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Gregory Clark published The Inheritance of Social Status: England, 1600-2022. You can find breakdowns of the results and methodology by geneticist Alexander Young and Cremieux in Twitter threads. The main takeaway is that a model of genetic inheritance and assortative mating nearly perfectly explains social status across nine different measures.
This builds on previous findings that dramatic changes in social structure or wealth transfers are often only temporary setbacks for elite families. In China, the Cultural Revolution, perhaps the single biggest upheaval in social structure and wealth redistribution in human history, saw the pre-communist elite families spend one generation below median income/education before outearning and outlearning other households by 16% and 11%, respectively, in the second generation. A similar phenomenon is seen in the American South following the Civil War, where it took antebellum elite families one generation to regain equal footing, with the second generation surpassing their counterparts in income and education.
Critics of the hereditarian hypothesis have posted critiques of the study, but, to my knowledge, no clear alternative hypotheses or explanations for the genetic model fitting basically perfectly.
It’s fascinating that even Turkheimer, one of the most prominent anti-HBD academics in this debate (and one of the most prominent academics in the space in general) barely gets 30-40 retweets in his commentary on a huge paper like this. It kind of shows how, even on the anti-hereditarian side, academic opinions don’t really matter. Sure, Vox might quote Turkheimer in an article on why group genetic differences are supposedly bullshit, but his views have nothing to do with why the article was written, they could be omitted or he could have never replied to their email and the article, save for the quote, would have been exactly the same. Turkheimer is useful to bolster the ‘mainstream’ narrative, but his role is narrow.
Arguing for hereditarianism is like being an economist in the Soviet Union in 1950 and arguing, using complex economic models and a lot of math and comparative data, that free markets could be better than centrally planned economies. The amount of data you have is completely irrelevant; your faculty peers of the establishment position might halfheartedly attempt a rebuttal as an intellectual exercise, but in truth everyone knows that the reason your paper isn’t going to lead to any big policy debate is because the Party has its ideology and intends to keep it and, most importantly, does not justify its maintenance of the current system on the grounds of an ongoing scientific enquiry. Marx and Lenin performed the scientific analysis, by definition socialism follows capitalism, by definition a reversal is undesirable and morally and thus politically wrong.
Likewise in this case. The right has the strange idea that progressive universalism, perhaps because the scientific revolution was coterminous with the emergence of many liberal ideas, is grounded in some kind of (flawed or misguided) scientific analysis. Certainly it has aspirations to that effect. But progressivism as ideology was never founded on ‘science’, it was founded on feeling and on sentiment, and so no scientific evidence can challenge it.
HBD arguments are persuasive to the people who can be reached. Eventually it will undermine the narrative.
By the 1980s, Marxism-Leninism was a spent force. Even though apparatchiks emptily repeated the slogans at party conferences, few true believers remained. How many KGB agents didn't secretly wish they had been born in the West?
Likewise, the empty platitudes of wokism will become more hollow. To me, and to anyone who is paying attention, HBD is true and obvious. The believers in blank-slatism will start to look more and more deranged, much like a Soviet functionary who actually believed in Marxism in 1980 (so cringe). Sure, one still can't say the true thing out loud. But passionately supporting the dogma will start to look pretty silly as well. The eye rolls will increase.
The intellectual arguments come first. Everything else follows.
I used to think it was just a matter of reaching enough people, but I've now come to realise that evidence doesn't really matter for a great number people if it interferes with their ideology and/or personal interest.
The amount of people in the West who would be negatively affected if HBD became the dominant intellectual frame of reference is now massive. They have a clear personal stake at never allowing that to happen. Dispassionate scientific inquiry is in fact something very few are interested in. You can show them a thousand papers. It won't matter. They will only use it to indict you for heresy.
It always has been. I realize you are mostly referring to racial HBD theories, but an HBD regime would equally be earthshaking for the poor, the working class, the failures more broadly. The majority of people in America who have reason to dread an HBD regime are white, because the majority of Americans are white.
If genetic talent will out, as the study purports to show, then if your family is still in the mud they probably deserve it, right? Affirmative action might in a few cases explain why someone is an engineer instead of a doctor, it never explains why someone is working retail instead of getting a real degree.
Alternatively, your riches are not because of hard work or dedication but simply because you won a random genetic lottery... so why do you deserve all these good things in life due to blind luck? It's a case that socialists can make just as well.
Wealth sure, status no. Beyond a bare minimus of comfortable survival, redistribution rhetoric has never taken the form of "Yes the ruling class is smarter, stronger, harder working, better looking, but still!"
Humans intuitively think smarter better humans deserve more reward.
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