15 Comments

Being not as technical, nor as intellectual as most on this site, it seems like this whole discussion is a nature/nurture thing and that the main crux of the matter is TIME. Both evolution and socialization took long periods of time. I would be interested to know if we were capable of assessing IQ disparities say during say the 1500's or 1800's for instance and comparing to today would we find the gaps closing? I wonder sometimes if the IQ (if measurable) between hunter/gatherer groups and settled societies were the similar, but that the skills made the difference. I'm thinking of the development of different parts & functions of the brain. Will the exposure to AI and the Metaverse increase these gaps, but between those with access and those without vs racial differences.

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Thank you Glenn for introducing the concept of “social relationships” effecting personal development independent of resource allocation. In my field, we refer to that as network of social support - but I prefer your term. I believe that all relationships have value including the customer-merchant business transaction relationship at the local store.

On the audience question of social relationships at an institution, where people arrive via different pathways; it is not on my radar. I cannot recall others mentioning it, either. My sense is that interaction performance shapes the relationship.

I will go John McWhorter mode and discuss a hypothetical Individual- “John Doe”. John Doe can be of any race. Whatever the potential opportunities that John Doe has, he is bombarded with non-stop activist/institution messaging to see a glass half-empty. This is important as much of what we experience is perception.

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It's interesting how much, in the beginning of your lecture, Dr Loury, with all the discussion about structural factors and the cultural construction of race and reproduction of racialized social and economic inequality, you end up sounding a great deal like the critical race theorists. I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising: social science is social science and, although economists are trained with a good deal more formal rigor than many other social scientists, this kind of mental model of social outcomes is all but inevitable for making society as something tractable to be studied academically.

Nevertheless, pondering what would really differentiate you from your former colleague, Derrick Bell and his intellectual descendents was an interesting exercise for the drive into work. I think, although you ascribe to many of the same formalism such as an attention to social mechanisms of differentiation (you even use the term 'racial other'!), with a similar conception of the need for this differentiation to reproduce, you lack the 'grand unifying theory' that critical theoretic approaches to the sociology of racial outcomes share: hegemony.

This is an important realization for me in my own, personal journey to try to understand the various intellectual approaches to these questions. While I've been familiarizing myself with CRT (and other, similar fields), it's been difficult to get a view past the particularities of any specific application and gain a view of the theoretical underpinnings of the viewpoint. While I've been familiar enough with Gramscian hegemony as a concept and how it's applied within critical theories, it took hearing you describe the structural relationships that critical race theorists often work within but then sharply diverting from their normal path of analysis and the types of conclusions they reach to really grasp it's fundamental importance to the whole analytic framework.

In a way, your whole emphasis on a development narrative is a pushback against the 'hegemony' core of these types of theories. When you say no one really believes that the tests are biased against black children and that this explains differential test outcomes, I think this highlights your departure from critical theory: CRT really does want to make the claim that the content of the test is informed by adherence to and participation in 'whiteness' and that performance on the test is determined by this, not any objective factor of knowledge or understanding. Whether any crits actually believe this I'll refrain from judging, but that really is exactly how their framework understands racially disparate test outcomes: a HEGEMONIC white supremacy creates tests and exams that structure and reproduce racial inequality, if not intentionally, at the very least as a necessary aspect of it's operation as a hegemony.

Your approach denies this central plank by reasserting an objective connection of some sort -- no matter the degree -- between the content of the test and knowledge and understanding of the subject. It's an important distinction and I want to thank you for helping me come to grasp it more deeply than I did before.

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Really enjoyed the talk. Thanks for sharing. This is the second or third time I've heard this lecture in one form or another and it seems that each time it gets more clear and succinct. Perhaps that's the repetition in my mind but it seems to be coalescing...

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Glenn: At about the 39:40 mark you're asked what you would do to increase social capital in the Black community and you preface your response with "I don't know." How about saying something like "Google 'Why are the Igbos....' and see what comes up. It's Why are the Igbos so smart, so successful, so rich, and so on. So my answer to increasing social capital is Do what the Igbos do.'"

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Good job at Baylor. Your reply to the last question was excellent.

Bari Weiss' piece in Commentary: “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. Courage Is What Gets Us Out.” bears directly on this subject.

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A very informative and educative lecture and subsequent discussion!

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I never cease to admire your courage and your candor — you tell it like a Southsider!

Another Southsider

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As much as I was looking forward to it, I think it's good that you are taking more time to formulate your discussion on "systemic racism" with John. It's an emotionally charged topic with lots of rabbit holes to fall into.

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This lecture was presented October 5, 2021, in case anyone was wondering.

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I think that explanations for persistent racial inequality grounded in anti-black bias or poor human capital development must in turn explain the IQ gap, which may well drive a plurality of the observed gaps in social outcomes. Here's an slightly technical overview of the evidence suggesting that the IQ gap is a substantial independent driver of racial disparity and that the difference is largely the result of genetic differences between the groups in question: https://humanvarieties.org/2019/12/22/the-persistence-of-cognitive-inequality-reflections-on-arthur-jensens-not-unreasonable-hypothesis-after-fifty-years/

I'd love to hear you speak more on this issue! For a bright, technical mind like your own -- e.g., one that surely often conceives of social science explanations as a matter of variance-partitioning -- I'm confident that you're cognizant of the importance of the IQ gap.

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