SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
4d ago
People often talk about the degree barrier
Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
SerialStateLineXer
7d ago
Oh, sorry, I didn't see this until now. It was about a year and a half, half because I wanted a break, and half because I really hate updating my resume and kept putting it off.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes.
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
Taxes on investment income distort the trade-off between present and future consumption in a way that neither taxes on consumption nor taxes on wage income do.
There's a superficial appearance of symmetry here, where it seems like taxes on investment income discourage investment and taxes on consumption discourage consumption, but the illusion goes away if you work through the math. The tax system really is set up in a way that penalizes saving and investing.
SerialStateLineXer
12d ago
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues.
There's a lack of quantitative reasoning in general. People just throw out qualitative claims and assume that the quantitative stuff works out to whatever is most convenient for their argument.
I wonder if there's a connection between this and schoolchildren's notorious aversion to word problems.
I think the reason for higher rates of comorbidities among low-IQ individuals from higher-IQ populations is that you're very unlikely to get an IQ two standard deviations below the mean purely because of additive genetic effects, so a large proportion of people with IQs this low are going to have some major developmental disorder causing the cognitive deficit. On the other hand, if an IQ of 70 is only one standard deviation below the population mean, then a sixth of the population is going to get there with additive genetic effects and a relatively small proportion will get there through some major developmental disorder.
I don't think it works the other way. The only way you get an IQ two standard deviations above the mean is with additive genetic effects. There's no anti-Down syndrome, where you can get an extra chromosome that gives you 30 extra IQ points.
However, it's worth noting that black students don't actually perform better in college than white students with the same test scores. They're just more likely to enroll and stick it out to the end. This is why I suspect that non-academic factors like higher family SES and athletics play a role. Unlike raw IQ, educational attainment has a substantial shared environment component in twin studies, probably due to a combination of cultural attitudes toward education and parents' ability to help pay for college.
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