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For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration? Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them? Arabs?
I'm not a HBD absolutist (Culture matters.), but I'll bite. I spent a few years at a stem-oriented boarding school for allegedly smart kids, so I wound up spending a fair amount of time with the kids of educated immigrants. Note, outside of that my experience is limited by having spent all my time in a not especially diverse part of the South. Also note, the smartest and dumbest kids I met there were of domestic extraction. The usual white problem was having mistaken being weird/nerdy for being smart (Those kids usually couldn't put down the video games long enough to study and weren't smart enough to get away with that, so they failed out quickly.) and the usual black problem was that "smart by the standards of the school back home" didn't mean that smart (though there were a few who were that smart).
Indians are among the most heavily filtered demographics in America (See also: Africans), so yeah, by and large they're at least midwits. In my experience the Indian kids weren't shockingly brilliant, but they were at least above average and the studious ones are doing well in life. An unfortunate set I met were a professor's sons. I have no idea what happened to one of them (He was something of a druggie burnout in college.) and the other is one whose level of education badly exceeds his intelligence combined with a nasty case of arrogance (and obesity) to boot, basically an Indian neckbeard and one of the universally reviled people I've known. It's hard to describe, but we're talking about a guy who had an MS in economics but couldn't really hack delivering pizza because he sucked at reading a map and using it find things.
The Asians tended to be FOBs or close to it with lousy English skills (same at the SEC school I attended) and/or terminal cases of introversion, but excellent at math (and WoW at the boarding school). The more Americanized ones have fared very well. I can't comment further because they tended to stick to their own clique.
The most oddly overrepresented demographic at the school were Russians/Ukrainians whose parents came here after the fall of the USSR/the bad 90s, about half Jewish and half gentile (Hilariously, it never occurred to me as a teenager that my friend who is the weediest, most obviously Jewish Russian Jew to ever walk the Earth is Jewish. White Southerners don't have Jewdar by default. Sadly, he suffers from neuroticism to a life-crippling degree and I see plenty of posts on Facebook about his struggles with CPTSD due to a less than ideal childhood.). The Russian from St. Petersburg is one of the most intelligent and driven people I've met, also among the most intransigent and outspoken, for better or worse. His inability to hide his sympathies for the Z invasion in '22 led to an epic crashout and loss of (mixed Russian and Ukrainian) friend group. He's now relocated to China with a wife, kid, and a job as a university professor. The Ukrainian was kind of an asshole (We ran in different cliques.) but definitely smart and is doing well here as an engineer. Memorably, he came up to me after someone else got the history ribbon during senior awards for DEI reasons and told me that it was bullshit that I didn't get it, high praise from an enemy (The history teachers wound up concocting a different award to give me that amounted to "teacher's pet".).
Exiting the classroom, I can't say much about Arabs because the only ones I've interacted with run gas stations, vape shops, or restaurants. They're not common where I've lived.
Hispanics are a broad category. The white Spanish ones are, well, white people, and the castizos aren't far off. One of my dear friends falls into that category and when she gets too deep into ranting about her experiences as a brown woman I like to fuck with her by pointing out that she's whiter than I am (If I have anything like a decent tan going on.). The mestizo Mexicans (and, they're all Mexican, or at least were; todays illegals are from further south), once assimilated (The kids of the W. era illegals have grown up now.) strike me as not much different from working-class white people (Note: I said working class and not white trash. The Mexicans strike me as less trashy, for now at least.). Hispanics don't really have the same problems that black Americans do. Hell, they live longer than white Americans in spite of being fatter and more diabetic.
For fun, I'll pick on my own kind, as someone who also had a chain smoking Mamaw named Bonnie who got married at 13. JD Vance might've done better to pick up a copy of Understanding the Borderline Mother (It would not surprise me if Scots-Irish women were found to suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder at rates above the white American baseline.) than to try to find a political explanation for his family's dysfunction (and to be clear, one of the themes of the book wasn't frustration over being poor, because his family wasn't, but over being dragged down from an otherwise middle class life by bad behavior). Hillbilly Elegy was a mediocre political polemic (and is badly dated; it was written pre-Trump when Vance was still angling for the Romney-Ryan wing of Republican politics) but his story was a sufficiently compelling trip down memory lane that I really don't want to read it again and refuse to watch the movie.
To twist the knife a bit more, his telling of the story comes across as claiming the sort of unconditional victimhood that can only be the luxury of the younger sibling. That, and while I deeply sympathize with his reactionary streak there’s an air of self-righteousness that’s a touch off putting in someone I’d otherwise want to like. I describe my mother as something of a cartoon villain but it’s hard to square “honor culture”/”honor” as I grew up to understand it with “writing a book outing Mom as a dysfunctional fuckup/bad person for all the world to read”. It never occurred to me to play the “write about my crappy childhood in a college admissions essay” card, but my little sister sure did.
I feel like there's a certain element where people in Western 'salary-driven' economies don't really understand that people in more developing economies tend to have far larger reliance on entrepreneurship to get rich enough to be in the West and especially to be affluent in the West. Whilst it's likely valuable to have intelligence to succeed as an entrepreneur, the great sort of Western civilization means that if you're living in an UMC bastion the locals likely have parents who are your doctors, engineers etcetera (which correlate more strictly with raw intellectual horsepower) whilst foreigners are more likely to have made their money through business ownership.
This IMO makes trying to proxy raw intellect via income weaker than you'd expect. An entrepreneur is testing for luck, social skills, connections et al in ways that white collar professionals aren't experiencing the same way. This also factors strongly into some groups being able to swing way above their intellectual horsepower due to having cultural setups that are better at enabling them to run businesses and find their way into more-softskill driven sinecuresque parts of the established economy through their mastery of networking and the art of the job application. This can be a double-edged sword in that said groups can be good at entrepreneurial (yay, more small business) and sinecure obtainment (boo, those jobs really should either not exist or be earmarked for sons of the soil and you'd have to be monumentally stupid to give these to foreigners) whilst the difference doesn't show on a spreadsheet to politicos who simply say 'X minority has a higher gdp per capita'.
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