Personally, I disagree with some of the more pessimistic conclusions being voiced by certain commenters regarding race. As people like Glenn and Thomas Sowell have been pointing out, life outcomes for Blacks when it comes to things like rates of marriage or crime have been deteriorating in the decades since the Civil Rights era. Even if there's always been a relative disparity in this country between Blacks and non-Blacks in these measures, the fact that Blacks have been declining in absolute terms suggests a cultural component at play. Biology might matter to some extent, but it’s almost certainly not the only factor. In fact, Sowell has cited data showing that many racial disparities have actually worsened post the Civil Rights era. In particular, the percentage of Black children born to unwed women went up from ~20% around 1960 to ~70% by the mid 1990s in this country. Although both Blacks and whites have exhibited a deterioration in various social measures in absolute terms, whatever cultural forces unleashed by the 1960s reform era clearly impacted Blacks more. To me that’s an interesting fact worth understanding.
As evidenced by the historical example of China during the Maoist era or the vast developmental disparity between North and South Korea today, IQ is at best a necessary but far from sufficient criterion for both individual and group level success. Culture and institutions clearly matter even if biology also factors in to some extent. To reduce the entirety of society to a stack ranking of various groups by IQ oversimplifies an almost certainly more interesting story.
In my opinion, the problem when it comes to discussions over group differences is that different categories of problems are being conflated. In my prior comments I suggested that society should focus first and foremost on uplifting broad portions of society at the expense of obsessing over the right tail. Increasing access to vocational training for the masses seems like a smarter strategy than endlessly fixating over racial disparities among +3 SD physicists. For what it’s worth I’m less convinced that social dysfunction is as intractable a problem as ensuring equal representation among disciplines at the tail end of the distribution. My optimism is founded in part on the fact that measures such as crime or marriage rates have gotten progressively worse for most groups over the past decades.
Given the persistence of group disparities, some level of skepticism towards a primarily environmental or cultural thesis isn’t entirely unfounded, but I also don’t believe that we truly know the extent to which biology matters. Even if only a fraction of the gaps could be closed, most of us would still agree that it was worth doing. People literally prepare their entire lives just so they can gain the slightest edge. There are also empirical oddities worth resolving, such as the fact that African immigrants outperform Black Americans despite the latter possessing a 1 SD advantage in average IQ relative to the former according to the psychometric literature. It’s possible that self-selection from a significantly larger population explains much of that difference, but it’s still worth pondering. Assuming an average IQ of 85 for Black Americans and 70 for Africans, we'd expect almost 15 times as many individuals per capita above a threshold of IQ 115 among the former relative to the latter. Yet African immigrants clearly outperform Black Americans in the US and there's very little indication that the former are actually being drawn from a population 1 SD lower in average intelligence.
Personally, I found the dominance of Africans in competitive Scrabble to be an interesting data point broadly aligned with a cultural thesis. In particular, it was noted that Scrabble at the highest levels of competition favored mathematical as opposed to verbal abilities and that at least among non-Africans many top Scrabble players came from fairly mathematical backgrounds. In my opinion this is a non-trivial data point that deserves an explanation assuming a primarily hereditarian thesis of group differences is true.
"To reduce the entirety of society to a stack ranking of various groups by IQ oversimplifies..."
Yan, for some people, the entire point is oversimplification. I cannot think of a more distinct example of oversimplification than race. Can you?
How many "races" are there? Do we even agree about that? What is race based on? For most people, it's skin color and hair texture. We say "Black" and "White". Two *colors* for Pete's sake. Then we add "Asian"--a continent.
Then we hear people say that "Indian" is not really "Asian". Then we have Jews, which is first and foremost a religion and a culture, but somehow they are also a "race", which happens to be full of many different skin colors and hair textures. Kinda like "Hispanics" and "Latinos", another "race", but one based around a language and a hemisphere. It's a crazy system when we dare to think about it.
What about "biracial" people? Or "quad-racial" people? I could go on.
But why are so many people so desperately locked into this idea? I think it's mostly about emotion, and ultimately irrational. But the world bought into the concept of race about 500 years ago and thus, it's "real" because people believe it to be real.
Some people think race is so real/important that they're fighting for "racial purity" (and they honestly think it's achievable in some way).
Even when they realize it is not, they continue to act like it is. Why? Because at some point it's about what people feel and want, and/or want to feel. It's a sign of immaturity.
Agree IQ is necessary but not sufficient. There is much to consider and learn on just what IS both necessary and sufficient by examining South Africa's devolution over the last 3 decades—hint: it ain't Wakanda over there. Yes, the African immigrant thing is almost certainly selection biased, but that doesn't mean the USA doesn't benefit substantially, in many ways, from importing high(er)-IQ blacks into its racial/ethnic mix.
The best data and analysis I've seen on the post-Civil Rights crash of President Johnson's Great Society dream, especially as regards American blacks is found in Charles Murray's 1984 "Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980," arguably one of his most important works in a pantheon of stellar analyses and critiques of American social policy. I encourage everyone interested in race relations and Glenn's "development narrative" to read Murray's incisive examination of just what went wrong and why.
I'd guess the Scrabble thing is cultural, much like the dominance of Asian Indians in spelling bees and the (passing?) fad of chess-playing black kids mostly in the American Northeast some years ago (may still be going on, I don't know).
Excellent content and compelling arguments; Ty. I bet the 1 SD advantage on average IQ of black Americans over black Africans is attributed to tiny but impactful greater amount of Neanderthal DNA in the former due to greater interbreeding with non-Africans because there is a high positive correlation between a race’s average IQ and the amount of their DNA traced to Neanderthals. I also agree with you that environments play an important role in outcomes.
As Richard suggests, the clearly superior of performance of African immigrants relative to Black Americans may very well be primarily a self-selection thing. There are ~40 million Black Americans while Africa as a whole has a population of ~1.4 billion.
But, if we assume an average IQ of 85 for Black Americans and 70 for Africans, that would mean that on a per capita basis there should be roughly 43 times as many Black Americans as Africans among those with IQs of at least 130. +3 SD above the mean is roughly 1 in 740 while +4 SD above the mean is roughly 1 in 32,000. It's also not clear that African immigrants are being drawn from the entire continent as a whole as opposed to disproportionately from certain countries like Nigeria.
Whenever you hear about some Black kid who scored a 1500 plus out of 1600 on the SAT and got accepted to every Ivy League school, that individual invariably turns out to be an African immigrant, often an Igbo Nigerian. Based on the numbers above, I'd lean towards there being more than just a self-selection effect in terms of explaining the superior performance of African immigrants relative to Black Americans.
If we take the psychometric literature at face value, we should in fact expect slightly higher absolute numbers of Black Americans with IQs above 130 than across the entire continent of Africa. Yet there's little indication that this is the case. There are ~35x as many Africans as Black Americans, but the latter in theory outnumber the former on a per capita basis by ~43x above an IQ threshold of 130.
“Our conclusion, that the Black–White IQ difference is partly heritable, ac- cords with previous analytic reviews of this literature. Loehlin et al. (1975) concluded that Black–White IQ differences “probably” reflected “genetic differ- ences among the groups” (p. 238).” https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY
J. Philippe Rushton Arthur R. Jensen
The University of Western Ontario University of California, Berkeley
I'm not necessarily dismissing the psychometric literature on race and intelligence. In any case I don’t have the mathematical or technical background to rigorously evaluate it, so like many I mostly take my cues from the likes of Charles Murray on these matters.
My point was more that if the strong hereditarian thesis is going to be presented as gospel, there are some empirical oddities in need of clarification. In particular, the superior performance of African immigrants relative to that of Black Americans deserves an explanation given that psychometrics suggests that the former possess an average IQ 1 SD lower relative to that of the latter.
Most people will reflexively explain this as the result of self-selection from Africa’s much larger population, but as I argued above, when you actually crunch the numbers the picture isn’t nearly as clear. Based on accepted group IQ data, we would actually expect slightly more Black Americans in absolute terms above an IQ of 130 relative to number of people with IQs 130+ across the entire continent of Africa. To anyone who's lamented the lagging performance of native born Blacks relative to their African immigrant counterparts, the prior conclusion would probably be surprising.
Based on SAT data, I'd say that IQ 130 is roughly the threshold for the average student at an elite high school like Stuyvesant or a lower tier Ivy League university, hence why I picked it for this discussion.
Thanks; btw don’t trust entrance criteria at schools because a lot let legacies in no matter how stupid they are and many don’t use SAT’s anymore because they could hit their Affirmative Action quotas (because their were not enough minorities testing high enough).
More likely explained by average white admixture of approx. 20% in (slave-descended) African Americans as well as 1st world/3rd world resources and upbringing when comparing AAs to black West Africans (whence American slave populations were drawn).
Personally, I disagree with some of the more pessimistic conclusions being voiced by certain commenters regarding race. As people like Glenn and Thomas Sowell have been pointing out, life outcomes for Blacks when it comes to things like rates of marriage or crime have been deteriorating in the decades since the Civil Rights era. Even if there's always been a relative disparity in this country between Blacks and non-Blacks in these measures, the fact that Blacks have been declining in absolute terms suggests a cultural component at play. Biology might matter to some extent, but it’s almost certainly not the only factor. In fact, Sowell has cited data showing that many racial disparities have actually worsened post the Civil Rights era. In particular, the percentage of Black children born to unwed women went up from ~20% around 1960 to ~70% by the mid 1990s in this country. Although both Blacks and whites have exhibited a deterioration in various social measures in absolute terms, whatever cultural forces unleashed by the 1960s reform era clearly impacted Blacks more. To me that’s an interesting fact worth understanding.
As evidenced by the historical example of China during the Maoist era or the vast developmental disparity between North and South Korea today, IQ is at best a necessary but far from sufficient criterion for both individual and group level success. Culture and institutions clearly matter even if biology also factors in to some extent. To reduce the entirety of society to a stack ranking of various groups by IQ oversimplifies an almost certainly more interesting story.
In my opinion, the problem when it comes to discussions over group differences is that different categories of problems are being conflated. In my prior comments I suggested that society should focus first and foremost on uplifting broad portions of society at the expense of obsessing over the right tail. Increasing access to vocational training for the masses seems like a smarter strategy than endlessly fixating over racial disparities among +3 SD physicists. For what it’s worth I’m less convinced that social dysfunction is as intractable a problem as ensuring equal representation among disciplines at the tail end of the distribution. My optimism is founded in part on the fact that measures such as crime or marriage rates have gotten progressively worse for most groups over the past decades.
Given the persistence of group disparities, some level of skepticism towards a primarily environmental or cultural thesis isn’t entirely unfounded, but I also don’t believe that we truly know the extent to which biology matters. Even if only a fraction of the gaps could be closed, most of us would still agree that it was worth doing. People literally prepare their entire lives just so they can gain the slightest edge. There are also empirical oddities worth resolving, such as the fact that African immigrants outperform Black Americans despite the latter possessing a 1 SD advantage in average IQ relative to the former according to the psychometric literature. It’s possible that self-selection from a significantly larger population explains much of that difference, but it’s still worth pondering. Assuming an average IQ of 85 for Black Americans and 70 for Africans, we'd expect almost 15 times as many individuals per capita above a threshold of IQ 115 among the former relative to the latter. Yet African immigrants clearly outperform Black Americans in the US and there's very little indication that the former are actually being drawn from a population 1 SD lower in average intelligence.
Personally, I found the dominance of Africans in competitive Scrabble to be an interesting data point broadly aligned with a cultural thesis. In particular, it was noted that Scrabble at the highest levels of competition favored mathematical as opposed to verbal abilities and that at least among non-Africans many top Scrabble players came from fairly mathematical backgrounds. In my opinion this is a non-trivial data point that deserves an explanation assuming a primarily hereditarian thesis of group differences is true.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/february-q-and-a-part-1/comment/5335113
"To reduce the entirety of society to a stack ranking of various groups by IQ oversimplifies..."
Yan, for some people, the entire point is oversimplification. I cannot think of a more distinct example of oversimplification than race. Can you?
How many "races" are there? Do we even agree about that? What is race based on? For most people, it's skin color and hair texture. We say "Black" and "White". Two *colors* for Pete's sake. Then we add "Asian"--a continent.
Then we hear people say that "Indian" is not really "Asian". Then we have Jews, which is first and foremost a religion and a culture, but somehow they are also a "race", which happens to be full of many different skin colors and hair textures. Kinda like "Hispanics" and "Latinos", another "race", but one based around a language and a hemisphere. It's a crazy system when we dare to think about it.
What about "biracial" people? Or "quad-racial" people? I could go on.
But why are so many people so desperately locked into this idea? I think it's mostly about emotion, and ultimately irrational. But the world bought into the concept of race about 500 years ago and thus, it's "real" because people believe it to be real.
Some people think race is so real/important that they're fighting for "racial purity" (and they honestly think it's achievable in some way).
Even when they realize it is not, they continue to act like it is. Why? Because at some point it's about what people feel and want, and/or want to feel. It's a sign of immaturity.
Agree IQ is necessary but not sufficient. There is much to consider and learn on just what IS both necessary and sufficient by examining South Africa's devolution over the last 3 decades—hint: it ain't Wakanda over there. Yes, the African immigrant thing is almost certainly selection biased, but that doesn't mean the USA doesn't benefit substantially, in many ways, from importing high(er)-IQ blacks into its racial/ethnic mix.
The best data and analysis I've seen on the post-Civil Rights crash of President Johnson's Great Society dream, especially as regards American blacks is found in Charles Murray's 1984 "Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980," arguably one of his most important works in a pantheon of stellar analyses and critiques of American social policy. I encourage everyone interested in race relations and Glenn's "development narrative" to read Murray's incisive examination of just what went wrong and why.
I'd guess the Scrabble thing is cultural, much like the dominance of Asian Indians in spelling bees and the (passing?) fad of chess-playing black kids mostly in the American Northeast some years ago (may still be going on, I don't know).
Excellent content and compelling arguments; Ty. I bet the 1 SD advantage on average IQ of black Americans over black Africans is attributed to tiny but impactful greater amount of Neanderthal DNA in the former due to greater interbreeding with non-Africans because there is a high positive correlation between a race’s average IQ and the amount of their DNA traced to Neanderthals. I also agree with you that environments play an important role in outcomes.
As Richard suggests, the clearly superior of performance of African immigrants relative to Black Americans may very well be primarily a self-selection thing. There are ~40 million Black Americans while Africa as a whole has a population of ~1.4 billion.
But, if we assume an average IQ of 85 for Black Americans and 70 for Africans, that would mean that on a per capita basis there should be roughly 43 times as many Black Americans as Africans among those with IQs of at least 130. +3 SD above the mean is roughly 1 in 740 while +4 SD above the mean is roughly 1 in 32,000. It's also not clear that African immigrants are being drawn from the entire continent as a whole as opposed to disproportionately from certain countries like Nigeria.
Whenever you hear about some Black kid who scored a 1500 plus out of 1600 on the SAT and got accepted to every Ivy League school, that individual invariably turns out to be an African immigrant, often an Igbo Nigerian. Based on the numbers above, I'd lean towards there being more than just a self-selection effect in terms of explaining the superior performance of African immigrants relative to Black Americans.
If we take the psychometric literature at face value, we should in fact expect slightly higher absolute numbers of Black Americans with IQs above 130 than across the entire continent of Africa. Yet there's little indication that this is the case. There are ~35x as many Africans as Black Americans, but the latter in theory outnumber the former on a per capita basis by ~43x above an IQ threshold of 130.
“Our conclusion, that the Black–White IQ difference is partly heritable, ac- cords with previous analytic reviews of this literature. Loehlin et al. (1975) concluded that Black–White IQ differences “probably” reflected “genetic differ- ences among the groups” (p. 238).” https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY
J. Philippe Rushton Arthur R. Jensen
The University of Western Ontario University of California, Berkeley
I'm not necessarily dismissing the psychometric literature on race and intelligence. In any case I don’t have the mathematical or technical background to rigorously evaluate it, so like many I mostly take my cues from the likes of Charles Murray on these matters.
My point was more that if the strong hereditarian thesis is going to be presented as gospel, there are some empirical oddities in need of clarification. In particular, the superior performance of African immigrants relative to that of Black Americans deserves an explanation given that psychometrics suggests that the former possess an average IQ 1 SD lower relative to that of the latter.
Most people will reflexively explain this as the result of self-selection from Africa’s much larger population, but as I argued above, when you actually crunch the numbers the picture isn’t nearly as clear. Based on accepted group IQ data, we would actually expect slightly more Black Americans in absolute terms above an IQ of 130 relative to number of people with IQs 130+ across the entire continent of Africa. To anyone who's lamented the lagging performance of native born Blacks relative to their African immigrant counterparts, the prior conclusion would probably be surprising.
Based on SAT data, I'd say that IQ 130 is roughly the threshold for the average student at an elite high school like Stuyvesant or a lower tier Ivy League university, hence why I picked it for this discussion.
Thanks; btw don’t trust entrance criteria at schools because a lot let legacies in no matter how stupid they are and many don’t use SAT’s anymore because they could hit their Affirmative Action quotas (because their were not enough minorities testing high enough).
More likely explained by average white admixture of approx. 20% in (slave-descended) African Americans as well as 1st world/3rd world resources and upbringing when comparing AAs to black West Africans (whence American slave populations were drawn).