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2yr ago
This isn't a novel claim in this space.
I'm not sure whether discrimination is the primary cause for differing outcomes between racial groups, but the question isn't as binary as it may seem. What if discrimination is responsible for the way that group's culture developed, or for selecting certain genes? It's been hypothesized that the type of discrimination jews faced for centuries placed a selective pressure for high intellectual achievement. If jews were pressured into professions requiring high IQ like doctors and banking (jews were the only ones allowed to charge interest in many places), then evolution would filter out the ones too dumb to practice medicine or banking. I'm inaccurately paraphrasing Scott Alexander's argument here but my point is that discrimination has downstream impacts that can last longer than the discrimination itself.
I believe racial groups have different mean IQs and that some of these differences could be partially explained by genetics. I guess that puts me in the HBD camp.
If HBD weren't real, I don't think I'd expect any major differences between countries. Asia and Africa would still be held back by poor institutions. The fact that the middle-IQ group dominated both the lower and higher IQ groups leads me to believe group IQ differences didn't have a high first-order impact on history. I think the biggest differences would be within countries. I'd expect to see more black and fewer jewish scientists, engineers, CEOs, etc. Racism would still exist on a similar scale. We'd worry less about economic disparities, but still worry about representational disparities. American "guilt" towards blacks would more closely resemble european guilt towards jews.
There's another aspect of HBD which proposes that, although men and women have the same mean IQs, men have higher variance than women. Whether that's true or not, I think the counterfactual would be of higher consequence.
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