Whether it's intellectually/morally appealing or not, there just aren't many blacks at the >130 level. In addition, IQ 130 is too low a cutoff for top programmers or academics, and there are other race differences besides IQ, which are generally unfavorable to blacks vis-à-vis whites and Asians. There's no getting around the fact that, if you treat people as individuals, the demographics in elite positions will unfortunately look nothing like the rest of society.
According to Thomas Sowell's book, "Social Justice Fallacies" (pages 42-43), research by Professor James Flynn indicates that IQ can change fairly quickly "by a standard deviation or more - in a generation or two. "
Sowell continues:
"This trend had been going on for years, before Professor Flynn research brought it to light. The reason it was not obvious to others before him was that IQ test results were repeatedly renormed, in order to maintain the average number of questions answered correctly at its definitional level of 100. As more people answered more IQ tot questions correctly over the years, an IQ of 100 now represented correctly answering more questions than before. Because Professor Flynn went back to the original raw scores on IQ test questions answered correctly, these rising performances on IQ tests were brought to light.
"Although the black IQ average, for example, remained more or less constant at about 85 for years, this constancy concealed the fact that blacks, like others, were answering more IQ test questions correctly than in the past. The number of questions that blacks answered correctly on IQ tests in 2002 would have given them an average IQ of 104 by the norms used in 1947-1948. This was slightly higher than the average performance of Americans in general during the earlier period.
"In short, the performances of blacks on IQ tests had risen significantly over time, just as the performances of other people in the United States and in other countries had risen, even though the renorming of IQ tests concealed these changes. Later data published by Charles Murray in 2021 showed that the mean black IQ was now 91, up from the usual 85 in earlier times. This meant that black improvement on IQ tests had not simply kept pace with other people's improvement but had improved somewhat more."
Within-country race differences and the Flynn effect have different causes. James Flynn himself acknowledged this: "the magnitude of white/black IQ differences on Wechsler subtests at any given time is correlated with the g loadings of the subtests; the magnitude of IQ gains over time on subtests is not usually so correlated; the causes of the two phenomena are not the same." See https://thecritic.co.uk/my-debunked-views/
But if IQ is shifting over time that suggests that group differences can be driven as much by culture as anything else, particularly when the gaps tend to change size over time. Genetics matter, but culture does as well, and they probably mutually reinforce the other.
How do you explain the fact that mean black IQ has risen from 85 5o 91? That necessarily translates into an increase in intelligence relative to other (non-black) Americans.
Sowell is wrong about the facts. Charles Murray reported an increase in black IQ, but his analysis included achievement tests that are not IQ tests. On actual IQ tests given to population-representative samples, average black IQ is the same as it's been for the past 50 years, namely, 82-85.
For around 50 years Sowell has been holding up the (now more than a century old) WWI data as his main evidence that IQ is culturally determined. This is a testament to the weakness of his case. Suppose the black-white IQ gap disappeared 50 years ago, but I pointed out that tests administered in WWI showed a difference. Obviously, that would be absurd. But people grasp at straws when it comes to defending environmentalism.
To answer your question: The WWI tests were given at a time when intelligence testing was much less sophisticated. It was also a time when a large proportion of the population didn't come close to achieving its intellectual potential due to differences in educational opportunity and probably nutrition, so differences in IQ scores were determined far more by environmental factors. Finally, the hereditarian hypothesis doesn't say that all populations with white skin are on average more intelligent than all populations with black skin. Northern blacks have higher IQs (and more white admixture) than southern blacks. Some white populations probably have lower average innate intelligence than some black populations. None of this is inconsistent with hereditarianism. When you give tests to *population-representative* groups living under comparable conditions. You get a US black-white gap of 15-18 points.
iirc Sowell's WW1 numbers are for conscripts, not all recruits or all servicemen.
Does excluding 650,000 white volunteers skew the comparison? (Only 4000 blacks volunteered, so I doubt their exclusion has a significant effect one way or the other.) Does it affect the comparison that it excludes everyone who scored too low (or was otherwise disqualified) to get into the Army?
I'm not going to hazard a guess how the comparison would look if we had numbers for all recruits and servicemen. But I think Sowell places too much weight on the narrow data he cites.
Thanks for sharing the actual distributions. I think you are quite correct in the short term. It would be interesting to see if the American black IQ distribution starts to shift to approach the white distribution over time if the black culture shifts to approximate the white culture. (Or Asian culture for that matter.) Whether that would be due to preferential mate selection (genetics) or shifting the focus on training the skills that improve IQ test performance would be difficult to suss out, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the over all curve moves a bit. Whether genetic or cultural, any system that relieves pressure demanding IQ is going to lower average IQ over time, and we definitely have that system in the US.
Black IQ will increase over time because people identifying as black will have more white DNA in them, but that's not quite the same thing is it. In addition, elite subgroups from Africa make up more and more of blacks in America (half of Harvards blacks I think).
The U.S. Army began testing the IQs of their recruits during WWI. They found that Southern whites had lower IQs than Northern blacks - long before there was much interracial marriage. That suggests that IQ is, at least in part, tied to things like culture and nutrition.
Everything is tied to nutrition, even things almost entirely genetic like height.
Look up "Dutch Hunger Winter Cohort". When everybody gets enough to eat, gets even as much education as the alphabet, and isn't plagued by diseases and parasites which have long since been eradicated, then they tend to saturate and plateau at their genetic potential at very low thresholds. The world of 107 years ago was still one in which many people's experiences did not meet those thresholds, but that hasn't been the case in generations.
Those results were published by Ashley Montagu (London born, "Israel Ehrenberg") who was the original "There's No Such Thing As Race - And Definitely Nothing to IQ" activist academic way back in the early 40's, he literally wrote the book on it, "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race", in which he made his claims just a bit more confidently than warranted given that it was a decade before anyone knew the structure of DNA and another half century before whole genomes could be sequenced and it would actually be possible to subject such claims to the most rigorously objective empirical scrutiny, where, duh, they all, uh, "failed to replicate".
Even in his own time Montagu's work was criticized* and a huge amount of WWII testing was inconsistent with it. So everyone mostly forgot about it for decades, which makes sense because otherwise you would have seen it mentioned all the time in things like Brown v Board of Education or Civil Rights Act debates, etc.
Then 35 years later the next generation's leading "There's No Such Thing As Race" popular academic was Stephen Gould who re-popularized the misleading alpha test results in "The Mismeasure of Man", which was later demonstrated to contain what could not have been other than intentional falsehoods the more notorious one being Gould's libel against Sam Morton.
Gould said Morton's numbers on skull measurements were wrong, because Morton was so racist that his racist unconscious caused him to either mismeasure or misreport the numbers to match his racist prejudices. But, uh, you know, when people went back to actually measure the skulls, all of Morton's numbers were completely accurate. So, how did Gould come to know Morton's numbers were wrong? He didn't, he made the whole thing up, and no one checked or called him out on it.
Montagu was likewise not the most reliable narrator when it came to accurately reporting on facts relevant to these highly sensitive questions. He also got booted from Rutgers for being a member of the Communist Party, but he landed on his feet and did well for himself for the rest of his long life.
*The issues with the alpha test results - which have been discussed exhaustively on online forums since Gould's book in the old "alt." usenet days - would take a while to discuss. But if one looks even at Montagu's massaged enormous ranges (Florida black median 9.3, Ohio black median 48.3, Mississippi white media 41.2, DC white median, 78.8) that should clue one in that these median scores differ far, far more than on any comparable g-loaded tests from any later generation. You get a hint in the name itself. The Army doesn't do anything with an alpha unless there's a beta, and sure enough, alpha was for 'literates' and beta was for illiterate adults, of which there were still very large numbers back over a century ago. The trouble was that some states gave alpha to nearly everybody and others to smaller portions, and the inconsistency created all kinds of selection effect problems and other confusions. Fortunately, we don't have to rely on 107 year old data, we have tons of better, more recent data, and none of it looks like Montagu's numbers.
I wonder how much of the IQ disparity is a side effect of the welfare state’s destruction of black families. The statistics with respect to fatherless children are not good; higher rates of dropout, drugs, alcohol, poverty, and suicide. Add to that children whose mothers were drinking or taking drugs during pregnancy.
Jim Crow wasn’t as nearly devastating to black Americans as paternalistic progressive policies were.
The good news is that Americans don't have to restrict the analysis to America, which is what Americans tend instinctively to do, because Americans are culturally conditioned from birth such that they cannot help but want to explain the reality of American sociology in terms of a normative framework that picks out particular aspects of American history as pan-explanatory original sins. They don't have to do this because there are plenty of black people in African counties and in a diaspora all around the world, and what makes that extra good is that all those populations had really different histories, economies, languages, cultures, levels of wealth, levels of education, religions, family structures and levels of stability, etc. And even in poorest Africa the world of 2024 is nothing like it was 50 years ago in terms of being constrained by lack of investment, education, isolation, and so forth. This is exactly the kind of variation you want and need if you are going to try to prove a hypothesis of equal subpopulation means in natural potential and are looking for the secret sauce tecioe of elements nurture above the "serious malnutrition and disease load" threshold that helps or hurts a lot in terms of people reaching their potential. Even better, in the world of 2024, every ancestral group has a diaspora with a lot of this kind of variation.
And we don't have to wonder about this, because this work has been done. And it turns out nurture stuff matters only a very little bit, and even all combined together is not even in the same ballpark as the nature side of the equation. And the means are not the same. They differ a lot, and this matters a lot. There's nothing anyone can do to change it without taking charge of genetics and procreation, and it's nobody's fault.
The good news is that going all out on education can help a little, and even accounting for approx 20% European admixture, American blacks tend to do a bit better than blacks living almost anywhere else in the world. The bad news is that this has done almost nothing when it comes to what would happen with meritocratic selection because all that effort didn't "close the gap" in means, with Asians especially blowing past everybody.
So you don't believe that genetics or culture affect IQ within group? Why would white people have kids with low IQ blacks in your story? Why wouldn't black people preferentially have kids with higher IQ black people? Why is mixing with whites the only way for black American IQ to increase? Why does evolutionary selection pressure not function in your story?
Why would high IQ blacks not be at the same disadvantage as any other such group - that being the disadvantage that they aren't going to have but one or two kids?
What high IQ people do is surely a blip compared to the incentives that drive reproduction in America, regardless of race.
Sowell seems to describe a belief in educational progress - embedded in that acronym, NAACP - that didn't pan out. That seems quaint now; an artifact of an earlier era of paternalism - when the subjects of that paternalism may have chafed under it but ultimately understood their goal to be synonomous with it.
But was it not panning out? Are we sure about that? "Fifty years ago" is a very important turn. The Great Society stepped in and put its thumb on the scale.
I am not familiar with Sowell's thinking beyond the well-known points - but I suspect he feels a bitterness with LBJ's I'm-gonna-out-liberal-you-bastards "reforms" as only one who had a foot in the worlds before and after, can.
Obviously I can't refute a statistician - but being just old enough to have caught a glimpse of earlier decades - and having a lively interest in the productions of the past, over those of the present, inclines me to think something went wrong - and that something is dysgenic.
I think (if I am following this correctly... there are like 10 threads here I am trying to keep track of) that you put your finger right on it: LBJ's Great Society reforms were immensely dysgenic in the cultural behavior changes they drove. The rates of single parent black families shot up, the rates of black unemployment shot up, basically every outcome we care about went in the wrong direction. Not just for blacks, but they were more heavily impacted it seems. What do you get when you tell a lot of women they can't get married or they lose a check, but having lots of kids with different men who won't be around anyway is fine and gets you more money? It isn't more choosy women, and it isn't men who strive to be more successful in business to attract a long term mate. Nothing in modern urban culture selects for intelligence.
Policy, culture and genetics all feed into one another.
I think this - rather than race-based IQ talk - should be the conservative talking point. Its effects are obvious, and certainly not limited to blacks (this you know if you live in the South or the West, anyway).
But in a curious case of opposite-word identity - the only word that gets people more worked up than "eugenic" - is "dysgenic".
You also seem to be forgetting that most American blacks are a mix of white and black compared to Africans.
As to your links, if successful blacks (presumably with higher IQ and culturally similar to whites on average) are marrying similarly successful white women, we would expect their kids to have higher IQs. You effectively have discovered that white males who are really into Asian culture tend to marry Asian women at higher rates. I wonder if unsuccessful blacks who marry equally unsuccessful white women (ok, have kids out of wedlock with) have kids with lower IQ than average... I have a sneaking suspicion they do!
That figure is from the Bell Curve book, chapter 13, page 279, representing rescaled results of ASVAB administered as part of NLSY in 1980, available here https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator/pages/search?s=NLSY79. Raw AQFT test scores are not available through this interface, only sample percentiles (1-99). 6502 whites and 3022 blacks were in the sample.
Actually there will be some resemblance to the NBA - with as many Blacks, or more, in the very top 1000 intellectuals as there now are Hispanics in the NBA (maybe 2 or 3?).
Few think the NBA is racist - because sports meritocracy is so clear to so many.
Sports success leads to more publicity, and influence, but seldom to moral prestige; and lots of sports status but not so much political influence.
Damore should not have been fired -- and none should be fired for telling the truth. But according to court cases, it seems that speaking the truth can be considered creating a hostile environment.
We can only get optimal government with the ability to speak the truth, even the ugly truth.
The best way to move forward on this is to live it. Create a private institution, call it elite if you want to, hire based strictly on merit or whatever criterion you desire and see how it works. If you like it great. If not, change it. Problem solved?
The big problem is that it is illegal to do that, in so far as you will be sued to hell and breakfast. Once those laws are changed such that "disparate impact" and all the other racially (and sexually) based rules on who you can hire or fire are gone, then it totally works.
I like that response, but I’m not certain it’s true in every instance or most instances. And where it is true, why not use First Amendment protections? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
I don't know that there has been a First Amendment challenge to the Title -stuff- rules that reached the Supreme Court, but given that those rules still exist I am guessing either it hasn't happened or the court went "nah, freedom of association doesn't count when it comes to hiring people". It is definitely the case that there is a huge amount of legal pressure to meet diversity quotas and avoid firing protected classes les you be sued into oblivion. So long as "protected classes" is a legally meaningful phrase it will be a problem to just hire/fire based on anything that doesn't include diversity of various protected traits.
In AY 2019-20, the main percentage distributions (above 5%) at 4-year college were:
Net tuition & fees: 34%
Federal appropriations: 13%
Private gifts, grants, and contracts: 13%
Investment revenues: 10%
Auxiliary services: 10%
Revenues of affiliated hospitals: 13%
Presumably, user fees (paid mainly by insurers?) constitute a large part of revenues at not-for-profit hospitals.
My point is that two major industries in the not-for-profit sector rely on families who pay tuition (or insurers who pay fees for patients), donors, and government appropriations. Accountability is complicated and a mess.
It is interesting that the consumer of services in education and health care has a really hard time knowing whether they got a good deal. And also that to a large extent, the services are paid for by someone else, especially in health care. So it is indeed a complicated mess.
Arnold - I have a question. You write, “If, like many young people, you think that working for a non-profit is more morally righteous than working for a profit-seeking business, I think you have it backwards. Many non-profits are grifts. Many treat their employees badly, because they can. A profit-seeking business runs into trouble if good employees are unhappy and leave, but the head of a non-profit just has to stay in good graces with the donors, even he runs a dysfunctional organization. In terms of the previous link, an executive in a profit-seeking business has more incentive to care about his or her subordinates.”
Does this apply to non-profit vs for-profit K-12 schools? Any reason why it wouldn’t?
I think there is a lot of pressure for private schools to act like government schools. This limits the amount of variance that one can find in the private school market. I would not expect to find much difference between non-profit private schools and for-profit private schools, but I have not looked at the literature.
It seems there are two kinds of private schools too. Elite (=fashionable, =progressive) private schools are, if anything, ahead of the curve and in the lead which government schools follow. Then there are non-elite schools that, whether they can publicly admit it or not, are dedicated to going against the mainstream's current in some respect. They can't afford to get too far out of line, as they are watched closely by countless micro-Berias ready to pounce on any excuse to get them shut down, usually by accusing them of some kind of discrimination.
Let’s be creative about this. Let’s imagine that Arnold Kling operates a for-profit school. Currently it’s a small, mostly online school called, In My Tribe. The school’s messages are primarily delivered via Substack.
Now we can imagine taking steps to increase the size and scope of this school. Hiring an employee to carry out research, create podcasts or update the Grader. We can also imagine in-person meetings that happen quarterly as with your NBU. We can hire more employees as needed.
I’m guessing that making this school a for-profit would be better for the reasons you already mentioned. Feel free to elaborate though.
"Does this apply to non-profit vs for-profit K-12 schools? Any reason why it wouldn’t?"
Two reasons. First, public schools have to stay in good graces with the voters and the law, and education law is something that most people opining about public schools are completely ignorant of. A teacher might have tenure, but if a teacher does something that violates community standards, that teacher will be gone. So no, public schools have to be very conscious of a wide range of customers.
Second, private schools are starved for labor. They have far more attrition than public schools do, particularly at the lower level, so it would be quite normal for them to do things purely to please teachers, as opposed to parents. At the elite level, schools can absolutely choose to follow norms demanded by teachers and ignore parents because, as we've seen, parents will take it.
A lot covered here, but I think I'll respond to Scott Alexander's "people saved" metric. Restating the obvious, a "saved" life is just a life that is kept for longer than it would have been otherwise. One wonders how much scrutiny any charity is under when it claims to have been the true cause of a prolonged life that would have been otherwise cut short by thirst, but even taking the claim as true for the purpose of argument, it makes little sense to point to it as an example of what the trendy academics of yesteryear would call a market failure of capitalism because if there is one thing that capitalism is exceptionally effective at, it's meeting the needs of the body at scale.
Capitalism, such as it is, has a strong track record for prolonging lives and shifting causes of death from the ones that strike early and haphazardly to the ones that strike late and predictably. The market system is far better at striking at all the root causes of early death than any focused charity. The better argument against capitalism (and nonprofits focused on corporeal ends) if you wanted to make it is that prolonging lives by itself is not good, and that a society that aims at such a thing is aiming at the wrong set of goals. You could also argue that a society that focuses on maximizing temporal quantities often does so at the expense of other and more important qualities. But erecting the nonprofit form as a "better" way of prolonging lives than the modern market is just putting up a strawman.
Quite so. One could pretty accurately describe the number of lives saved by capitalism* by graphing world population by year going back as far as we know to today, with a horizontal line pinned to the population around 1750 (or whenever you want to start the industrial revolution) and say everyone above that line was saved by capitalism. Usually the estimates of global population looks like this https://bluepyramid.org/storey/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/WorldPopAD.png basically a really slow grow till about 1750, hitting 1 billion only around 1800, then growing very rapidly after till 7-8 billion today about 200 years later. So something like 6 billion people saved at least, although that of course doesn't measure the full total of people saved in terms of "Would have died at 40, lived to 80" but I don't know a good way of measuring that, or even estimating.
*Whatever that means... markets maybe? For profit production of goods by private owners of capital distributed via market mechanisms?
"But I don’t think that “race realism” is necessary or sufficient to get to the point where we treat people as individuals."
Yes.
A social and moral system like wokeness is best engaged with a social and moral system like respect for each individual.
And "race realism" is itself a social and moral stance. You can argue about the merits of the research it cites, but what if new and better research supercedes the old? What if the old research is applied reductively and overconfidently with blinders like status and groupthink? The ethic of individual dignity remains compelling regardless of all that.
Nathan Cofnas writes: "I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality."
Do the woke really take equality seriously? Their actions belie that claim. Why, for example, would anyone who cares about equality run schools for the benefit of teachers’ unions rather than for that of students?
Why would anyone who cares about equality declare that the “bourgeois virtues” of self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility are “white traits”? Why would people who care about the minority poor teach them that these traits, which have led people of all cultures and ethnicities out of poverty for millennia, are racist?
Why would anyone who cares about equality teach minority children that the deck is stacked against them and that they are incapable of improving their lives and those of their loved ones through their own actions? Why would anyone who cares about equality teach minority children that they will have no future until white people stop being racist but that white people can never be not racist?
Let me give you a line by line boilerplait explanation. I'm not saying these are good ideas, but they are "consistent" in their own terrible bullshit way.
"run schools for the benefit of teachers’ unions rather than for that of students?"
The teachers unions are highly trained professional experts that know what is best for children. The idea that they put their interests before the kids is conservative propaganda because they hate poor people and want to cut school funding so they can get tax breaks for the rich so they can own yachts.
"self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility"
Lack of these characteristics in black Americans is used as an excuse to discriminate against blacks. There are other, equal or more valuable traits, that blacks excel at that and white supremicists focus on these traits because they want to exclude blacks.
And besides, blacks obviously have all those traits in sufficient quantity, whites just lie about it.
"Why would anyone who cares about equality teach minority children that the deck is stacked against them and that they are incapable of improving their lives and those of their loved ones through their own actions?"
So that they engage in racial solidarity to lobby and protest to get a better deal from the unfair establishment. Without such racial solidarity and activism individual blacks stand no change of advancement. Fight the power!
Neither the woke's ideas nor their rationales stand up to empirical data. We don't have to buy the woke claims of moral superiority as Cofnas implies. Truly moral people would care about the results of their actions and beliefs.
"Neither the woke's ideas nor their rationales stand up to empirical data."
Correct, but they deny empirics. Starting with IQ and race, then everything else because you have to once you've done that.
"We don't have to buy the woke claims of moral superiority as Cofnas implies."
I don't. But I bite the bullet on race realism.
Sowellism got a shot. It was the center-right view from The Cosby Show.
I'll give you a story of why it failed. I tutored briefly at one of those Asian cram schools. In the Sowell view these are great examples of their culture, in my view they seemed like a waste of time that explains part of why Asians don't have time to breed anymore.
In my time there we never really improved anyones SAT scores. The first practice test or two might get you 30 points, but the rest was all diminishing returns. The was common in the industry and can be confirmed by many studies.
Most of the kids in the cram school were reasonably bright, but one was like literally retarded. But his parents were helicopter Asian parents who REALLY REALLY believed in culture. They sent him after school every day and all day on Saturday and Sunday. Doing SAT prep tests was this fucking kids life, and they wanted him to go to Harvard! He never stood a chance. It was so fucking miserable to watch.
When people say "we can just improve black culture" I think about some black kid having to do SAT practice tests all weekend long instead of having a childhood with no change in their score. For the love of god, let the kid shoot some hoops. He doesn't have a lot of options in life, let him enjoy what pleasures he has.
A lot of black people did try to fix their culture but it didn't change their IQ, so it didn't work.
"Truly moral people would care about the results of their actions and beliefs."
Sure, but have you gotten a good look at human beings lately? Heck, you can't even admit that all this culture talk can be harmful.
You seem to think that the overall American black culture is roughly equivalent to American Asian culture with regards to the importance of school, studying, work, career, family etc. and thus would have similar marginal returns.
I can tell you from direct experience it is not. Asians probably are overdoing things, yes, but look at stats for inner city school attendance, family formation, whatever, and tell me that they are even approaching the same culture. American Asian culture probably is getting strongly diminishing returns on human potential, but American black culture doesn't even attempt to push the potential. (Outside of professional sports, arguably.)
"You seem to think that the overall American black culture is roughly equivalent to American Asian culture"
I don't, you seem to have missed the point.
If American black culture matches Asian culture, I would expect no change in their IQ.
"inner city school attendance, family formation, whatever, and tell me that they are even approaching the same culture."
There are aspects of black culture that could possibly be improved. You don't NEED a high IQ to get and stay married. This was the point of Charles Murrays work, was it not.
If you get the black illegitimacy rate down it will make their lives and the lives around them better. I do not think it will affect their IQ at all. They will still be janitors or whatever, but maybe they will have happier lives as janitors. I took this to be the point of Murray's work, which has a strong element of focusing less on how to make everyone computer programmers and more on how to make the life of a janitor better.
So you seem to be misunderstanding the relationship between culture, IQ and genetic potential.
Say you take someone with good genetic potential, what would be a high IQ, but don't give them any schooling. Basically have them raised by wolves. That person will, upon being given an IQ test, perform well below their potential. They will probably do better than someone with a low genetic potential for IQ, but they probably won't do better than someone with lower genetic potential for IQ but who has also had some schooling.
Now do the opposite, that that high potential person and train the absolute crap out of them to maximize their use of IQ. They will score really highly. Then put them in some more training. Will they do better? Probably not much, because they have already nearly maxed out their potential.
So you see, while Asians who train the hell out of their kids to get the most out of their inherent IQ potential aren't going to get many returns, blacks who pretty much neglect the training have a lot to gain. Their potential doesn't change, but what they make of their potential does. The current state of black culture, broken families that largely ignore children, no focus on education, over emphasis on sports, a neglect of "white" traits like being on time, conscientiousness and the like, all that mess, if that gets corrected there are huge gains to be had. Not necessarily easy gains; changing culture is hard, but gains.
Expecting no change in measured black IQ if they suddenly adopted the culture of Asians (including marrying and reproducing for academic or business success) is just ridiculous. The only way it could possibly hold is if culture has no appreciable effect and all outcomes are based on genetics, which is to say that individual behaviors have no effect on outcomes.
Two of my kids are 8th grade math teachers who work at Title I schools. They regularly get students who are illiterate, so they end up teaching reading as well as math. At the beginning of one school year, only 9% of the students in one of my daughter's classes tested at proficiency level for their grade. By the end of the school year, over half of her students were at proficiency level.
The point is that minority kids do better when they have good teachers who care. As to a "reform package," my kids get hit with those all the time: "Stop doing the things that work and start using these untested techniques that someone came up with that we're really really sure will improve equity."
I work at Title I schools and math teachers teach math,not English. There's literally no "so they end up teaching reading". Doesn't happen.
I assume you are saying that the kids improved in math, not reading. In any case, no. You can't get to 8th grade in America and genuinely be illiterate So maybe they were Asians who didn't speak English and so didn't understand the test.
As for your magic story, proficient is a high standard, so the kids who didn't test as proficient might have tested as basic, and it's hardly shocking that she might have moved kids from high basic to proficient.
Yes, the kids improved in math. They also improved in reading. I talked to a young lady who tutored football players in a university that will not be named. According to her, one of her students wrote essays at the level of, “I John Doe, I football player.” You may call that literate, I don’t. Presumably, that football player had to get through 8th grade to get into college. So, I don’t buy your claim that there are no (non-immigrant) illiterate 8th graders in America.
"In that case, using the normal distribution formula, there are tens of thousands of black Americans who meet that threshold."
So what? The competition for those "tens of thousands" isn't just Microsoft and Harvard- it is every other corporation and college in the United States. And you are again making the assertion that nothing is known about the distribution in the tails of intellectual ability.
Charity over Capitalism is "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish".
Scott rigged the framing of the argument with that early caveat of "near mode". That lets him get away with prematurely disposing of the *main* argument for capitalism over charity, which is that it's *an error* to do this analysis by restricting it solely to a near mode to near mode comparison of consequences. To put it in more technical language, dynamic effects can overcome static effects, so purely static analysis can be completely misleading.
The point about capitalism is the long term broadly-enjoyed benefits of investment. Of *course* investment doesn't pay off in saving lives or reducing suffering *today*. Investment is not about *today*, it's about *tomorrow*, and it does more for tomorrow than charity can do today. The only reason a dollar earned by some American can do literally anything for anyone in Africa is because of centuries of accumulated knowledge, effort, technology, institution evolution, etc. that created a whole global market infrastructure essential for making such things even remotely possible.
To put it a different way, a dollar spent on improving lives today is a dollar taken away from improving lives in the future. The lesson of economic history is that you can almost always do a lot more improving for a lot more people in the future than you can today, and yes, you don't even have to be intending or trying to do it, it just happens as a consequence of capitalism creating economic growth which makes everybody richer.
We could have simply said that you generally can’t have charity without surplus, and it seems pretty clear you can’t have surplus without capitalism.
Going further to suppose that surplus invested to improve future lives always (or almost always, but query what the parameters for that determination are?) has greater value than charity given today is silly.
For people that have the good fortune of having such surplus, there is a place for each and people can and should hedge their bets by engaging in both.
"If Harvard admitted students based on their academic qualifications alone, Harvard would be 43 percent Asian, 38.4 percent white, 0.7 percent black..."
- Heather Mac Donald (The New Criterion, November 2019)
Cofnas says that "blacks would virtually disappear" from Harvard if it used colorblind admissions criteria. Kling says he finds that statement "neither intellectually nor morally appealing." Since what Cofnas said is true, why does Kling think it matters that he finds it unappealing?
A question could be whether, if Arnold made a claim that he believed to be true, and someone disagreed with it on the basis of finding it or the manner in which it was expressed neither intellectually nor morally appealing, would Arnold accept that as a valid criticism, or tell that person that appeal is irrelevant to truth, and mature adults accept the fact that some things are both true and unappealing.
There's a reason Land named it "The Dark Enlightenment". There's a reason we have an expression like "Ugly Truths", or of more recent vintage, "Red Pill".
To borrow from Phil Dick, "Reality is that which, when you stop finding it appealing, doesn't go away.'
If you want to argue that "race realism" is not necessary to get colorblindness, argue it. There are people who accept the math and still argue that say human beings can't handle the truth, which is a thesis one can debate honestly.
But this contortion on the statistics and flat out lying about the math is really bad form. It's been tried for fifty years now and it's gotten us nowhere.
Normal distribution gives us 55,000 blacks about 130 IQ. But there are 6.5M non-blacks (and I'm being generous here). That is 0.9% of 130 IQ. Naturally, those blacks are going to disburse amongst various institutions and professions.
Personally, I found race realism to be one of the most life affirming and optimistic things I ever discovered. Before I found it, I logically had to conclude that something was seriously wrong with our society. After I found it I realized that we were actually doing pretty good as a society. The truth will set you free.
You should not assume that IQ is normally distributed, or even what the shape of the distribution is if it is normal. That is not to say that there might be real differences in racial IQ and that there wouldn't be more or less representation of some sub-groups, but "the math" isn't being lied about. People vastly over use normal distributions because they are mathematically convenient, regardless of how well they describe the data.
As someone working for a company that uses all Microsoft products, I would also argue that one doesn't need a 130 IQ to work for Microsoft; 90 might do the trick :D
The problem when you are off by a factor of 13:1 is that it really doesn't matter if you think a slightly different distribution applies. It ain't gonna change the big picture.
Moreover, we do shove more blacks into elite professions and they always perform poorly. It's not like, once they get a chance, they prove themselves. It's hard for me to believe there is a bunch of untapped IQ potential out there.
Firstly, I didn't say there wouldn't be shifts in representation, I specifically said there would be. I was pointing out that the math isn't being lied about.
Why is the math not being lied about? Because changes in the distribution DO create large differences out in the tails. The difference between a normal distribution or a fat tail or a skewed distribution can be very large. Not large enough to entirely swing things; anyone claiming that would be wrong. But large enough that saying things like "There would be no blacks in high IQ jobs" would also be wrong. Again, not arguing there wouldn't be fewer, but also not as small as many "race realists" seem to believe. (Not even getting to what looks like a high IQ job might not be, etc.)
Your point about affirmative action putting a lot of blacks into jobs they can't handle is valid, but you are also missing the point that 1: you have a very small sample size, and 2: putting unqualified blacks into jobs makes all blacks look worse. That latter point has been made for years by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. Not only does affirmative action tend to push those affected past the point where they can't do the job and so make them look bad, every one in their group tends to be assumed to be a "diversity hire" which will hold back those who actually are good and incentivizing participation in politicking instead of competence.
So, again, yea, going colorblind probably will lower the number of blacks in the high IQ jobs. Possibly not as much as some people believe. Also, why the hell are "race realists" trying to claim that it will cause all blacks to be out of higher status jobs? What are they gaining by trying to lowball the number? Claiming "We are being realistic!" is not true, because realistic is "we don't really know, but it will be lower, maybe in this sort of range" not "We know down to the thousands!" What's the goal there?
1) Blacks have a fat tail relative to what we see everywhere else
2) That fat tail goes in one direction (I don't see you claiming it means there are more retard blacks on the other end
3)
If blacks are 13% of the population and make up 1% or less of high end jobs that is what people mean by "there would be no blacks in high end jobs". They don't literally mean ZERO BLACKS ANYWHERE. They mean that it will be very very obvious to everyone that blacks are drastically less prevalent in the elite than they are in the general population.
In any situation where there is a low enough N, there might not be any blacks at all. Let's say there are twenty practicing doctors at a clinic. In normal times you would think there would be two blacks. In reality we would expect 0.17 blacks. So it's likely that particular clinic there isn't a single black doctor (and like 10 asians or whatever). You don't think that is going to seem odd to people?
Let's say blacks and blacks alone have this "fat tail". How fat is it? 13x more fat? This just does not happen in statistics. We are straining credibility here.
I would posit that if you doubled the number of blacks above 130 IQ compared to the normal distribution, people would still ask why they are 13% of the pop and 2% or less of the elite. Same at 3%.
"If blacks are 13% of the population and make up 1% or less of high end jobs that is what people mean by "there would be no blacks in high end jobs"."
Well, then say that !!!!!!!!! The "no blacks" statement makes you look like an idiot and really tars "race realism". Everyone who argues for some sort of race realism now has to deal with, "Race realists think that there are no high IQ blacks. They are factually and morally wrong. It is a waste of time (and a near occasion of sin) to have anything to do with them. They should be banished from the internet and any school."
No. Let me try and be more clear for you. My theory is:
1) IQ does not necessarily follow a normal distribution, and indeed probably doesn't because the left end of the tail will be truncated and the right end will be fatter. In any case, assuming a perfect normal distribution is a really bad idea, in almost any area.
2) When people say "There would be no blacks in high end jobs" they are either being hyperbolic which means they should not be taken seriously, or they are too stupid to understand that it is not literally true due both to raw numbers of IQ and the fact that IQ is not all that determines who has high end/status jobs, in which case they should not be taken seriously. Which do you prefer?
3) When it comes to questions of "Why are they 13% percent of the population but less than 2% of the elite?" the proper answer is "People are different, dumb ass," then point to all the stats about IQ, school performance, college major selection, reverse rates in sports, or whatever else you want. Again, what is the point of over stating the doom and gloom scenario of going color blind in the rules? Who is that helping?
So why didn't this work? There are people who say fuck off about all this. Why did they lose the culture war? What's your theory?
We already had The Cosby Show. We already had center-right colorblindness that talked a bunch about culture. Will Smith rapped about saving money to help your mom buy school supplies. We had No Child Left Behind.
It didn't work. It lost.
Isn't that the whole point of Cofnas essay?
Look, blacks aren't going to look at a 13:1 discrepancy and go "that's alright". Someone is going to come along and say "you're right, its not right, I will get your justice, please vote for me 90/10 split and lend me your social and street pressure". That's a $100 bill on the sidewalk that somebody is going to pick up.
And since most white people have been raised to think "that 13:1 seems wrong" they are going to want someone offering "solutions" too. At least some of them. That's a political coalition.
Women make up more than 50% of the student body at most colleges. As customers, would they prefer a body of faculty hired strictly on IQ and other cognitive factors? Or would they prefer a hiring model that takes into account both character, cognitive skills and other traits? In other words, who would the customers want as their professors?
Nathan Cofnas is mostly correct - the DNA denialists who are against group average differences currently are accorded the winning moral superiority position. It was part of the Civil Rights idea to end segregation and end legal discrimination. And then the big gaps would be closing.
Fail.
>>Given that legal equality failed to usher in an era of racial equality of outcome, and that the elites were unwilling to accept striking racial disparities as a product of nature, there was no way to avoid wokism. ...
Belief in psychological equality clashed with reality: racial disparities persisted after legal barriers were removed. Because of the taboo on hereditarianism, racial disparities were attributed to environmental factors, triggering an ever-escalating effort to correct the environment.<<
There was an offhand early remark about Christian equality being part of the dominance of IQ denialism. All humans are created equal in the eyes of God - and need to be treated based on their character - judged by their actions. Equality morality seems clearly superior. But that means intellectual superiority is NOT moral superiority.
Black IQs are, on average, lower than Whites; such an ugly, ugly truth.
What America needs to do is raise the quality of life for low IQ people - Confas fails to suggest methods.
Very good article - a bit long. What does the Kling-opEd grader think?
Water: a subject that makes me cranky. I see you folks at the grocery store putting the 32-packs of plastic water bottles in your cart, and I find it kinda funny. See, I dislike plastic bottle waste and the effect on the environment, visual and otherwise, and being spartan in my habits have never purchased water at the store. In fact I would ban the sale of those bottles (as one does - bans things one wants to be rid of). As a trash-picker-upper, I certainly appreciate plastic bag bans (spoiler: y'all are going to let them blow around forever) but always felt, we're pretending this other plastic waste isn't just as bad. It's too meager a little start (and y'all mostly killed those local bans anyway, because all places must have the same rules, because we're all converging toward a homogenized, centrally-directed future, much like Comintern ... oh well, one can't expect to have expunged all of Communism's impulses so quickly ...).
I would thus be "anti-capitalist" in these leanings (although not having studied Marxism or subscribed to it, I don't have a strong attachment to or understanding of such a Marxist term).
On the other hand, the bottle buyers are not getting on the Appalachian Trail (in which case, in any event, you would not carry those stupid water bottles). They're going home or to work, both of which places have clean water on tap.
Water! On tap! A problem solved - by "capitalism" if you like. I wouldn't dispute that!
But in order to justify the stupid wasteful bottles, you have to pretend that the problem was not solved, you're too precious to drink that water. It's almost "anti-capitalist".
The fundamental issue regarding who to include in one’s group--whether it be hiring for a software company, admitting students to a school, or granting permission to join a religious group--is our tribal nature. Humans are religious and tribal creatures. Hiring strictly based on IQ is just another religion. Those that want to hire that way should be free to do so. We should all be free to discriminate however we want, and per the First Amendment we are free to do so. Merit is just another form of discrimination. Merit is a religious principle. Science is a religious principle. Get past the semantics and think as deeply as you can here.
This is really just a First Amendment issue. The first Amendment allows us to discriminate. Just sit and ponder its words long enough. Focus on the broader meaning of religion. I’ve spent weeks trying to improve the wording with regard to the word “religion” and I find it very difficult to do so. Why didn’t the Founders also include science? History? Philosophy?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It is also the central question in the persecution of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the murder of Joseph Smith. What does it mean to be American? Who will you allow into your county, your state?
And this is also one of the central debates in Zionism. How do you create a Jewish state--with the goal of national liberation for the Jew; the revitalization of the existential condition of the Jew—that also treats equally everyone already living in British Mandate (Palestine)?Who do the Zionist allow into their country and what rights do they have?
Cofnas: Wildly extreme take. Clearly for any practical purpose whatever criterion that one might want to select for is distributed as a result of genetic and non-genetic factors. And many of the non-genetic factors work against members of certain demographic groups. Therefore, it is a refutable proposition that when selecting among people, it makes sense to give an edge to the person from the "disadvantaged" (for that context) group.
Here is the distribution of white vs. black IQ based on *actual data*, not just the normal distribution formula: https://twitter.com/nathancofnas/status/1740086453466796186/
Whether it's intellectually/morally appealing or not, there just aren't many blacks at the >130 level. In addition, IQ 130 is too low a cutoff for top programmers or academics, and there are other race differences besides IQ, which are generally unfavorable to blacks vis-à-vis whites and Asians. There's no getting around the fact that, if you treat people as individuals, the demographics in elite positions will unfortunately look nothing like the rest of society.
According to Thomas Sowell's book, "Social Justice Fallacies" (pages 42-43), research by Professor James Flynn indicates that IQ can change fairly quickly "by a standard deviation or more - in a generation or two. "
Sowell continues:
"This trend had been going on for years, before Professor Flynn research brought it to light. The reason it was not obvious to others before him was that IQ test results were repeatedly renormed, in order to maintain the average number of questions answered correctly at its definitional level of 100. As more people answered more IQ tot questions correctly over the years, an IQ of 100 now represented correctly answering more questions than before. Because Professor Flynn went back to the original raw scores on IQ test questions answered correctly, these rising performances on IQ tests were brought to light.
"Although the black IQ average, for example, remained more or less constant at about 85 for years, this constancy concealed the fact that blacks, like others, were answering more IQ test questions correctly than in the past. The number of questions that blacks answered correctly on IQ tests in 2002 would have given them an average IQ of 104 by the norms used in 1947-1948. This was slightly higher than the average performance of Americans in general during the earlier period.
"In short, the performances of blacks on IQ tests had risen significantly over time, just as the performances of other people in the United States and in other countries had risen, even though the renorming of IQ tests concealed these changes. Later data published by Charles Murray in 2021 showed that the mean black IQ was now 91, up from the usual 85 in earlier times. This meant that black improvement on IQ tests had not simply kept pace with other people's improvement but had improved somewhat more."
Within-country race differences and the Flynn effect have different causes. James Flynn himself acknowledged this: "the magnitude of white/black IQ differences on Wechsler subtests at any given time is correlated with the g loadings of the subtests; the magnitude of IQ gains over time on subtests is not usually so correlated; the causes of the two phenomena are not the same." See https://thecritic.co.uk/my-debunked-views/
But if IQ is shifting over time that suggests that group differences can be driven as much by culture as anything else, particularly when the gaps tend to change size over time. Genetics matter, but culture does as well, and they probably mutually reinforce the other.
How do you explain the fact that mean black IQ has risen from 85 5o 91? That necessarily translates into an increase in intelligence relative to other (non-black) Americans.
Sowell is wrong about the facts. Charles Murray reported an increase in black IQ, but his analysis included achievement tests that are not IQ tests. On actual IQ tests given to population-representative samples, average black IQ is the same as it's been for the past 50 years, namely, 82-85.
How do you explain the fact that IQ tests of recruits during WWI showed that Southern whites had lower IQs than Northern blacks?
For around 50 years Sowell has been holding up the (now more than a century old) WWI data as his main evidence that IQ is culturally determined. This is a testament to the weakness of his case. Suppose the black-white IQ gap disappeared 50 years ago, but I pointed out that tests administered in WWI showed a difference. Obviously, that would be absurd. But people grasp at straws when it comes to defending environmentalism.
To answer your question: The WWI tests were given at a time when intelligence testing was much less sophisticated. It was also a time when a large proportion of the population didn't come close to achieving its intellectual potential due to differences in educational opportunity and probably nutrition, so differences in IQ scores were determined far more by environmental factors. Finally, the hereditarian hypothesis doesn't say that all populations with white skin are on average more intelligent than all populations with black skin. Northern blacks have higher IQs (and more white admixture) than southern blacks. Some white populations probably have lower average innate intelligence than some black populations. None of this is inconsistent with hereditarianism. When you give tests to *population-representative* groups living under comparable conditions. You get a US black-white gap of 15-18 points.
iirc Sowell's WW1 numbers are for conscripts, not all recruits or all servicemen.
Does excluding 650,000 white volunteers skew the comparison? (Only 4000 blacks volunteered, so I doubt their exclusion has a significant effect one way or the other.) Does it affect the comparison that it excludes everyone who scored too low (or was otherwise disqualified) to get into the Army?
I'm not going to hazard a guess how the comparison would look if we had numbers for all recruits and servicemen. But I think Sowell places too much weight on the narrow data he cites.
Thanks for sharing the actual distributions. I think you are quite correct in the short term. It would be interesting to see if the American black IQ distribution starts to shift to approach the white distribution over time if the black culture shifts to approximate the white culture. (Or Asian culture for that matter.) Whether that would be due to preferential mate selection (genetics) or shifting the focus on training the skills that improve IQ test performance would be difficult to suss out, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the over all curve moves a bit. Whether genetic or cultural, any system that relieves pressure demanding IQ is going to lower average IQ over time, and we definitely have that system in the US.
True, and it would be good to de-emphasize IQ (cognitive) relative to character (non-cognitive).
Black IQ will increase over time because people identifying as black will have more white DNA in them, but that's not quite the same thing is it. In addition, elite subgroups from Africa make up more and more of blacks in America (half of Harvards blacks I think).
The U.S. Army began testing the IQs of their recruits during WWI. They found that Southern whites had lower IQs than Northern blacks - long before there was much interracial marriage. That suggests that IQ is, at least in part, tied to things like culture and nutrition.
Everything is tied to nutrition, even things almost entirely genetic like height.
Look up "Dutch Hunger Winter Cohort". When everybody gets enough to eat, gets even as much education as the alphabet, and isn't plagued by diseases and parasites which have long since been eradicated, then they tend to saturate and plateau at their genetic potential at very low thresholds. The world of 107 years ago was still one in which many people's experiences did not meet those thresholds, but that hasn't been the case in generations.
Those results were published by Ashley Montagu (London born, "Israel Ehrenberg") who was the original "There's No Such Thing As Race - And Definitely Nothing to IQ" activist academic way back in the early 40's, he literally wrote the book on it, "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race", in which he made his claims just a bit more confidently than warranted given that it was a decade before anyone knew the structure of DNA and another half century before whole genomes could be sequenced and it would actually be possible to subject such claims to the most rigorously objective empirical scrutiny, where, duh, they all, uh, "failed to replicate".
Even in his own time Montagu's work was criticized* and a huge amount of WWII testing was inconsistent with it. So everyone mostly forgot about it for decades, which makes sense because otherwise you would have seen it mentioned all the time in things like Brown v Board of Education or Civil Rights Act debates, etc.
Then 35 years later the next generation's leading "There's No Such Thing As Race" popular academic was Stephen Gould who re-popularized the misleading alpha test results in "The Mismeasure of Man", which was later demonstrated to contain what could not have been other than intentional falsehoods the more notorious one being Gould's libel against Sam Morton.
Gould said Morton's numbers on skull measurements were wrong, because Morton was so racist that his racist unconscious caused him to either mismeasure or misreport the numbers to match his racist prejudices. But, uh, you know, when people went back to actually measure the skulls, all of Morton's numbers were completely accurate. So, how did Gould come to know Morton's numbers were wrong? He didn't, he made the whole thing up, and no one checked or called him out on it.
Montagu was likewise not the most reliable narrator when it came to accurately reporting on facts relevant to these highly sensitive questions. He also got booted from Rutgers for being a member of the Communist Party, but he landed on his feet and did well for himself for the rest of his long life.
*The issues with the alpha test results - which have been discussed exhaustively on online forums since Gould's book in the old "alt." usenet days - would take a while to discuss. But if one looks even at Montagu's massaged enormous ranges (Florida black median 9.3, Ohio black median 48.3, Mississippi white media 41.2, DC white median, 78.8) that should clue one in that these median scores differ far, far more than on any comparable g-loaded tests from any later generation. You get a hint in the name itself. The Army doesn't do anything with an alpha unless there's a beta, and sure enough, alpha was for 'literates' and beta was for illiterate adults, of which there were still very large numbers back over a century ago. The trouble was that some states gave alpha to nearly everybody and others to smaller portions, and the inconsistency created all kinds of selection effect problems and other confusions. Fortunately, we don't have to rely on 107 year old data, we have tons of better, more recent data, and none of it looks like Montagu's numbers.
I wonder how much of the IQ disparity is a side effect of the welfare state’s destruction of black families. The statistics with respect to fatherless children are not good; higher rates of dropout, drugs, alcohol, poverty, and suicide. Add to that children whose mothers were drinking or taking drugs during pregnancy.
Jim Crow wasn’t as nearly devastating to black Americans as paternalistic progressive policies were.
The good news is that Americans don't have to restrict the analysis to America, which is what Americans tend instinctively to do, because Americans are culturally conditioned from birth such that they cannot help but want to explain the reality of American sociology in terms of a normative framework that picks out particular aspects of American history as pan-explanatory original sins. They don't have to do this because there are plenty of black people in African counties and in a diaspora all around the world, and what makes that extra good is that all those populations had really different histories, economies, languages, cultures, levels of wealth, levels of education, religions, family structures and levels of stability, etc. And even in poorest Africa the world of 2024 is nothing like it was 50 years ago in terms of being constrained by lack of investment, education, isolation, and so forth. This is exactly the kind of variation you want and need if you are going to try to prove a hypothesis of equal subpopulation means in natural potential and are looking for the secret sauce tecioe of elements nurture above the "serious malnutrition and disease load" threshold that helps or hurts a lot in terms of people reaching their potential. Even better, in the world of 2024, every ancestral group has a diaspora with a lot of this kind of variation.
And we don't have to wonder about this, because this work has been done. And it turns out nurture stuff matters only a very little bit, and even all combined together is not even in the same ballpark as the nature side of the equation. And the means are not the same. They differ a lot, and this matters a lot. There's nothing anyone can do to change it without taking charge of genetics and procreation, and it's nobody's fault.
The good news is that going all out on education can help a little, and even accounting for approx 20% European admixture, American blacks tend to do a bit better than blacks living almost anywhere else in the world. The bad news is that this has done almost nothing when it comes to what would happen with meritocratic selection because all that effort didn't "close the gap" in means, with Asians especially blowing past everybody.
So you don't believe that genetics or culture affect IQ within group? Why would white people have kids with low IQ blacks in your story? Why wouldn't black people preferentially have kids with higher IQ black people? Why is mixing with whites the only way for black American IQ to increase? Why does evolutionary selection pressure not function in your story?
Why would high IQ blacks not be at the same disadvantage as any other such group - that being the disadvantage that they aren't going to have but one or two kids?
What high IQ people do is surely a blip compared to the incentives that drive reproduction in America, regardless of race.
Sowell seems to describe a belief in educational progress - embedded in that acronym, NAACP - that didn't pan out. That seems quaint now; an artifact of an earlier era of paternalism - when the subjects of that paternalism may have chafed under it but ultimately understood their goal to be synonomous with it.
But was it not panning out? Are we sure about that? "Fifty years ago" is a very important turn. The Great Society stepped in and put its thumb on the scale.
I am not familiar with Sowell's thinking beyond the well-known points - but I suspect he feels a bitterness with LBJ's I'm-gonna-out-liberal-you-bastards "reforms" as only one who had a foot in the worlds before and after, can.
Obviously I can't refute a statistician - but being just old enough to have caught a glimpse of earlier decades - and having a lively interest in the productions of the past, over those of the present, inclines me to think something went wrong - and that something is dysgenic.
I think (if I am following this correctly... there are like 10 threads here I am trying to keep track of) that you put your finger right on it: LBJ's Great Society reforms were immensely dysgenic in the cultural behavior changes they drove. The rates of single parent black families shot up, the rates of black unemployment shot up, basically every outcome we care about went in the wrong direction. Not just for blacks, but they were more heavily impacted it seems. What do you get when you tell a lot of women they can't get married or they lose a check, but having lots of kids with different men who won't be around anyway is fine and gets you more money? It isn't more choosy women, and it isn't men who strive to be more successful in business to attract a long term mate. Nothing in modern urban culture selects for intelligence.
Policy, culture and genetics all feed into one another.
I think this - rather than race-based IQ talk - should be the conservative talking point. Its effects are obvious, and certainly not limited to blacks (this you know if you live in the South or the West, anyway).
But in a curious case of opposite-word identity - the only word that gets people more worked up than "eugenic" - is "dysgenic".
"Why would white people have kids with low IQ blacks in your story?"
There is a trend of successful black men marrying white women. Black women complain about this quite a bit.
Here is the one minute version of the phenomenon from a black artist:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0ciiecvmaEQ
IQ rises with white admixture %:
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-d79beb11a7614ad9331e354fb51d9195-pjlq
If you look at a list of African American elites it's disproportionately mulatto.
You seem to have forgotten the other questions.
You also seem to be forgetting that most American blacks are a mix of white and black compared to Africans.
As to your links, if successful blacks (presumably with higher IQ and culturally similar to whites on average) are marrying similarly successful white women, we would expect their kids to have higher IQs. You effectively have discovered that white males who are really into Asian culture tend to marry Asian women at higher rates. I wonder if unsuccessful blacks who marry equally unsuccessful white women (ok, have kids out of wedlock with) have kids with lower IQ than average... I have a sneaking suspicion they do!
That figure is from the Bell Curve book, chapter 13, page 279, representing rescaled results of ASVAB administered as part of NLSY in 1980, available here https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator/pages/search?s=NLSY79. Raw AQFT test scores are not available through this interface, only sample percentiles (1-99). 6502 whites and 3022 blacks were in the sample.
Actually there will be some resemblance to the NBA - with as many Blacks, or more, in the very top 1000 intellectuals as there now are Hispanics in the NBA (maybe 2 or 3?).
Few think the NBA is racist - because sports meritocracy is so clear to so many.
Sports success leads to more publicity, and influence, but seldom to moral prestige; and lots of sports status but not so much political influence.
Damore should not have been fired -- and none should be fired for telling the truth. But according to court cases, it seems that speaking the truth can be considered creating a hostile environment.
We can only get optimal government with the ability to speak the truth, even the ugly truth.
The best way to move forward on this is to live it. Create a private institution, call it elite if you want to, hire based strictly on merit or whatever criterion you desire and see how it works. If you like it great. If not, change it. Problem solved?
The big problem is that it is illegal to do that, in so far as you will be sued to hell and breakfast. Once those laws are changed such that "disparate impact" and all the other racially (and sexually) based rules on who you can hire or fire are gone, then it totally works.
I like that response, but I’m not certain it’s true in every instance or most instances. And where it is true, why not use First Amendment protections? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
I don't know that there has been a First Amendment challenge to the Title -stuff- rules that reached the Supreme Court, but given that those rules still exist I am guessing either it hasn't happened or the court went "nah, freedom of association doesn't count when it comes to hiring people". It is definitely the case that there is a huge amount of legal pressure to meet diversity quotas and avoid firing protected classes les you be sued into oblivion. So long as "protected classes" is a legally meaningful phrase it will be a problem to just hire/fire based on anything that doesn't include diversity of various protected traits.
Re: "The main difference is that profit-seeking businesses ultimately are accountable to customers, and non-profits are accountable to donors. "
Colleges and hospitals are a big part of the not-for-profit sector. (Half of hospitals are not-for-profit.)
Most of the not-for-profit colleges depend a lot on tuition (i.e., revenues from customers). See the data at the link below:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_333.40.asp
In AY 2019-20, the main percentage distributions (above 5%) at 4-year college were:
Net tuition & fees: 34%
Federal appropriations: 13%
Private gifts, grants, and contracts: 13%
Investment revenues: 10%
Auxiliary services: 10%
Revenues of affiliated hospitals: 13%
Presumably, user fees (paid mainly by insurers?) constitute a large part of revenues at not-for-profit hospitals.
My point is that two major industries in the not-for-profit sector rely on families who pay tuition (or insurers who pay fees for patients), donors, and government appropriations. Accountability is complicated and a mess.
It is interesting that the consumer of services in education and health care has a really hard time knowing whether they got a good deal. And also that to a large extent, the services are paid for by someone else, especially in health care. So it is indeed a complicated mess.
Arnold - I have a question. You write, “If, like many young people, you think that working for a non-profit is more morally righteous than working for a profit-seeking business, I think you have it backwards. Many non-profits are grifts. Many treat their employees badly, because they can. A profit-seeking business runs into trouble if good employees are unhappy and leave, but the head of a non-profit just has to stay in good graces with the donors, even he runs a dysfunctional organization. In terms of the previous link, an executive in a profit-seeking business has more incentive to care about his or her subordinates.”
Does this apply to non-profit vs for-profit K-12 schools? Any reason why it wouldn’t?
Reading recommendations on this please?
I think there is a lot of pressure for private schools to act like government schools. This limits the amount of variance that one can find in the private school market. I would not expect to find much difference between non-profit private schools and for-profit private schools, but I have not looked at the literature.
It seems there are two kinds of private schools too. Elite (=fashionable, =progressive) private schools are, if anything, ahead of the curve and in the lead which government schools follow. Then there are non-elite schools that, whether they can publicly admit it or not, are dedicated to going against the mainstream's current in some respect. They can't afford to get too far out of line, as they are watched closely by countless micro-Berias ready to pounce on any excuse to get them shut down, usually by accusing them of some kind of discrimination.
Let’s be creative about this. Let’s imagine that Arnold Kling operates a for-profit school. Currently it’s a small, mostly online school called, In My Tribe. The school’s messages are primarily delivered via Substack.
Now we can imagine taking steps to increase the size and scope of this school. Hiring an employee to carry out research, create podcasts or update the Grader. We can also imagine in-person meetings that happen quarterly as with your NBU. We can hire more employees as needed.
I’m guessing that making this school a for-profit would be better for the reasons you already mentioned. Feel free to elaborate though.
"Does this apply to non-profit vs for-profit K-12 schools? Any reason why it wouldn’t?"
Two reasons. First, public schools have to stay in good graces with the voters and the law, and education law is something that most people opining about public schools are completely ignorant of. A teacher might have tenure, but if a teacher does something that violates community standards, that teacher will be gone. So no, public schools have to be very conscious of a wide range of customers.
Second, private schools are starved for labor. They have far more attrition than public schools do, particularly at the lower level, so it would be quite normal for them to do things purely to please teachers, as opposed to parents. At the elite level, schools can absolutely choose to follow norms demanded by teachers and ignore parents because, as we've seen, parents will take it.
How does this compare to for-profit schools?
A lot covered here, but I think I'll respond to Scott Alexander's "people saved" metric. Restating the obvious, a "saved" life is just a life that is kept for longer than it would have been otherwise. One wonders how much scrutiny any charity is under when it claims to have been the true cause of a prolonged life that would have been otherwise cut short by thirst, but even taking the claim as true for the purpose of argument, it makes little sense to point to it as an example of what the trendy academics of yesteryear would call a market failure of capitalism because if there is one thing that capitalism is exceptionally effective at, it's meeting the needs of the body at scale.
Capitalism, such as it is, has a strong track record for prolonging lives and shifting causes of death from the ones that strike early and haphazardly to the ones that strike late and predictably. The market system is far better at striking at all the root causes of early death than any focused charity. The better argument against capitalism (and nonprofits focused on corporeal ends) if you wanted to make it is that prolonging lives by itself is not good, and that a society that aims at such a thing is aiming at the wrong set of goals. You could also argue that a society that focuses on maximizing temporal quantities often does so at the expense of other and more important qualities. But erecting the nonprofit form as a "better" way of prolonging lives than the modern market is just putting up a strawman.
Quite so. One could pretty accurately describe the number of lives saved by capitalism* by graphing world population by year going back as far as we know to today, with a horizontal line pinned to the population around 1750 (or whenever you want to start the industrial revolution) and say everyone above that line was saved by capitalism. Usually the estimates of global population looks like this https://bluepyramid.org/storey/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/WorldPopAD.png basically a really slow grow till about 1750, hitting 1 billion only around 1800, then growing very rapidly after till 7-8 billion today about 200 years later. So something like 6 billion people saved at least, although that of course doesn't measure the full total of people saved in terms of "Would have died at 40, lived to 80" but I don't know a good way of measuring that, or even estimating.
*Whatever that means... markets maybe? For profit production of goods by private owners of capital distributed via market mechanisms?
"But I don’t think that “race realism” is necessary or sufficient to get to the point where we treat people as individuals."
Yes.
A social and moral system like wokeness is best engaged with a social and moral system like respect for each individual.
And "race realism" is itself a social and moral stance. You can argue about the merits of the research it cites, but what if new and better research supercedes the old? What if the old research is applied reductively and overconfidently with blinders like status and groupthink? The ethic of individual dignity remains compelling regardless of all that.
Nathan Cofnas writes: "I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality."
Do the woke really take equality seriously? Their actions belie that claim. Why, for example, would anyone who cares about equality run schools for the benefit of teachers’ unions rather than for that of students?
Why would anyone who cares about equality declare that the “bourgeois virtues” of self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility are “white traits”? Why would people who care about the minority poor teach them that these traits, which have led people of all cultures and ethnicities out of poverty for millennia, are racist?
Why would anyone who cares about equality teach minority children that the deck is stacked against them and that they are incapable of improving their lives and those of their loved ones through their own actions? Why would anyone who cares about equality teach minority children that they will have no future until white people stop being racist but that white people can never be not racist?
Let me give you a line by line boilerplait explanation. I'm not saying these are good ideas, but they are "consistent" in their own terrible bullshit way.
"run schools for the benefit of teachers’ unions rather than for that of students?"
The teachers unions are highly trained professional experts that know what is best for children. The idea that they put their interests before the kids is conservative propaganda because they hate poor people and want to cut school funding so they can get tax breaks for the rich so they can own yachts.
"self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility"
Lack of these characteristics in black Americans is used as an excuse to discriminate against blacks. There are other, equal or more valuable traits, that blacks excel at that and white supremicists focus on these traits because they want to exclude blacks.
And besides, blacks obviously have all those traits in sufficient quantity, whites just lie about it.
"Why would anyone who cares about equality teach minority children that the deck is stacked against them and that they are incapable of improving their lives and those of their loved ones through their own actions?"
So that they engage in racial solidarity to lobby and protest to get a better deal from the unfair establishment. Without such racial solidarity and activism individual blacks stand no change of advancement. Fight the power!
Neither the woke's ideas nor their rationales stand up to empirical data. We don't have to buy the woke claims of moral superiority as Cofnas implies. Truly moral people would care about the results of their actions and beliefs.
"Neither the woke's ideas nor their rationales stand up to empirical data."
Correct, but they deny empirics. Starting with IQ and race, then everything else because you have to once you've done that.
"We don't have to buy the woke claims of moral superiority as Cofnas implies."
I don't. But I bite the bullet on race realism.
Sowellism got a shot. It was the center-right view from The Cosby Show.
I'll give you a story of why it failed. I tutored briefly at one of those Asian cram schools. In the Sowell view these are great examples of their culture, in my view they seemed like a waste of time that explains part of why Asians don't have time to breed anymore.
In my time there we never really improved anyones SAT scores. The first practice test or two might get you 30 points, but the rest was all diminishing returns. The was common in the industry and can be confirmed by many studies.
Most of the kids in the cram school were reasonably bright, but one was like literally retarded. But his parents were helicopter Asian parents who REALLY REALLY believed in culture. They sent him after school every day and all day on Saturday and Sunday. Doing SAT prep tests was this fucking kids life, and they wanted him to go to Harvard! He never stood a chance. It was so fucking miserable to watch.
When people say "we can just improve black culture" I think about some black kid having to do SAT practice tests all weekend long instead of having a childhood with no change in their score. For the love of god, let the kid shoot some hoops. He doesn't have a lot of options in life, let him enjoy what pleasures he has.
A lot of black people did try to fix their culture but it didn't change their IQ, so it didn't work.
"Truly moral people would care about the results of their actions and beliefs."
Sure, but have you gotten a good look at human beings lately? Heck, you can't even admit that all this culture talk can be harmful.
You seem to think that the overall American black culture is roughly equivalent to American Asian culture with regards to the importance of school, studying, work, career, family etc. and thus would have similar marginal returns.
I can tell you from direct experience it is not. Asians probably are overdoing things, yes, but look at stats for inner city school attendance, family formation, whatever, and tell me that they are even approaching the same culture. American Asian culture probably is getting strongly diminishing returns on human potential, but American black culture doesn't even attempt to push the potential. (Outside of professional sports, arguably.)
"You seem to think that the overall American black culture is roughly equivalent to American Asian culture"
I don't, you seem to have missed the point.
If American black culture matches Asian culture, I would expect no change in their IQ.
"inner city school attendance, family formation, whatever, and tell me that they are even approaching the same culture."
There are aspects of black culture that could possibly be improved. You don't NEED a high IQ to get and stay married. This was the point of Charles Murrays work, was it not.
If you get the black illegitimacy rate down it will make their lives and the lives around them better. I do not think it will affect their IQ at all. They will still be janitors or whatever, but maybe they will have happier lives as janitors. I took this to be the point of Murray's work, which has a strong element of focusing less on how to make everyone computer programmers and more on how to make the life of a janitor better.
So you seem to be misunderstanding the relationship between culture, IQ and genetic potential.
Say you take someone with good genetic potential, what would be a high IQ, but don't give them any schooling. Basically have them raised by wolves. That person will, upon being given an IQ test, perform well below their potential. They will probably do better than someone with a low genetic potential for IQ, but they probably won't do better than someone with lower genetic potential for IQ but who has also had some schooling.
Now do the opposite, that that high potential person and train the absolute crap out of them to maximize their use of IQ. They will score really highly. Then put them in some more training. Will they do better? Probably not much, because they have already nearly maxed out their potential.
So you see, while Asians who train the hell out of their kids to get the most out of their inherent IQ potential aren't going to get many returns, blacks who pretty much neglect the training have a lot to gain. Their potential doesn't change, but what they make of their potential does. The current state of black culture, broken families that largely ignore children, no focus on education, over emphasis on sports, a neglect of "white" traits like being on time, conscientiousness and the like, all that mess, if that gets corrected there are huge gains to be had. Not necessarily easy gains; changing culture is hard, but gains.
Expecting no change in measured black IQ if they suddenly adopted the culture of Asians (including marrying and reproducing for academic or business success) is just ridiculous. The only way it could possibly hold is if culture has no appreciable effect and all outcomes are based on genetics, which is to say that individual behaviors have no effect on outcomes.
Two of my kids are 8th grade math teachers who work at Title I schools. They regularly get students who are illiterate, so they end up teaching reading as well as math. At the beginning of one school year, only 9% of the students in one of my daughter's classes tested at proficiency level for their grade. By the end of the school year, over half of her students were at proficiency level.
You should come up with an education reform package based on their work and fix the problem nationwide. I heard nobody every tried that before.
The point is that minority kids do better when they have good teachers who care. As to a "reform package," my kids get hit with those all the time: "Stop doing the things that work and start using these untested techniques that someone came up with that we're really really sure will improve equity."
I work at Title I schools and math teachers teach math,not English. There's literally no "so they end up teaching reading". Doesn't happen.
I assume you are saying that the kids improved in math, not reading. In any case, no. You can't get to 8th grade in America and genuinely be illiterate So maybe they were Asians who didn't speak English and so didn't understand the test.
As for your magic story, proficient is a high standard, so the kids who didn't test as proficient might have tested as basic, and it's hardly shocking that she might have moved kids from high basic to proficient.
Yes, the kids improved in math. They also improved in reading. I talked to a young lady who tutored football players in a university that will not be named. According to her, one of her students wrote essays at the level of, “I John Doe, I football player.” You may call that literate, I don’t. Presumably, that football player had to get through 8th grade to get into college. So, I don’t buy your claim that there are no (non-immigrant) illiterate 8th graders in America.
"In that case, using the normal distribution formula, there are tens of thousands of black Americans who meet that threshold."
So what? The competition for those "tens of thousands" isn't just Microsoft and Harvard- it is every other corporation and college in the United States. And you are again making the assertion that nothing is known about the distribution in the tails of intellectual ability.
It indeed seems like a very coastal attitude.
It's a whole big country.
The entire EA schtick amounts to "a dollar goes further in Africa".
But capitalism increased global GDP dramatically, and Africa has been stagnant for fifty years despite massive foreign aid.
When a billion or so Africans swamp Europe and turn it into a third world country, remember that it made SSC feel more virtuous then his 401k.
Charity over Capitalism is "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish".
Scott rigged the framing of the argument with that early caveat of "near mode". That lets him get away with prematurely disposing of the *main* argument for capitalism over charity, which is that it's *an error* to do this analysis by restricting it solely to a near mode to near mode comparison of consequences. To put it in more technical language, dynamic effects can overcome static effects, so purely static analysis can be completely misleading.
The point about capitalism is the long term broadly-enjoyed benefits of investment. Of *course* investment doesn't pay off in saving lives or reducing suffering *today*. Investment is not about *today*, it's about *tomorrow*, and it does more for tomorrow than charity can do today. The only reason a dollar earned by some American can do literally anything for anyone in Africa is because of centuries of accumulated knowledge, effort, technology, institution evolution, etc. that created a whole global market infrastructure essential for making such things even remotely possible.
To put it a different way, a dollar spent on improving lives today is a dollar taken away from improving lives in the future. The lesson of economic history is that you can almost always do a lot more improving for a lot more people in the future than you can today, and yes, you don't even have to be intending or trying to do it, it just happens as a consequence of capitalism creating economic growth which makes everybody richer.
We could have simply said that you generally can’t have charity without surplus, and it seems pretty clear you can’t have surplus without capitalism.
Going further to suppose that surplus invested to improve future lives always (or almost always, but query what the parameters for that determination are?) has greater value than charity given today is silly.
For people that have the good fortune of having such surplus, there is a place for each and people can and should hedge their bets by engaging in both.
"If Harvard admitted students based on their academic qualifications alone, Harvard would be 43 percent Asian, 38.4 percent white, 0.7 percent black..."
- Heather Mac Donald (The New Criterion, November 2019)
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/11/harvard-admits-its-preferences
Cofnas says that "blacks would virtually disappear" from Harvard if it used colorblind admissions criteria. Kling says he finds that statement "neither intellectually nor morally appealing." Since what Cofnas said is true, why does Kling think it matters that he finds it unappealing?
A question could be whether, if Arnold made a claim that he believed to be true, and someone disagreed with it on the basis of finding it or the manner in which it was expressed neither intellectually nor morally appealing, would Arnold accept that as a valid criticism, or tell that person that appeal is irrelevant to truth, and mature adults accept the fact that some things are both true and unappealing.
There's a reason Land named it "The Dark Enlightenment". There's a reason we have an expression like "Ugly Truths", or of more recent vintage, "Red Pill".
To borrow from Phil Dick, "Reality is that which, when you stop finding it appealing, doesn't go away.'
If you want to argue that "race realism" is not necessary to get colorblindness, argue it. There are people who accept the math and still argue that say human beings can't handle the truth, which is a thesis one can debate honestly.
But this contortion on the statistics and flat out lying about the math is really bad form. It's been tried for fifty years now and it's gotten us nowhere.
Normal distribution gives us 55,000 blacks about 130 IQ. But there are 6.5M non-blacks (and I'm being generous here). That is 0.9% of 130 IQ. Naturally, those blacks are going to disburse amongst various institutions and professions.
Personally, I found race realism to be one of the most life affirming and optimistic things I ever discovered. Before I found it, I logically had to conclude that something was seriously wrong with our society. After I found it I realized that we were actually doing pretty good as a society. The truth will set you free.
You should not assume that IQ is normally distributed, or even what the shape of the distribution is if it is normal. That is not to say that there might be real differences in racial IQ and that there wouldn't be more or less representation of some sub-groups, but "the math" isn't being lied about. People vastly over use normal distributions because they are mathematically convenient, regardless of how well they describe the data.
As someone working for a company that uses all Microsoft products, I would also argue that one doesn't need a 130 IQ to work for Microsoft; 90 might do the trick :D
The problem when you are off by a factor of 13:1 is that it really doesn't matter if you think a slightly different distribution applies. It ain't gonna change the big picture.
Moreover, we do shove more blacks into elite professions and they always perform poorly. It's not like, once they get a chance, they prove themselves. It's hard for me to believe there is a bunch of untapped IQ potential out there.
So you are making a few errors there.
Firstly, I didn't say there wouldn't be shifts in representation, I specifically said there would be. I was pointing out that the math isn't being lied about.
Why is the math not being lied about? Because changes in the distribution DO create large differences out in the tails. The difference between a normal distribution or a fat tail or a skewed distribution can be very large. Not large enough to entirely swing things; anyone claiming that would be wrong. But large enough that saying things like "There would be no blacks in high IQ jobs" would also be wrong. Again, not arguing there wouldn't be fewer, but also not as small as many "race realists" seem to believe. (Not even getting to what looks like a high IQ job might not be, etc.)
Your point about affirmative action putting a lot of blacks into jobs they can't handle is valid, but you are also missing the point that 1: you have a very small sample size, and 2: putting unqualified blacks into jobs makes all blacks look worse. That latter point has been made for years by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. Not only does affirmative action tend to push those affected past the point where they can't do the job and so make them look bad, every one in their group tends to be assumed to be a "diversity hire" which will hold back those who actually are good and incentivizing participation in politicking instead of competence.
So, again, yea, going colorblind probably will lower the number of blacks in the high IQ jobs. Possibly not as much as some people believe. Also, why the hell are "race realists" trying to claim that it will cause all blacks to be out of higher status jobs? What are they gaining by trying to lowball the number? Claiming "We are being realistic!" is not true, because realistic is "we don't really know, but it will be lower, maybe in this sort of range" not "We know down to the thousands!" What's the goal there?
Your theory is that:
1) Blacks have a fat tail relative to what we see everywhere else
2) That fat tail goes in one direction (I don't see you claiming it means there are more retard blacks on the other end
3)
If blacks are 13% of the population and make up 1% or less of high end jobs that is what people mean by "there would be no blacks in high end jobs". They don't literally mean ZERO BLACKS ANYWHERE. They mean that it will be very very obvious to everyone that blacks are drastically less prevalent in the elite than they are in the general population.
In any situation where there is a low enough N, there might not be any blacks at all. Let's say there are twenty practicing doctors at a clinic. In normal times you would think there would be two blacks. In reality we would expect 0.17 blacks. So it's likely that particular clinic there isn't a single black doctor (and like 10 asians or whatever). You don't think that is going to seem odd to people?
Let's say blacks and blacks alone have this "fat tail". How fat is it? 13x more fat? This just does not happen in statistics. We are straining credibility here.
I would posit that if you doubled the number of blacks above 130 IQ compared to the normal distribution, people would still ask why they are 13% of the pop and 2% or less of the elite. Same at 3%.
"If blacks are 13% of the population and make up 1% or less of high end jobs that is what people mean by "there would be no blacks in high end jobs"."
Well, then say that !!!!!!!!! The "no blacks" statement makes you look like an idiot and really tars "race realism". Everyone who argues for some sort of race realism now has to deal with, "Race realists think that there are no high IQ blacks. They are factually and morally wrong. It is a waste of time (and a near occasion of sin) to have anything to do with them. They should be banished from the internet and any school."
I really don't think the issue of disagreement here has anything to do with what you're talking about.
If you think the NATURAL level of blacks is 13%, 1% or 0% are both about as unnatural and evil.
Moreover, 13% us what THE LAW expects. Your no less subject to disparate impact at 1% vs 0%.
No. Let me try and be more clear for you. My theory is:
1) IQ does not necessarily follow a normal distribution, and indeed probably doesn't because the left end of the tail will be truncated and the right end will be fatter. In any case, assuming a perfect normal distribution is a really bad idea, in almost any area.
2) When people say "There would be no blacks in high end jobs" they are either being hyperbolic which means they should not be taken seriously, or they are too stupid to understand that it is not literally true due both to raw numbers of IQ and the fact that IQ is not all that determines who has high end/status jobs, in which case they should not be taken seriously. Which do you prefer?
3) When it comes to questions of "Why are they 13% percent of the population but less than 2% of the elite?" the proper answer is "People are different, dumb ass," then point to all the stats about IQ, school performance, college major selection, reverse rates in sports, or whatever else you want. Again, what is the point of over stating the doom and gloom scenario of going color blind in the rules? Who is that helping?
"People are different, dumb ass,"
So why didn't this work? There are people who say fuck off about all this. Why did they lose the culture war? What's your theory?
We already had The Cosby Show. We already had center-right colorblindness that talked a bunch about culture. Will Smith rapped about saving money to help your mom buy school supplies. We had No Child Left Behind.
It didn't work. It lost.
Isn't that the whole point of Cofnas essay?
Look, blacks aren't going to look at a 13:1 discrepancy and go "that's alright". Someone is going to come along and say "you're right, its not right, I will get your justice, please vote for me 90/10 split and lend me your social and street pressure". That's a $100 bill on the sidewalk that somebody is going to pick up.
And since most white people have been raised to think "that 13:1 seems wrong" they are going to want someone offering "solutions" too. At least some of them. That's a political coalition.
Women make up more than 50% of the student body at most colleges. As customers, would they prefer a body of faculty hired strictly on IQ and other cognitive factors? Or would they prefer a hiring model that takes into account both character, cognitive skills and other traits? In other words, who would the customers want as their professors?
Nathan Cofnas is mostly correct - the DNA denialists who are against group average differences currently are accorded the winning moral superiority position. It was part of the Civil Rights idea to end segregation and end legal discrimination. And then the big gaps would be closing.
Fail.
>>Given that legal equality failed to usher in an era of racial equality of outcome, and that the elites were unwilling to accept striking racial disparities as a product of nature, there was no way to avoid wokism. ...
Belief in psychological equality clashed with reality: racial disparities persisted after legal barriers were removed. Because of the taboo on hereditarianism, racial disparities were attributed to environmental factors, triggering an ever-escalating effort to correct the environment.<<
There was an offhand early remark about Christian equality being part of the dominance of IQ denialism. All humans are created equal in the eyes of God - and need to be treated based on their character - judged by their actions. Equality morality seems clearly superior. But that means intellectual superiority is NOT moral superiority.
Black IQs are, on average, lower than Whites; such an ugly, ugly truth.
What America needs to do is raise the quality of life for low IQ people - Confas fails to suggest methods.
Very good article - a bit long. What does the Kling-opEd grader think?
Water: a subject that makes me cranky. I see you folks at the grocery store putting the 32-packs of plastic water bottles in your cart, and I find it kinda funny. See, I dislike plastic bottle waste and the effect on the environment, visual and otherwise, and being spartan in my habits have never purchased water at the store. In fact I would ban the sale of those bottles (as one does - bans things one wants to be rid of). As a trash-picker-upper, I certainly appreciate plastic bag bans (spoiler: y'all are going to let them blow around forever) but always felt, we're pretending this other plastic waste isn't just as bad. It's too meager a little start (and y'all mostly killed those local bans anyway, because all places must have the same rules, because we're all converging toward a homogenized, centrally-directed future, much like Comintern ... oh well, one can't expect to have expunged all of Communism's impulses so quickly ...).
I would thus be "anti-capitalist" in these leanings (although not having studied Marxism or subscribed to it, I don't have a strong attachment to or understanding of such a Marxist term).
On the other hand, the bottle buyers are not getting on the Appalachian Trail (in which case, in any event, you would not carry those stupid water bottles). They're going home or to work, both of which places have clean water on tap.
Water! On tap! A problem solved - by "capitalism" if you like. I wouldn't dispute that!
But in order to justify the stupid wasteful bottles, you have to pretend that the problem was not solved, you're too precious to drink that water. It's almost "anti-capitalist".
The fundamental issue regarding who to include in one’s group--whether it be hiring for a software company, admitting students to a school, or granting permission to join a religious group--is our tribal nature. Humans are religious and tribal creatures. Hiring strictly based on IQ is just another religion. Those that want to hire that way should be free to do so. We should all be free to discriminate however we want, and per the First Amendment we are free to do so. Merit is just another form of discrimination. Merit is a religious principle. Science is a religious principle. Get past the semantics and think as deeply as you can here.
This is really just a First Amendment issue. The first Amendment allows us to discriminate. Just sit and ponder its words long enough. Focus on the broader meaning of religion. I’ve spent weeks trying to improve the wording with regard to the word “religion” and I find it very difficult to do so. Why didn’t the Founders also include science? History? Philosophy?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It is also the central question in the persecution of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the murder of Joseph Smith. What does it mean to be American? Who will you allow into your county, your state?
And this is also one of the central debates in Zionism. How do you create a Jewish state--with the goal of national liberation for the Jew; the revitalization of the existential condition of the Jew—that also treats equally everyone already living in British Mandate (Palestine)?Who do the Zionist allow into their country and what rights do they have?
This is covered quite well by Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. Remember?
Cofnas: Wildly extreme take. Clearly for any practical purpose whatever criterion that one might want to select for is distributed as a result of genetic and non-genetic factors. And many of the non-genetic factors work against members of certain demographic groups. Therefore, it is a refutable proposition that when selecting among people, it makes sense to give an edge to the person from the "disadvantaged" (for that context) group.
If American institutions hired “purely on merit” it would lead to institutions crowded with Chinese and/or Indian nationals, depending on the field.
True or false?