I see you haven’t spent very much time around white people in your life.

Perhaps Malcolm X was right about the Irish.

Cheers,
John

Not arguing about intelligence here, but perspective.—Larry C.

The bottom line is that some societies are healthy and wealthy, and some are dysfunctional, poor and getting poorer. The differences can presumably be because of genetic endowment, or culture, or the physical landscape in which the society lives. Jarod Diamond makes a big song-and-dance about the landscape, but he’s ultimately answering a different question—- “why did history go the way it did?”—- not “how important is the land to wealth?”. Looking at the landscape in a non-scientific, but “intuitive” manner, to me it seems clear that by far the most important salient differences are cultural. If one accepts that, then the corollary is that certain cultures need to be persuaded to change their ways, and if they refuse, have only themselves to blame for the consequences. This seems a pretty harsh statement, but one that flows naturally from the argument; and I think we’d all be better off pondering the truth of it and its consequences. For example and immediate question is, do we know anything about how to change culture? What sort of things change naturally, and what sort of change can be imposed? What sorts of timescales are involved?

Certainly all this would be a heck of a lot more fruitful than yet another round of “intelligence is genetic; is not; is too; is not; is too; I know you are but what am I”.

I think, however the issue of intelligence and race is not the main issue facing us today.

The main issue is intelligence and Republicanism: can they co-exists and if so, how long until we can point to an unequivocal example?

Nothing, you would think. But here’s how Douglas Massey began his review of TBC in AJS:

“The discipline of sociology has a lot to answer for, and one of the things I lay at its feet is The Bell Curve. If sociologists had been more forthright in studying human intelligence over the past two decades, Herrnstein and Murray might never have written this book, or at least they would have produced a very different sort of work.”

He mentions Oscar Lewis and DP Moynihan as examples of what happens to people studying ethnic differences; I could give Bereiter and Engelmann as another. Massey ends his review thus:

“Herrnstein and Murray have thrown down the gauntlet. Does the field of sociology have the will and the courage to accept the challenge?”

Why did I put in that parenthetical? Because not only is KEVIN begging the question: KIERAN is begging the quesiton as well.

What we REALLY want to get to is not who fills out the best tests with their number two pencils—so that we can measure “intelligence” as a score in the 1400’s (my SAT score) makes me “more intelligent” than on in the 1200’s (the President of the United States’ score—bet you didn’t think he got that high a score!).

What we want is to explain SOCIETAL SUCCESS (which, of course, we being a money-obsessed society—with all the good and bad that represents—defining “success” as “money”).

Thus, consideration of this cockamamie “intelligence” measure is based on a RIDICULOUS, RIDICULOUS (did I mention RIDICULOUS) assumption that success is a directly correlated result of “intelligence” in the first place! Thus—go ahead and make all the racially charged arguments that somehow the African American brain is intrinsically “less intelligent” than the all powerful Caucasian brain. SO WHAT It doesn’t explain differentials in societal (i.e., economic) success more than a little.

Guess what. Intelligence is “a” factor. A SMALL factor. Compared to raw ambition (and willingness to break rules to win at all costs), greed, LUCK, and HEREDITY, what the &^%$ does “intelligence” have to do with success? Not much. I mean that. I have find a correlation—but a small one. Its about ambition, connections, and luck. It was Coolidge who said the world was full of “educated derelicts”. It is.

African Americans and Latinos, alas, have fewer people in place to hand them the “connections”, and affirmative action has been a poor substitute. Single parent families (disproportionate in these communities) hurt some more on this front, and on the next—luck.

Luck, I suppose, is distributed randomly (although African Americans and Latinos tend to be less likely to have the “luck” of inheriting tremendous sums of money—something the Bush Administration insists a right to be done tax free.)

Ambition? Well—endless societal discrimination (and it hasn’t ended) has a way of helping to stifle or limit ambition. And we’re talking about groups much MORE likely to be God-fearing churchgoing groups—i.e., PEOPLE WHO PLAY BY THE RULES. Problematically, we happen not to be a society that, in general, REWARDS people who play by the rules (especially these days). In general, we &^{%$% such people. (Maybe avoiding this being *&}%ed DOES come back to intelligence, but that’s not necessarily the message we want to be sending.)

So—thanks to the above, we rely on tests whose DESIGNERS tell us they are correlated to family income, and THEN say—aha! The Black people [with lower family income] are “less intelligent”.

Its all maddening. It explains why I move further left with each passing year: the societal distribution of goodies by our so-called free market system (which INCLUDES “intelligence” as we measure it) is by no measure “fair” or “just”. So—the presumption of the Bell Curve—that “intelligence” is distributed by God or nature—and the implicit assumption that this correlates to success—is as offensive as it is nonsensical.

Controlling for test scores eliminates most of the earnings gap between black and white men (see http://brookings.nap.edu/books/0815746091/html/480.html ), and all of it for women (and Hispanics).