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Notes -
Far Right HBD Civil War
Bronze Age Pervert recently xeeted on what he believes in the current infeasibility of HBD politically:
This was controversial with numerous pundits amongst the different spheres of the Right: with Woods, Winegard, and Fuentes having opposing views.
I think the question of politically feasibility of HBD is a point of discussion, in addition to—perhaps more interestingly—the timing of the xeet by Bronze Age Pervert—wat means? Is HBD the path forward? In the chaos of the Isreal-Hamas war and the current anti-woke backlash, is the vitalist Right looking to make themselves more palatable?
I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a question that has been bubbling whenever (racial) HBD comes up as a topic on this forum: do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?
Studies of the correlation between education levels that are clear indicators of IQ (ie, a Bachelor's or above) are scarce, possibly because it is almost impossible to actually study because the number of college graduates who actually commit crimes is so tiny as to be nonexistent. Lochner and Morretti found a 30% decrease in murder and assault rates for each additional year of schooling, and that increases in schooling after high school graduation had no discernable impact because the rate of incarceration had already bottomed out. I couldn't find actual data on the topic, but working backward prisoners appear to have less than 4% of the odds of having a Bachelor's compared to the general population.
HBD advocates like Charles Murray and Lee Kuan Yew have both talked about the effects of the Great Sort, that once meritocratic policies are implemented and a majority of working class students have the opportunity to advance through education, the remaining working class becomes increasingly composed of the less intelligent or less conscientious. LKY talks about how labor union leaders in Singapore were initially drawn directly from workers, but this became less practical in recent years because there was no one smart enough to take on a leadership role, so they brought in college educated labor professionals to lead. Murray discusses this as a central thesis of Coming Apart, where he discusses the decline in IQ among working class whites. My own father talks frequently about how when he was young, a lot of white contractors were smart guys who never thought about going to college or just took over the family business, where today young white contractors are dumber and lazier because any white kid who wanted to work and had half a brain got into college.
So if I want to avoid crime, why would I advocate for racial discrimination, and not for economic discrimination? Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race? Which is rather...what we have in our current Capitalist Hellscape, n'est pas? If you want to escape crime, have money. If you want to have money, have good genetics for intelligence and conscientiousness, work hard, and you'll get a job that will pay you enough to move into a restrictively zoned neighborhood where the criminally inclined will be kept out by high housing prices and lack of public transport.
Why do wignats who trumpet HBD findings convenient for them rail against "elites," elites who clearly have the better gene pool?
The political problem with true HBD, in the long run, is that very few people are located at its apex. If I accept its moral bases, I see no reason to help out people below me on its ladder, whether by skin color or by education. And most people are below someone.
No, this is just another gotcha. "Poor people" are not a race. We could imagine a world where assortative mating was such that there were distinct (if not perfectly so) populations separated by income level; perhaps it would look something like a society with non-interbreeding castes. The US, at least, is not such a place (though it may be moving in that direction)
If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as (in)frequent as intermarriage between race, how would you change your mind?
If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as infrequent as intermarriage between races, that marriage throughout the class was common (that is, that the "class" was not made up of much smaller groups which only bred internally), that there was little social mobility, and that this had been going on for many generations, then we would be in the situation of having genetic castes, which HBD could look at. We are not in that situation. Some aspects of that situation exist -- for instance, there's generational welfare recipients. But though there are black and non-Hispanic white generational welfare recipients, they're largely separate groups.
Assortative Mating and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1754-2021:
Abstract:
ETA: bolded the most important sentence
The whole paper is here. But even if I was convinced by the tower of assumptions made there, I don't live in England; the US has long been reputed to have a much weaker class system.
Other evidence exists. For instance, in Sweden, social status decays by about 25% per generation, which is consistent with it being (a) entirely genetic and (b) approximately perfect assortative mating. Similar estimates are found for the US, England, Chile, and China - Japan and India have even smaller levels of decay.
ETA: The alternative interpretation is that there is an absolutely enormous environmental factor. However, given many twin studies (feel free to ask for link) that collectively show ~0 impact of environment on earnings, this seems exceedingly unlikely.
So he's got direct measures of social mobility, but rejects that in favor of a surrogate measure based on correlations of surnames?
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I don't understand your argument here. Human Bio-Diversity, on its face, says nothing about race. Only about humans. If humans are of different ability levels, and it is correct to discriminate based on them, I don't see why I should only choose to discriminate based on race and not on other useful parameters, like education level and income.
I think you do. Your argument is just a dressed-up version of "You HBD proponents are just a bunch of racists, if you really believed in HBD rather than just hating the blacks, you'd apply your lens to poor people as well."
No, if that was all human bio-diversity said, only the most radical tabula rasa leftists would disagree. HBD as it is normally espoused also says that distinct populations of humans have different average levels of ability, which are genetically determined.
I'm really not seeing what your point is here, you've just restated a weaker version of the point I'm making. Who the cap fit let them wear it. You haven't provided any counter evidence. Just because you view it as a gotcha doesn't mean it didn't get ya.
Yes, and it generally settles on identifiable racial categories as everyday shorthand for those genetic traits. But I fail to see how or why that observation would be limited to one, messy, shorthand when society provides us with an excellent, individually tested shorthand: income and education level. Fine argue that one or the other is better or worse; if I accept HBD's moral bases why wouldn't I want to apply both to benefit myself, my family, my nation? Without a strong racist or wignat element introduced, focusing purely on the IQ supremacy and criminality planks that typically define HBD discourse, what justification is there to not discriminate against poor whites? They've demonstrated all the outcomes you decry as evidence of genetic inferiority.
How many generations of stupidity do I need evidence of before I can write it off as genetics? The stupid children of stupid parents? Stupid children with 3/4 stupid grandparents? We can find many millions of those in America.
I gave you the main reason it's not true. I don't need to go through a lot of effort to refute a cheap gotcha with an obvious flaw, I merely need point to the flaw.
The people who are really into it have various sorts of categories. HBD Chick is well known for talking about groups which originate on one side or the other of the Hajnal line. As I mentioned, castes in India fit the bill too. But race pretty much works in the US (at least as long as you split "Asian" up somewhat), and is the most relevant politically.
More than one, which is why "poor people" doesn't work as a relevant group.
This seems silly? What exactly is lost by treating "poor people" as a relevant group? I guess I don't see the relevant differences.
It would be quite surprising if they were the same along all traits as elites, because of factors like those originally pointed out by @FiveHourMarathon: there is obviously selection going on as people find their positions in society, and assortative mating will help those clusters to be distinct. I see no reason not to look at additional, smaller, clusters beyond race.
Our default assumption should be that it is partially genetic, since that seems true of a great many things about human differences.
It's fine to compare groups even if they interbreed, as long as it's not an even mixing between them—statistical differences should be preserved (for how long depends on how strong the selection and interbreeding is).
They're not a separate population; all they have in common is being poor. Same reason it makes sense to consider Ashkenazi Jews as a population (in the sense of HBD) but not people born on the Fourth of July.
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