Links to Consider, 1/26

The WSJ on college in decline; Lorenzo Warby on heritability, race, and inequality; Alice Evans on cultural conservatism; Virginia Postrel on fame, luck, and Martin Gurri

For the WSJ, Douglas Belkin writes,

A quarter of college graduates do not have basic skills in numeracy and one in five does not have basic skills in literacy, says Irwin Kirsch, who oversees large-scale assessments for ETS, the company that administers the SAT.

Too many college students come in with big learning deficits. Thanks to grade inflation, they graduate with those deficits.

During my brief, unhappy career as an adjunct econ professor at George Mason, my grading rubric included quality of writing. A number of students thought that was unfair.

I read a portion of one student paper to my wife, and she said I should be forgiving of students with a foreign native language. I looked at the name on the paper, and it was clearly not a foreign student. Her first name was Kelly. My wife then suggested that I forward the essay to the GMU admissions department.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

There needs to be a way of putting the hereditarian thesis that is not tied to race, because race is not a good general descriptor. It’s not an accurate term when it comes to which groups differ by what distribution of traits and why.

…That executive function is almost entirely heritable is surely a large reason why social mobility is so persistently low across human societies. Given the selection processes involved in being enslaved, it’s likely why social mobility is even lower among slave diasporas.

Concentrating folk of lower executive function in particular localities is a great way to create socially dysfunctional localities. This is especially true in under-policed, fiscal-sink⁴ localities.

He points out that inheritance includes cultural inheritance. Does weak executive function, for example, come from genes or culture? My guess is that it is both. That is, there ways that the social environment in general and parental choices in particular can overcome at least some of a child’s inborn weakness in executive function. Hello Ritalin. But causality is difficult to disentangle, and watch out for the Null Hypothesis.

cultures bundle together different life strategy patterns. . .Cultural patterns are somewhat more tractable than differences in genetic dispensations, but not all that much more tractable, and particularly not when it comes to public policy. Cultures also set up selection processes, both genetic and social. Various cultural traits show considerable persistence.

Warby wants to use this analysis to propose a reasonable way to think about race. Unfortunately, I suspect that one cannot the fit the square peg of reasonableness into the round hole of our intuitive notions of race.

Alice Evans writes,

1. In culturally tight societies (with labour-intensive agriculture or strong kinship intensity), then even as families grow richer, they still care for social approval. This suppresses individual resistance.

She argues that it was difficult to use capital to raise productivity in growing cotton or rice. Societies that relied on these crops required obedient labor. This fostered a culture that was “tight,” meaning that people were strongly discouraged from violating social norms.

Societies where cousin marriage was normalized fostered tight family bonds. This discouraged individualism.

In societies without cousin marriage and without labor-intensive crops, individualism increased along with economic growth. Ultimately, we reached the 1960s, with women’s liberation and gay liberation.

The post is long and recommended. I hope that my abbreviation is not too misleading.

Then she has another interesting essay.

Endogamous societies trust close-knit kin, so they prefer to socialise, marry, and do business together. Thus even as Indian grows economically, caste persists. Wealthy Saudi Arabia likewise remains extremely tribal, with high rates of cousin marriage.

I suggest that exogamy motivates a stronger outward orientation for marriage, commerce and cooperation. So, as exogamous societies undergo economic growth and urbanisation, people seize any and all opportunities to develop ties of trust, intimacy and reciprocity.

As these networks expand, people are no longer beholden to a narrow, close-knit group of gatekeepers or social policeman. This enables cultural liberalisation. Because business isn’t based on endogamous bonds, Hong Kong women aren’t socialised to marry and stay put.

Virginia Postrel writes,

When it comes to books, no amount of intellectual quality is enough without dumb luck. It’s an absolute miracle Martin Gurri’s book, which is excellent, has become well known.

She makes the point that some outstanding writers only are discovered years after they wrote, while others presumably are not discovered at all.

Think of the editorial/publishing decision in statistical terms as having two types of error. Type 1 is rejecting something really good. Type 2 is accepting something that is not so good. Publishers are bound to make both types of errors. The tougher that they filter, the less likely they are to make avoid Type 2 errors, but the more Type 1 errors that they will make.

The number of subscribers to my substack recently reached 6000, including 300 paid. Others have much, much bigger numbers, but I like to think that my readers will be more likely to remember years from now some of the things that I write.

substacks referenced above:

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Quality Matters, but You Also Need Luck

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Why are some Rich Societies Conservative?

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Quibbling with Cofnas: I