Race, Genetics, and High Achievement
How to talk about these?
In American academic economics, there is no higher honor than the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to a leading economist under the age of 40. It is generally considered to be on par with a Nobel Prize. The Clark medal used to be given every two years, but since 2010 it has been given annually.
In 2021, the recipient was Isaiah Andrews. His Wikipedia entry reports,
Andrews grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of Yale-educated economists Marcellus Andrews and Cheryl Smith.
So he had favorable genes. He also happens to be black.
As far as I can tell, the only other Clark medal winner who is black is Roland Fryer. His Wikipedia entry says,
Fryer grew up in Lewisville, Texas, where he had moved with his abusive alcoholic father at the age of 4. Fryer's mother left when he was very young
So Fryer’s destiny for high achievement does not seem to owe as much to his parents.
If I am correct that there have been no black winners other than Andrews and Fryer, then statistically blacks are under-represented among Clark medal winners. What are we to make of that?
In a podcast with Richard Hanania, Amy Wax argues for “race realism.” She says,
What will happen when we have real color blindness? Well, what will happen is there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability. And here I’m talking about, you know, 130 IQ plus. So we’re talking about academic medicine, academic law, academia, generally, a lot of business positions, high tech positions, anything kind of technical and scientific, it’s going to be hard to get almost any blacks in those positions on a pure meritocracy. And you could say, nah, that’s not true, but actually the IQ numbers are really stark. They are really, really stark. So how are we going to sell that to the public?
Note that Andrews and Fryer have achieved at a much higher level than “the public.” They have achieved at a much higher level than you or me. They have achieved at a much higher level than Hanania or Wax. So when Wax says “there won’t be hardly any blacks in positions demanding very high cognitive ability,” she is not helping people understand genetics or statistics or racial differences.1
I think that you have to talk to people in ways that someone with no natural handle on statistics or probability can still understand. And to most people, “hardly any” sounds like the number of Jews playing pro basketball. It is a misleading and harmful characterization.
I would describe the relationship between race and intelligence as more like the relationship between sex and height. The average male is taller than the average female. But plenty of females are taller than the average male. And plenty of males are shorter than the average female. Similarly, many blacks have higher IQ than the average white, and many whites have lower IQ than the average black.
But beyond that, high achievement is not solely determined by IQ. In many fields, intelligence does play a role. But IQ never perfectly predicts achievement. Other factors matter, by amounts that differ by field. High achievement is multidimensional, and we are not very good at explaining or predicting high achievement.
For intelligence, heredity plays a role. But intelligence cannot be perfectly predicted on the basis of parental intelligence. So if you want to predict people who will attain high achievement, the relationship to parental characteristics, including race, will be tenuous.
Both Isaiah Andrews and Roland Fryer are very unusual. Not many people, regardless of their race or parental background, achieve at their level. What their examples say to me is that having black skin does not preclude high achievement as an economist. It does not place a ceiling on intelligence. Nor does it impose a barrier of discrimination.
And even if as of today Andrews and Fryer are the only black Clark medal winners, this does not signify that the process for selecting winners is racist. It is far better for Andrews, Fryer, and the rest of us for the American Economic Association to continue to select winners based on merit, without regard to race. The same is true for other positions in society.
I suppose that a social justice activist would insist that race itself is a dominant factor in outcomes, and that “the system” discriminates against blacks. I need to see direct evidence of discrimination in a field in order to find this persuasive.
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If the transcript is accurate, then she is also using improper English. She meant to say that “there will be hardly any,” not that there won’t be.
Emergent order forces are at play here, I believe. There’s nature and nurture: families, many of them broken, that don’t place a high value on education and achievement, school environments that are failing. Cultures that lampoon success in academics as somehow “white.” These forces can also be found in lower class white cultures in places in London, as documented by Thomas Sowell in his book Charter Schools and Their Enemies, where he also documents the remarkable academic achievements at places like Success Academy.
How many Clark medals were won by people with IQs, let's say, 115 and lower? There is no way of knowing, of course, but a good guess would be zero.