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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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