Reignite this discussion about human development. What about a World Bank type organization that goes into the poorest areas of the US to promote develpment? why can't we pay US defence contractors to build up the US?
Throughout my life, I have known a few people with genius IQ's. Two of them are longtime friends and close business associates going back over 25 years. One happens to be "White" and of Irish descent. The other, African-American. Both males. I know these gentlemen quite well. And it has never occurred to me that the world needed more (or less) of guys like them simply or mainly because they possessed high IQs.
It would be literally crazy for me to think like that.
Obviously, my personal experiences are anecdotal just like anyone else's. But regardless, it is mind-blowing to me how some people get so caught up in the subject of "race" and IQ and its future implications for America and the world given all of the other factors that go into life as we know it.
To hear *Americans*, *in 2023*, remain so firm about this stuff--like a new religion or something--is remarkable; even after witnessing it again and again, over the past 30 or so years.
It doesn't make me sad. To be honest, it amuses me oftentimes. But for the most part, it's just kinda weird.
Having said that, if the primary goal/preference/wet dream of these people is *not* to eliminate or separate from a certain group of people with certain immutable characteristics, then what is it? Specifically?
Sincere question. For anyone; including those who don't particularly care for me.
Love this, and, as always when you talk about how American blacks need to do this or that, I think, "And women too!" Because women hold themselves back in much the same way, with the same destructive, self-limiting values, beliefs, toxic narratives, and victim-centred thinking.
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.
You raised good points. I'm currently recovering from COVID (brain fog/fatigue), acquired while out of the country. I'm not at 100% yet, especially at age 72. I'll get back to you ASP.
Love ya Richard, but I truly wish you'd come out with a blistering rebuke of these cretins trying to pretend that there aren’t discernible differences between the races regarding intelligence. You tenderly tiptoe through the tulips when, given the social horrors we currently face, you should take the gloves off. It serves NO one any good for people on all sides of the racial spectrum to continue this farcical charade.
Blacks have on average the lowest IQ scores by far. And it can’t just be raised by education. This relatively low IQ results in the violence of black on black crime that crushes the cities blacks are the majority in. You need to address the low IQ and expectations for what is a practical outcome. Btw 1964 Affirmative Action legislation gave legal protections to all but straight white males: so that group has had less equal opportunity and protections for the last 60 years: 3 generations. Try harder to be honest.
I have a book, titled “American Human Development Report 2008-2009.” A section covers Age 0-5. By age 3, vocabulary acquisition (number of words a child knows) can be double that of less fortunate children. Lead; a friend’s baby tested positive in 2008 as did another friend who lived in a basement apartment for 6+ years as an adult. Network of Social Support- should be large and diverse, (family, neighbors, neighborhood, co-workers, etc.)
Frankly, I'm perplexed that the issue needs so much introspection. "Equality" in no way translates into "we are all intermarrying and moving into the same neighborhood." Equality means that we CAN intermarry and move into the same neighborhood. To try to force-fit "equality" into some abstract notion of some ideology's idea of "equity" takes us in the opposite direction of equality.
As an ad hoc student of nineteenth century America, I have an observation along the lines of, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." People oversimplify the time of slavery as either for or against. It's not that simple. Even as some people argued in favor of the end of slavery, they did not necessarily argue in favor of intermixing races. There are libraries full of contemporary literature, from all points of view, and I have read lot of them. But I can't possibly sum it all up in a short essay. The fact is, there are so many facets, NOBODY can sum it all up. Suffice to say, do NOT try to simplify our cultural issues into a Cliff notes version. It cannot be done well. It cannot be done accurately.
But, here's one little piece of the puzzle, that is entirely missing from contemporary ideology: Slaves and slave owners were part of a singular culture. Not a good one, but a singular one. In a sense, it was yin and yang. Both slaves and slave owners had generations to become used to the idea that blacks NEEDED to be enslaved, because they were too inferior to fend for themselves. This was not a universal belief, but it was the predominant one. Abolitionists in the North (and the South) favored legal equality, but that didn't always translate into a sense cultural commonality. One big difference between North and South, of which slavery is just one manifestation, is that Northers largely had a Calvinist belief in the power and need for individual effort. Southerners were far more accustomed to top-down authority over the individual. Hence, slavery is the tip of the iceberg concerning a radical difference in cultures.
So, even with the end of slavery, the former slaves and former slave owners largely continued with their "peculiar institution." So, has this changed? Not that much. One thing I failed to mention: It is democrats who persisted in expanding and codifying slavery. The Republican party formed for the express purpose of ending it. Today, the democratic party insists on fealty from blacks, and many democrats become incensed at those blacks who fail to stay loyal to the reformulated "peculiar institution." Republicans, on the other hand, think largely in terms of "We freed you, the rest is up to you."
This is almost unnoticeably different from the thinking of nearly 200 years ago. So, I would not make it so much about race; I would make it about culture. There are those who want a strong central authority that sets the rules and expects individuals to subvert their sense of individuality in favor of conformity. And there are those who insist on their individuality and independence and see government as the means only of seeing to the paving of roads and such. THAT is the real difference. Not skin color.
The above does not even rise to the level of Cliffs notes. Yet I see it as a very significant aspect to our current situation. And it is completely overlooked. In case anyone cares to read it, I have linked an essay I wrote, asking "How Free Are You?"
Excellent article. I believe that some of the fault lies with our K-12 educational system and the curriculum presently favored for reading instruction, Balanced Literacy. Proficiency rates for reading are abysmal. Phonics must make a comeback. Academic competence will lead to a better chance for success.
As another poster said, how would that same speech play at Stanford in 2023? This may be the biggest problem in what Glenn hopes to achieve - the people who most need to hear him out and consider his ideas are the least willing to do so for various reasons.
I'm starting to think that "America's perpetual dilemmas about race" exist because perpetuating them is advantageous to so many. The activist class has its pulpit from which to preach. The political class has its mascots and victims to use as campaign fodder. People in that class have a ready-made excuse for every time things don't go their way. This is not exclusive to race; it covers any and every cause one can imagine. There is goal or end point in mind and certainly no coherent path for achieving it. Reaching that end point would be the end of the gravy train for the hustlers and politicos who traffic in grievance.
The people who speak the loudest about caring for minorities have failed them. Look at urban schools. What parent would willingly send a child there? Look at urban crime rates and how the power structure turns a blind eye, largely harming the law-abiding majority within those communities. Look at sprawling homeless and addicted populations, encroaching ever more on the places where people live and work. That is failure at an institutional level and the lower one's income, the more difficult it is to escape that failure. Disproportionately, that means a tougher struggle for blacks, and it's made even tougher by the people whom they - and no small number of patronizing whites - put into office.
Still, though, I'd like to see how this same speech would fare today on the same campus where law students lost their collective (collectivist?) minds over a judge who had been invited to speak. I imagine Glenn would be called a white supremacist much like Larry Elder or a particular Supreme Court Justice. The irony is that a group of mostly white and mostly privileged kids attending an expensive university would be trying to shout down a black man who is old enough to have lived during the 'colored only' era. Irony is dead and self-awareness is on life support. How one gets through to people like that is a mystery. If that can be solved, then the things Glenn talks about might have a chance.
More and more I see Democrats as taking advantage of Black people, using them for leverage and patronage, talking down to them, tokenizing them, patting them on the head and telling them, We know you’re not very smart, but don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. Wokeism only exacerbates the problem. Black voters are slowly slicing off from the Dems. I don’t see the Republican Party as a very viable option for them either, though. Meanwhile there’s a growing cadre of Black intellectuals who seem to be showing the way using brains, commonsense and critical thinking. Loury, McWhorter, Hughes, Foster, etc.
The ideas that Glenn presented in this piece are exactly what I would like to see happen. The main obstacle is that his proposal requires nationally and locally functional governance. We have become mostly incapable of solving social problems on any scale. Instead, we careen from crisis to crisis, ram one program after another through legislatures without first taking the time to study what is needed, and no plan for measuring the programs' effectiveness. We have poured billions upon billions of money into various efforts to address racial disparities in education, without much apparent improvement in outcomes for black kids overall, (although many individuals have reported that these programs did benefit them).
Why did these efforts fail? Is it even true that they failed, or did they succeed but get jettisoned anyway? Why are we not going over whatever data the past programs generated, in an effort to reinstate what worked and change the rest?
Obviously, a great many Americans have been eager to prioritize the concerns of black people, and they have in fact been donating lots of money and falling all over themselves trying to abolish racial disparities. Most of the current efforts towards progress in this area are nevertheless much less well thought out than the previous programs, and not only are they more likely to fail, they are starting to take down a lot of people who were doing relatively okay.
We live in a profoundly dysfunctional country, in which the ruling class becomes daily wealthier and everyone else becomes poorer. Groups of people who were at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are sinking deeper into poverty, and the middle class is disappearing. The prospects for a dramatic turnaround are not good. We continue to have the will to resolve social disparities and the generosity to donate money to good causes, but we do not work together cooperatively to resolve problems. For many of us, (not including myself), a shift towards dictatorship has become increasingly attractive. I too wish our young people well, but I hope that I do not live long enough to have to suffer all of the effects of their Marxist revolution. We all know how those have worked out so far.
Reignite this discussion about human development. What about a World Bank type organization that goes into the poorest areas of the US to promote develpment? why can't we pay US defence contractors to build up the US?
Throughout my life, I have known a few people with genius IQ's. Two of them are longtime friends and close business associates going back over 25 years. One happens to be "White" and of Irish descent. The other, African-American. Both males. I know these gentlemen quite well. And it has never occurred to me that the world needed more (or less) of guys like them simply or mainly because they possessed high IQs.
It would be literally crazy for me to think like that.
Obviously, my personal experiences are anecdotal just like anyone else's. But regardless, it is mind-blowing to me how some people get so caught up in the subject of "race" and IQ and its future implications for America and the world given all of the other factors that go into life as we know it.
To hear *Americans*, *in 2023*, remain so firm about this stuff--like a new religion or something--is remarkable; even after witnessing it again and again, over the past 30 or so years.
It doesn't make me sad. To be honest, it amuses me oftentimes. But for the most part, it's just kinda weird.
Having said that, if the primary goal/preference/wet dream of these people is *not* to eliminate or separate from a certain group of people with certain immutable characteristics, then what is it? Specifically?
Sincere question. For anyone; including those who don't particularly care for me.
Mission accomplished.
Love this, and, as always when you talk about how American blacks need to do this or that, I think, "And women too!" Because women hold themselves back in much the same way, with the same destructive, self-limiting values, beliefs, toxic narratives, and victim-centred thinking.
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
You raised good points. I'm currently recovering from COVID (brain fog/fatigue), acquired while out of the country. I'm not at 100% yet, especially at age 72. I'll get back to you ASP.
Love ya Richard, but I truly wish you'd come out with a blistering rebuke of these cretins trying to pretend that there aren’t discernible differences between the races regarding intelligence. You tenderly tiptoe through the tulips when, given the social horrors we currently face, you should take the gloves off. It serves NO one any good for people on all sides of the racial spectrum to continue this farcical charade.
Check out this very rare book -
https://www.amazon.com/Race-Evolution-Behavior-History-Perspective/dp/0965683605
Blacks have on average the lowest IQ scores by far. And it can’t just be raised by education. This relatively low IQ results in the violence of black on black crime that crushes the cities blacks are the majority in. You need to address the low IQ and expectations for what is a practical outcome. Btw 1964 Affirmative Action legislation gave legal protections to all but straight white males: so that group has had less equal opportunity and protections for the last 60 years: 3 generations. Try harder to be honest.
I have a book, titled “American Human Development Report 2008-2009.” A section covers Age 0-5. By age 3, vocabulary acquisition (number of words a child knows) can be double that of less fortunate children. Lead; a friend’s baby tested positive in 2008 as did another friend who lived in a basement apartment for 6+ years as an adult. Network of Social Support- should be large and diverse, (family, neighbors, neighborhood, co-workers, etc.)
"there’s nothing inherently 'conservative' or 'liberal' about the development narrative—it’s a pragmatic approach to a social problem"
YES. Aaron must be my brother from another mother.
Frankly, I'm perplexed that the issue needs so much introspection. "Equality" in no way translates into "we are all intermarrying and moving into the same neighborhood." Equality means that we CAN intermarry and move into the same neighborhood. To try to force-fit "equality" into some abstract notion of some ideology's idea of "equity" takes us in the opposite direction of equality.
As an ad hoc student of nineteenth century America, I have an observation along the lines of, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." People oversimplify the time of slavery as either for or against. It's not that simple. Even as some people argued in favor of the end of slavery, they did not necessarily argue in favor of intermixing races. There are libraries full of contemporary literature, from all points of view, and I have read lot of them. But I can't possibly sum it all up in a short essay. The fact is, there are so many facets, NOBODY can sum it all up. Suffice to say, do NOT try to simplify our cultural issues into a Cliff notes version. It cannot be done well. It cannot be done accurately.
But, here's one little piece of the puzzle, that is entirely missing from contemporary ideology: Slaves and slave owners were part of a singular culture. Not a good one, but a singular one. In a sense, it was yin and yang. Both slaves and slave owners had generations to become used to the idea that blacks NEEDED to be enslaved, because they were too inferior to fend for themselves. This was not a universal belief, but it was the predominant one. Abolitionists in the North (and the South) favored legal equality, but that didn't always translate into a sense cultural commonality. One big difference between North and South, of which slavery is just one manifestation, is that Northers largely had a Calvinist belief in the power and need for individual effort. Southerners were far more accustomed to top-down authority over the individual. Hence, slavery is the tip of the iceberg concerning a radical difference in cultures.
So, even with the end of slavery, the former slaves and former slave owners largely continued with their "peculiar institution." So, has this changed? Not that much. One thing I failed to mention: It is democrats who persisted in expanding and codifying slavery. The Republican party formed for the express purpose of ending it. Today, the democratic party insists on fealty from blacks, and many democrats become incensed at those blacks who fail to stay loyal to the reformulated "peculiar institution." Republicans, on the other hand, think largely in terms of "We freed you, the rest is up to you."
This is almost unnoticeably different from the thinking of nearly 200 years ago. So, I would not make it so much about race; I would make it about culture. There are those who want a strong central authority that sets the rules and expects individuals to subvert their sense of individuality in favor of conformity. And there are those who insist on their individuality and independence and see government as the means only of seeing to the paving of roads and such. THAT is the real difference. Not skin color.
The above does not even rise to the level of Cliffs notes. Yet I see it as a very significant aspect to our current situation. And it is completely overlooked. In case anyone cares to read it, I have linked an essay I wrote, asking "How Free Are You?"
https://donewithparties.com/how-free-are-you-2/
Excellent article. I believe that some of the fault lies with our K-12 educational system and the curriculum presently favored for reading instruction, Balanced Literacy. Proficiency rates for reading are abysmal. Phonics must make a comeback. Academic competence will lead to a better chance for success.
As another poster said, how would that same speech play at Stanford in 2023? This may be the biggest problem in what Glenn hopes to achieve - the people who most need to hear him out and consider his ideas are the least willing to do so for various reasons.
I'm starting to think that "America's perpetual dilemmas about race" exist because perpetuating them is advantageous to so many. The activist class has its pulpit from which to preach. The political class has its mascots and victims to use as campaign fodder. People in that class have a ready-made excuse for every time things don't go their way. This is not exclusive to race; it covers any and every cause one can imagine. There is goal or end point in mind and certainly no coherent path for achieving it. Reaching that end point would be the end of the gravy train for the hustlers and politicos who traffic in grievance.
The people who speak the loudest about caring for minorities have failed them. Look at urban schools. What parent would willingly send a child there? Look at urban crime rates and how the power structure turns a blind eye, largely harming the law-abiding majority within those communities. Look at sprawling homeless and addicted populations, encroaching ever more on the places where people live and work. That is failure at an institutional level and the lower one's income, the more difficult it is to escape that failure. Disproportionately, that means a tougher struggle for blacks, and it's made even tougher by the people whom they - and no small number of patronizing whites - put into office.
Still, though, I'd like to see how this same speech would fare today on the same campus where law students lost their collective (collectivist?) minds over a judge who had been invited to speak. I imagine Glenn would be called a white supremacist much like Larry Elder or a particular Supreme Court Justice. The irony is that a group of mostly white and mostly privileged kids attending an expensive university would be trying to shout down a black man who is old enough to have lived during the 'colored only' era. Irony is dead and self-awareness is on life support. How one gets through to people like that is a mystery. If that can be solved, then the things Glenn talks about might have a chance.
More and more I see Democrats as taking advantage of Black people, using them for leverage and patronage, talking down to them, tokenizing them, patting them on the head and telling them, We know you’re not very smart, but don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. Wokeism only exacerbates the problem. Black voters are slowly slicing off from the Dems. I don’t see the Republican Party as a very viable option for them either, though. Meanwhile there’s a growing cadre of Black intellectuals who seem to be showing the way using brains, commonsense and critical thinking. Loury, McWhorter, Hughes, Foster, etc.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
There are advantages to being old like you, Glenn. You are wise and you are correct.
The ideas that Glenn presented in this piece are exactly what I would like to see happen. The main obstacle is that his proposal requires nationally and locally functional governance. We have become mostly incapable of solving social problems on any scale. Instead, we careen from crisis to crisis, ram one program after another through legislatures without first taking the time to study what is needed, and no plan for measuring the programs' effectiveness. We have poured billions upon billions of money into various efforts to address racial disparities in education, without much apparent improvement in outcomes for black kids overall, (although many individuals have reported that these programs did benefit them).
Why did these efforts fail? Is it even true that they failed, or did they succeed but get jettisoned anyway? Why are we not going over whatever data the past programs generated, in an effort to reinstate what worked and change the rest?
Obviously, a great many Americans have been eager to prioritize the concerns of black people, and they have in fact been donating lots of money and falling all over themselves trying to abolish racial disparities. Most of the current efforts towards progress in this area are nevertheless much less well thought out than the previous programs, and not only are they more likely to fail, they are starting to take down a lot of people who were doing relatively okay.
We live in a profoundly dysfunctional country, in which the ruling class becomes daily wealthier and everyone else becomes poorer. Groups of people who were at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are sinking deeper into poverty, and the middle class is disappearing. The prospects for a dramatic turnaround are not good. We continue to have the will to resolve social disparities and the generosity to donate money to good causes, but we do not work together cooperatively to resolve problems. For many of us, (not including myself), a shift towards dictatorship has become increasingly attractive. I too wish our young people well, but I hope that I do not live long enough to have to suffer all of the effects of their Marxist revolution. We all know how those have worked out so far.