Instapundit just posted a link to his new book, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Here is how it describes itself:
The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.
Emphasis added. That's exactly the claim his defenders have been trying to walk away from all this time: that the things we tend to describe as structural racism are in fact the fault of minority groups, because they are (a) less intelligent on average and (b) more violent (perhaps because they are less intelligent). He has apparently decided to embrace this idea and use his last years in defense of it.
I don't know that I believe that (a) is true; I am persuaded that at least some of the counterarguments I've read over the year are plausible. Claim (b) is true as a matter of empirical fact, although just why it is true is the real issue. Are some groups more violent because their situation is less tolerable or just, or are they more violent in some inherent -- perhaps even essential -- way?
I notice the top-rated review accuses Murray of "soft pedaling" and "sugarcoating," which is definitely not how I would have described this approach.
Another reviewer has an insight that poses an immediate danger of confirmation bias to me: "An honest appraisal of the differences in criminality between groups by actual data. What I took away, however, is that in cities of 500,000 or less these group differences are much less evident and important. What this book seems to be is a reasoned argument for a post-urban society. Most, if not all of the pathologies of modern life are associated with large urban populations."
It's not quite all -- there are still plenty of drugs in rural America, for example. It may really be most.
9 comments:
I read the book last week. It says the same things he's been arguing since The Bell Curve: that we must judge individuals individually, but if we insist at looking at results among different groups, then we're up against the statistical truth that you can find all sorts of undeniable differences in their averages, differences that can't be explained away by income, zip code, home life, or any of the other many explanations that have been explored. That's true of IQ just as it's true of many other qualities.
Murray scrupulously avoids trying to answer the question of why IQ varies statistically so as to rank SE Asians/Parsees/Ashkenazy Jews at the top, followed by Whites, Hispanics, and Blacks. He's open to any argument anyone wants to make about how to even out IQs among those groups, but observes that what we've been trying for the last 30 years or so has been spectacularly unsuccessful. If the answer is that it's not nature at all, it's mostly nurture, then we clearly don't understand much about what kind of nurture is at the root of it. Some of the effect is robust even among identical twins separated at birth. It's gotten pretty hard to argue it's mostly nurture.
Unless and until we equalize IQs, it's indefensible to insist that differential group outcomes associated with IQ must result from systemic racism. There are more obvious explanations that don't require to wave vaguely at behavior no one can quite identify. Statistically, a strong case can be made that the different group outcomes are strongly linked to IQ: wealth, prevalence among various prestigious professions, and possibly even criminal behavior. Obviously there are confounding variables for all of these, but they don't erase the signal.
About once a page, Murray reminds us that these are statistical averages for groups and have no bearing whatever on what a specific person with specific qualities is likely to achieve. A poor black woman with a sky-high IQ is equally likely to do fabulous STEM work as a rich Ashkenazy man of the same IQ, given the same opportunity, and anyone looking to hire a hot prospect, or make any kind of fair judgment, ignores that truth at his peril.
Murray's other point, patiently made and remade for decades, is that minor differences at the mean translate into extreme differences at the tail. The more unusual an ability is, the more extreme this effect is, whether you're looking at star basketball players or Nobel Prize winners.
If we can figure out how to equalize IQ (the real quality, not just consolation prizes on paper), we can erase these effects. No one, however, has any idea how to equalize IQs across ethnic groups. While we're at it, if we can equalize propensities for things like diabetes and resistance to malaria, we'll erase a lot of differential health effects among ethnic groups. We don't know how to do that either, which doesn't make us racist.
What we can do is take people's abilities into account in how we treat them. On the privilege side, that means getting Nobel Prize winners in the door when we need Nobel-Prize-level work done. On the less privileged side, it means aiming laws and instructions at average or even below-average people, so that everyone can follow them instead of leaving a large swathe of the population in the dust when it comes, say, to how to take a prescription or call 911 or perform jury duty. The one approach that won't work is to insist on equal performance by groups with different average characteristics and hurl insults of racism at society when we don't get it. It makes exactly as little sense as it does to complain that too few women have won Medals of Honor.
"Disparate effect" lawsuits made a mess of our society. At first they seemed like a good way to get at hidden racism or sexism. Later they became a way to manufacture racism or sexism out of thin air.
There is no way to equalize IQ just as there's no way to equalize height or hair color, or anything else as you say, and it's painful that this is where the discussion often seems to revert to.
I'm presently reading The Bell Curve, and it's an even-handed treatment that reiterates over and over again its observational basis.
I think with his latest book (which I haven't yet read), I get the sense that Murray has tried to simplify his arguments to basic well-supported facts, and removed any attempts to explain them, preferring instead to let the stark facts stand in front of the boiling social cauldron so that individuals can reach their own conclusions. It's a kind of appeal; I believe he's realized that he doesn't have the power to advocate, and that the designated advocates currently in vogue actively misrepresent these issues in order to accumulate social and political capital.
Just remember that in the mean average of IQ, 50% of the people are dumber than that, no matter what race or ethnicity.
I would also say that nurture makes a lot of difference. In my experience, anecdotally speaking, kids with average IQ always do better with two parent households typically, than kids from broken homes. I will say though, that kids from broken homes who's fathers are involved do better than kids who have no paternal influence at all.
YMMV. I'm just a layman with no college degree, just a lot of life experience.
The HBD folks think Murray is a bit of a squish because he gives so much space for environment to be operating, when the numbers are not there to support that. He keeps insisting environmental stuff must be in there, even though he can't point to specifics. That is not to say that environment is disproven only that the purported evidence is mostly associations, not demonstrable causes. There is still that wide open "random" category. Violent crime rates for African-Americans are about 8-10 times greater nationwide. The range is about 4 times higher in Southern and midwestern rural areas to 16x in the largest cities. The large cities may, in fact be a magnet, or a sink for the least capable and most violent.
There may be genes that are activated by prenatal stress or exposure to violence as a child, increasing the likelihood of committing violence oneself. You could call that environmental. Putnam discovered that young males of all races get more activated and violent when differing groups are nearby. That could be described as an urban, and thus environmental phenomenon. In rural areas, people of a different race are not so readily perceived as being part of a "group" that is dangerous to your group. They are more just themselves.
Still there is 4x greater violence minimum, even in rich school districts where overall crime is low. The part I hate is blaming the teachers and police because in the game of musical chairs they are always left hanging when the music stops and are called racist. "It must be you. It can't be anything else, because we have refused to consider any of the other answers."
Suppose we found today that lead poisoning in the mothers caused the average black/white IQ difference, and that lack of some nutrient found in many Chinese/Japanese diets explained the average "asian"/white difference--and we embarked on a campaign to ensure proper nutrition and clean up the lead. And the next generation all evened out and we lived happily together ever after--or as happily as people ever do (not very).
In the meantime, what do we do? If this is "damage" it has already been done to the babies born right now. IIRC that was one of the questions in Bell Curve: how do you arrange for a meaningful role in society for those who live on the left side of the curve?
Murray didn't cite "The devil finds work for idle hands to do," but that's a big problem here. We automate and try to make our society a "knowledge-based" economy, and that gives the slower of _all_ ethnicities little or no way to contribute. Even in our hypothetical "evened-out-averages" society that will still be a problem. "Learn to code" is a cruel joke for a lot of us who can't do algebra.
At the moment our movers and shakers seem to prefer lying to solving.
Murray didn't cite "The devil finds work for idle hands to do," but that's a big problem here. We automate and try to make our society a "knowledge-based" economy, and that gives the slower of _all_ ethnicities little or no way to contribute...
Yes, that's a subject we've discussed here from time to time. I think their final answer is to eliminate as much reproduction as possible, in the hope that there won't be so many idle hands -- but not until they do fully automate, more or less. As long as they actually have to pay wages, they need crushing numbers of poor laborers to depress wages and keep workers down.
And that's not just the slower, even. Pretty quickly that's the average, and then the above-average. In fact, it's already for the well-above-average who don't swear fealty to the new ideology; that's what cancel culture is really about. It's not about the poor or the slow, it's about pushing all the smart-but-wrongthinkers out of an ability to make a living. Make them compete for the starvation jobs instead, so they can help hold wages down. They'll probably do your starvation jobs better anyway, so you win twice as a member of the ruling class.
It is possible to change average IQ or height or skin color, whatever you want. However, it takes strong selective pressure. One way to change IQ is to kill everyone with an IQ less than 100 before they breed. The next generation will almost all have IQ's greater than 100 if the previous standard test is used.
Of course, there will be a new average. Will we renorm the test?
A bigger problem is that over the last 150 years or so the mean British (an by implication all European whites) IQ has declined by about 15 points, one point per decade. This is based on response times, which correlate with IQ, and which have been measured for Brits for 150 years.
Yes, there are fewer geniuses percentagewise today than in Newton's time.
Yes, it is likely the average US IQ has declined by 5 points since Neil Armstrong's Moon landing.
15 points is one full standard deviation, and 5 points is one-third standard deviation. These are very big deals statistically.
If IQ helps survival, it will respond over time to selective pressure by increasing IQ among surviving generations. If not, it won't. We don't have to put a thumb on the scale. No notions of how much better the world would be if the wrong people didn't reproduce will ever justify murder in service of genetic improvement.
We're free, of course, to adopt personal and societal policies that reward behavior that seems to yield a result we like. The free market does that, among other societal constructs. Maybe that will change who reproduces, and maybe we should be thinking about that effect.
We have next to no idea why selective pressure leads to IQ differences among ethnic groups. There are lots of theories, but few rise beyond the level of "just so" stories.
@ sykes - I have seen the reaction time claim and am not persuaded. I agree that it is there, and may mean something, but 15 points is a lot, and there are not other corresponding proxies showing the same thing. The WAIS has been renormed upwards over the decades, though that stopped about thirty years ago. I am willing to grant a slight decline in the American numbers, largely a result of the brightest having fewer children, a trend that actually started among Oxford/Cambridge graduates as far back as the 1860s. But five points in 50 years seems steep.
Post a Comment