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Interesting. What's the name for the shared social environment created by a group of people?
I don't believe this is correct, my understanding is that studies tend to show that home environmental impacts are modest, not nonexistent.
Then what's the point of HBD? If African-American violence is substantially different from people of similar ancestry, then why am I supposed to think that ancestry is important at all? If you can't compare two groups of related people simply because they are in different environments then it sounds like the environment is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
We started this conversation with you condemning what you termed the conservative explanation that "welfare state and ghetto culture" were responsible for high African American criminality. But now with just a little pressing, you're resorting to essentially the same explanation: that access to expanded resources and fewer constraints led to a dramatic rise in African-American crime. This is just a slightly rephrased version of a boomer American conservative rant about the welfare state and soft-on-crime prosecutors. You might object that your idea that "prosperity leads to crime" is mechanically different than "dependency via the welfare state leads to crime" theory our hypothetical pal would espouse, but you would also oppose giving them welfare, since that could increase their latitude of action.
Your criticism is that our boomer friend doesn't understand HBD. But you agree with him that welfare policies make the situation worse (and probably you agree with him on his criticisms of lax law enforcement, I would guess). And neither you nor our hypothetical boomer conservative can do anything about their ancestry. He might be able to do something about the welfare state and law enforcement policies: those are actual levers the American state has control over. So while you criticize his lack of understanding of The Bell Curve (which, I think, is actually something many, perhaps most intellectual conservatives are familiar with) he's actually trying to push policies that might make a difference on the ground in real life. And to the degree that those policies can make a difference one way or the other, it seems to me that you think his understanding of the problem is largely correct.
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