about the similarities of twins, nature-nurture was a war with a stalemated front and intelligence was its Verdun—the most hotly contested and costly battle.

So would it not be rather wonderful if a scientific discovery came along that called a truce and calmed all the fury? I think this is about to happen. Call it the Goldilocks theory of intelligence: not too genetic, not too environmental—and proving that intelligence is impossible to meddle with, genetically.

The immediate cause of this optimism is a recent paper in Molecular Psychiatry, which confirms that genes account for about half of the difference in IQ between any two people in a modern society….

So far, so good. But Ridley goes off the rails with this:

…Some of the more extreme “nurturists,” especially those who dominated the debate in the 1960s to 1980s, might not welcome the new confirmation of the nearly 50% role of genes in determining IQ differences, even though it has been blindingly clear for a long time now.

They should, though. A world in which intelligence is 100% genetic would be horribly unfair….

What does “fairness” have to do with it? Is there a master gene-dispenser in the sky to whom one can complain about not having received a “fair share” of smart genes? I think not.

There would be nothing “unfair” about a world in which intelligence is 100 percent genetic. That’s just the way it would be, and nothing could — or should — be done about it.

But that wouldn’t stop leftists from trying to do something about it. As I say here,

[t]he search for cosmic justice — the rectification of all that is “unfair” in the world — is relentless, knows no bounds, and is built upon the resentment and punishment of success.

“Unfair” is the battle cry of the envious and the rabble-rouser, who derive great satisfaction from apportioning blame where no blame is due. I expect better of Ridley.

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Tag Archives: heritability of intelligence

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XIV)

Not-So-Random Thoughts (X)

Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications

Nature Is Unfair

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