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.
Your African-American friend is a rarity. Only 1 in 300 Blacks are geniuses- IQ 130 and over. 1 in 33 whites are geniuses, and 1 in 7 Ashkenazi Jews are geniuses. Going in the other direction 1 in 7 Blacks are retarded- IQ below 70, 1 in 33 whites are retarded and 1 in 300 Jews are retarded. IQ affects many measurable outcomes such as education level, income, wealth, criminality and incarceration, addiction rates, out-of-wedlock births, and physical health including infant and maternal mortality rates. Blacks have the worst outcomes per capita.
Vast amounts of tax dollars have been spent over many years attempting to close the Black/white ''gap''- actually a gap between Blacks and every one else. Given Blacks average IQ of 85 I'm cynical that Blacks will ever adopt the social norms of the successful groups- whites and Asians. These norms have been in place and available for anyone to adopt but Blacks apparently prefer their own norms of single motherhood with multiple baby Daddies and criminal behavior.
Personally for my own self preservation I avoid places where Blacks congregate. I avoid shopping at malls that attract large amounts of Black shoppers, I don't go into Black neighborhoods and I would leave a venue that had a sudden influx of Blacks. This has everything to do with Black behavior and nothing to do with facial features or skin tones.
I don't know if this answers your question and I'm only one white person, I can't speak for others.
My question was: "...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?"
With you, we didn't have to get to the "then what is it?" part (which was my REAL question).
Your goal and your plan of action is in fact one of the two options I laid out: separate or eliminate. You choose to separate. Got it.
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.
"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).
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.
Thank-you for noting that I raised good points (ie the root cause is that “on average” blacks have the lowest IQ scores and this results in numerous disadvantages for them). Hope you recover quickly and fully from latest bout of Covid. Btw speaking of genes, on average whites are more susceptible to COVID, blacks are more susceptible to HIV and Jewish people to Tay Sachs.
I dated a crazy White Jewish woman with severe abandonment issues, which I easily detected on the first date. Her rich Uncle wanted to turn me into a black Jew. Lol!!!!
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.
I know Rushton's work: some is spotty, some quite solid, but all of it is generally worth reading and thinking about.
The folks you mention know deep down that they're engaged in a fruitless effort to hold back the tide of history and human progress as the vast majority of the most capable scientists all over the world clearly accept and lay out for all to see the principles and mechanics of genetic evolution. That our age's Luddites put their fingers in their ears and sing "I can't hear you!" reflects the pathetic nature of their denial in the face of incontrovertible reality. To the extent we (rationalists) allow these fantasists to attempt to redefine reality by turning men into women, women into men, humans into androids, and androids into humans, they can prolong the charade, but there comes a point where it must and will be said "And yet it moves!" Once the emperor is seen to have no clothes the pretenders instantly lose their ability to bully others to accept their delusions and follow their orders. That day is rapidly approaching.
P.S. As far as my tiptoeing, a few things are in play: there are only a select few who are amenable to changing their views based on the arguments and data put before them. I try to identify such folks here and elsewhere and show them at least the entrance to where such forbidden knowledge exists. Whether they choose to enter, consider, and grow to believe what they find there is up to them. Also, I'm not particularly concerned with the extent, duration, and severity of the coming intellectual and possibly literal bloodletting. I'll be gone by then, my children, their children, and their children's children are well provided for, and those who will suffer the most are those who did the least to prevent the cataclysm. There's a crude form of justice and a grim sense of satisfaction in that outcome as far as I'm concerned.
I've left them sufficient assets to do what they must to survive and prosper. There are genetic advances everyday as theory becomes practice which then becomes routine technology. Polygenic scoring and serious genetic engineering (cure for cancer type stuff) is just beginning to take off. I think those who deny the reality of evolutionary genetics (race is a social construct, men and women are the same, gender is fluid, and the like) will wake up one day and find they're the only people left in the room. Everyone else will have left to thrive in a real world of their own making rather than waste themselves playing at life in the stale fantasy of a game world.
Respectfully, I love the pollyannaish view but unfortunately I don’t think this transition will remotely be as cut and dried as you hope…The moral reckoning you’re counting on could ultimately occur down the road but I feel it’ll be an incredibly slow road with brutal ‘growing pains’ to go from what’s now a rapidly increasing pro-gender zeitgeist to a Darwinian shift towards the truth. I hope I’m wrong but my gut tells me this entire situation of feelings over facts, imagination over absolute truth, etc is not going to go softly into that good night….Tellin’ ya Richard, it’s going to get VERY ugly long before any semblance of normalcy retakes our world…..I’m not sure how old you are, guessing about 60 but either way, buckle up and batten down the hatches cause this bifurcation is well on its way….Arm up and stock ammo, have an escape plan with your loved ones rehearsed, prep ALL essentials, and make sure your 4X4 vehicle is fully operational….🙏🏻
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'm not sure what point you're trying to make. IQ is measured using tests that were created to measure something that we call intelligence. But even the experts creating the tests don't have precise definitions of what intelligence is, or is not. Ideally, such a test measures inherent "intelligence" apart from environmental factors. But that is all but impossible to accomplish.
And, are IQ test biased for and against certain cultures and backgrounds? Absolutely. It's not intentional, but it's unavoidable.
The trouble with statistics is that, while they can tell us a lot, they can also mislead us a lot. How intelligent are blacks? Whites? Asians? Hispanics? You can look at averages, but don't forget that, no matter what average you have in hand, there are blacks, Whites, Asians and Hispanics who are extremely smart, capable and accomplished. Also, among all those groups, there are those who are abject failures. And everyone in between, which is most of us.
So, what do those statistics tell us about individual blacks, or any other race? Essentially, nothing. As a co-worker once said to me, "According to the law of averages, a person with one foot in a bucket of ice water and the other foot in a fire, is comfortable."
We do know that the SAT's and similar tests are good predictors of academic performance regardless of the ethnic identities of the testees. These tests probably measure combinations of innate intelligence, lifetime intellectual development or losses, and training on similar tests prior to taking the official ones. The question of how much of the score is due to innate ability is of interest, and has been raised by Glenn Loury, but the tests do predict how well people will do in traditional academic programs.
I certainly agree with that. I sometimes wholeheartedly agree with Glenn, and sometimes fully disagree. So, which one of us is the smart one?
My point was that an IQ score is only good for just so much. And, there's different kinds of smart. I have said many times that ignorance consists of not knowing something; stupidity is in not knowing that you don't know it. I am expert at a few things, and very ignorant of everything else. I like to think I know which is which.
I have another expression: The more sure you are that you are right, the more likely you are to be wrong. That is because, once a person is convinced that they fully comprehend, they stop assessing, modifying, and validating. And that increases the chances of being very mistaken. I try to be in perpetual doubt about pretty much everything. Not because I'm insecure, but because I want to be receptive to both supporting and conflicting information.
So, what is IQ, and can it be accurately measured? I am quite sure that I don't really know.
Have you read Freddie DeBoer's recent book "The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice"? He explains just what cognitive ability is (what an IQ score purports to measure) and how essential it is to educational and professional achievement. Well worth reading.
P.S. DeBoer is a dyed-in-the-wool classical Marxist, so no knuckle-dragging right-winger.
Thanks for the info. It sounds as if the book might frustrate me, but I think I need to read it.
There is the old saying, "Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result." As our public schools continue to fail, the solution that educators offer is to do still MORE of it.
It bothers me that we think of intelligence as linear, something that can be measured on a linear scale. Intelligence is spatial: A person can be very smart about this thing over here, and ignorant about that thing over there. There are different means by which people assess reality. None is necessarily more valid than the others. Yet one approach might measure out well on and IQ test, and another measure low.
I was a public school teacher for six years, and came to recognize the obvious. Each student is unique. Some will learn academically, which is to say they will absorb what they are taught and be able to reliably repeat it back. That student may, or may not, have the ability to extrapolate beyond what he has been taught. Other students are less academic but show clear ability to intellectually project possibilities and draw conclusions beyond what they have been taught. And, frankly, many students just don't care and just don't learn. They may or may not have a high IQ. If they don't care, they don't learn. I was very surprised to find that one such student, who consistently failed in all his classes, had one of the highest IQs in has class.
The biggest failure of progressivism is the premise that we are all alike; it's just our experiences that vary. That is pure BS. And that is the biggest failure of public education.
Here's an essay I wrote that gets at this. It's about freedom, but still gets at the heart of what we're discussing here:
You're confusing (I HATE 'conflating') IQ with qualities of creativity, intuition, memorization, inference, understanding, and a host of other variable abilities and talents which make us unique and uniquely human.
IQ measures raw processing power. Think of it as the rate at which brain cells register and transmit impulses. There is a "blink test" which correlates reasonably well to measured IQ. A light is flashed and the subject presses a button as soon after the flash as possible. Faster reaction time, quicker brain response, higher IQ. Pretty simple really.
Murray/Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" is still the standard for understanding IQ in America and all its complex social implications. DeBoer's "Cult of Smart" on the other hand, quickly and ably accepts that IQ is highly heritable and that it matters HUGELY—on an individual basis—in education. He explicit denies the existence of and refuses to discuss group differences (racial, ethnic, sex), and he can do so because it's simply not germane to his argument. For an educator, I think DeBoer's book is the more relevant and important. Should you wish to more fully understand IQ and how it is measured and distributed across America, Murray and Herrnstein are excellent guides.
"And, are IQ test biased for and against certain cultures and backgrounds? Absolutely. It's not intentional, but it's unavoidable."
You provide no evidence for this claim. To claim that a test is "biased" against black testees means that it is not a valid predictor of black testees' performance. This is not true. SAT's, ACT's, Miller Analogy Tests, and other ability tests are strong predictors of academic performance, especially when coupled with high school GPA's, and this is why colleges have used them.
If SAT's plus GPA's were biased towards black high school graduates seeking admission to colleges, we would expect to see more black students who scored low on the tests going on to succeed in college (thereby exceeding expectations set by their test scores and their high school GPA's). We do not see this happening. High school students of any color who score low on college admission tests and have low GPA's are less likely to succeed in college and more likely to drop out before completing their degrees than are students with higher high school GPA's and higher test scores.
The combination of these numbers does not explain ALL of the variation in who succeeds in college and who does not, but the predictive validity of the tests plus GPA is high. This is a matter of fact, not of opinion. It happens to be a fact that many people would prefer to deny, because it might mean that black students are innately inferior intellectually to whites, Chinese, and so on, and that white students are inferior to Chinese and so on. Reality is not always what everyone wants it to be.
It is true that "innate general ability" is the thing that we are trying to measure with IQ tests, and we still need another measure to define what we mean by ability. IQ scores at the low end of the range reflect peoples' abilities to function independently and to benefit from training in basic life skills, for example. At the higher end of the range, which is what Loury is generally talking about, IQ tests and college admission tests combined with measures of past achievement predict performance in academia and knowledge-based careers. The best predictors of performance in jobs are tests that measure abilities that will be needed in those jobs, so SAT's are not generally used to select people interested in skilled trades. Another example would be Art or Music careers, for which auditions and portfolios are used to predict performance.
It is wonderful that you are open to various viewpoints, but with respect to the predictive validity versus invalidity or "bias" of tests, this can be determined by observable outcomes. People who have low SAT's and low high school GPA's have much lower odds of succeeding in college than people who have high ones, and this is a fact.
Excellent explanation of the predictive validity in academic performance associated with IQ and GPA. You managed to make a complex and confusing relationship crystal clear—nice work!
That is why I used the word “average”. It tells us that, on average blacks have the lowest IQ scores. Also tells us that on average Asians have the highest IQ scores. And while not perfect, IQ scores are the best measure of intelligence and widely accepted across time and space. (“Widely” doesn’t mean “universally” or “always”)
(ON AVERAGE!) Ashkenazi Jews have East Asians beat by around 7-10 IQ points (1/2 to 2/3 of a standard deviation). I know of no human racial/ethnic group with higher average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews who shine in verbal acuity although I believe East Asians are somewhat more adept in crunching math and visuospatial tasks.
This seems related. “The analysis revealed two distinct subgroups within the remains: one with greater Middle Eastern ancestry, which may represent Jews with origins in Western Germany, and another with greater Eastern and Central European ancestry. The modern Ashkenazi population formed as a mix of these groups and absorbed little to no outside genetic influences over the 600 years that followed, the authors said.
Some disease-causing mutations that are widespread in modern Ashkenazi Jews are suspected to have been introduced by members of the founding group long ago. The team found some of these mutations in Erfurt as well, indicating that the medieval Ashkenazi population indeed originated from an extremely small set of founders.
Further evidence came from mitochondrial DNA, which is part of the genome transmitted only from mothers. Analyses showed that one third of the Erfurt individuals descended in their maternal line from a single ancestral woman, again highlighting how small the founding population must have been, the authors said.” https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-provides-new-insights-ashkenazi-jewish-history.
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?"
Completely incorrect and way too wordy; equity means equal outcomes as in in we all get the same amount of money at the end of the year. Equality is about equal opportunities. Do better.
Thanks for nothing. Literally. Face it, your comment has no real content.
I have no idea how you got the idea that I must meet your idea of standards. That's not what I would have expected from someone calling themselves, "Libertarian".
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.
The Democratic Party wholly owned education system is optimized to render blacks unable to read or do math at anything close to grade level proficiency. Numerous public schools in Baltimore have not a single student testing at grade proficiency. Not a single student. Public school teachers k-16 (yes university too) and administrators “took the soup” to borrow a phrase from the Irish Famine.
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.
You forget Ibram X. Kendi, Michael Eric Dyson, Jamelle Bouie, Charles Blow, Ta-Nahisi Coates, and the rest of the crew. Each and every one of them better known, with greater reach, given more awards and kudos, and younger, stronger, and likely longer lived than Glenn Loury.
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.
Richard Herrnstein (co-author with Charles Murray of 1994's "The Bell Curve") wrote in 1971(!):
"Greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness, and educational opportunity are NOT going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage. It will instead give us a society sharply graduated, with ever greater innate separation between the top and the bottom, and ever more uniformity within families as far as inherited abilities are concerned. Naturally, we find this vista appalling, for we have been raised to think of social equality as our goal. The vista reminds us of the world we had hoped to leave behind - aristocracies, privileged classes, unfair advantages and disadvantages of birth. ... By removing arbitrary barriers between classes, society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers. When people can freely take their natural level in society, the upper classes will, virtually by definition, have greater capacity than the lower." (emphasis in the original)
"By removing arbitrary barriers between classes, society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers." What does he mean by "biological barriers"? Inherited abilities?
My understanding is that the upper SES's are accumulating enough wealth to progressively increase the number of trust fund kids in the population. These individuals do not necessarily show evidence of having inherited much of the intelligence, drive, etc., that their money-making ancestors had.
I think that we can count on happening is that greed and lust for power will always reassert itself, and there is a certain segment of the population that excels at that. After that goes on for too long, a countermovement will attempt to take down the ruling class, and may or may not succeed. After another long while, the countermovement will succumb to the same traditional sins and the whole cycle will restart.
Think of it like this, Sandra. As you work toward providing everyone a fully enriched environment, differences in performance are increasingly due to innate (in)abilities. It's a cruel but iron-clad calculus. Note the date on Herrnstein's prediction—over 50 years ago!
"As you work toward providing everyone a fully enriched environment, differences in performance are increasing due to innate (in)abilities."
I don't know if you are referring to within group differences or between group differences here, but I can address the point either way.
In an ideal world where everyone has the fully enriched environment, we still would have the between group cultural preferences. I personally consider myself fortunate to have not been raised in the Chinese cultural environment with respect to educational pressure. Maybe other cultural groups, such as American black people, don't want to conform to the white upper middle class cultural expectations for educational achievement. But if we imagine a situation in which all cultural groups have roughly equivalent values regarding educational performance, I would expect the following:
1. There would still be individual (within group) differences in motivation.
2. Setting this aside for the purposes of this discussion, the innate differences between individuals and groups would be much more clearly revealed than they are now, and we would be able to say more accurately what they are. Based on your comments, I assume that you are more interested in between group differences.
It is certainly possible that American whites, blacks, Chinese, etc., would not have equal mean performances academically. It is impossible to determine whether the mean differences would be greater or less than they are now.
With respect to individual differences within groups, I would expect that many people could improve their performances, but everyone would be limited by whatever is maximally achievable with a human brain. This would tend to reduce the range of individual scores on tests like the SAT.
Sorry for my typo—meant to say "...increasingLY due to innate..."
Agree it doesn't particularly matter whether looking at inter- or intra-group differences. Heritability due to genetic factors increases once you equalize environmental (i.e. non-genetic) factors. I would think cultural environments would tend to become more similar than different once enrichment becomes more universally the norm. I have no issues with the remainder of your analysis. Thanks for posting.
In thinking further, the range might not change much because the people at the far left tail of the distribution are severely impaired, and many of them already receive specialized services. With improved nutrition and so on, there might be fewer people at the lowest end of the ability distribution, but some of the most impaired people would still anchor that end of the range. I would predict that mean scores for the entire population would rise, as well as mean scores for the ethnic subgroups. This would shift the highest part of the bell shape to the right, indicating actual improvement in ability population-wide. If this were to occur, psychometricians would probably adjust the tests, so that the average score would be 100 again, but this number would be the equivalent of 110 (or whatever) on the first version of the test.
Sandra, I am worried that I’m going to miss your Unifying Theory On The Psychology of Social Norms and Impact on Culture in the 21st Century because you will bury it in a reply to Dick Bickers of all people. By way of this comment, I am requesting you alert me when you publish it. Thanks much in advance.
That is very sweet, Libertarian! I am contemplating starting up my own Substack, and have been holding back only because of lack of time. I will let you know when and if I actually do it.
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.
Your African-American friend is a rarity. Only 1 in 300 Blacks are geniuses- IQ 130 and over. 1 in 33 whites are geniuses, and 1 in 7 Ashkenazi Jews are geniuses. Going in the other direction 1 in 7 Blacks are retarded- IQ below 70, 1 in 33 whites are retarded and 1 in 300 Jews are retarded. IQ affects many measurable outcomes such as education level, income, wealth, criminality and incarceration, addiction rates, out-of-wedlock births, and physical health including infant and maternal mortality rates. Blacks have the worst outcomes per capita.
Vast amounts of tax dollars have been spent over many years attempting to close the Black/white ''gap''- actually a gap between Blacks and every one else. Given Blacks average IQ of 85 I'm cynical that Blacks will ever adopt the social norms of the successful groups- whites and Asians. These norms have been in place and available for anyone to adopt but Blacks apparently prefer their own norms of single motherhood with multiple baby Daddies and criminal behavior.
Personally for my own self preservation I avoid places where Blacks congregate. I avoid shopping at malls that attract large amounts of Black shoppers, I don't go into Black neighborhoods and I would leave a venue that had a sudden influx of Blacks. This has everything to do with Black behavior and nothing to do with facial features or skin tones.
I don't know if this answers your question and I'm only one white person, I can't speak for others.
You answered my question--kinda sorta.
My question was: "...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?"
With you, we didn't have to get to the "then what is it?" part (which was my REAL question).
Your goal and your plan of action is in fact one of the two options I laid out: separate or eliminate. You choose to separate. Got it.
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.
But that's OK—we've got other things for women to do.
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).
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.
Thank-you for noting that I raised good points (ie the root cause is that “on average” blacks have the lowest IQ scores and this results in numerous disadvantages for them). Hope you recover quickly and fully from latest bout of Covid. Btw speaking of genes, on average whites are more susceptible to COVID, blacks are more susceptible to HIV and Jewish people to Tay Sachs.
I dated a crazy White Jewish woman with severe abandonment issues, which I easily detected on the first date. Her rich Uncle wanted to turn me into a black Jew. Lol!!!!
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
I know Rushton's work: some is spotty, some quite solid, but all of it is generally worth reading and thinking about.
The folks you mention know deep down that they're engaged in a fruitless effort to hold back the tide of history and human progress as the vast majority of the most capable scientists all over the world clearly accept and lay out for all to see the principles and mechanics of genetic evolution. That our age's Luddites put their fingers in their ears and sing "I can't hear you!" reflects the pathetic nature of their denial in the face of incontrovertible reality. To the extent we (rationalists) allow these fantasists to attempt to redefine reality by turning men into women, women into men, humans into androids, and androids into humans, they can prolong the charade, but there comes a point where it must and will be said "And yet it moves!" Once the emperor is seen to have no clothes the pretenders instantly lose their ability to bully others to accept their delusions and follow their orders. That day is rapidly approaching.
P.S. As far as my tiptoeing, a few things are in play: there are only a select few who are amenable to changing their views based on the arguments and data put before them. I try to identify such folks here and elsewhere and show them at least the entrance to where such forbidden knowledge exists. Whether they choose to enter, consider, and grow to believe what they find there is up to them. Also, I'm not particularly concerned with the extent, duration, and severity of the coming intellectual and possibly literal bloodletting. I'll be gone by then, my children, their children, and their children's children are well provided for, and those who will suffer the most are those who did the least to prevent the cataclysm. There's a crude form of justice and a grim sense of satisfaction in that outcome as far as I'm concerned.
Hey Richard, I sincerely appreciate your insights, wit and humor. Thank-you.
Confused by your suggestion that your descendants are somehow going to be immune from when the shtf? How so?
Also, by what mechanism is the emperor going to be stripped of his clothes worldwide? This unveiling happens all at once in your view?
How does this revelation happen in your estimation?
I've left them sufficient assets to do what they must to survive and prosper. There are genetic advances everyday as theory becomes practice which then becomes routine technology. Polygenic scoring and serious genetic engineering (cure for cancer type stuff) is just beginning to take off. I think those who deny the reality of evolutionary genetics (race is a social construct, men and women are the same, gender is fluid, and the like) will wake up one day and find they're the only people left in the room. Everyone else will have left to thrive in a real world of their own making rather than waste themselves playing at life in the stale fantasy of a game world.
Respectfully, I love the pollyannaish view but unfortunately I don’t think this transition will remotely be as cut and dried as you hope…The moral reckoning you’re counting on could ultimately occur down the road but I feel it’ll be an incredibly slow road with brutal ‘growing pains’ to go from what’s now a rapidly increasing pro-gender zeitgeist to a Darwinian shift towards the truth. I hope I’m wrong but my gut tells me this entire situation of feelings over facts, imagination over absolute truth, etc is not going to go softly into that good night….Tellin’ ya Richard, it’s going to get VERY ugly long before any semblance of normalcy retakes our world…..I’m not sure how old you are, guessing about 60 but either way, buckle up and batten down the hatches cause this bifurcation is well on its way….Arm up and stock ammo, have an escape plan with your loved ones rehearsed, prep ALL essentials, and make sure your 4X4 vehicle is fully operational….🙏🏻
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'm not sure what point you're trying to make. IQ is measured using tests that were created to measure something that we call intelligence. But even the experts creating the tests don't have precise definitions of what intelligence is, or is not. Ideally, such a test measures inherent "intelligence" apart from environmental factors. But that is all but impossible to accomplish.
And, are IQ test biased for and against certain cultures and backgrounds? Absolutely. It's not intentional, but it's unavoidable.
The trouble with statistics is that, while they can tell us a lot, they can also mislead us a lot. How intelligent are blacks? Whites? Asians? Hispanics? You can look at averages, but don't forget that, no matter what average you have in hand, there are blacks, Whites, Asians and Hispanics who are extremely smart, capable and accomplished. Also, among all those groups, there are those who are abject failures. And everyone in between, which is most of us.
So, what do those statistics tell us about individual blacks, or any other race? Essentially, nothing. As a co-worker once said to me, "According to the law of averages, a person with one foot in a bucket of ice water and the other foot in a fire, is comfortable."
We do know that the SAT's and similar tests are good predictors of academic performance regardless of the ethnic identities of the testees. These tests probably measure combinations of innate intelligence, lifetime intellectual development or losses, and training on similar tests prior to taking the official ones. The question of how much of the score is due to innate ability is of interest, and has been raised by Glenn Loury, but the tests do predict how well people will do in traditional academic programs.
I certainly agree with that. I sometimes wholeheartedly agree with Glenn, and sometimes fully disagree. So, which one of us is the smart one?
My point was that an IQ score is only good for just so much. And, there's different kinds of smart. I have said many times that ignorance consists of not knowing something; stupidity is in not knowing that you don't know it. I am expert at a few things, and very ignorant of everything else. I like to think I know which is which.
I have another expression: The more sure you are that you are right, the more likely you are to be wrong. That is because, once a person is convinced that they fully comprehend, they stop assessing, modifying, and validating. And that increases the chances of being very mistaken. I try to be in perpetual doubt about pretty much everything. Not because I'm insecure, but because I want to be receptive to both supporting and conflicting information.
So, what is IQ, and can it be accurately measured? I am quite sure that I don't really know.
Have you read Freddie DeBoer's recent book "The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice"? He explains just what cognitive ability is (what an IQ score purports to measure) and how essential it is to educational and professional achievement. Well worth reading.
P.S. DeBoer is a dyed-in-the-wool classical Marxist, so no knuckle-dragging right-winger.
Thanks for the info. It sounds as if the book might frustrate me, but I think I need to read it.
There is the old saying, "Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result." As our public schools continue to fail, the solution that educators offer is to do still MORE of it.
It bothers me that we think of intelligence as linear, something that can be measured on a linear scale. Intelligence is spatial: A person can be very smart about this thing over here, and ignorant about that thing over there. There are different means by which people assess reality. None is necessarily more valid than the others. Yet one approach might measure out well on and IQ test, and another measure low.
I was a public school teacher for six years, and came to recognize the obvious. Each student is unique. Some will learn academically, which is to say they will absorb what they are taught and be able to reliably repeat it back. That student may, or may not, have the ability to extrapolate beyond what he has been taught. Other students are less academic but show clear ability to intellectually project possibilities and draw conclusions beyond what they have been taught. And, frankly, many students just don't care and just don't learn. They may or may not have a high IQ. If they don't care, they don't learn. I was very surprised to find that one such student, who consistently failed in all his classes, had one of the highest IQs in has class.
The biggest failure of progressivism is the premise that we are all alike; it's just our experiences that vary. That is pure BS. And that is the biggest failure of public education.
Here's an essay I wrote that gets at this. It's about freedom, but still gets at the heart of what we're discussing here:
https://donewithparties.com/how-free-are-you-2/
You're confusing (I HATE 'conflating') IQ with qualities of creativity, intuition, memorization, inference, understanding, and a host of other variable abilities and talents which make us unique and uniquely human.
IQ measures raw processing power. Think of it as the rate at which brain cells register and transmit impulses. There is a "blink test" which correlates reasonably well to measured IQ. A light is flashed and the subject presses a button as soon after the flash as possible. Faster reaction time, quicker brain response, higher IQ. Pretty simple really.
Murray/Herrnstein's "The Bell Curve" is still the standard for understanding IQ in America and all its complex social implications. DeBoer's "Cult of Smart" on the other hand, quickly and ably accepts that IQ is highly heritable and that it matters HUGELY—on an individual basis—in education. He explicit denies the existence of and refuses to discuss group differences (racial, ethnic, sex), and he can do so because it's simply not germane to his argument. For an educator, I think DeBoer's book is the more relevant and important. Should you wish to more fully understand IQ and how it is measured and distributed across America, Murray and Herrnstein are excellent guides.
"And, are IQ test biased for and against certain cultures and backgrounds? Absolutely. It's not intentional, but it's unavoidable."
You provide no evidence for this claim. To claim that a test is "biased" against black testees means that it is not a valid predictor of black testees' performance. This is not true. SAT's, ACT's, Miller Analogy Tests, and other ability tests are strong predictors of academic performance, especially when coupled with high school GPA's, and this is why colleges have used them.
If SAT's plus GPA's were biased towards black high school graduates seeking admission to colleges, we would expect to see more black students who scored low on the tests going on to succeed in college (thereby exceeding expectations set by their test scores and their high school GPA's). We do not see this happening. High school students of any color who score low on college admission tests and have low GPA's are less likely to succeed in college and more likely to drop out before completing their degrees than are students with higher high school GPA's and higher test scores.
The combination of these numbers does not explain ALL of the variation in who succeeds in college and who does not, but the predictive validity of the tests plus GPA is high. This is a matter of fact, not of opinion. It happens to be a fact that many people would prefer to deny, because it might mean that black students are innately inferior intellectually to whites, Chinese, and so on, and that white students are inferior to Chinese and so on. Reality is not always what everyone wants it to be.
It is true that "innate general ability" is the thing that we are trying to measure with IQ tests, and we still need another measure to define what we mean by ability. IQ scores at the low end of the range reflect peoples' abilities to function independently and to benefit from training in basic life skills, for example. At the higher end of the range, which is what Loury is generally talking about, IQ tests and college admission tests combined with measures of past achievement predict performance in academia and knowledge-based careers. The best predictors of performance in jobs are tests that measure abilities that will be needed in those jobs, so SAT's are not generally used to select people interested in skilled trades. Another example would be Art or Music careers, for which auditions and portfolios are used to predict performance.
It is wonderful that you are open to various viewpoints, but with respect to the predictive validity versus invalidity or "bias" of tests, this can be determined by observable outcomes. People who have low SAT's and low high school GPA's have much lower odds of succeeding in college than people who have high ones, and this is a fact.
https://www.newsweek.com/when-race-trumps-merit-how-pursuit-equity-threatens-lives-opinion-1794872. Saw this today on realclearpolitics and looks related to the discussion on tests.
Yep! When I was a college student, there was a slogan "Don't trust anyone over 30." I am thinking, "Don't trust any doctor under 50."
Thanks for forwarding the article--Heather MacDonald's articles are always worth reading.
Excellent explanation of the predictive validity in academic performance associated with IQ and GPA. You managed to make a complex and confusing relationship crystal clear—nice work!
Thanks, Richard!
That is why I used the word “average”. It tells us that, on average blacks have the lowest IQ scores. Also tells us that on average Asians have the highest IQ scores. And while not perfect, IQ scores are the best measure of intelligence and widely accepted across time and space. (“Widely” doesn’t mean “universally” or “always”)
(ON AVERAGE!) Ashkenazi Jews have East Asians beat by around 7-10 IQ points (1/2 to 2/3 of a standard deviation). I know of no human racial/ethnic group with higher average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews who shine in verbal acuity although I believe East Asians are somewhat more adept in crunching math and visuospatial tasks.
This seems related. “The analysis revealed two distinct subgroups within the remains: one with greater Middle Eastern ancestry, which may represent Jews with origins in Western Germany, and another with greater Eastern and Central European ancestry. The modern Ashkenazi population formed as a mix of these groups and absorbed little to no outside genetic influences over the 600 years that followed, the authors said.
Some disease-causing mutations that are widespread in modern Ashkenazi Jews are suspected to have been introduced by members of the founding group long ago. The team found some of these mutations in Erfurt as well, indicating that the medieval Ashkenazi population indeed originated from an extremely small set of founders.
Further evidence came from mitochondrial DNA, which is part of the genome transmitted only from mothers. Analyses showed that one third of the Erfurt individuals descended in their maternal line from a single ancestral woman, again highlighting how small the founding population must have been, the authors said.” https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-provides-new-insights-ashkenazi-jewish-history.
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.)
You can get to the root cause quicker by looking at average IQ scores from around the world and across time.
"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/
Completely incorrect and way too wordy; equity means equal outcomes as in in we all get the same amount of money at the end of the year. Equality is about equal opportunities. Do better.
Thanks for nothing. Literally. Face it, your comment has no real content.
I have no idea how you got the idea that I must meet your idea of standards. That's not what I would have expected from someone calling themselves, "Libertarian".
Least I didn’t take 6 paragraphs to say nothing. Lol.
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.
The Democratic Party wholly owned education system is optimized to render blacks unable to read or do math at anything close to grade level proficiency. Numerous public schools in Baltimore have not a single student testing at grade proficiency. Not a single student. Public school teachers k-16 (yes university too) and administrators “took the soup” to borrow a phrase from the Irish Famine.
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.
You’ve put together the exact points from my original post here far more eloquently than I did. Well said, Sir! 👏🏼
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/
You forget Ibram X. Kendi, Michael Eric Dyson, Jamelle Bouie, Charles Blow, Ta-Nahisi Coates, and the rest of the crew. Each and every one of them better known, with greater reach, given more awards and kudos, and younger, stronger, and likely longer lived than Glenn Loury.
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.
Speaking of Charles Murray, here's something for you to think about that comes from a lifetime of experience doing social science:
https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/the-3-laws-of-social-programs/
Richard Herrnstein (co-author with Charles Murray of 1994's "The Bell Curve") wrote in 1971(!):
"Greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness, and educational opportunity are NOT going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage. It will instead give us a society sharply graduated, with ever greater innate separation between the top and the bottom, and ever more uniformity within families as far as inherited abilities are concerned. Naturally, we find this vista appalling, for we have been raised to think of social equality as our goal. The vista reminds us of the world we had hoped to leave behind - aristocracies, privileged classes, unfair advantages and disadvantages of birth. ... By removing arbitrary barriers between classes, society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers. When people can freely take their natural level in society, the upper classes will, virtually by definition, have greater capacity than the lower." (emphasis in the original)
"By removing arbitrary barriers between classes, society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers." What does he mean by "biological barriers"? Inherited abilities?
My understanding is that the upper SES's are accumulating enough wealth to progressively increase the number of trust fund kids in the population. These individuals do not necessarily show evidence of having inherited much of the intelligence, drive, etc., that their money-making ancestors had.
I think that we can count on happening is that greed and lust for power will always reassert itself, and there is a certain segment of the population that excels at that. After that goes on for too long, a countermovement will attempt to take down the ruling class, and may or may not succeed. After another long while, the countermovement will succumb to the same traditional sins and the whole cycle will restart.
Think of it like this, Sandra. As you work toward providing everyone a fully enriched environment, differences in performance are increasingly due to innate (in)abilities. It's a cruel but iron-clad calculus. Note the date on Herrnstein's prediction—over 50 years ago!
"As you work toward providing everyone a fully enriched environment, differences in performance are increasing due to innate (in)abilities."
I don't know if you are referring to within group differences or between group differences here, but I can address the point either way.
In an ideal world where everyone has the fully enriched environment, we still would have the between group cultural preferences. I personally consider myself fortunate to have not been raised in the Chinese cultural environment with respect to educational pressure. Maybe other cultural groups, such as American black people, don't want to conform to the white upper middle class cultural expectations for educational achievement. But if we imagine a situation in which all cultural groups have roughly equivalent values regarding educational performance, I would expect the following:
1. There would still be individual (within group) differences in motivation.
2. Setting this aside for the purposes of this discussion, the innate differences between individuals and groups would be much more clearly revealed than they are now, and we would be able to say more accurately what they are. Based on your comments, I assume that you are more interested in between group differences.
It is certainly possible that American whites, blacks, Chinese, etc., would not have equal mean performances academically. It is impossible to determine whether the mean differences would be greater or less than they are now.
With respect to individual differences within groups, I would expect that many people could improve their performances, but everyone would be limited by whatever is maximally achievable with a human brain. This would tend to reduce the range of individual scores on tests like the SAT.
Sorry for my typo—meant to say "...increasingLY due to innate..."
Agree it doesn't particularly matter whether looking at inter- or intra-group differences. Heritability due to genetic factors increases once you equalize environmental (i.e. non-genetic) factors. I would think cultural environments would tend to become more similar than different once enrichment becomes more universally the norm. I have no issues with the remainder of your analysis. Thanks for posting.
In thinking further, the range might not change much because the people at the far left tail of the distribution are severely impaired, and many of them already receive specialized services. With improved nutrition and so on, there might be fewer people at the lowest end of the ability distribution, but some of the most impaired people would still anchor that end of the range. I would predict that mean scores for the entire population would rise, as well as mean scores for the ethnic subgroups. This would shift the highest part of the bell shape to the right, indicating actual improvement in ability population-wide. If this were to occur, psychometricians would probably adjust the tests, so that the average score would be 100 again, but this number would be the equivalent of 110 (or whatever) on the first version of the test.
Thanks for the dialogue, Richard.
Sandra, I am worried that I’m going to miss your Unifying Theory On The Psychology of Social Norms and Impact on Culture in the 21st Century because you will bury it in a reply to Dick Bickers of all people. By way of this comment, I am requesting you alert me when you publish it. Thanks much in advance.
That is very sweet, Libertarian! I am contemplating starting up my own Substack, and have been holding back only because of lack of time. I will let you know when and if I actually do it.