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Notes -
Richard Hanania writes we need to shut up about HBD.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq
He defines HBD as believing:
Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)
Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)
People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)
Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)
And he goes on to criticize 2-4. I tend to agree with those criticisms, but I think it’s fairly common in these kinds of circles to believe a version of 2 focused on ideological competition, not between racial groups, where the social justice left and its preferred policies to rectify group differences can only be defeated by using the facts to explain group differences that won’t be rectified through policy.
While I accept Hanania’s point that the facts frequently don’t matter in which political ideas rise to the top, I still feel like Cofnas has a point (whom Hanania is responding to).
I’m quite philosemetic, for example. The best argument against antisemitism based on observing Jewish overperformance and concluding it’s due to some kind of plot is explaining that intelligence matters and the Ashkenazim underwent a particular history and we now observe them having very high average test scores.
Hanania himself wrote not so long ago about how Jewish personality traits might be needed to fully explain their political interest and influence, beyond just intelligence.
Using biology to explain overperformance but not underperformance seems like a strange compromise.
In much of today’s polite society, if one points out the achievement gap among groups, you’re a racist.
But if one doesn’t acknowledge the achievement gap between groups to justify affirmative action, you’re a racist.
And that’s without even mentioning biology! Watching lefties like Kathryn Paige Harden and Freddie deBoer try to (admirably) describe these kinds of issues while trying to remain in the good graces of polite society is enlightening.
Now, if you could guarantee me a return to a more race-blind culture and legal system if we shut up about genetics then I would take that. But we are on a path towards learning the murky details of (and being able to influence) genetics of both groups and individuals. I don’t think the elephant in the room will stay quiet.
It’s a bit remarkable to read Hanania write:
I think he means, “talk about something publicly” as opposed to at all, but actually I’ll easily bite those bullets and say we ought to understand the disadvantages short men face due to female preferences and that we ought to know just how much we expend society’s resources on the severely handicapped.
Social desirability bias is incredibly powerful and one should choose one’s battles. Polite society in the West went from being quite racist, in ways that didn’t always align with the facts, to correcting hard (thanks, Hitler) to race is only skin deep, which also doesn’t align. And then we got the influence of Kendiism.
Even ignoring immigration (where he doesn’t cover the Garret Jones stance), a lot of US politics comes down to this issue, and HBD was mostly in a quietist tradition the last few decades with little influence for being outside the Overton Window.
I know Trace doesn’t like HBD much, but wow is that like the whole story of his FAA traffic controller storyline. If you listen to the Blocked and Reported episode, he and Jesse aren’t shy about pointing out it was an insane policy to completely jettison meritocracy, but they dance around the general point that if you set a fairly high intellectual bar for a job, it’s going to look like the racists are right. If you allow self-selection, you also very well might make it look like the sexists are right.
The elephant in the room is only growing larger for anyone following the facts. Conceding the present Overton Window is unassailable is I think conceding defeat to the social justice left.
I think there's a fundamental difference between the sides here in terms of intuitions about social processes.
Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?
My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'
Poverty sticks. If your parents lived their entire lives without wealth, then you're going to start with no wealth and little investment, you're going to take on debt and take short-term solutions over long-term investments just to stay afloat, you're not going to be able to afford a car to get to the better job you were offered 35 minutes from home, or you'll lose the job when your shitty used car malfunctions and you miss a day. Etc. The basis for all of capitalism is capital accumulation, money making money through investment or collecting rents, and that's a game where starting conditions and your initial pot matter more than anything else.
Poor education sticks. If it was illegal for your great-grandparents to be taught to read, and your grandparents were taught in segregated schools that barely treated them better than animals, and your parents were seen as per-linguistic savages because they spoke a different dialect than their teachers and were put in slow classes and neglected because of it, how well are they going to educate you as an infant, how well are they going to help you with your homework, what kind of relationship with the school and the state are they going to train you to expect? The US absolutely has social and cultural 'classes' that tend to run in families, and coming from a family with a history of poor education makes it a lot harder to escape your class.
Minority status matters. If you are making a movie you may as well appeal to the largest possible audience, white people. And if you want to appeal to white people, you may as well have a white main character. And if your main character is white, a white writer and white director and a white makeup artist and hair stylist will probably provide a more authentic voice and feel to that character. None of that's discrimination, it's just smart business decisions... and you can make the same argument for the management of a company that sells clothes aimed at white people, or customer service jobs in a majority white area, or etc. It's not discrimination to want to mentor up-and-coming employees who you have a lot in common with and see yourself in and enjoy hanging out with, and hey look for the majority white managers those appealing mentees overwhelmingly tend to be white for actually truly non-discriminatory reasons.
And etc., across every aspect of life.
And these aren't just drags on the system that slow down the process of everyone attaining their 'natural' place in the hierarchy. They're mutually-reinforcing process that actively push the people on the bottom further down.
If your career doesn't advance as fast because your boss wanted to mentor someone they felt more in tune with, then you might have to work longer hours and have less time to help with your kids homework, you might be in a lower-tier position that just fires you when your car breaks and you come in late instead of a higher-tier position where that's fine and no one cares, you might retire with less savings and your kids will need to spend their money and time on caring for you in your old age instead of getting themselves training and slack to look for better positions, etc.
I feel like there's a libertarian logic which expects people to be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve the position in life that their natural talents naturally oblige them to. And I'm here to say that, while that story is not impossible for any (single individual to live out, that is just not how hugely stochastic processes involving millions of inter-related causal factors and hundreds of millions of people work, at all.
When you average across hundreds of millions of people, all of those stochastic factors that make it harder or less likely for one newborn infant to have a life trajectory towards their full potential than another really add up.
And if no one is making any conscious effort to correct for those factors - if we have no diversity initiatives and no AA and no social efforts to lift up disadvantaged people and no policies that care about this at all - if we just leave it up to chance and the standard grinding gears of the economy and society and government, then things are not going to sort themselves out quickly.
I don't expect 100% of the first generation of hugely disadvantaged people to experience zero discrimination to completely solve the problem and attain their genetically-proper level in their lifetime. I don't expect 100% of their children to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their grandchildren to attain it. I don't expect 100% of their great-grandchildren to attain it.
I have personal experience with families and their family histories and trajectories that span great-grandparent to great-grandchild. I can see how family circumstances flow over 4 generations, and I can have an intuitive sense that while there's definitely room for variance and changes over that timeframe, there is not an actual 0% casual relationship between the financial and social circumstances of the first and last generation. Not even close.
I admit that I don't have the type of intuition needed to guess what happens after 10 or 15 generations. If our systems of capitalism and government and society don't undergo any big changes in that time, then I still expect the correlations to exist somewhat even over those timeframes, but I really don't know. I can admit that maybe that would be long enough to erase them, just through entropy and simulated annealing, if no one was making any intentional effort to erase them otherwise.
But, that those differences would disappear in 60 years since the Civil Rights Act, even if we pretended that that date was the end of all racism and discrimination in the country. No. Fuck no. Come the fuck on.
People's grandparents were educated under segregation. People's parents couldn't buy homes or get out of slums due to redlining. People in the prime-age workforce today grew up under the anti-ebonics backlash that treated them as stupid and illiterate for being fluent in a non-standard dialect and refused to teach them in a language they understood.
Lots of people overcome those disadvantages, but stochastically they will drag teh average very far down. That's what the word 'disadvantage' means in this context.
So when you say there is 'mounting evidence', my reaction is 'since when? I would expect the timeframe to be hundreds of years, so the fact that the gap has only closed a little in the last 40 years seems like not much evidence to me, pretty close to what I'd expect. And the modern debate over HBD and cancel culture isn't even 40 years old, it's like 10 years old, there absolutely should not be appreciable changes in the data that could count as persuasive evidence over a timeframe like that.
Which makes me wonder if the 'mounting evidence' is less of 'we have a general model of how we expect this process to evolve over time under each hypothesis, and the data is favoring one hypothesis to a decisive degree', and more 'I've been talking about this issue for much of my adult life and nothing has changed in that timeframe, so it sure feels like the situation is unchangeable and will never change and anyone who doesn't admit that is delusional'.
Or maybe the 'mounting evidence' phrase does refer to the entire trend over the last 50 years, and you just expect much bigger changes over that timeframe. It's just the difference in intuition.
Which of course gets back to the big difference in philosophy and intuition between classic liberals and progressives.
The liberal position is 'erase discrimination from our laws and our hearts, and you're done. Without those hard barriers, people will rise to their natural level, we'll have a true meritocracy, no one will have anything to complain about, the world will be just and fair.'
And the progressive position is 'Well, that's a good start, but you don't actually live in the most-convenient-world where that's all it takes. There are inertial factors that keep formerly poor and oppressed groups poor and disadvantaged far into the future, there are persistent structural factors that disadvantage minorities for totally non-discriminatory reasons. Those forces push away from a meritocracy, so if you want a meritocracy you have to actually study what those factors are and apply some type of corrective against them. Those forces have nothing to do with the individual and are fundamentally unjust, so if you want justice you have to go out there and make it yourself.'
And this gets to the fundamental difference in intuition between the left and the right on things like AA and diversity initiatives and minority scholarship grants and etc. The right sees a situation where two resumes arrive and you care about race when evaluating and sees a process that pushes away from meritocracy. The left sees a system where many people never produce a resume that represents their full innate potential because of systemic factors working against them, and sees a correction applied against those factors as a long-term pressure towards a meritocratic equilibrium.
Of course, this is me once again saying 'people who think like me look at the whole picture and the full complexity of the world and have sophisticated thought about how to correct it, people who disagree with me just look at small atomic situations and have simplistic thoughts about how to react to them and never consider the macro-scale implications of that policy'.
There's an extent to which that just feels true, like, the right is more focused on individualism and individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and what is right-or-wrong behavior when two individuals interact, and is inherently suspicious or dismissive of systems-level explanations that rely on stochastic process and probability distributions over outcomes over generations, right? Being derisive towards that type of academic-sounding socialist/communist egghead bullshit is part of the brand, right?
But there's also an extent to which I feel like that must be wrong, where probably everyone can model how their opponent reacts to individual bounded scenarios but can't simulate their larger complicated systemic worldview, and therefore concludes their opponents don't have such a systemic worldview to begin with.
I certainly have the experience of people on the right describing people on the left as though they are motivated by individual-level hatred of white men instead of macro-level concerns about how the overall structure of the system unfairly and dangerously advantages some demographics.
Am I making the same myopic mistake when I say the right views this question through the lens of individual achievement and personal responsibility and misses the larger systemic/stochastic factors that produce national trends in the data? Or is that just literally actually their position?
Would love to hear people's thoughts on that bit, it's a place I could learn something about people's positions and worldviews.
No, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and flatly contradicted by multiple streams of available evidence.
First, there's the historical example of East Asian and Jewish Americans. Yes, recent immigration from East Asia has been selective, but East Asians had already pretty much caught up with whites by the late 60s, before selective immigration really got going, and I don't think there was ever much selective immigration with Jews, who were already so overrepresented at top universities that Harvard imposed quotas in the 20s, when antisemitism was still a very real problem.
Second, poverty just isn't that sticky. The intergenerational rank-rank elasticity of permanent income (i.e. lifetime earnings) is about 0.4, meaning that on average, the children of parents at a given permanent income level will regress about 60% of the way to the 50th percentile.
Note that that 0.4 elasticity is not purely due to the stickiness of exogenous poverty, as much of it is due to the heredity of cognitive and personality traits. The true exogenous effect of parental income is considerably smaller than this. What this means is that we can expect regression to the mean in just a generation or two. This is commonly observed with truly exogenous poverty, e.g. with Vietnamese refugees.
Finally, rapid regression towards the mean was observed with black families during and for approximately one generation after the Civil Rights Era. And then it stopped, and has now been stalled out for two generations. We now see downward mobility of black men born into families with permanent incomes above the black mean, even when below the white mean. In other words, black men regress towards a lower mean than white men. It's tough to pin this on the the intergenerational stickiness of poverty (even ignoring the aforementioned fact that it's not actually that sticky), but is exactly what we would expect to see if there were a genetic basis for the achievement gap.
Raj Chetty says that this isn't consistent with a genetic basis for the gap because black women don't exhibit the same degree of downward mobility, but the case of women is more complicated because the shortage of reliable black men means that black women are more dependent on their own incomes than white men. Furthermore, black women from middle-class families are especially well positioned to benefit from affirmative action because they're less likely to have criminal records than black men. Finally, black women still do not exhibit the upward mobility that we would expect to see if their parents' poverty were truly exogenous.
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A fairly unhinged estimate. Jewish refugees and Chinese immigrants have shown quite definitively the answer, in America, is closer to 20 years. Almost all of your subpoints are simply wrong, and/or disconnected from what is happening in America. Poor education does not stick, indeed, in America, blacks are furnished with better education than anyone else (save for the part where they are in classrooms with other black kids). Black kids raised in the top 10% households commit crimes on rates on par with white kids in the bottom 10%. The problem is clearly not some legacy, unless that legacy is an internalized cultural one. An internalized culture that would be stronger by orders of magnitude than any other in the US from 1950 to today, and it also would have to have magically also spun up a high bastardy rate as part of its legacy.
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I agree! Even if you multiply a number by .8 every decade, after 300 years .1% still remains. However, crucially, I don't think that a .1% - or even 7% - remaining difference in racial wealth or achievement gaps is a huge political issue. And then it's plausible again that the gap closes faster. How long closing the gap to that takes depends on how quickly someone who has average genes, but is poor, mixes into having average income.
I think trying to prove a black-white IQ gap just via the existing income gap is a mistake, anyway. There's just so much going on in society that it's quite hard to figure out cause and effect. The thing is, there are other much stronger lines of evidence, like the fraction of of black people in the top .1% of intelligence being so small, the gap in IQ or standardized test scores, etc. And once you believe that for other reasons, it's a simple explanation for existing income gaps. But I'll go through this first:
And yet, the absolute poverty rate has absolutely plummeted. All of our great-grandparents lived in conditions that, by today's standards, were truly horrific. Yet, here we are. The vast majority of Americans aren't in any sense poor. The relative costs of food, rent, transportation, etc are cheaper than they've ever been. And many of the people I know personally who are high-income or high-status had average income parents or grandparents.
And large-scale genome sequencing has demonstrated that intelligence and other cognitive and personality traits - things that contribute to income, life success - are quite (~50%) heritable. It makes sense that, over multiple generations in a deeply connected modern world, people would cluster along these lines. And that it'd be difficult to distinguish without careful looks this effect from 'poverty keeps people down'.
I think the material abundance of modern life sinks ideas like 'poverty rationally forces you to take on debt and short-term solutions' - you can just not spend much money on non-must-haves, save, work, etc. The poor people I know all attest that poor people are worse with their money than middle-class people, act less rationally, etc. Yeah, it's a distribution, there definitely are smart people who are poor for one reason or another, but not anywhere near enough to explain most poverty or even racial income gaps.
This is why there are so many (bad) papers to the effect of "poverty makes impulse control worse", "epigenetic effects of poverty", etc. Unfortunately, they're methodologically poor and don't replicate.
I mean ... universal education. Six hours a day, five days a week, being directly taught in every subject. This system has taught the vast majority of kids, smart and average and below average, rich and poor, over the past few centuries. Like, it's a significant component of why modern life works at all - the hyper-smart kid who's randomly born into a middle-class family does well on test scores, gets into a top college, specializes in something, and goes into industry from there and designs a chip or writes scripts for a movie or trades bonds or whatever. And even if the average person doesn't go to a good school, they can excel once they've gotten a job and then be promoted based on their competence and rise from there. Both of these have happened constantly, for any given successful person if you go between 0 and 3 generations back most paths terminate at someone whose parents weren't well off but did well in school or an occupation. Poor education mostly doesn't stick. Yeah, it sticks in some cases, but I don't think most. And even granting that, modern technology helps even more - a kid in a bad home can teach themselves english with TV, they gain knowledge and skills just by having fun on the internet, etc etc etc.
Or, quantitatively, take a look at this, a visualization from a paper (i'm not super confident that the data for this is correct, but I'd be surprised, but not terribly so, if it was wrong enough to affect the conclusion): https://viz.theinequalitylab.com/Animations/1-mobility-rates.html
Your theory would predict that being bottom 20%, or bottom 40%, is 'sticky'. Yet, 40% of children of whites in the bottom 20% made it out of the bottom 40% (and 27% of black children). In the second poorest quintile, 29% of white and 14% of black children make it to the top 40%. It seems like poverty is a lot stickier for blacks than whites. Being rich is a lot less sticky for blacks and whites though! Go look at the visualizations, it's quite striking. Curiously enough, the numbers for the 2nd top quintile seem a lot starker than for the poorer quintiles - i.e. in a relative sense poor blacks and whites have somewhat similar rates of existing poverty, but richer blacks drop out of the rich quintiles a lot faster than rich whites. This isn't at all what you'd guess if stickiness of poverty was what was driving racial income gap differences. And again this is where the multigenerational trauma or poverty habits or whatever research comes in, but that doesn't replicate.
I mean, this illustrates the other problem. If you've watched any popular media recently - there are ethnic minorities everywhere. Even Biden notices it. This is an explicit effort on the part of the progressive-leaning people who make up the media. If some sort of implicit bias in media makes it harder for minorities to get jobs, it's more than made up for by this. We're basically discussing black people specifically here, and:
And, despite this representation, the SAT score gaps aren't closing. The progressive arguments were a lot harder to rebut sixty years ago, when 'structural racism' and 'patriarchy' as described today were manifestly real and significant. But people with similar beliefs to you been hard at work dismantling them. And, you know, some of these gaps did close, especially for women. But the remaining gap is very difficult to explain along the same lines. I'm sure you've heard all about the test score gap before, so here's something:
But to demonstrate racial IQ differences, I think the clearest example is just that ... there are so few black people in high IQ professions. Like, nobel prize winners in math and science, top scientists in general, CEOs, and to a lesser extent anything intellectually demanding. And just anecdotally, any community that's very g-loaded just won't have a noticeable number of black people. I wonder what the rate here is. And the dual of this, of course, is that asians and especially jews are very overrepresented in those areas. And again anecdotally, any community around something that requires high intelligence has heaps of jews and asians. If you read around on wikipedia articles on pure research mathematics, there are jews (2% of US population, less internationally) everywhere, and barely a black to be found.
This can't be primarily explained as a poverty or racism effect. Plenty of these people were average income as kids, or had average income parents. There's clearly a strong race effect after you control for income. So many successful historical figures began their lives as poor or middle class Jews. And yet there are enough rich black families that you'd expect a lot more successful black pure mathematicians than there are.
And, to be clear, by my argument this is no inevitable somber fact of nature, but could be fixed by just modifying a small fraction of the nucleotides in the human genome of each (future) person. Or maybe large-scale selective sperm donation, but that's not really socially plausible in anything resembling today's environment.
(I think a better version of this post would have a lot more numbers and data, but w/e those are my thoughts)
This is not quite right. For one, adult intelligence is more like 70-80% heritable. But also, we know this from twin studies, not from genome sequencing. Due to insufficient data (partially due to the inherent difficulty of collecting reliable IQ and genetic data for millions of people, and partly due to ideologically motivated obstruction of such efforts), current GWAS models show only a fraction of the true heritability of IQ. IIRC the best models predict only about 15% of variance in IQ.
Twin studies are the gold standard for estimating heritability; the advantage of GWAS is that it can give us actual models to predict IQ from genetic sequences.
I changed your "~50%" to "roughly 50%" because the site interpreted a quoted tilde as markup for strikethrough.
Thanks!
The first thing was more of a composition error - I mean to imply that the whole basket of traits were somewhere around 50%.
The second mistake was just implying something incorrect though. I know that, I just wasn't paying enough attention while writing so broadly.
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This seems like an overestimate to me. Have you seen the studies on how in places like china, people who were part of the regime were, after the communists took over, much poorer, worse off socially, etc., but in two generations, they now are again the ones in power? This would make it seem like a tendency towards being an elite could well be heritable. You'll respond to this that there are substantial cultural differences (they raised their children differently) which is entirely fair and reasonable.
When I look at what is holding black people back, I don't think the left's policies are well aligned. Setting aside IQ sorts of things, there are obviously real problems with US black culture that no one really is trying to fix—the high rates of sleeping around, low rates of marriage, high rates of divorce, low rates of fathers present, glorification of crime, less savings and financial responsibility, higher levels of dependence on welfare, and all around less of a vision of what a healthy life looks like and more of an emphasis on taking nice things now. Or at least so I have been led to believe.
The solution, apparently? Affirmative action, which does little to deal with most of those, and instead promotes black people beyond their level of ability, leading them to systematically be less competent and hurting those who genuinely deserve the positions they have earned by their own ability. Affirmative action literally makes racism justified—I should rationally expect that a black person holding a position is less competent than a white person holding the same position, for most high status jobs!
This is true for many other progressive policies: opposition to prosecution of crime leads to more crime, which makes black culture worse. Not stopping shoplifting reduces the presence of stores and leads to higher prices. Opposition to SATs, because of racial disparities, when in actuality SATs are more equitable and better measure merit at the top levels than the metrics more easily gameable by wealth.
The attempt to argue for systemic racism, and simultaneously defend black culture, when the systemic racism is black culture is unhealthy. Bush was not wrong when he spoke of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
As it currently exists, if a black person is capable, they will have no problem reaching the upper echelons of society (though they may not be as respected when they get there). They will have preferential treatment at every step of the way.
One thing that makes this make more sense than what you are suggesting: black immigrants do better than their children, who do better than their grandchildren, I believe. Many see this as a genetic regression to the mean (I'm not familiar enough with how that would work), but it could also be due to that the children/grandchildren end up more captured by the harmful culture. Under your model, they would have successful parents, and so should be more successful.
What then should be done? I'm not sure. Legislation could surely be passed, tax/welfare incentives could be adjusted to promote a healthier culture. Policing should increase (and the carrying out of the sentences, racial disparities be damned), drugs etc. should be kept out to the extent possible. Focus on literacy, mathematical ability, and so on seems reasonable, but whatever's going on with the schools is surely not working, so there needs to be a better plan than "dump more money at it."
Similarly affirmative action, etc. even if we decide that we need to have some sort of program to fix disparities, should be tested to see if they actually work. Do these programs cause (not correlate with) the children of the beneficiaries to have substantial better life outcomes? And if so, is it worth the negative externality of forming a stereotype of black incompetence? Worth the promotion of those who are best at exploiting whatever the grant systems are over those who are best at being productive?
Perhaps this depends on what you mean by meritocracy. Dropping of regulation would lead to a meritocracy, on average, in that, whoever is most fit for the position would get it. Perhaps it would miss those who were born with whatever capacity but do not currently have it. Then, should we push harder for a meritocracy for children?
The study on this topic that I'm familiar with also found that economic success of the children of pre-revolutionary elites was mediated by an expressed belief that "hard work is critical to success" (when it was controlled for the gap dropped by 75%) and that this expressed belief was in turn mediated by having a living parent. Among the children of pre-revolutionary elites whose parents were dead (and who thus were not raised by them), there was no significant difference in expressed belief from the general population.
I can't interpret the math for myself because I'm bad at statistics but the authors say:
This would actually seem to suggest cultural transmission rather than genetic.
Likewise (with the same caveat on my end that I'm bad at statistics) the authors of the study on the rebound of southern slaveholders after the Civil War which has been cited elsewhere in the thread claim:
(They end up concluding that social networking was the most important factor)
Thanks, that's good to know.
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Chinamen were once an impoverished minority with legal disabilities, you know.
More to the point, you don’t have to go back in time to see the black/other minority group difference in abilities show up in differing rates of upward mobility- Hispanic upwards mobility right now is a pretty good example. And factually black upward mobility has been highest not when they had the most help, or racism was weakest, but when the economy was booming- eg, the 50’s, the 90’s, etc. This is what we would expect if racism wasn’t the main cause of black underachievement; the amount of affirmative action given is not a constant, so if that was the determining factor you’d see a different trend than ‘how’s the economy overall’.
The civil rights act bans individual level or intentional racism, which is pretty much a solved problem(at least in the white to black direction). What you’re arguing is the effects of generational racism/poverty, which the civil rights act doesn’t actually address.
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Your post was so long and so wrong that I really struggled to finish it, but I managed and I'll respond:
These narratives about oppression and its relation to economic achievement sound plausible but if you really look into them they just don't hold up at all, ditto with the vicious cycle of poverty argument espoused by you and Terry Pratchet (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned).
Exogenous shocks to family wealth generally don't have that much impact on long-term outcomes. Here's an article on slave owners after the civil war: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191422 . Basically their wealth rebounded, despite the loss of a huge amount of property. This finding seems to replicate in an incredible range of times and circumstances.
You see a similar dynamic with pre-Cultural Revolution elites in China. Despite being prevented from attending university, rusticated, struggled, and generally oppressed, pre-Revolution elites rebounded basically as soon as they were allowed to, it did not take 300-500 years. This was after a concerted effort to destroy their position as elites and prevent them from regaining it. The source for thus is The Son Also Rises by Greg Clark, which you should read as I think it completely refutes the worldview espoused in your post.
And of course the examples of Asian-Americans (weird the internment of Japanese during WW2 hasn't resulted in long-term underachievement) and Jews in the US and Europe are also completely at odds with the huge effects of past/present discrimination that you posit.
Why do Asians and Jews do better than the majority if being a minority is so deleterious? Why do black immigrants?
Yes, obviously nothing will change quickly, that's why colorblindness died as a political goal. The question is what is the cause of this disparity. If the cause is genetic then diversity initiatives will not help. If the cause is cultural or anti-black discrimination, diversity initiatives might be worth dealing with the less competent hirees/admits. You seem to just assume it's not significantly genetic though, I'm not sure why.
This position is simply incoherent. Blacks do worse on every standardized test that could reasonably be called cognitive from the SAT to Fire Chief qualification exams. Given this, it doesn't make sense to believe anything other than that blacks are less qualified on average for cognitively demanding jobs. Whether this was caused by past discrimination or whatever else doesn't change the fact that by every measure we have, we should expect black underrepresentation in anything cognitively demanding. Even if you believe the cause of this gap is purely environmental, it's Kendyist wishful thinking to say that there is not a real racial "merit" gap such that affirmative action means hiring worse candidates. If you're for affirmative action despite that, it's fine, but these little memes about not being able to put together a resume or having the opportunity to get experience are incredibly unrepresentative of reality.
Yes, you're making a mistake. I don't think you have any idea of the nuances of the debate or of anything you discussed in your post. Handwavey "conservatives think like this.... liberals think like this" posts are generally bad and yours was particularly bad and irrelevant in this context.
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I'm going to go kinda hard on your comment, not because I didn't wish many of the ideas were true, but because the evidence against them is so overwhelming.
There has been social interventions - in pro-'oppressed' direction. Affirmative action, government transfers have been helping black families for decades. Yet by many metrics blacks in America are doing worse than they were in the 1950s.
You might also find instructive the experience of the Chinese attempt in the cultural revolution to neutralize richer / more well-educated families by seizing their wealth, or outright jailing and even killing them. Yet just a few decades later, the same surnames who had wealth and status before found themselves overrepresented at the top of society.
If minority status is such a burden, why do Jews do so well economically almost everywhere around the world? I would argue that history has been even less kind to the Jews than to African-Americans, yet I don't think they form a permanent underclass in, say, Germany? Similarly, why do Chinese emigres tend to academically and economically dominate in most of the countries they emigrate to?
Regarding the rest of your post - I will agree that racism is keeping back many black American families. Where I DISAGREE is that most of this racism comes from the left, largely via the bigotry of low expectations.
I think you and I can agree that raising children in married, two-parent families is by far the best for them. Are you familiar with the black out-of-wedlock birthrate in America? Over 70% of black kids born in America are to unmarried women. Mostly, people don't talk about this, as it's considered impolite. But every time I've heard of this mentioned as a problem it was by people who were either conservative, or prefaced it first apologizing that they "didn't mean to echo conservative talking points". In other words, it's not conservatives that have put together the system of generous welfare benefits that makes all this possible.
As another example - look at education. I think you and I can agree that disruptive learning environments can absolutely fuck over a lot of kids and significantly impact their chances at a well-paying job in the future. And nothing is more disruptive than kids beating the shit out of others (or even you!) in school. Yet, because the perpetrators are also black, American educators are loathe to actually punish them. This was most evident in the Obama administration's guidance to 1) reduce punishments and 2) have greater rates of equities in punishments.
Look at Oregon governor Kate Brown signing legislation that allows kids to graduate high school without proving they can read, write, or do basic math - explicitly citing that current requirements disproportionately hurt black and brown kids. Look at school boards in San Francisco voting to stop teaching algebra before high school because those classes were disproportionately not-black.
Look at predominantly black cities all around America - how they spend $20, $30k, sometimes over $50k a year on students - and often have schools where not a single student is proficient at reading (or alternatively, math). Look at how they turn a blind eye to institutions that utterly fail their students as long as their motivations sound nice. If you actually cared about black kids succeeding in school, shouldn't you make noises to address the failures of, say, lebron james' school, which throws money at kids and yet is utterly failing them academically?
Look at how the media and government treat charter schools - some of which (Success Academy being a prime example) actually have great track records of helping poor black and latino kids achieve academic success. But because these places have strict behavioral requirements, the media would rather talk about how kids are sometimes being disciplined too harshly.
Right, this was posing a hypothetical.
I am not proposing a generic theory of 'any race that has bad things happen to them will be economically disadvantaged forever.' The world is too complicated for that to be true. I was talking narrowly and specifically about black americans, because I think that's the primary motte of the culture war version of this conversation.
The holocaust was very very very bad, I don't really see any point in making value judgements about whether it was 'worse' than chattel slavery or w/e. But it was a singular event. It wasn't multiple generations living as chattel without education, with it being illegal to teach them to read. It wasn't more decades of segregation and redlining and so forth. It wasn't the long development of a separate oppressed culture and dialect. All of the very specific things I mentioned in my post as causal factors, don't really apply to that situation.
I mean, ok, obviously I disagree with some of your points and characterizations, but my point was about HBD vs other causal factors for racial gaps. It sounds like you are listing a bunch of additional non-genetic factors that cause racial gaps. Does this mean you agree with me that there no strong evidence for HBD explaining racial gaps in this specific instance, because of things like the problems you list?
I think that there are many non-genetic explanations, many of which which exacerbate genetic explanations (for example, generous welfare policies enabling dysgenic selection).
If you don't believe in HBD, may I ask you - do you believe in HBD anywhere? Do you think all 'races' do not differ in height (I am aware of the effect of diet - such as many East Asian countries gaining several inches of average height in the last two generations). Do you think there is no West African advantage in sprinting, or East African advantage in distance running? If not, how do you explain the dominance of people from various 'races' in certain sports? If so, why do you think group differences can only be possible outside of cognition?
Yes, I believe in HBD. I'd really rather not think about it - because intragroup differences are often much larger than inter-group differences. One of the smartest kids I knew growing up was Black. One of the best athletes was Indian. But none of that changes what I see as overwhelming evidence for differences between 'races' (and I understand the fuzziness of the word). The only two defenses I've seen against HBD are "many of the people who've done this research are bad people with bad motives, who maybe use bad methods sometimes", and "hey if you believe this, we're going to tell everyone you're an odious racist".
Again, motte and bailey.
I don't believe there's sufficient evidence that black people are incapable of economic success such that we should conclude all current inequities are 'natural' and gear policy towards that conclusion. I don't believe there's reason to think that immigration is innately dysgenic and we should close the borders for that reason.
Are various populations different than some other populations by at least some amount on some metrics? Yes, trivially. Random variance alone would make that true, and I don't believe that's the only thing at play in every possible comparison of this type that you could make.
But this isn't the 'random facts about genetics and population statistics' thread, it's the culture war thread. The culture war over HBD is related to politics and policy concerns, and I don't think the people on the HBD side of that war have sufficient evidence to justify any of their policy proposals, or their general aesthetic and ethos on the topic.
If the thing you believe is just the incredibly trivial fact that some groups are at least somewhat different from some other groups on some factors based on population averages, but you don't agree with policy proposals that use specific types of racial inferiority as a bedrock premise, then my advice is that you should not say that you believe in HBD.
The 'some groups are different in some ways' thing is, as you say, trivially true and obvious. The HBD movement uses that as a motte to silence critics, but it's not their actual project or purpose - their project and purpose is about policy geared towards acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies thereby. The obviously true thing doesn't have or need an acronym, this project is what 'HBD' actually means to most people, and if they react badly it's because they're reacting to that actual project, not the obvious motte.
If that's not your project, but you heard someone in the HBD movement say the motte and thought to yourself 'Well I agree with that, I must be an HBD believer', I'm here to tell you that you are being used as a useful idiot by a project you don't agree with. As someone in progressive spaces, I'm very used to the phenomenon, and the signs are easy to recognize once you're looking.
If that is your project, then that is the thing we actually disagree about, and stop trying to paint me as disagreeing with the trivially true motte.
I'd largely agree with this when it comes to identification and advice, actually?
The claim that different selected groups of humans have some genetic variation between them seems obviously true but also not particularly interesting. Yes, there's some minor genetic variation across the human race as a whole. So what?
The interesting and controversial part is the answer to the "so what?", and the problem I have with so-called 'HBD' is that their answer to that question, as far as I can tell, firstly massively outstrips the evidence they refer to, and secondly frequently appears to be both malicious in its intent and destructive in its policy goals.
Are there people who identify with HBD who aren't malicious or destructive? Sure. No group is homogenous. But it seems to me that enough of them are, that the general direction of the vague group of people that we refer to here as 'the HBD movement', is such that for as much as the motte is apparently true, the bailey is such that we should definitely avoid it.
Nara Burns makes a fair point about individuals below. I'm not going after Charles Murray or anything. But when he says that he has "never personally encountered" a person who advocates HBD with racist goals, I'm just confused, because, well, I've read the Motte.
it looks like you're using circular definition here.
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This reads to me like deliberate weak manning. At minimum you should probably reference a more specific example than "the HBD movement." For example Charles Murray is probably credibly part of any putative "HBD movement" but if you described him as "acknowledging racial inferiority and creating explicit hierarchies" then I would say you either didn't read him, didn't understand him, or are willfully misunderstanding him. I assume there are some people out there using the (as you suggest) "trivial fact" of HBD for purely racist goals, but I have never personally encountered such a person.
I wasn't going to actually moderate you for the earlier quote but when I got to this one, it pushed you over the edge. I suspect we all get to be someone's useful idiot, sometimes, but "the only reasons you could possibly disagree with me here is that you are evil, or stupid" is not really a permissible discussion posture under our ruleset.
I think maybe the advice I want to give you here is to try to keep your arguments addressed to other arguments, rather than making them about (general or specific) people.
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Gosh it sure is convenient that being discriminated against takes hundreds of years for a population to recover from. I guess the complete and utter failure of progressive environmental intervention to even begin closing the gap over the course of generations doesn't mean anything. Nope, we have to let them have the reins of society all the way into like Star Trek times before we can notice that nothing they're doing works.
If the descendant effects of discrimination worked the way you need them to work to keep progressive orthodoxy viable, someone on one of these forums would have coughed up some compelling historical examples among other groups at some point in the last X years of having this argument. Instead it's the bog standard usual, the one thing anti-HBD types always seem to have for us: A bunch of just-so excuses for why this or that counter-example involving Jews or Asians totally shouldn't count.
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The obvious reply to that is "why do Asians do well?" Shouldn't it take hundreds of years for them to catch up too? (Of course, Asians weren't quite as disadvantaged, but I wouldn't say they had a hundred year head start either.)
It seems like the rapid economic advancement of East Asia is an argument against hard racial hereditarianism. Because the HBD arguments goes that Sub-Saharan Africa is poor, underdeveloped, and wartorn because black Africans are just have bad genes. But if we grant the HBD premise that EAsians are, for genetic reasons, more intelligent than whites, blacks, American Indians, Arabs, etc. then it becomes clear that a people with high "genetic potential" can spend centuries mired in poverty, before some environmental stimulus induces rapid development. Because prior to the mid-point of the century, many EAsian countries were as poor or poorer than many SSA and Latin American countries. Someone in the 19th or early 20th century who claimed EAsian poverty was for genetic reasons would have been on as solid footing a someone who claimed the same of SSA poverty today, but he would have been wrong.
You know what? Once Portuguese visited Japan in 16th century, they got some Japanese slaves. Slavemasters owning both African and Japanese slaves noticed stunning difference between two. Pretty soon, enslaving East Asians was outlawed.
Where can I read about this?
I don't remember where I read about this, wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Japan has some links
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Except Japan existed and was developed and rich despite having no natural resources. They almost immediately matched the European nations once they started trying. China also matched and exceeded Europe prior to the 19th century. I'm sure some racists thought they were inferior, but no one who actually looked at the history of Africa and Asia would find them comparable.
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You’re switching from outcomes of various groups within America to globally at a country level, which makes it more complex.
North Koreans are shorter than South Koreans. We know pretty strongly that’s environment and not genes causing that difference. But when we can control for environment sufficiently and remove it as a barrier, as in the case of malnutrition, it’s probably going to be genes setting the upper limit on height.
Also we can now compare performance on international tests and observe outcomes for various immigrant groups around the world over time as well as at the country level. If there weren’t consistent trends then that would be strong counterevidence. But there are quite consistent trends.
I misread the comment and assumed we were talking about the races on a global scale.
Why do you think east Asia was significantly poorer and more underdeveloped than Europe for so long if east Asians really have more "raw" intelligence (g or whatever) than Europeans? What do you think the barrier was in that case; why did they need to adop European tech and institutions rather than developing their own equivalent (or superior) ones?
Re: “European” tech and institutions:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
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Markets work if they aren’t strangled and the Industrial Revolution didn’t arrive everywhere the same way.
Japan was closed off, then it rapidly industrialized, then after WWII it rebuilt and became a juggernaut until an aging population slowed things down.
China and Korea had a real bloody time of it. Then South Korea was able to rapidly grow with US protection and eventuality China loosened up on the central planning and also made significant gains. North Korea remains a basket case.
Now we see if they can possibly do anything to avoid population collapse…
Well you're saying that East Asians abandoned inefficient economic policies and adopted the efficient ones of Europeans, but that's besides the point. If you accept the premises that inborn genetic ability (however it is measured) is the primary determinant of national prosperity, and that Asians are equal to or higher than Europeans in measured ability, then it becomes strange that East Asians had to play "catch-up" at all. Why was it the Europeans who in the first place developed the technology and industry necessary to generate unprecedented wealth?
Luck matters.
History is full of strange contingencies and many books have been written trying to explain why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in Western Europe and not somewhere else. Britain having easily accessible coal was pretty important, for example. Lots of people believe Christianity had important cultural effects that led to intellectual and economic freedom and the resulting innovation.
The correlation in modern times between national IQ and wealth is a modern correlation. Inborn ability can be constrained from reaching its potential by the environment. China is still hobbled by bad policy and underperforms its potential, as is North Korea.
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And the rapid increase in height in Japan is an argument against hard physical hereditarianism.
There are certainly things that can hold down development besides heritable low intelligence. The most obvious is Communism (thanks to the Kims for demonstrating the quite clearly). But this doesn't mean heritable intelligence doesn't exist, and we have other information demonstrating that.
I don't think heritable intelligence doesn't exist.
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I am not an expert on this topic, but first google result, The US Asian population has doubled since 2000 and has gone up 40x since 1960; today, 57% of Asian Americans were born in a different country, and 30% live in California.
Basically, the averages for Asians in the US are dominated by recent immigrants who start out relatively affluent and don't have the family history of oppression that a chinese person whose ancestors worked on the railroad might be able to attest to. And they tend to cluster in places with high cost-of-living, which translates to 'high income' in national averages that don't adjust for that.
And this isn't true for, say, blacks in the US, of whom 82% are native-born descendants of slaves, and cluster more in southern states with low cost of living.
I've tried a few times to find data on average income/etc for Asian Americans descended from eg chinese railroad workers in the old West vs recent immigrants in the last generation or three, but haven't had any luck. It may be that Asian immigrants so vastly outnumber the 'native' stock of Asians in the US that interbreeding has rendered this distinction meaningless, which I don't think it has for black populations.
What about Jews? Jews started as poor immigrants with a history of centuries of persecution. And it didn't take 300 years for them to catch up.
When you say immigrants, are you saying 'to the US', or some other thing?
If you mean the US, first of all I'd ask you support your claim because it doesn't actually sound correct to me, and second of all I'd say that well educated and affluent people being forced to flee at one specific time to a place that gives them full rights and opportunities is not the same as centuries of chattel slavery and segregation.
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Ignoring race, poverty doesn’t stick nearly so much as genes, so all of your examples about generational issues don’t imply what you want them to.
Again ignoring race, your example about poor education over generations is even more unfortunate, given what a strong proxy that is for intelligence.
Some people just aren’t tall. On average, their offspring probably won’t be very tall either. Height and intelligence are both highly heritable and assortive mating tends to reinforce these things.
Moreover, we have multiple examples of groups that faced intense discrimination and disadvantages and it took a generation or two to catch up or exceed society averages, not centuries. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants that came to the US did not tend to come from privileged positions and suffered a great deal of adversity. They do pretty well for themselves.
The classic example is the Ashkenazim, a group of Jews that ended up being evicted to northern Italy, having a genetic bottleneck (and some admixture with the locals), moving into Central Europe for some centuries and growing in size, and then being forced eastwards through Europe all the way to Russia. Centuries of near-constant persecution. Many cases of having to move and start over. Intense generational trauma.
And yet that adversity hasn’t stopped them from being so successful in so many places and fields that it fuels conspiracy theories that are popular on both left and right. Even right here on the Motte if you can believe it.
It’s not a coincidence the Ivy League discriminated against Jews as it more recently has against East Asians.
The mounting evidence is a combination of evermore time, money, and effort trying to rectify gaps and that not working, various twin and adoption studies shedding light on the balance of nature vs. nature, and progress on genetics.
The issue and underlying science is a lot bigger than the sustained achievement gap of one particular minority in the US. The politics sure does revolve around it though.
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