Tag Archives: race and intelligence

Selected Writings about Intelligence

Posted on by

I have treated intelligence many times; for example:

Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice: Part IV
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Bigger, Stronger, and Faster — But Not Quicker?
The IQ of Nations
Some Notes about Psychology and Intelligence
“Science” vs. Science: The Case of Evolution, Race, and Intelligence
More about Intelligence
Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXI), fifth item
Intelligence and Intuition
Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness
Intelligence As a Dirty Word

The material below consists entirely of quotations from cited sources. The quotations are consistent with and confirm several points made in the earlier posts:

  • Intelligence has a strong genetic component; it is heritable.
  • Race is a real manifestation of genetic differences among sub-groups of human beings. Those subgroups are not only racial but also ethnic in character.
  • Intelligence therefore varies by race and ethnicity, though it is influenced by environment.
  • Specifically, intelligence varies in the following way: There are highly intelligent persons of all races and ethnicities, but the proportion of highly intelligent persons is highest among Ashkenazi Jews, followed in order by East Asians, Northern Europeans, Hispanics (of European/Amerindian descent), and sub-Saharan Africans — and the American descendants of each group.
  • Males are disproportionately represented among highly intelligent persons, relative to females. Males have greater quantitative skills (including spatio-temporal aptitude) relative to females; whereas, females have greater verbal skills than males.
  • Intelligence is positively correlated with attractiveness, health, and longevity.
  • The Flynn effect (rising IQ) is a transitory environmental effect brought about by environment (e.g., better nutrition) and practice (e.g., learning and application of technical skills). The Woodley effect is (probably) a long-term dysgenic effect among people whose survival and reproduction depends more on technology (devised by a relatively small portion of the populace) than on the ability to cope with environmental threats (i.e., intelligence).

I have moved the supporting material to a new page: “Intelligence“.

Freespace and Me

Posted on by

This is the introduction to “Freespace and Me”, one of the pages listed at the top of this blog. It gives a place of prominence to two subjects about which I’ve often blogged: “natural rights” (the quotation marks connote their fictional status) and the connection between race and intelligence.

Late in 2004, I was asked by Timothy Sandefur to guest-blog for a week at Freespace. By combing the archives of Mr. Sandefur’s blog and using The Wayback Machine, I have reconstructed that week and its sequel, in which Sandefur and I continue an exchange that began during my guest-blogging stint. I reproduce the entire sequence of posts here.

Some of my posts are culled from my old blog, Liberty Corner, where I had cross-posted from Freespace, My name appears as Fritz at the bottom of those posts because I was using it as my handle when I culled the posts.

The attentive and determined reader who slogs through the posts reproduced here will note that Sandefur didn’t thank me for guest-blogging at Freespace. It is my view that Sandefur regretted having asked me to guest-blog because of my less-than-pure view of rights — which I take to be social constructs, not timeless entities — and my candid and accurate (but negative) take on the relative intelligence of blacks. For more on that, see “Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action“, “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications“, “Evolution and Race“, ““Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ“, “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality“, “Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race“, “Non-Judgmentalism as Leftist Condescension“, “Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost“, “The IQ of Nations“, “Race and Social Engineering“, “More about Intelligence“, “Leftist Condescension“, “Who’s Obsessing, Professor McWhorter?“, and “Racism on Parade“.

Among the posts reproduced below are some early ones in a prolonged exchange between Sandefur and me on the question of “natural rights”. I answered him definitively in “Evolution, Human Nature, and ‘Natural Rights’“, and he never responded, as far as I am able to tell. He has addressed “natural rights” only once since I wrote “Evolution…”, but persists in error; thus:

Of course, philosophy probably knows no more complicated word than “natural,” but when used in the context of rights, the word is meant to signify that rights are not merely conventional—they are not privileges accorded to people by the state. Instead, their origin is in something real about them: in the objective characteristics of human beings qua human beings. I know of no better word for that than “natural.” Rand contends that “[t]he source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity, A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by nature for his proper survival…. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Emphasis altered).

To understand the error –a common one among doctrinaire leftists, who justify all kinds of coercion and theft in the name of “natural rights” — read “Evolution, Human Nature, and ‘Natural Rights’“, “The Futile Search for Natural Rights’“, “Natural Law, Natural Rights, and the Real World“, and “Natural Law and Natural Rights Revisited“.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXI)

Posted on by

An occasional survey of web material that’s related to subjects about which I’ve posted. Links to the other posts in this series may be found at “Favorite Posts,” just below the list of topics.

Fred Reed, in a perceptive post worth reading in its entirety, says this:

Democracy works better the smaller the group practicing it. In a town, people can actually understand the questions of the day. They know what matters to them. Do we build a new school, or expand the existing one? Do we want our children to recite the pledge of allegiance, or don’t we? Reenact the Battle of Antietam? Sing Christmas carols in the town square? We can decide these things. Leave us alone….

Then came the vast empire, the phenomenal increase in the power and reach of the federal government, which really means the Northeast Corridor. The Supreme Court expanded and expanded and expanded the authority of Washington, New York’s store-front operation. The federals now decided what could be taught in the schools, what religious practices could be permitted, what standards employers could use in hiring, who they had to hire. The media coalesced into a small number of corporations, controlled from New York but with national reach….

Tyranny comes easily when those seeking it need only corrupt a single Congress, appoint a single Supreme Court, or control the departments of one executive branch. In a confederation of largely self-governing states, those hungry to domineer would have to suborn fifty congresses. It could not be done. State governments are accessible to the governed. They can be ejected. They are much more likely to be sympathetic to the desires of their constituents since they are of the same culture.

Tyranny is often justified by invoking “the will of the people”, but as I say here:

It is a logical and factual error to apply the collective “we” to Americans, except when referring generally to the citizens of the United States. Other instances of “we” (e.g., “we” won World War II, “we” elected Barack Obama) are fatuous and presumptuous. In the first instance, only a small fraction of Americans still living had a hand in the winning of World War II. In the second instance, Barack Obama was elected by amassing the votes of fewer than 25 percent of the number of Americans living in 2008 and 2012. “We the People” — that stirring phrase from the Constitution’s preamble — was never more hollow than it is today.

Further, the logical and factual error supports the unwarranted view that the growth of government somehow reflects a “national will” or consensus of Americans. Thus, appearances to the contrary (e.g., the adoption and expansion of national “social insurance” schemes, the proliferation of cabinet departments, the growth of the administrative state) a sizable fraction of Americans (perhaps a majority) did not want government to grow to its present size and degree of intrusiveness. And a sizable fraction (perhaps a majority) would still prefer that it shrink in both dimensions. In fact, The growth of government is an artifact of formal and informal arrangements that, in effect, flout the wishes of many (most?) Americans. The growth of government was not and is not the will of “we Americans,” “Americans on the whole,” “Americans in the aggregate,” or any other mythical consensus.

I am pleased to note that my prognosis for Trump’s presidency (as of December 2016) was prescient:

Based on his appointments to date — with the possible exception of Steve Bannon [now gone from the White House] — he seems to be taking a solidly conservative line. He isn’t building a government of bomb-throwers, but rather a government of staunch conservatives who, taken together, have a good chance at rebuilding America’s status in the world while dismantling much of Obama’s egregious “legacy”….

Will Donald Trump be a perfect president, if perfection is measured by adherence to the Constitution? Probably not, but who has been? It now seems likely, however, that Trump will be a far less fascistic president than Barack Obama has been and Hillary Clinton would have been. He will certainly be far less fascistic than the academic thought-police, whose demise cannot come too soon for the sake of liberty.

In sum, Trump’s emerging agenda seems to resemble my own decidedly conservative one.

But anti-Trump hysteria continues unabated, even among so-called conservatives. David Gelertner writes:

Some conservatives have the impression that, by showing off their anti-Trump hostility, they will get the networks and the New York Times to like them. It doesn’t work like that. Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

David Brooks of The New York Times is one of the (so-called) conservatives who shows off his anti-Trump hostility. Here he is writing about Trump and tribalism:

The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens. Regular Americans are being oppressed by a snobbish elite that rigs the game in its favor. White Americans are being invaded by immigrants who take their wealth and divide their culture. Normal Americans are threatened by an Islamic radicalism that murders their children.

This is a tribal story. The tribe needs a strong warrior in a hostile world. We need to build walls to keep out illegals, erect barriers to hold off foreign threats, wage endless war on the globalist elites.

Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.

I am unaware that Mr. Trump has anything against talented people. But he rightly has a lot against adding to the welfare rolls and allowing jihadists into the country. As for tribalism — that bugbear of “enlightened” people — here’s where I stand:

There’s a world of difference between these three things:

  1. hating persons who are different because they’re different
  2. fearing persons of a certain type because that type is highly correlated with danger
  3. preferring the company and comfort of persons with whom one has things in common, such as religion, customs, language, moral beliefs, and political preferences.

Number 1 is a symptom of bigotry, of which racism is a subset. Number 2 is a sign of prudence. Number 3 is a symptom of tribalism.

Liberals, who like to accuse others of racism and bigotry, tend to be strong tribalists — as are most people, the world around. Being tribal doesn’t make a person a racist or a bigot, that is, hateful toward persons of a different type. It’s natural (for most people) to trust and help those who live nearest them or are most like them, in customs, religion, language, etc. Persons of different colors and ethnicities usually have different customs, religions, and languages (e.g., black English isn’t General American English), so it’s unsurprising that there’s a tribal gap between most blacks and whites, most Latinos and whites, most Latinos and blacks, and so on.

Tribalism has deep evolutionary-psychological roots in mutual aid and mutual defense. The idea that tribalism can be erased by sitting in a circle, holding hands, and singing Kumbaya — or the equivalent in social-diplomatic posturing — is as fatuous as the idea that all human beings enter this world with blank minds and equal potential. Saying that tribalism is wrong is like saying that breathing and thinking are wrong. It’s a fact of life that can’t be undone without undoing the bonds of mutual trust and respect that are the backbone of a civilized society.

If tribalism is wrong, then most blacks, Latinos, members of other racial and ethnic groups, and liberals are guilty of wrong-doing.

None of this seems to have occurred to Our Miss Brooks (a cultural reference that may be lost on younger readers). But “liberals” — and Brooks is one of them — just don’t get sovereignty.

While we’re on the subject of immigration, consider a study of the effect of immigration on the wages of unskilled workers, which is touted by Timothy Taylor. According to Taylor, the study adduces evidence that

in areas with high levels of low-skill immigration, local firms shift their production processes in a way that uses more low-skilled labor–thus increasing the demand for such labor. In addition, immigrant low-skilled labor has tended to focus on manual tasks, which has enabled native-born low-skilled labor to shift to nonmanual low-skilled tasks, which often pay better.

It’s magical. An influx of non-native low-skilled laborers allows native-born low-skilled laborers to shift to better-paying jobs. If they could have had those better-paying jobs, why didn’t they take them in the first place?

More reasonably, Rick Moran writes about a

Federation for American Immigration Reform report [which] reveals that illegal aliens are costing the U.S. taxpayer $135 billion.  That cost includes medical care, education, and law enforcement expenses.

That’s a good argument against untrammeled immigration (legal or illegal). There are plenty more. See, for example, the entry headed “The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration” at this post.

There’s a fatuous argument that a massive influx of illegal immigrants wouldn’t cause the rate of crime to rise. I’ve disposed of that argument with one of my own, which is supported by numbers. I’ve also dealt with crime in many other posts, including this one, where I say this (and a lot more):

Behavior is shaped by social norms. Those norms once were rooted in the Ten Commandments and time-tested codes of behavior. They weren’t nullified willy-nilly in accordance with the wishes of “activists,” as amplified through the megaphone of the mass media, and made law by the Supreme Court….

But by pecking away at social norms that underlie mutual trust and respect, “liberals” have sundered the fabric of civilization. There is among Americans the greatest degree of mutual enmity (dressed up as political polarization) since the Civil War.

The mutual enmity isn’t just political. It’s also racial, and it shows up as crime. Heather Mac Donald says “Yes, the Ferguson Effect Is Real,” and Paul Mirengoff shows that “Violent Crime Jumped in 2015.” I got to the root of the problem in “Crime Revisited,” to which I’ve added “Amen to That” and “Double Amen.” What is the root of the problem? A certain, violence-prone racial minority, of course, and also under-incarceration (see “Crime Revisited”).

The Ferguson Effect is a good example of where the slippery slope of free-speech absolutism leads. More examples are found in the violent protests in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory. The right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” has become the right to assemble a mob, disrupt the lives of others, destroy the property of others, injure and kill others, and (usually) suffer no consequences for doing so — if you are a leftist or a member of one of the groups patronized by the left, that is.

How real is the Ferguson effect? Jazz Shaw writes about the rising rate of violent crime:

We’ve already looked at a couple of items from the latest FBI crime report and some of the dark news revealed within. But when you match up some of their numbers with recent historical facts, even more trends become evident. As the Daily Caller reports this week, one disturbing trend can be found by matching up locations recording rising murder rates with the homes of of widespread riots and anti-police protests.

As we discussed when looking at the rising murder and violent crime rates, the increases are not homogeneous across the country. Much of the spike in those figures is being driven by the shockingly higher murder numbers in a dozen or so cities. What some analysts are now doing is matching up those hot spots with the locations of the aforementioned anti-police protests. The result? The Ferguson Effect is almost undoubtedly real….

Looking at the areas with steep increases in murder rates … , the dots pretty much connect themselves. It starts with the crime spikes in St. Louis, Baltimore and Chicago. Who is associated with those cities? Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and Laquan McDonald. The first two cities experienced actual riots. While Chicago didn’t get quite that far out of hand, there were weeks of protests and regular disruptions. The next thing they have in common is the local and federal response. Each area, rather than thanking their police for fighting an increasingly dangerous gang violence situation with limited resources, saw municipal leaders chastising the police for being “too aggressive” or using similar language. Then the federal government, under Barack Obama and his two Attorney Generals piled on, demanding long term reviews of the police forces in those cities with mandates to clean up the police departments.

Small wonder that under such circumstances, the cops tended to back off considerably from proactive policing, as Heather McDonald describes it. Tired of being blamed for problems and not wanting to risk a lawsuit or criminal charges for doing their jobs, cops became more cautious about when they would get out of the patrol vehicle at times. And the criminals clearly noticed, becoming more brazen.

The result of such a trend is what we’re seeing in the FBI report. Crime, which had been on the retreat since the crackdown which started in the nineties, is back on the rise.

It is well known that there is a strong, negative relationship between intelligence and crime; that is, crime is more prevalent among persons of low intelligence. This link has an obvious racial dimension. There’s the link between race and crime, and there’s the link between race and intelligence. It’s easy to connect the dots. Unless you’re a “liberal”, of course.

I was reminded of the latter link by two recent posts. One is a reissue by Jared Taylor, which is well worth a re-read, or a first read if it’s new to you. The other, by James Thompson, examines an issue that I took up here, namely the connection between geography and intelligence. Thompson’s essay is more comprehensive than mine. He writes:

[R]esearchers have usually looked at latitude as an indicator of geographic influences. Distance from the Equator is a good predictor of outcomes. Can one do better than this, and include other relevant measures to get a best-fit between human types and their regions of origin?… [T]he work to be considered below…. seeks to create a typology of biomes which may be related to intelligence.

(A biome is “a community of plants and animals that have common characteristics for the environment they exist in. They can be found over a range of continents. Biomes are distinct biological communities that have formed in response to a shared physical climate.”)

Thompson discusses and quotes from the work (slides here), and ends with this:

In summary, the argument that geography affects the development of humans and their civilizations need not be a bone of contention between hereditarian and environmentalist perspectives, so long as environmentalists are willing to agree that long-term habitation in a particular biome could lead to evolutionary changes over generations.

Environment affects heredity, which then (eventually) embodies environmental effects.

Returning to economics, about which I’ve written little of late, I note a post by Scott Winship, in which he addresses the declining labor-force participation rate:

Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) makes the argument that the decline in prime-age male labor is a demand-side issue that ought to be addressed through stimulative infrastructure spending, subsidized jobs, wage insurance, and generous safety-net programs. If the CEA is mistaken, however, then these expensive policies may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

The CEA is mistaken—the evidence suggests there has been no significant drop in demand, but rather a change in the labor supply driven by declining interest in work relative to other options.

  • There are several problems with the assumptions and measurements that the CEA uses to build its case for a demand-side explanation for the rise in inactive prime-age men.
  • In spite of conventional wisdom, the prospect for high-wage work for prime-age men has not declined much over time, and may even have improved.
  • Measures of discouraged workers, nonworkers marginally attached to the workforce, part-time workers who wish to work full-time, and prime-age men who have lost their job involuntarily have not risen over time.
  • The health status of prime-age men has not declined over time.
  • More Social Security Disability Insurance claims are being filed for difficult-to-assess conditions than previously.
  • Most inactive men live in households where someone receives government benefits that help to lessen the cost of inactivity.

Or, as I put it here, there is

the lure of incentives to refrain from work, namely, extended unemployment benefits, the relaxation of welfare rules, the aggressive distribution of food stamps, and “free” healthcare” for an expanded Medicaid enrollment base and 20-somethings who live in their parents’ basements.

An additional incentive — if adopted in the U.S. — would be a universal basic income (UBI) or basic income guarantee (BIG), which even some libertarians tout, in the naive belief that it would replace other forms of welfare. A recent post by Alberto Mingardi reminded me of UBI/BIG, and invoked Friedrich Hayek — as “libertarian” proponents of UBI/BIG are wont to do. I’ve had my say (here and here, for example). Here’s I said when I last wrote about it:

The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG), also known as Universal Basic Income (UBI), is the latest fool’s gold of “libertarian” thought. John Cochrane devotes too much time and blog space to the criticism and tweaking of the idea. David Henderson cuts to the chase by pointing out that even a “modest” BIG — $10,000 per adult American per year — would result in “a huge increase in federal spending, a huge increase in tax rates, and a huge increase in the deadweight loss from taxes.”

Aside from the fact that BIG would be a taxpayer-funded welfare program — to which I generally object — it would necessarily add to the already heavy burden on taxpayers, even though it is touted as a substitute for many (all?) extant welfare programs. The problem is that the various programs are aimed at specific recipients (e.g., women with dependent children, families with earned incomes below a certain level). As soon as a specific but “modest” proposal is seriously floated in Congress, various welfare constituencies will find that proposal wanting because their “entitlements” would shrink. A BIG bill would pass muster only if it allowed certain welfare programs to continue, in addition to BIG, or if the value of BIG were raised to a level that such that no welfare constituency would be a “loser.”

In sum, regardless of the aims of its proponents — who, ironically, tend to call themselves libertarians — BIG would lead to higher welfare spending and more enrollees in the welfare state.

-30-

Who’s Obsessing, Professor McWhorter?

Posted on by

A black scholar named John McWhorter has issued a demand to “Stop Obsessing Over Race and IQ” (National Review, July 5, 2017). McWhorter opens with this:

Suppose it’s true.

Suppose that, at the end of the day, people of African descent have lower IQs on average than do other groups of humans, and that this gap is caused, at least in part, by genetic differences….

There is, however, a question that those claiming black people are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs than others fail to answer: What, precisely, would we gain from discussing this particular issue?

In fact, Jared Taylor addressed McWhorter’s challenge nine years before McWhorter issued it. This is from Taylor’s “Egalitarian Orthodoxy: Noble Fiction — Or Noxious Poison?” (VDARE.com, June 24, 2008):

It is … the dogma of equality that makes … policy mischief, because it requires identical racial outcomes. The notorious No Child Left Behind Act brands schools as failures if they cannot close the achievement gap between blacks (and Hispanics) and whites (and Asians). Because not one of the approximately 90,000 public schools in the country has managed to do this, every “diverse” school in America would be declared a failure—if the government followed its own rules….

But there is much worse. The “noble fiction” of racial equality does terrible damage to race relations. According to the fiction, blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Asians are all equally smart and hard-working. They are precisely, mathematically, geometrically equal. Even the slightest deviation in outcomes has only one cause: white racism, past and present. (The fact that Asians do better than whites is conveniently omitted from this argument.)

This means we are constantly telling blacks that white people are cheating them. If blacks are not as rich as whites, if they are more likely that whites to be in jail or on drugs or have AIDS or be on welfare or get shot or knocked up, it is because vicious, systematic racism did it to them. They are responsible for none of it….

[A]ccording to the “noble fiction,” blacks are never allowed to grow up. If they lost the race it was only because they were cheated. We tell them that if they are behind as a group, it is never their responsibility. It is because—and only because—whitey hates them and holds them down. If our goal were to teach blacks to hate white people, it would be hard to think of a better way to do it (along, of course, with constant reminders of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow).

I have addressed the issue several times. In “Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action“, I say this of affirmative action and other efforts to force racial equality:

[B]lameless Americans have been burdened with equal employment opportunity (EEO), about which more below; minority lending preferences, which contributed to the Great Recession by encouraging mortgage loans to low-income borrowers; public-accommodations laws, a.k.a. theft of property rights and denial of freedom of association; the expansion of the welfare state, which led to welfare dependency, broken families, and crime; and the prosecution and persecution of politically incorrect views as “hate crimes” and “inappropriate” expressions of thought.

Of those burdens, I am most familiar with EEO (a.k.a. affirmative action) because I had to contend with its enforcement and consequences in my job as the chief financial and administrative officer of a private, federally funded, research organization….

Blacks constitute the identity group most likely to seek “protection” under the rubric of  EEO.  On balance, the (effectively) forced hiring of under-qualified blacks causes significant economic damage — as well as resentment of and condescension toward blacks as “affirmative action hires.”…

Reverse discrimination in favor of blacks has victimized millions of Americans, in at least three ways:

  • The aforementioned combination of resentment and condescension has undoubtedly impeded the advance of racial harmony.
  • Many whites have suffered the loss of opportunities and income in the workplace — opportunities and income that would have been theirs if blacks were held to the same standards as whites with respect to hiring and promotion.
  • Many blacks have suffered, in the not-so-long run, because reverse discrimination has set them up for failure.

In “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality” I give a lot of space to Richard Sander, who has shown that aspiring blacks are chief among the victims of the form of racial preferences. Five years ago, Sander was a guest blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy, where he posted thrice on the subject. In his first post, Sander writes:

As some readers will recall, a little more than seven years ago I published an analysis of law school affirmative action in the Stanford Law Review. The article was the first to present detailed data on the operation and effects of racial preferences in law schools (focusing on blacks).

I also laid out evidence suggesting that large preferences seemed to be worsening black outcomes. I argued that this was plausibly due to a “mismatch effect”; students receiving large preferences (for whatever reason) were likely to find themselves in academic environments where they had to struggle just to keep up; professor instruction would typically be aimed at the “median” student, so students with weaker academic preparation would tend to fall behind, and, even if they did not become discouraged and give up, would tend to learn less than they would have learned in an environment where their level of academic preparation was closer to the class median.

I suggested that the “mismatch effect” could explain as much as half of the black-white gap in first-time bar passage rates (the full gap is thirty to forty percentage points). I also suggested that “mismatch” might so worsen black outcomes that, on net, contemporary affirmative action was not adding to the total number of black lawyers, and might even be lowering the total number of new, licensed black attorneys.

This is from Sander’s second post:

Some of the most significant recent work on affirmative action concerns a phenomenon called “science mismatch”. The idea behind science mismatch is very intuitive: if you are a high school senior interested in becoming, for example, a chemist, you may seriously harm your chances of success by attending a school where most of the other would-be chemists have stronger academic preparation than you do. Professors will tend to pitch their class at the median student, not you; and if you struggle or fall behind in the first semester of inorganic chemistry, you will be in even worse shape in the second semester, and in very serious trouble when you hit organic chemistry. You are likely to get bad grades and to either transfer out of chemistry or fail to graduate altogether….

Duke economists Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo, and Ken Spenner last year completed a study that looked at a number of ways that differences in admissions standards at Duke affected academic outcomes. In one of many useful analyses they did, they found that 54% of black men at Duke who, as freshmen, had been interested in STEM fields or economics, had switched out of those fields before graduation; the comparative rate for white men was 8%. Importantly, they found that “these cross-race differences in switching patterns can be fully explained by differences in academic background.” In other words, preferences – not race – was the culprit.

In research conducted by FTC economist Marc Luppino and me, using data from the University of California, we have found important peer effects and mismatch effects that affect students of all races; our results show that one’s chances of completing a science degree fall sharply, at a given level of academic preparation, as one attends more and more elite schools within the UC system. At Berkeley, there is a seven-fold difference in STEM degree completion between students with high and low pre-college credentials.

As is always the case with affirmative action, ironies abound. Although young blacks are about one-seventh as likely as young whites to eventually earn a Ph.D. in STEM fields, academically strong blacks in high school are more likely than similar whites to aspire to science careers. And although a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report in 2010 documented the “science mismatch” phenomenon in some detail, President Obama’s new initiative to improve the nation’s production of scientists neither recognizes nor addresses mismatch….

Science mismatch is, of course, relevant to the general affirmative action debate in showing that preferences can boomerang on their intended beneficiaries. But it also has a special relevance to Fisher v. University of Texas. The university’s main announced purpose in reintroducing racial preferences in 2004 was to increase “classroom” diversity. The university contended that, even though over a fifth of its undergraduates were black or Hispanic, many classrooms had no underrepresented minorities. It sought to use direct (and very large) racial preferences to increase campus URM numbers and thus increase the number of URMs in classes that lacked them. But science mismatch shows that this strategy, too, can be self-defeating. The larger a university’s preferences, the more likely it is that preferenced students will have trouble competing in STEM fields and other majors that are demanding and grade sternly. These students will tend to drop out of the tough fields and congregate in comparatively less demanding ones. Large preferences, in other words, can increase racial segregation across majors and courses within a university, and thus hurt classroom diversity.

And this is from Sander’s third post:

[In the previous post] I discussed a body of research – all of it uncontroverted – that documents a serious flaw in affirmative action programs pursued by elite colleges. Students who receive large preferences and arrive on campus hoping to major in STEM fields (e.g., Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) tend to migrate out of those fields at very high rates, or, if they remain in those fields, often either fail to graduate or graduate with very low GPAs. There is thus a strong tension between receiving a large admissions preference to a more elite school, and one’s ability to pursue a STEM career.

Is it possible for contemporary American universities to engage constructively with this type of research? …

Colleges and universities are committed to the mythology that diversity happens merely because they want it and put resources into it, and that all admitted students arrive with all the prerequisites necessary to flourish in any way they choose. Administrators work hard to conceal the actual differences in academic preparation that almost invariably accompany the aggressive use of preferences. Any research that documents the operation and effects of affirmative action therefore violates this “color-blind” mythology and accompanying norms; minority students are upset, correctly realizing that either the research is wrong or that administrators have misled them. In this scenario, administrators invariably resort to the same strategy: dismiss the research without actually lying about it; reassure the students that the researchers are misguided, but that the university can’t actually punish the researchers because of “academic freedom”….

Affirmative action and similar race-based preferences are harmful to blacks. But those preferences persist because most Americans do not understand that there are inherent racial differences that prevent blacks, on the whole, from doing as well as whites (and Asians) in school and in jobs that require above-average intelligence. But magical thinkers (like McWhorter) want to deny reality. He admits to being driven by hope: “I have always hoped the black–white IQ gap was due to environmental causes.” And this hope clearly colors his entire essay.

Magical thinking — which is rife on the left — plays into the hands of politicians, most of whom couldn’t care less about the truth. They just want the votes of those blacks who relish being told, time and again, that they are “down” because they are “victims”, and Big Daddy government will come to their rescue. But unless you are the unusual black of above-average intelligence, or the more usual black who has exceptional athletic skills, dependence on Big Daddy is self-defeating because (like a drug addiction) it only leads to more of the same. The destructive cycle of dependency can be broken only by willful resistance to the junk being peddled by cynical politicians.

It is for the sake of blacks that the truth about race and intelligence ought to be pursued — and widely publicized. If they read and hear the truth often enough, perhaps they will begin to realize that the best way to better themselves is to make the best of available opportunities instead of moaning abut racism and relying on preferences and handouts.

This advice is far from new, and it has been given by prominent blacks — who, for their candor, have been vilified. But that is no reason to deny the truth or cease to pursue it.

Related reading: Steve Sailer, “NYT: ‘Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago’“, The Unz Review, August 24, 2017

Related posts:
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Conversing” about Race
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost
The IQ of Nations
Race and Social Engineering

“Science” vs. Science: The Case of Evolution, Race, and Intelligence

Posted on by

If you were to ask those people who marched for science if they believe in evolution, they would have answered with a resounding “yes”. Ask them if they believe that all branches of the human race evolved identically and you will be met with hostility. The problem, for them, is that an admission of the obvious — differential evolution, resulting in broad racial differences — leads to a fact that they don’t want to admit: there are broad racial differences in intelligence, differences that must have evolutionary origins.

“Science” — the cherished totem of left-wing ideologues — isn’t the same thing as science. The totemized version consists of whatever set of facts and hypotheses suit the left’s agenda. In the case of “climate change”, for example, the observation that in the late 1900s temperatures rose for a period of about 25 years coincident with a reported rise in the level of atmospheric CO2 occasioned the hypothesis that the generation of CO2 by humans causes temperatures to rise. This is a reasonable hypothesis, given the long-understood, positive relationship between temperature and so-called greenhouse gases. But it comes nowhere close to confirming what leftists seem bent on believing and “proving” with hand-tweaked models, which is that if humans continue to emit CO2, and do so at a higher rate than in the past, temperatures will rise to the point that life on Earth will become difficult if not impossible to sustain. There is ample evidence to support the null hypothesis (that “climate change” isn’t catastrophic) and the alternative view (that recent warming is natural and caused mainly by things other than human activity).

Leftists want to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming because it suits the left’s puritanical agenda, as did Paul Ehrlich’s discredited thesis that population growth would outstrip the availability of food and resources, leading to mass starvation and greater poverty. Population control therefore became a leftist mantra, and remains one despite the generally rising prosperity of the human race and the diminution of scarcity (except where leftist governments, like Venezuela’s, create misery).

Why are leftists so eager to believe in problems that portend catastrophic consequences which “must” be averted through draconian measures, such as enforced population control, taxes on soft drinks above a certain size, the prohibition of smoking not only in government buildings but in all buildings, and decreed reductions in CO2-emitting activities (which would, in fact, help to impoverish humans)? The common denominator of such measures is control. And yet, by the process of psychological projection, leftists are always screaming “fascist” at libertarians and conservatives who resist control.

Returning to evolution, why are leftists so eager to eager to embrace it or, rather, what they choose to believe about it? My answers are that (a) it’s “science” (it’s only science when it’s spelled out in detail, uncertainties and all) and (b) it gives leftists (who usually are atheists) a stick with which to beat “creationists”.

But when it comes to race, leftists insist on denying what’s in front of their eyes: evolutionary disparities in such phenomena as skin color, hair texture, facial structure, running and jumping ability, cranial capacity, and intelligence.

Why? Because the urge to control others is of a piece with the superiority with which leftists believe they’re endowed because they are mainly white persons of European descent and above-average intelligence (just smart enough to be dangerous). Blacks and Hispanics who vote left do so mainly for the privileges it brings them. White leftists are their useful idiots.

Leftism, in other words, is a manifestation of “white privilege”, which white leftists feel compelled to overcome through paternalistic condescension toward blacks and other persons of color. (But not East Asians or the South Asians who have emigrated to the U.S., because the high intelligence of those groups is threatening to white leftists’ feelings of superiority.) What could be more condescending, and less scientific, than to deny what evolution has wrought in order to advance a political agenda?

Leftist race-denial, which has found its way into government policy, is akin to Stalin’s support of Lysenkoism, which its author cleverly aligned with Marxism. Lysenkoism

rejected Mendelian inheritance and the concept of the “gene”; it departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection.

This brings me to Stephen Jay Gould, a leading neo-Lysenkoist and a fraudster of “science” who did much to deflect science from the question of race and intelligence:

[In The Mismeasure of Man] Gould took the work of a 19th century physical anthropologist named Samuel George Morton and made it ridiculous. In his telling, Morton was a fool and an unconscious racist — his project of measuring skull sizes of different ethnic groups conceived in racism and executed in same. Why, Morton clearly must have thought Caucasians had bigger brains than Africans, Indians, and Asians, and then subconsciously mismeasured the skulls to prove they were smarter.

The book then casts the entire project of measuring brain function — psychometrics — in the same light of primitivism.

Gould’s antiracist book was a hit with reviewers in the popular press, and many of its ideas about the morality and validity of testing intelligence became conventional wisdom, persisting today among the educated folks. If you’ve got some notion that IQ doesn’t measure anything but the ability to take IQ tests, that intelligence can’t be defined or may not be real at all, that multiple intelligences exist rather than a general intelligence, you can thank Gould….

Then, in 2011, a funny thing happened. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania went and measured old Morton’s skulls, which turned out to be just the size he had recorded. Gould, according to one of the co-authors, was nothing but a “charlatan.”

The study itself couldn’t matter, though, could it? Well, recent work using MRI technology has established that descendants of East Asia have slightly more cranial capacity than descendants of Europe, who in turn have a little more than descendants of Africa. Another meta-analysis finds a mild correlation between brain size and IQ performance.

You see where this is going, especially if you already know about the racial disparities in IQ testing, and you’d probably like to hit the brakes before anybody says… what, exactly? It sounds like we’re perilously close to invoking science to argue for genetic racial superiority.

Am I serious? Is this a joke?…

… The reason the joke feels dangerous is that it incorporates a fact that is rarely mentioned in public life. In America, white people on average score higher than black people on IQ tests, by a margin of 12-15 points. And there’s one man who has been made to pay the price for that fact — the scholar Charles Murray.

Murray didn’t come up with a hypothesis of racial disparity in intelligence testing. He simply co-wrote a book, The Bell Curve, that publicized a fact well known within the field of psychometrics, a fact that makes the rest of us feel tremendously uncomfortable.

Nobody bears more responsibility for the misunderstanding of Murray’s work than Gould, who reviewed The Bell Curve savagely in the New Yorker. The IQ tests couldn’t be explained away — here he is acknowledging the IQ gap in 1995 — but the validity of IQ testing could be challenged. That was no trouble for the old Marxist.

Gould should have known that he was dead wrong about his central claim — that general intelligence, or g, as psychologists call it, was unreal. In fact, “Psychologists generally agree that the greatest success of their field has been in intelligence testing,” biologist Bernard D. Davis wrote in the Public Interest in 1983, in a long excoriation of Gould’s strange ideas.

Psychologists have found that performance on almost any test of cognition will have some correlation to other tests of cognition, even in areas that might seem distant from pure logic, such as recognizing musical notes. The more demanding tests have a higher correlation, or a high g load, as they term it.

IQ is very closely related to this measure, and turns out to be extraordinarily predictive not just for how well one does on tests, but on all sorts of real-life outcomes.

Since the publication of The Bell Curve, the data have demonstrated not just those points, but that intelligence is highly heritable (around 50 to 80 percent, Murray says), and that there’s little that can be done to permanently change the part that’s dependent on the environment….

The liberal explainer website Vox took a swing at Murray earlier this year, publishing a rambling 3,300-word hit job on Murray that made zero references to the scientific literature….

Vox might have gotten the last word, but a new outlet called Quillette published a first-rate rebuttal this week, which sent me down a three-day rabbit hole. I came across some of the most troubling facts I’ve ever encountered — IQ scores by country — and then came across some more reassuring ones from Thomas Sowell, suggesting that environment could be the main or exclusive factor after all.

The classic analogy from the environment-only crowd is of two handfuls of genetically identical seed corn, one planted in Iowa and the other in the Mojave Desert. One group flourishes; the other is stunted. While all of the variation within one group will be due to genetics, its flourishing relative to the other group will be strictly due to environment.

Nobody doubts that the United States is richer soil than Equatorial Guinea, but the analogy doesn’t prove the case. The idea that there exists a mean for human intelligence and that all racial subgroups would share it given identical environments remains a metaphysical proposition. We may want this to be true quite desperately, but it’s not something we know to be true.

For all the lines of attack, all the brutal slander thrown Murray’s way, his real crime is having an opinion on this one key issue that’s open to debate. Is there a genetic influence on the IQ testing gap? Murray has written that it’s “likely” genetics explains “some” of the difference. For this, he’s been crucified….

Murray said [in a recent interview] that the assumption “that everyone is equal above the neck” is written into social policy, employment policy, academic policy and more.

He’s right, of course, especially as ideas like “disparate impact” come to be taken as proof of discrimination. There’s no scientifically valid reason to expect different ethnic groups to have a particular representation in this area or that. That much is utterly clear.

The universities, however, are going to keep hollering about institutional racism. They are not going to accept Murray’s views, no matter what develops. [Jon Cassidy, “Mau Mau Redux: Charles Murray Comes in for Abuse, Again“, The American Spectator, June 9, 2017]

And so it goes in the brave new world of alternative facts, most of which seem to come from the left. But the left, with its penchant for pseudo-intellectualism (“science” vs. science) calls it postmodernism:

Postmodernists … eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials rather than anything that could possibly be mutually agreed upon…. [S]cience therefore becomes an instrument of Western oppression; indeed, all discourse is a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. In this scheme, there is no Western civilization to preserve—as the more powerful force in the world, it automatically takes on the role of oppressor and therefore any form of equity must consequently then involve the overthrow of Western “hegemony.” These folks form the current Far Left, including those who would be described as communists, socialists, anarchists, Antifa, as well as social justice warriors (SJWs). These are all very different groups, but they all share a postmodernist ethos. [Michael Aaron, “Evergreen State and the Battle for Modernity“, Quillette, June 8, 2017]

Other related reading (listed chronologically):

Molly Hensley-Clancy, “Asians With “Very Familiar Profiles”: How Princeton’s Admissions Officers Talk About Race“, BuzzFeed News, May 19, 2017

Warren Meyer, “Princeton Appears To Penalize Minority Candidates for Not Obsessing About Their Race“, Coyote Blog, May 24, 2017

B. Wineguard et al., “Getting Voxed: Charles Murray, Ideology, and the Science of IQ“, Quillette, June 2, 2017

James Thompson, “Genetics of Racial Differences in Intelligence: Updated“, The Unz Review: James Thompson Archive, June 5, 2017

Raymond Wolters, “We Are Living in a New Dark Age“, American Renaissance, June 5, 2017

F. Roger Devlin, “A Tactical Retreat for Race Denial“, American Renaissance, June 9, 2017

Scott Johnson, “Mugging Mr. Murray: Mr. Murray Speaks“, Power Line, June 9, 2017

Related posts:
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Conversing” about Race
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost
The IQ of Nations
Race and Social Engineering
Some Notes about Psychology and Intelligence

More about Intelligence

Posted on by

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

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

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People to some extent make their own environments….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

Related posts:
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Conversing” about Race
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Round Up the Usual Suspects
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost
The IQ of Nations
Race and Social Engineering

Race and Social Engineering

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *

Related posts:
Race and Reason: The Derbyshire Debacle
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Conversing” about Race
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race
Affirmative Action Comes Home to Roost
The IQ of Nations
Liberty and Social Norms Re-examined

The IQ of Nations

Posted on by

UPDATED 07/02/18

In a twelve-year-old post, “The Main Causes of Prosperity,” I drew on statistics (sourced and described in the post) to find a statistically significant relationship between a nation’s real, per-capita GDP and three variables:

Y =  – 23,518 + 2,316L – 259T  + 253I

Where,
Y = GDP in 1998 dollars (U.S.)
L = Index for rule of law
T = Index for mean tariff rate
I = Verbal IQ

The r-squared of the regression equation is 0.89 and the p-values for the intercept and independent variables are 8.52E-07, 4.70E-10, 1.72E-04, and 3.96E-05.

The effect of IQ, by itself, is strong enough to merit a place of honor:

per-capita-gdp-and-average-verbal-iq

Another relationship struck me when I revisited the IQ numbers. There seems to be a strong correlation between IQ and distance from the equator. That correlation, however, may be an artifact of the strong (negative) correlation between blackness and IQ: The countries whose citizens are predominantly black are generally closer to the equator than the countries whose citizens are predominantly of other races.

Because of the strong (negative) correlation between blackness and IQ, and the geographic grouping of predominantly black countries, it’s not possible to find a statistically significant regression equation that accounts for national IQ as a function of the distance of nations from the equator and their dominant racial composition.

The most significant regression equation omits distance from the equator and admits race:

I = 84.0 – 13.2B + 12.4W + 20.7EA

Where,
I = national average IQ
B = predominantly black
W = predominantly white (i.e., residents are European or of European origin)
EA = East Asian (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, which is largely populated by persons of Chinese descent)

The r-squared of the equation is 0.78 and the p-values of the intercept and coefficients are all less than 1E-17. The F-value of the equation is 8.24E-51. The standard error of the estimate is 5.6, which means that the 95-percent confidence interval is plus or minus 11 — a smaller number than any of the coefficients.

The intercept applies to all “other” countries that aren’t predominantly black, white, or East Asian in their racial composition. There are 66 such countries in the sample, which comprises 159 countries. The 66 “other” countries span the Middle East; North Africa; South Asia; Southeast Asia; island-states in Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans; and most of the nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean. Despite the range of racial and ethnic mixtures in those 66 countries, their average IQs cluster fairly tightly around 84. By the same token, there’s a definite clustering of the black countries around 71 (84.0 – 13.2), of the white countries around 96 (84.0 + 12.4), and of the East Asian countries around 105 (84.0 + 20.7).

Thus this graph, where each “row” (from bottom to top) corresponds to black, “other,” white, and East Asian:

estimated-vs-actual-iq

The dotted line represents a perfect correlation. The regression yields a less-than-perfect relationship between race and IQ, but a strong one. That strong relationship is also seen in the following graph:

iq-vs-distance-from-the-equator

There’s a definite pattern — if a somewhat loose one — that goes from low-IQ black countries near the equator to higher IQ white countries farther from the equator. The position  of East Asian countries, which is toward the middle latitudes rather than the highest ones, points to something special in the relationship between East Asian genetic heritage and IQ.

My analysis strongly implies that IQ varies by race and is therefore strongly heritable. This is a point that I cover in several of the posts listed below. A long-standing, and fatuous, objection to that position is that race is a “social construct”. I address that point in “The Balderdash Chronicles“. Gregory Cochran has addressed it often, and most recently in a review of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer.

Related posts:
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications
“Conversing” about Race
Evolution and Race
“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ
Evolution, Culture, and “Diversity”
The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality
Let’s Have That “Conversation” about Race

Immigration and Intelligence

Posted on by

REVISED 11/18/16

I haven’t written about intelligence since April 18, 2015 (here, third item). What’s on my mind now? This:

1. Immigrants to the U.S. are overwhelmingly poor and possibly (but not necessarily) below-average in intelligence.

2. The availability of immigrants seeking employment is a boon to entrepreneurs. Investments in capital (often modest ones such as lawn mowers and chain saws) can be turned into gainful employment for immigrants and profits for entrepreneurs.

3. The employment of immigrants is also a boon to American consumers, who are able to obtain some things more cheaply and some things that they might otherwise not be able to afford (e.g., fresh fruit, maid services, yard work).

4. Consumers should be indifferent about the origin of the labor that benefits them.

5. Taxpayers should care about the origin of labor only to the extent that immigration drives up the taxes because of state support for immigrants (e.g., schooling, medical care, welfare programs where citizenship isn’t a prerequisite).

6. Each taxpayer is also a consumer, and each taxpayer is therefore in a different position with respect to the net benefits (or costs) of immigration. But every consumer-citizen is likely to benefit to some degree because of immigration, though the benefit may not offset the rise in every consumer-citizen’s taxes.

7. Low-skilled Americans who have opted for the dole have no stake in the matter of immigration. If some low-skilled Americans lose jobs that they might otherwise have held, they aren’t “losers” any more than the wagon-makers who lost their jobs when automobiles come along. Voluntary economic change doesn’t have winners and losers — it takes arbitrary government interventions (e.g., minimum-wage laws) to create them.

8. Yes, government allows immigration, but the original intervention that created winners and losers is the one that restrained immigration. If it’s all right for a piece of fruit to move from Mexico to Texas, why isn’t it all right for a worker to move from Mexico to Texas? If it’s all right for a Californian to move to Texas, it is definitely all right for a Mexican to move to Texas.

9. So the only question is whether immigration imposes net costs on some consumers who are also taxpayers. And it’s an issue only because of government programs that allow immigrants to impose costs on taxpayers.

10. The real issue, for me, isn’t immigration, it’s government interventions that may encourage immigration (at a rate higher than the “natural” one) and subsidize immigrants. As usual, government is the problem, not the solution.

What does this have to do with intelligence? This post was spurred by a recent one at West Hunter by Gregory Cochran, “Our Dumb World.” Cochran’s post, combined with another one of his to which he links, can be read as follows:

  • There’s a strong link between the average IQ of a nation and its economic success. (True.)
  • Some things have skewed the relationship (e.g., the imposition of Communism), but the link is there nonetheless.
  • Mass migration from low-IQ countries (presumably Mexico and other Central American nations) to a country with a higher average IQ (e.g., the United States) will reduce the average IQ of the receiving country and therefore harm it economically.

I don’t buy it. For one thing, immigration — even immigration by low-skilled workers with (perhaps) below-average intelligence — can be a boon to the residents of the receiving country, as discussed above. For another thing:

Low-IQ immigrants do not reduce the productivity of high-IQ natives – any more than short immigrants reduce the height of tall natives. (See here for further discussion).

To repeat myself, the real issue is whether government action causes immigrants to impose burdens on natives that wouldn’t be imposed in the absence of government action. And to be clear, government action is any action that results in a rate of immigration which is higher or lower than would occur in the absence of that action (e.g., immigration quotas, implicit or explicit promises of government aid to indigent immigrants).

What about the political and cultural effects of massive immigration from south of the border? I am at the point of declaring that it doesn’t matter. The welfare state is so firmly entrenched in America that I really don’t expect it to be uprooted, except by non-electoral means. Mass culture is already so degenerate that it’s hard to see what could make it worse. And I have no reason to believe that, in general, Hispanics are more vulgar than American Anglos. (Just look at the prime-time TV lineup.) Those of us who prefer high culture can enjoy it without mingling with the hoi polloi.

I have been for years an opponent of illegal immigration. I was on the verge of changing my mind — something of which I am capable. But I’m not ready to do that. My main reservation now has to do with the effect of mass immigration on crime, which argues strongly against immigration from south of the border.

Quick Hits

Posted on by

There’s work underway to

find any of the genetic variants associated with intelligence, however weak and inconsistent they may be, and then look up the published literature to see how frequent those variants are in any racial group.

I’m fairly certain how it will turn out, if the work isn’t sabotaged by those who fear the truth.

Academe’s war on conservatism continues. What else is new?

There’s also a (not new) internet-based war on conservatism (e.g., here and here). Cass Sunstein, a leading light of the anti-free speech forces, was Obama’s regulatory czar. Connect the dots.

Robert Higgs hates the use of “we,” “us,” and “our” in policy discourse. So do I.

Steven Horwitz offers a concise and elegant gloss of Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” I’ve addressed Hayek’s essay here, and a related one (“The Pretence of Knowledge“) here.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (X)

Posted on by

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.”

“Wading” into Race, Culture, and IQ

Posted on by

Below, I offer a list of readings on the subject of (or closely related to) Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. These readings supplement and generally buttress the points that I make in “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications” and “Evolution and Race.”

Steve Sailer, “2008 SAT Scores by Race and Income,” Steve Sailer: iSteve, March 15, 2014

Charles Murray, “Book Review: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ by Nicholas Wade,” WSJ.com, May 2, 2014

Arnold Kling, “Heritability of Social Status,” Library of Economics and Liberty, May 5, 2014

Alfred W. Clark, “Roundup of Book Reviews of Nicholas Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance,” Occam’s Razor, May 6, 2014

Robert VerBruggen, “Race Is Real. What Does That Mean for Society?,” RealClearScience, May 6, 2014

Steve Sailer, “The Race FAQ,” Steve Sailer: iSteve, May 6, 2014

Steve Sailer, “Gelman on ‘A Troublesome Inheritance in Slate,” Steve Sailer: iSteve, May 8, 2014

Steve Sailer, “From the Steveosphere on ‘A Troublesome Inheritance,” Steve Sailer: iSteve, May 8, 2014

Ashutosh Jogelekar, “Genes and Race: The Distant Footfalls of Evidence,” Scientific American, May 13, 2014*

James Thompson, “‘It’s the People Stupid’: A Review of Wade’s ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’,” Psychological Comments, May 14, 2014

Fred Reed, “‘A Troublesome Inheritance’: Wading in the Zeitgeist,” Fred on Everything, May 17, 2014

Greg Allmain and Wesley Morganston, “Gene Appears to Increase IQ and Memory,” Theden, May 22, 2014

Steven Malanga, “A Biological Basis for Race?,” City Journal, June 6, 2014

__________
Scientific American chastised Jogelekar for his politically incorrect views, and then fired him. How “scientific”!

IQ, Political Correctness, and America’s Present Condition

Posted on by

This is a wandering post, in which I use a recent controversy about IQ to make some observations about political correctness, which leads to a tale of leftist subversion and America’s descent into statism.

Since my last post about IQ, more than a year ago, the biggest kerfuffle on the IQ front arose when Jason Richwine was chased from his job at Heritage Foundation. The proximate cause of Richwine’s departure from Heritage was the usual kind of witch hunt that accompanies the discovery of anything coming from a conservative source that might offend political correctness. Richwine was “guilty” of having penned a dissertation that contains unremarkable statements about ethnic differences in average IQ, including the IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.

These are excerpts of John Derbyshire’s narration of l’affaire Richwine as it unfolded:

… Following the release of a report by the Heritage Foundation arguing that the Rubio-Schumer immigration bill will cost the nation $6.3 trillion, the Slave Power set their dwarf miners to digging.

They soon found gold. One of the co-authors of the study is twentysomething Jason Richwine, a Heritage analyst. Not just an analyst, but a quantitative analyst: “Heritage’s senior policy analyst in empirical studies.” …

After a few days’ digging the Nibelungs turned up Richwine’s Ph.D. thesis from Harvard University, title: “IQ and Immigration Policy.” The mother lode! (You can download it from here.)

The Washington Post ran a gleeful story on the find under the headline “Heritage study co-author opposed letting in immigrants with low IQs.” [By Dylan Matthews, May 8, 2013]. They note that:

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races.

Eek! A witch! …

Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, on secondment from Conservatism, Inc. to offer some pretense of “balance” at the Post, hastened to join the lynch mob. “It undermines the cause of all immigration opponents to have their prized work authored by such a character,” she wrote, reading Richwine out of respectable society….

She then brings in Jennifer S. Korn for a quote. Ms. Korn was Secretary for Hispandering in the George W. Bush White House….

What does Ms. Korn have to tell us?

Richwine’s comments are bigoted and ignorant. America is a nation of immigrants; to impugn the intelligence of immigrants is to offend each and every American and the foundation of our country….

Even if you take Ms. Korn’s usage of “impugn” to mean Richwine has stated that immigrants have lower mean IQ than natives, she is wrong. Table 2.2 in the thesis (p. 30) gives an average estimated mean IQ of 105.5 for immigrants from Northeast Asia….

And so another “anti-racist” witch hunt commences….

The forces of orthodoxy have identified a heretic. They’re marching on his hut with pitchforks and flaming brands. The cry echoes around the internet: “Burn the witch!” … (“‘Burn the Witch’: Heritage Foundation Scuttles Away from Jason Richwine–and the Cold, Hard Facts,” VDare.com, May 9, 2013)

The impetus for politically correct witch-hunting comes from the left, of course. This is unsurprising because leftists, on average, are dumber than conservatives and libertarians. (See this and this, for example.) Which would explain their haste to take offense when the subject of IQ is raised.

But facts are facts, and Richwine summarizes them neatly in a recent (post-Heritage) essay; for example:

The American Psychological Association (APA) tried to set the record straight in 1996 with a report written by a committee of experts. Among the specific conclusions drawn by the APA were that IQ tests reliably measure a real human trait, that ethnic differences in average IQ exist, that good tests of IQ are not culturally biased against minority groups, and that IQ is a product of both genetic inheritance and early childhood environment. Another report signed by 52 experts, entitled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” stated similar facts and was printed in the Wall Street Journal. (“Why Can’t We Talk about IQ?,” Politico, August 9, 2013)

Richwine continues:

[W]hen Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, speculated in 2005 that women might be naturally less gifted in math and science, the intense backlash contributed to his ouster.Two years later, when famed scientist James Watson noted the low average IQ scores of sub-Saharan Africans, he was forced to resign from his lab, taking his Nobel Prize with him.

When a Harvard law student was discovered in 2010 to have suggested in a private email that the black-white IQ gap might have a genetic component, the dean publicly condemned her amid a campus-wide outcry. Only profuse apologies seem to have saved her career.

In none of these cases did an appeal to science tamp down the controversy or help to prevent future ones. My own time in the media crosshairs would be no different.

So what did I write that created such a fuss? In brief, my dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on a variety of cognitive tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive deficit rather than to culture or language bias. It analyzes how that deficit could affect socioeconomic assimilation, and concludes by exploring how IQ selection might be incorporated, as one factor among many, into immigration policy.

Because a large number of recent immigrants are from Latin America, I reviewed the literature showing that Hispanic IQ scores fall between white and black scores in the United States. This fact isn’t controversial among experts, but citing it seems to have fueled much of the media backlash.

Derbyshire follows up:

Jason, who can hardly be more than thirty, has not yet grasped an important thing about humanity at large: that most of our thinking is magical, superstitious, religious, social, and egotistical. Very little of it is empirical. I myself am as stone-cold an empiricist as you’ll meet in a month of Sundays; yet every day when I walk my dog there is a certain tree I have to pat as we pass it. (It’s on the wrong side of the road. The family joke is that I shall one day be hit by a truck while crossing the road to pat my lucky tree.)

Hence Jason’s puzzlement that 25 years after Snyderman and Rothman, 19 years after The Bell Curve and the follow-up “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” declaration, the public discourse even in quality outlets is dominated by innumerate journo-school graduates parroting half-remembered half-truths from Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, the greatest work of Cultural Marxist propaganda yet produced.

That’s how we are. That’s the shape of human nature. Alan Cromer explained it in his 1993 book Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science. Not many people can think empirically much of the time. At the aggregate level, where the lowest common denominator takes over and social acceptance is at the front of everyone’s mind, empiricism doesn’t stand a chance unless it delivers some useful technology.

Nor is it quite the case that “emotion trumps reason.” What mostly trumps reason is the yearning for respectability, leading us to conform to ambient dogmas—in the present-day West, the dogmas of Cultural Marxism, which waft around us like a noxious vapor….

This is how we are: jumbles of superstition, emotion, self-deception, and social conformism, with reason and science trotting along behind trying to keep up.

Science insists that there is an external world beyond our emotions and wish-fulfillment fantasies. It claims that we can find out true facts about that world, including facts with no immediate technological application. The human sciences insist even more audaciously that we ourselves are part of that world and can be described as dispassionately as stars, rocks, and microbes. Perhaps one day it will be socially acceptable to believe this. (“Why We Can’t Talk about IQ,” Taki’s Magazine, August 15, 2013)

Much has been made of the “bland” 1950s and the supposed pressure to conform to the Ozzie and Harriett way of life. Though i was never clear about the preferred alternative. On the evidence of the past 50 years, it seems to have been a potent mix of blue language, promiscuous sex, sodomy, broken families, drugs, violence, and ear-blasting “music.”

The true forces of conformity had begun their work many years before Ricky Nelson was a gleam in his father’s eye. There was, of course, the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, from which America was beginning to recover by the late 1920s.. But then came the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the establishment in America of a fifth column dedicated to the suppression of liberty:

As recounted in [KGB: The Inside Story by KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky and Cambridge intelligence expert Christopher Andrew]  … Harry Hopkins — FDR’s confidant, advisor, and policy czar, who actually resided in the White House during World War II — was the Big Enchilada among American agents of influence working for the USSR. Gordievsky recounts attending a lecture early in his career by Iskhak Akhmerov, the KGB’s top “illegal” spy in the U.S. during the 1940s (In espionage parlance, “illegals” do not have legal cover if caught). According to Gordievsky, Akhmerov spoke for a long period about Hopkins, calling him the top Soviet asset in the US. Yet, Gordievsky and Andrew tiptoe around this allegation by representing that Hopkins was a naïve devotee who only courted Stalin to ensure victory over Hitler’s Germany.

Although I know Andrew well, and have met Gordievsky twice, I now doubt their characterization of Hopkins…. It does not ring true that Hopkins was an innocent dupe dedicated solely to defeating the Nazis. Hopkins comes over in history as crafty, secretive and no one’s fool, hardly the personality traits of a naïve fellow traveler. And his fingerprints are on the large majority of pro-Soviet policies implemented by the Roosevelt administration. [Diana] West [author of American Betrayal: Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character] deserves respect for cutting through the dross that obscures the evidence about Hopkins, and for screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. was the victim of a successful Soviet intelligence operation….

West mines Venona, the testimony of “Red spy queen” Elizabeth Bentley — who confessed her work for the communist underground to the FBI in 1945 — and the book Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans, a re-examination of the McCarthy era using Venona and hundreds of other recently declassified documents from the FBI, CIA, and other agencies. And West lambastes the Truman administration for not revealing data from Venona that would have exonerated McCarthy and informed the nation that Soviet agents had indeed infiltrated key departments of the FDR administration….

The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Laurence Duggan, and 397 more American agents have been confirmed and verified as Soviet agents. West claims Harry Hopkins has been outed too in Venona, but Radosh and other scholars say this identification is bogus. But the Soviets also ran important agents of influence with great attention to the security of their identities. In essence, whether or not Hopkins is ever identified in Venona, he remains, as the cops say, a person of interest. (Bernie Reeves, “Reds under the Beds: Diana West Can’t Sleep,” American Thinker, August 10, 2013)

Influence flows downhill. What happened in Washington was repeated in many a city and State because the New Deal had made leftism respectable. By the end of World War II, which made nationalization the norm, the “mainstream” had shifted far to the left of where it had flowed before the Great Depression.

Influence also flows laterally. The growing respectability of leftism emboldened and empowered those institutions that naturally lean left: the media, academia, and the arts and letters. And so they went forth into the wilderness, amplifying the gospel according to Marx.

The most insidious influence has been the indoctrination of students — from pre-Kindergarten to graduate school — in the language and ideals of leftism: world government (i.e., anit-Americanism); redistributionism (as long as it hits only the “rich,” of course); favoritism for “minorities” (i.e., everyone but straight, white males); cultural diversity (any kind of crap in the arts, music, and literature, as long as it wasn’t produced by dead, white mailes); moral relativism (e.g., anti-feminism is bad, unless it’s practiced by Muslims). All of that, and much more, is the stuff of political correctness, which is an especially corrosive manifestation of social conformism, as Jason Richwine learned the hard way.

And then came the “pod people.” These are the masses of “ordinary people” who may have been deaf or impervious to indoctrination by teachers and professors, but who in vast numbers were (and continue to be) seduced by into collaboration with the left by years and decades of post-educational exposure to leftist cant. Seduced by slanted opinionators — usually disguised as reporters. Seduced by novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, and other denizens of the world of arts and letters. Seduced by politicians (even “conservative” ones) trading “free lunches” and “local jobs” for votes.

It is more than a small wonder that there is such a sizable remnant of true conservatives and non-leftish libertarians (unlike this leftish one). But we are vastly outnumbered by staunch leftists, wishy-washy “moderates,” and “conservatives” whose first instinct is to defend sacred cows (Social Security and Medicare, for example) instead of defending liberty.

I will have more to say, in future posts, about the subversion of “Old America.” For now, I end with this observation from an earlier post:
If America was ever close to being a nation united and free, it has drifted far from that condition — arguably, almost as far as it  had by 1861. And America’s condition will only worsen unless leaders emerge who will set the nation (or a large, independent portion of it) back on course. Barring the emergence of such leaders, America will continue to slide into baseness, divisiveness, and servitude.

*     *     *

Related posts:
Affirmative Action: Two Views from the Academy
Affirmative Action, One More Time
A Contrarian View of Segregation
After the Bell Curve
A Footnote . . .
Schelling and Segregation
Affirmative Action: Two Views from the Academy, Revisited
“Family Values,” Liberty, and the State
Is There Such a Thing as Society
Intellectuals and Capitalism
Secession
A New, New Constitution
Secession Redux
A New Cold War or Secession?
The Real Constitution and Civil Disobedience
A Declaration of Independence
First Principles
The Shape of Things to Come
The Near-Victory of Communism
The Constitution: Original Meaning, Corruption, and Restoration
“Intellectuals and Society”: A Review
Intelligence, Personality, Politics, and Happiness
The Left’s Agenda
The Left and Its Delusions
Intelligence as a Dirty Word
Crimes against Humanity
Abortion and Logic
The Myth That Same-Sex “Marriage” Causes No Harm
The Spoiled Children of Capitalism
Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy
Subsidizing the Enemies of Liberty
Are You in the Bubble?
Abortion, Doublethink, and Left-Wing Blather
Reclaiming Liberty throughout the Land
Race and Reason: The Victims of Affirmative Action
Abortion, “Gay Rights,” and Liberty
Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap–Causes and Implications
Dan Quayle Was (Almost) Right
Tolerance on the Left
The Eclipse of “Old America”
Genetic Kinship and Society
Government in Macroeconomic Perspective
Keynesianism: Upside-Down Economics in the Collectivist Cause
Secession for All Seasons
Liberty and Society
Liberty as a Social Construct: Moral Relativism?
A Contrarian View of Universal Suffrage
Well-Founded Pessimism
America: Past, Present, and Future
Defending Liberty against (Pseudo) Libertarians
“Conversing” about Race
The Fallacy of Human Progress
Political Correctness vs. Civility

Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications

Posted on by

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 →