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sakusha's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
I liked the book because it provided interesting statistics on many social ills and how IQ predicts them. I didn’t agree with everything the authors said, but I still think the book brings to light important facts that should be considered and well known when proposing or voting for certain social policies meant to improve outcomes among the poor and minorities.
The book is controversial for pointing out that blacks and Latinos have a lower IQ bell curve distribution than whites and Asians, but the first half of the book only deals with the correlation between IQ and outcomes among whites only. So it’s not as if whites have so much privilege that they are immune to all the social ills associated with poverty. Whites too have low IQs and bad outcomes, they just have lower rates of those things than blacks do. Because low IQ is strongly correlated with many negative outcomes for whites, it makes sense that blacks have more negative outcomes because blacks have lower average IQ than whites do. Even if socioeconomic status were held constant among whites and blacks, the statistics suggest that blacks would still have higher rates of negative outcomes because of the difference in IQ.
“When properly administered, [IQ] tests are not measurably biased against socioeconomic, ethnic, or racial subgroups. They predict a wide variety of socially important outcomes” (15).
The authors say that the founders of America never thought that people were of equal intelligence. They quote John Adams who said, “I believe there is as much in the breed of men as there is in that of horses” (531). Just as different types of dogs and horses come in different sizes and have different talents and capabilities for learning different things, so do humans. But liberals/people don’t want to admit this because they’re afraid of hurting some humans’ feelings. It’s a statistical fact that when people are grouped by race and sex, they differ significantly in IQ and outcomes. The book and its authors are NOT white supremacists, because they admit that Asians score higher in IQ than whites (269). The authors also don’t think that the racial difference in IQ is entirely genetic; they say both genes and environment are the cause (311).
IQ predicts success better than socioeconomic status, education, etc. It is a fact that some people are naturally smarter than others, before education and in spite of disadvantaged backgrounds (21). Once a child is about age 10, the IQ remains stable for the rest of life (130). If education mattered at increasing intelligence, IQ would increase with further education after age 10, but that’s not the case. A study in Sweden analyzed several hundred boys who had a wide range of years in school, from less than eight years to university. “The main determiner by far of IQ at the age of 20 was the IQ at the age of 10, by a factor of more than five times as important as years of schooling” (396). “National surveys still indicate that fewer than 60% in the top quartile of intelligence actually complete a bachelor’s degree” (113). So smart people are not necessarily educated people.
“Poverty cannot be a simple, direct cause of such problems as crime, illegitimacy, and drug abuse. . . . It is indisputable because poverty was endemic at a time when those problems were minor. We know that reducing poverty cannot, by itself, be expected to produce less criminality, illegitimacy, drug abuse, or the rest of the catalog of social problems, else the history of the twentieth century would have chronicled their steep decline” (128-129). “Most of the world’s children throughout history have grown up poor, with ‘poverty’ meaning material deprivation far more severe than the meaning of ‘below the poverty line’ in today’s America. Many of the disadvantages today’s children experience are not the poverty itself but the contemporary correlates of poverty: being without a father, for example, or living in high-crime-neighborhoods. Today, high proportions of poor children experience these correlates; fifty years ago, comparatively few poor children did” (223). Poverty was already declining steadily from 1940 to 1960 by about 30%. But in about 1970, the amount of poor people stagnated (129). LBJ’s War on Poverty bill was signed on 8/20/64. This bill seems to have been the start of a lot of declines in America. “In the 1960s and 1970s, America became much more of a welfare state” (362). Marriage rates began to drop in 1973 “and have been dropping ever since, in good years and bad” (168). “In 1920, only death parted husbands and wives in about 82% of marriages and . . . Only about 8 out of 1000 married females experienced a divorce (172). In about 1965, the divorce rate began to rise sharply (173). “When the divorce rate hit its peak at the end of the 1970s, a marriage had more than a 50-50 chance of ending in divorce. Despite a downward trend since 1980, divorce remains at twice the annual rate of the mid-1960s” (173). The mid-1960s was also when illegitimate births began to skyrocket (178-179). Affirmative action also started in the 1960s (448). (Wikipedia says 1965 was when LBJ signed the executive order, which replaced Kennedy’s fairer don’t-discriminate executive order.) Black college enrollment was already increasing between 1950 and 1965, but affirmative action made it shoot up higher starting in 1966 (469).
At the beginning of the Kennedy administration in 1961, it was still acceptable to talk about the deserving and undeserving poor, but by the end of the 1960s it was only acceptable to say that poverty had broad systemic causes and not the fault of individuals (131). “After a slow and meandering rise since the end of WWII, the welfare caseload was still less than 2% of families when JFK took office. Then, as with so many other social phenomena, the dynamics abruptly changed in the mid-1960s. In a concentrated period from 1966 to 1975, the percentage of American families on welfare nearly tripled” (193). “From 1950-1963, the rate for violent crime was almost flat, followed by an extremely rapid rise from 1964-1971, followed by continued increases until the 1980s,” when it decreased a little, but soon shot up again (236-237). Crime has remained well above the rate before 1964. “Historically, the black-white difference in marriage rates was small until the early 1960s and then widened. By 1991, only 38% of black women ages 15-44 were married, compared to 58% of white women” (329). “In 1960, 24% of black children were illegitimate, compared to only 2% of white children—a huge proportional difference. But birth within marriage remained the norm for both races. By 1991, the figures on illegitimate births were 68% of all births for blacks compared to 39% for Latinos and 18% for non-Latino whites” (330).
SAT scores began to decline in 1963 and kept declining through 1980. They have since risen a bit, but are still not at the level they were before 1963 (425). The authors say that during the 50s and early 60s, the SAT pool expanded dramatically but scores remained steady. Throughout the decline, the whites taking the SAT were shrinking, not expanding. So the cause of the decline was not that more students were taking the test (426). “Neither race, class, parental education, composition of the pool, nor gender can explain this decline of 40-odd points on the verbal score and 20-odd points on the math for the white SAT taking population during the 60s and 70s” (427). My guess is that television is to blame for this. TV, welfare, and outsourcing jobs brought down America! Put another way, instant gratification entertainment, compassion, and greed brought down America. The solutions: returning to imagination entertainment, tough love, and taking hits to the bottom line for the greater good. The authors say that education was dumbed down in the 60s, citing “The Troubled Crusade” by Diane Ravitch 1983 and “Summerhill” by Neill 1960, which was an anarchy of a school that allowed kids to do whatever they wanted (https://www.panarchy.org/neill/summerhill.html) (430, 776). I agree that the lack of discipline and prioritizing feelings over learning academics would have a negative impact on kids. “Since the late 1960s, such straightforward ways of looking at standards in the humanities, social sciences, and even the physical sciences were corrupted, in the sense that the standards of each discipline were subordinated to other considerations. Chief among these other considerations were multiculturalism in the curriculum, the need to minimize racial differences in performance measures, and enthusiasm for fostering self-esteem independent of performance” (432). “When the first significant aid went to secondary education at the end of the Eisenhower years, it was for the brightest students who might become scientists or engineers. In 1965, with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the funding priority turned 180 degrees, and it has remained anchored int he new position ever since” (434).
Low IQ better predicts poverty than low parent socioeconomic class (132, 135). “48% of the poor in 1989 came from the bottom 20% in intelligence” (370). IQ predicts high school graduation better than parental SES (149). “Two-thirds of high school dropouts came form the bottom 20% in intelligence” (372). “The brighter dropouts may go back to get a GED, but they continue to share in common with the permanent dropouts a lower-class social background that has not inculcated a work ethic that makes for success in the labor force. Thus, GEDs are more like normal graduates in their intelligence but more like other dropouts in their success in the labor force” (151). IQ better predicts college degree attainment than parental SES (152). The higher the IQ, the less likely a white man will be unemployed or out of the labor force for a month or more, but the higher his parents’ SES, the more likely he is to be out of the labor force for a month or more, and SES has no effect on unemployment (159, 164). “64% of able-bodied men who did not work in 1989 were in the bottom 20% of intelligence” (374). “The longer the period of unemployment, the more prevalent is low IQ” (375). The lower the IQ, the more likely a white man will have health problems that prevent him from working (161). “The smarter you are, the less likely that you will have accidents” (162). (That’s a little surprising to me since the nerd stereotype is someone who’s clumsy.) “The risk of motor vehicle accidents rises as the driver’s IQ falls” (162). “High IQ raises the probability of marriage for the white high school sample, while high socioeconomic background lowers it” (172). Dumber whites get married at younger ages than smarter whites (171), but the dumber ones have a higher probability of divorcing within the first five years of marriage (175). High parental SES increases the likelihood of divorce (175). Dumber children are more likely to live with divorced or separated mothers (379). The dumber the white woman, the more likely she will have an illegitimate baby (180). “52% of illegitimate children were born to mothers in the bottom 20% of intelligence” (378). IQ has a larger effect on white illegitimate births than mother’s SES (183). For white women already below the poverty line, IQ still positively correlates with illegitimate birth while parental SES negatively correlates (188).
The lower a woman’s IQ, the more likely she is to be on welfare, temporarily or chronically (377). Interestingly, most chronic (white) welfare recipients have gotten a high school diploma (42%). Even those who got a GED (16%) or less than a high school diploma (38%) had lower rates of chronic welfare (199). For women with a high school education, intelligence plays a large role—and for the low-IQ women without a high school education who become chronic welfare recipients, a low socioeconomic background is a more important predictor” (200).
“Among identical twins, the one with the higher IQ is likely to have been heavier at birth” (393). A 2,001-2,500 gram increase in birth weight can add 3.7-6.0 IQ points (573). “Low IQ among white mothers in the NLSY sample was related to low birth weight, even after controlling for socioeconomic background, poverty, and age of the mother. . . . Low maternal IQ was associated with problematic temperament in the baby and with low scores on an index of ‘friendliness,’ with poor motor and social development of toddlers and with behavioral problems from age 4 and up” (203, charts on 226-227, 381, 383). “Predictably, the mother’s IQ was also strongly related to the IQ of the child” (203), and IQ mattered much more than the mother’s SES (231). Although even bright and very bright mothers occasionally had a child in the bottom decile of IQ—6-7% (compared to 39% for a very dull mother) (230). “72% of children in the bottom decile of IQ had mothers in the bottom 20% of intelligence” (384). “63% of children who lived in poverty throughout the first three years had mothers in the bottom 20% of intelligence” (383).
Interestingly, a (white) woman’s first baby being born out of wedlock is 23% if her father is absent by age 14, while if it’s the mother who is absent but not the father, the rate is only 8% (185). (10% if both parents were present, 8% if the child had adoptive parents.) Kids from single moms have a lot of other bad outcomes independent of SES (571), but I wonder how they compare to kids of single dads. If kids have better outcomes with a single dad than a single mom, then judges should award fathers custody more often and default to mothers only when the child is nursing.
“Cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40% and no more than 80%” (23). “The irony is that as America equalizes the circumstances of people’s lives, the remaining differences in intelligence are increasingly determined by differences in genes” (91). “Biologically related siblings resembled each other in job status, even though they grew up in different homes. And among them, the full siblings had more similar job status than the half siblings. Meanwhile, adoptive siblings were NOT significantly correlated with each other in job status” (54). “A bright worker is likely to have a bright sister or brother. But the average IQ score difference between siblings is 11-12 points” (85). “The most modern study of identical twins reared in separate homes suggests a heritability for general intelligence between .75 and .80” (107).
“The correlation between IQ and job status is just about as high if the IQ test is given in childhood, decades before people enter the job market, as it is among young adults who are taking an intelligence test after years of education” (53). If IQ was all about how much education one has received, IQ would be higher per number of years of school attended. But high school graduates have a wide range of differing IQ scores. IQ measures “g” which stands for general intelligence. “g explains [job] productivity in ways that education and socioeconomic background cannot” (560). “Reaction times on elementary cognitive tasks that require no conscious thought, such as responding to a lighted button, show a significant correlation with IQ test scores” (561).
Common sense to me, but in case there’s any doubt: “Working class parents tend to be more authoritarian than middle-class parents. Working class parents tend to use physical punishment and direct commands, whereas middle-class parents tend to use reasoning and appeals to more abstract principles of behavior. The consistency of these findings extends from the earliest studies to the most recent. . . . Immediate irritants like boisterous play might evoke a whack from working-class parents, whereas middle-class parents tended to punish when the intend of the child’s behavior (knowingly hurting another child, for example) was problematic (205). “Working-class parents were more likely to use physical punishment impulsively, when the parents themselves needed the relief, not when it was likely to do the child the most good” (206). “Mothers in the top cognitive classes use physical punishment less often (though they agree in principle that physical punishment can be an appropriate response), and the television set is off more of the time in the homes of the top cognitive classes (220). Although any parent can neglect or abuse their child, it’s more common among the poor (208-209). Neglecting families tend to have low education and low IQ, while the abusive families tend to have normal IQ and a high school diploma (211). “A white mother’s IQ is more important than her socioeconomic background in predicting the worst home environments” (222). “56% of all children from bottom decile in home environment were born to mothers in the bottom 20% of intelligence” (382).
During bedtime stories, middle class parents encourage kids to ask questions, talk about the book. They praised right answered and explained why things were wrong (206). Working class students did well in school compared to middle class students, but where they differed was the working class kids had trouble answering open ended/personal/imaginative questions (207).
People seem to think that poor women don’t have access to prenatal care, but this book says that “almost everyone got prenatal care” (214). “Very high proportions of children already get prenatal care, nutrition, home environments, and classroom environments that are good enough to leave little room for measurable improvement. The grim stories of childhood deprivation involved a small proportion of children. And when it comes to helping that small proportion of children, the results seldom approach expectations” (390-391).
Alcohol consumption was about the same across the cognitive classes, but smoking was more common among the less educated and lower IQ (white) women (214). The lower the woman’s IQ, the more likely she will have a low birth weight baby. Socioeconomic background had no effect (215).
“The advantage conferred by IQ is long-lasting. Much remains to be learned, but usually the smarter employee tends to remain more productive than the less smart employee even after years on the job” (64). I can think of exceptions to this, but it’s true that “the exceptions do not invalidate the importance of a statistically significant correlation” (68). "Tests of general intelligence often do better in predicting future job performance than do contrived tests of job performance itself" (77). "The test score is a better predictor of job performance than any other single measure," including biographical data, reference checks, education, interview, college grades, interests, and age (81). “Proficiency in most common civilian and military occupations can be predicted by IQ, with an overall validity that may conservatively be placed at .4. The more demanding a job is cognitively, the more predictive power such a test has, but no common job is so undemanding that the test totally lacks predictiveness” (87).
“Brighter children of all socioeconomic classes, including the poorest, learn more rapidly about politics and how government works, and are more likely than duller children to read about, discuss, and participate in political activities” (253). “The people who vote least and who care the least about political issues are not so much the poor as the uneducated, whatever their income or occupation” (253). IQ was more significant than SES in predicting which people have middle class values (264-265, 385). Even when only assessing people of the same education level, there are differences in IQ which correlate with middle class values (265). “‘Civil-ized’ people do not need to be tightly constrained by laws or closely monitored by the organs of state. Lacking such civility, they do, and society must over time become much less free” (254). So an anarchy would only work with an intelligent population. Government is needed because of stupid people who are irresponsible and commit crimes and can’t educate their own kids.
Crime: “62% of men ever interviewed in jail or prison came from the bottom 20% of intelligence” (376). Criminal offenders have average IQs of 92, with series/chronic offenders having lower scores than casual offenders (235). In a 20 year longitudinal study of over 500 boys in a Swedish community, 30% of the arrests of men by age 30 were of the 6% with IQs below 77 and 80% were of those with IQs below 100. The offender population is short of very low IQ people—“people whose scores are so low that they have trouble mustering the competence to commit most crimes. A sufficiently low IQ is, in addition, usually enough to exempt a person from criminal prosecution” (243, chart on 247). Great, so they get released back into the public to commit more crimes just because they’re so dumb. “The IQs of uncaught offenders are not measurably different from the ones who get caught” (243). IQ predicts crime better than socioeconomic background (249). Higher SES actually was associated with higher crime after controlling for IQ (249).
“Most people take it for granted, for example, that poverty and unemployment cause crime—classical sociological arguments that are distinguished more by their popularity than by evidence” (237). It’s usually people between the ages of 15 and 24 who commit crimes (239). (And 83% of the white offenders are male [245].) “When the age distribution of the population shifts toward more people in their peak years for crime, the average level of crime may be expected to rise. Or crime may rise disproportionately if a large bulge in the youthful sector of the population fosters a youth culture that relishes unconventionality over traditional adult values. The exploding crime rate of the 1960s is, for example, partly explained by the baby boomers’ reaching adolescence. Or suppose that a style of child rearing sweeps the country, and it turns out that this style of child rearing leads to less control over the behavior of rebellious adolescents. The change in style of child rearing may predictably be followed, 15 or so years later, by a change in crime rates” (239).
“When a society reaches a certain overall level of affluence, the haves begin to feel sympathy toward, if not guilt about, the condition of the have-nots. Thus dawns the welfare state—the attempt to raise the poor and the needy out of their plight” (523). Raising the minimum wage or mandating job benefits can backfire by making robots more affordable and making the jobs disappear altogether (519-520). “Inevitably, with technological advances, the niches for the less intelligent have shrunk” (536). That’s another negative thing about technological advancement. “Congress and presidents have deemed it necessary to remove more and more functions from the neighborhood. The entire social welfare system, services and cash payments alike, may be viewed in that light. Certain tasks—such as caring for the poor, for example—were seemed to be too difficult or too poorly performed by the spontaneous efforts of neighborhoods and voluntary organizations, and hence were transferred” (539). IMO, things were better back then. Each community took care of its own poor. Now with the government doing it, poor people take advantage, and he homeless and criminals congregate in big cities to collect their benefits. Then “as urban tax rates rise, the middle class flees, leaving behind even more starkly segregated poles of rich and poor” (104). So democrat policies create more problems, one of which is the large wealth gap that they’re always complaining about, and they think taxing the rich will help eliminate it.
“People are not naturally angelic but self-interested—else, as Publius pointed out, governments would not be necessary in the first place” (518). Which is why socialism/communism fail—they operate under the erroneous assumption that people can be selfless. And it’s also why anarchy fails—without government forcing people to be nice by law, people would behave selfishly and harm their neighbors. “In the modern view that [Thomas] Hobbes helped shape, individuals freely accept constraints on their own behavior in exchange for ridding themselves of the dangers of living in perfect freedom, hence perfect anarchy. The constraints constitute lawful government” (529). “The egalitarian ideal of contemporary political theory underestimates the importance of the differences that separate human beings. It fails to come to grips with human variation. It overestimates the ability of political interventions to shape human character and capabilities. The systems of government that are necessary to carry out the egalitarian agenda ignore the forces that the Founders described in ‘The Federalist,’ which lead inherently and inevitably to tyranny, throughout history and across cultures. These defects in the egalitarian tradition are reflected in political experience, where the failure of the communist bloc to construct happy societies is palpably apparent” (532).
Racial differences:
“There are differences between the races, and they are the rule, not the exception. That assertion may seem controversial to some readers, but it verges on tautology: Races are by definition groups of people who differ in characteristic ways. Intellectual fashion has dictated that all differences must be denied except the absolutely undeniable differences in appearance, but nothing in biology says this should be so” (272). Races “differ genetically for sure, otherwise they would not have differing skin colors or hair textures or muscle mass. They also differ intellectually on the average” (297). If the observed ethnic differences in IQ were solely due to environment, the average environment of whites would have to be 1.58 SDs better than the average environment of blacks, and .32 SD worse than the mean environment for East Asians. In percentile terms, blacks’ environment would have to be at the 6th percentile of the white environment distribution, and East Asians would have to be a the 63rd percentile of white environments. “Environmental differences of this magnitude and pattern are implausible” (298-299). The races also differ in brain size, just as the sexes do, and “a significant and substantial relationship does exist between brain size and measured intelligence after body size is taken into account” (564). “What matters is not the source but the existence of group differences and their intractability (for whatever reasons)” (563).
Men and women have nearly identical mean IQs but men have a broader distribution. “The average boy tests 1.8 IQ points higher than the average girl, and boys have a standard deviation that is .8 point larger than girls. . . . There are more men than women at either extreme of the IQ distribution” (275).
Ashkenazi Jews of European origins test higher than any other ethnicity/race (275). The Jews and the Chinese have also experienced discrimination and racism in America, and yet their IQ scores are high, so discrimination and racism cannot be the reason for why blacks have low scores (299). “Asians are an ethnic minority, many of whom, or whose parents, came to the United States under circumstances of extreme deprivations. Many suffered from racial prejudice. Whether or not they are treated differently from whites by elite universities, Asians are indisputably treated differently from every other nonwhite ethnic minority” (453).
“East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Japanese), whether in America or in Asia, typically earn higher scores on intelligence and achievement tests than white Americans. The precise size of their advantage is unclear; estimates range from just a few to ten points. A more certain difference between the races is that East Asians have higher nonverbal intelligence than whites while being equal, or perhaps slightly lower, in verbal intelligence” (269). East Asians score higher than whites on visuospatial tests and lower than whites on verbal tests in America, East Asian countries, and even when adopted into white families (300). So environment or language fluency can’t explain the differences. (“American Indians and Inuit similarly score higher visuospatially than verbally; their ancestors migrated to the Americas from East Asian hundreds of centuries ago” [300-301].)
The median IQs for East Asians in 1991 (272):
110 Chinese living in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, China
103 Japanese in Japan
103 East Asians in North America
Other IQ studies (274):
104.5 Japanese (13-15 year old) abstract reasoning
114 Japanese (13-15 year old) spatial relations
113 Hong Kong 9 year olds
110 Japan 9 year olds
100 Britain 9 year olds
Vernon’s appraisal for Asian American IQ (301):
97 verbal
110 visuospatial
Lynn’s 1987 review on East Asians (301):
98 verbal
106 visuospatial
Asian American SAT differences in SDs above the national mean (301):
.21 verbal
.43 math
“The difference in test scores between African-Americans and European-Americans as measured in dozens of reputable studies has converged on approximately a one standard deviation difference for several decades. Translated into centiles, this means that the average white person tests higher than about 84% of the population of blacks and that the average black person tests higher than about 16% of the population of whites. The average black and white differ in IQ at every level of socioeconomic status (SES), but they differ more at high levels of SES than at low levels. Attempts to explain the difference in terms of test bias have failed. The tests have approximately equal predictive force for whites and blacks” (269).
In 156 studies, the mean black/white difference in IQ is 1.08 standard deviations, or about 16 IQ points (276-277). The black bell curve compared to the white bell curve is on page 279. Blacks in 1990 have improved in IQ since blacks in 1969-1973, but they still underperform compared to whites (291). Whether black and white test scores will continue to converge depends on whether environmental differences and fertility patterns for different SES groups are comparable (293). If that’s the case, then the authors predict convergence will happen sometime in the middle of the 21st century (293). However, black scores stopped rising in the mid 1980s (294). “Some studies have found a small decline in IQ of each successive child born to a given woman, even after holding overall family size constant” (393). But interestingly, “in black families in rural Georgia, the elder sibling typically has a lower IQ than the younger. The larger the age difference is between the siblings, the larger is the difference in IQ. . . . But demonstrating that environment can depress cognitive development does not prove that the entire b/w difference is environmental” (303-304). Examining blacks and whites who get the same IQ score, there are still differences. Whites are stronger on spatial-perceptual ability, while blacks are stronger on arithmetic and immediate memory (302).
About test bias: “The evidence is that the major standardized tests used to help make school and job decisions do not underpredict black performance, nor does the expert community find any other general or systematic difference in the predictive accuracy of tests for blacks and whites” (281). “In study after study of the leading tests, the hypothesis that the b/w difference is caused by questions with cultural content has been contradicted by the facts. Items that the average white test taker finds easy relative to other items, the average black test taker does too; the same is true for items that the average white and black find difficult. . . . The b/w difference is wider on items that appear to be culturally neutral than on items that appear to be culturally loaded” (282). What if blacks are just not motivated to try hard on the test? “The studies that have attempted to measure motivation in such situations have generally found hat blacks are at least as motivated as whites” (283). ”White reaction time is faster than black reaction time, but black movement time is faster than white movement time” (284). This is consistent with the common sense observation that blacks are better physically while whites are better mentally. SES explains 37% of the b/w difference in IQ (286). Blacks had no trouble or showed no lack of motivation for counting forward compared to whites, but blacks scored lower on counting backwards. “The b/w difference persists on nonverbal tests such as the Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices” (306).
“Black IQ scores go up with socioeconomic status, but the black-white difference does not shrink” (288). If black IQ disadvantage was due to racism or discrimination in the US, then we should test blacks in Africa, right? Well, “blacks in Africa, including urbanized blacks with secondary educations, have obtained extremely low scores” (289). The median black African IQ is 75, about 1.7 standard deviations below the US overall population average, about ten points lower than American blacks (289). The IQ of mixed South Africans has been found to be similar to that of American blacks (289), probably because many American blacks are also mixed race.
“Even when samples of Africans are selected in ways that will tend to bias the results upward—for example, by limiting the sample to people who have completed primary school (many of the least able have dropped out by that time), people who are employed, or people who live in urban areas—and even when the tests involved are ones such as the SPM, designed for cross-cultural comparisons, devoid of any requirements of literacy or numeracy, the scores of African samples everywhere have been in the region of two standard deviations below European or East Asian means” (565). See p. 659 for how race of the examiner and the other test takers in the room also does not impair black ability.
IQ scores in adoption studies (309):
117 biological children of white parents
112 white children who were adopted
109 adopted children with one black and one white/Asian parent
97 adopted children with two black parents
Teen IQs (310):
109 biological children of white parents
106 white children who were adopted
99 adopted children with one black and one white/Asian parent
89 adopted children with two black parents
The Flynn Effect: “IQ scores often rose with every successive year after a test was first standardized. For example, when the Standford-Binet IQ was restandardized in the mid-1930s, it was observed that individuals earned lower IQs on the new tests than they got on the Stanford-Binet that had been standardized in the mid-1910s. . . . Most of the change has been concentrated in the nonverbal portions of the test” (307-308). So it’s not that people are getting smarter. They’re just getting better at taking a certain test. And it’s not because of studying, because people usually don’t study for IQ tests. I’ve heard it suggested that the cause of the Flynn Effect is people’s minds being subconsciously connected, and that there’s a kind of subconscious memory that is passed from the parent to child. Interestingly, the Flynn effect is only about nonverbal IQ rising only (392).
Blacks and Latinos of the same IQ as whites actually have a higher chance of graduating from high school (319). The reason blacks and Latinos graduate less than whites is because the former have lower IQs than whites on average, and lower IQ people in general are less likely to graduate. Whites are more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree, but when holding IQ constant, blacks have the highest rate (320). (Asians were not included.) “In the NLSY, the black-white differences for every education level, from high school diploma to Ph.D, are large, with the smallest being a difference of 1.2 standard deviations” (502).
Jobs: “Blacks are overrepresented in almost every occupation, but most of all for the high-status occupations like medicine, engineering, and teaching” (321). There are about six times as many blacks in the occupation as there would be if job admittance were race blind (321). The probability of being in a high IQ population is only 2% higher for whites compared to blacks and Latinos, but when IQ is held constant at 100, blacks have a 26% rate of being in a high IQ occupation, Latinos have a 16% rate, and whites only have a 10% rate (322). Whites only make more than minorities because whites tend to have higher IQs; when IQ is held constant, whites, blacks, and Latinos make about the same amount of money (323). IQ is more important in explaining black-white wage differences than SES or education (325). “Controlling for age, IQ, and gender (ignoring education and parental SES), the average wage for year-round black workers in the NLSY sample was 101% of the average white wage” (326). Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be unemployed than whites, but when IQ is held constant, black unemployment lowers by more than half and Latino unemployment is the same as white unemployment (328).
Blacks have a 19% higher risk of being in poverty than whites, and Latinos have an 11% higher chance of being in poverty than whites, but when their IQs are equal, the difference is only 3-5% (326). Black marriage rates are about 17-24% lower than white and Latino marriage rates, and that doesn’t change when IQ is held constant (329). Black women are much more likely to have a child out of wedlock compared to whites and Latinos, and that remains true even when controlling for IQ, SES, poverty, education, or coming from a broken home (330-331). Blacks are more likely to be on welfare than whites and Latinos, and this continues to be the case when IQ is held constant. “Among women who were poor in the year prior to birth, the black-white difference is slightly larger after controlling for IQ, not smaller. These data, like those on illegitimacy and marriage, lend support to the suggestion that blacks differ from whites or Latinos in their likelihood of being on welfare for reasons that transcend both poverty and IQ” (332). Blacks are more likely to have low birth weight babies, have a child living in poverty the first three years, and have worse home environments; chances are lowered when IQ is held constant, but whites and Latinos still fare better (334-335). Both blacks and Latinos have much higher rates of giving birth to a retarded child, even when the mother is of average IQ (337). “Virtually all of the difference in the prevalence of black and white juvenile delinquents is explained by the IQ difference, independent of the effect of SES” (338). Whites are more like to have middle class values than Latinos or blacks, even when IQ is held constant (339).
The mean IQ of immigrants in the 1980s was 95 (341). The ethnic ancestry of legal immigrants then (359):
41% Latino
21% Asian
11% non-Latino white
11% middle east or other
9% black
7% Filipino
Wow, why would Africans want to move to the US when the US is so racist against blacks? Is it because Africa sucks even worse? Well then perhaps the whites did Africans a favor by taking them to America even if it was for slavery. How many African Americans choose to move to Africa? Much less than the amount of blacks that choose to move to the US, I bet.
The average IQ of those born abroad was .4 SDs lower (34th centile) than the mean of American born people. White immigrants score a bit higher than native-born Americans, but lower than the mean for native-born US whites (360). Foreign-born immigrant blacks score about 5 IQ points higher than native-born blacks (360), probably because the ones immigrating are the smart ones coming here for university. “Latino immigrants have mean scores more than seven points lower than native-born Latinos and more than a SD below the overall national native-born mean. THe NLSY gives no information on the large immigrant population from the countries of East Asia and Vietnam, who might be significantly boosting the immigrant mean” (360). Immigrants “from Western European countries do quite well in the United States, and their cohorts have exhibited a general increase in earnings (relative to their measured skills) over the postwar period. On the other hand, persons from less developed countries do not perform well in the U.S. labor market and their cohorts have exhibited a general decrease in earnings (relative to their measured skills) over the postwar period” (363).
The authors believe “that the main purpose of immigration law should be to serve America’s interests. It should be among the goals of public policy to shift the flow of immigrants away from those admitted under the nepotistic rules (which broadly encourage the reunification of relatives) and toward those admitted under competency rules, already established in immigration law—not to the total exclusion of nepotistic and humanitarian criteria but a shift” (549). I agree that if the country wants to be prosperous, it’s best to mainly admit the high IQ people. However, I personally think that anyone who wants to come in should be allowed to as long as they become a tax paying citizen. And there should be a time limit on welfare and laws that say if you stay/become unemployed for over a month and can’t pay your rent/mortgage, you will be deported. There should likely be an English speaking requirement too.
Affirmative Action:
“Perfectly practiced, the traditional American ideal of equal opportunity means using exclusively individual measures, applied uniformly, to choose some people over others. Perfectly practiced, affirmative action means assigning a premium, an edge, to group membership in addition to the individual measures before making a final assessment that chooses some people over others” (450). In other words, affirmative action is racist. “The edge given to minority candidates could be more easily defended if the competition were between disadvantaged minority youths and privileged white youths. But nearly as large a cognitive difference separates disadvantaged black freshmen from disadvanaged white freshmen. Still more difficult to defend, blacks from affluent socioeconomic backgrounds are given a substantial edge over disadvantaged whites” (447). Blacks get accepted into college at high rates despite their low SAT scores, but they have high dropout rates—twice the white rate (448, 473). “The median difference between the white mean and the black mean was 180 SAT points, or conservatively estimated, about 1.3 SDs” (451). Latinos had a median of 129 points or about .9 SDs below the white mean, while Asians faced a median penalty of 30 points (452). In 1993, only 129 blacks and 234 Latinos nationwide had SAT-verbal scores in the 700s—and these represented all-time highs—compared to 7,114 whites (454).
What good does it do to let in lots of low IQ people who are just going to drop out because college is too hard for them? Oh, I suppose the college makes money off of them while they attend, and it gets to claim that it’s racially inclusive. Colleges provide extra enticements to blacks to get them to join their school—“full scholarships even for families with ample financial resources, free trips to visit the campus, recruiting visits, and promotional activities—that used to be reserved for star high school athletes” (454).
“Cognitive test scores generally OVERPREDICT college grade point average (GPA) for both blacks and Latinos, in comparison to whites” (471). So that means blacks and Latinos will do even worse in college than their low cognitive test scores predict.
Do want an incompetent person being your lawyer, doctor, plumber, police officer, or your child’s teacher? On the law school aptitude test, blacks score 1.49 SDs lower than whites, Latinos score 1.01 SDs below whites, and Asians score .32 SDs below whites (455). “More than 1,100 registered white law students had scores of 170 or higher on a scale going from 120 to 180, compared to three blacks” (456). In a medical college admissions test, compared to whites, blacks scored 1.36 SDs lower on biological science, 1.26 SDs lower on physical science, and 1.40 SDs lower on verbal reasoning (456). “In none of the three subtests did more than 19 blacks score in the 12 to 15 range (on a scale that goes from 1 to 15), compared to 1,146, 1,469, and 853 whites” on these tests (457). Even in plumbing, pipefitter, and electrician jobs, “blacks quit at more than three times the rate for whites, were terminated for cause at more than three times the rate for whites, and did not respond to a job dispatch at more than six times the rate for whites” (497).
By 1982, 40% of the Washington D.C. police candidates failed the admissions test, and the department was having trouble filling positions. “A new test was introduced in 1985, normed to favor minority applicants. Standards in the police academy were lowered to the point at which not one student flunked out of the training course in 1983 (despite the lower cognitive ability of the candidates being admitted). In 1988, the academy abolished its final comprehensive pencil-and-paper examination after 40% of graduating recruits failed it. The former head of the Fraternal Order of Police and a veteran of 22 years on the force reported that, at about that time, he began hearing ‘about people at the academy who could not read or write.’ A former academy instructor says that ‘I saw people who were practically illiterate. I’ve seen people diagnosed as borderline retarded graduate from the police academy” (495). Wow! “Washington is not unique. In Miami in 1985 the cops were found to be working in cahoots with cocaine smugglers. “This crime, as well as many others that were straining community-police relations at the time, could be traced in part to the relaxation of hiring standards mandated by affirmative action regulations” (496). New York City has spent lots of money trying to create a sergeant’s exam with “strict stands of job specificity and freedom from demonstrable cultural bias, but large ethnic disparities have persisted. The disparities themselves invalidate the test, and a new version must be prepared. The police department has even used a video-based test, on grounds that any form of paper-and-pencil test must necessarily discriminate against minorities” (502).
Only 35%-68% of blacks pass the teacher competency exam, while 80%-93% of whites pass, a difference of 1.0-1.4 SDs (493). Some argue that there’s more that goes into being a good teacher besides tests scores. “But the way affirmative action programs actually work, these other qualities are not tested or compared. The minority candidate with the best score on the test of intellectual qualities is selected. As for the other qualities, not measured by the test, there is no reason to assume that they are any higher than average” (494).
All the minorities do worse than whites in graduate school admissions tests, with blacks performing the worst. An exception is that Asians score better than whites on the quantitative part of the test while doing worse at the verbal and analytical parts (458).
Of all those who ever entered a four-year college, 63% of whites had gotten a bachelor’s degree by age 26 compared to only 34% of blacks (473). “The first and dominant explanation of higher black dropout rates is cognitive ability. Controlling for age and IQ, the black and white dropout rates converge” (473).
Affirmative Action’s other negative effects:
Because employers know that blacks get into college easier than whites do, it makes the blacks’ degree seem less valuable; the blacks got in because of their skin color, while the whites got in by their merits (474). Nowadays there are cases of blacks being given passing grades just because of their skin color too.
America’s universities are “perpetuating in the ranks of their graduates the same gap in cognitive ability that separates blacks and Latinos from whites in the general population” (474-475).
“Racial clashes on campuses began to surface in he early 1980s and apparently have been growing since then, with the great bulk of the difficulties between whites and blacks” (472). The authors propose that it’s because whites feel that the blacks don’t belong there, and the blacks feel that the environment is hostile to them (473).
Even before affirmative action, college admission has never been based purely on academic merit (459). “One of the goals of any admissions process is to serve the institution’s own interests” (459). Colleges would take a prince of average intelligence over a highly intelligent ordinary person (460). They would take someone of poor academic skills who overcame a poor environment, illness, or disability (461).
Still, I think affirmative action should be ended. Before affirmative action began, from the mid 1950s to mid-1960s, minorities were being accepted into college at higher rates already. “Color-blindness was actively taken as the ideal. At many colleges during that era, applicants were forbidden to enclose a photograph and instructed to avoid any information in the essay that might help identify their race or religion. . . . Racial differences in qualifications during that time were minor” (476). Nowadays, liberals consider color blindness to be racist, and they bring up race whenever they can. “If cognitive ability is taken into account, the underrepresentation of blacks in professional and technical jobs was gone by 1964, prior to the Civil Rights Act” (492). “The great truth about the 1960s was not that the nation finally enacted the civil rights laws but that the American people were finally and inexorably moving in the right direction anyway” (507).
I agree with the authors, who say “we reject equality of outcome as an appropriate goal. Equality of opportunity is the test most consistent with the vision of the Congress that enacted the [Civil Rights] law in 1964, and for that matter with the vision that animated the Constitution. The appropriate goal is a job market in which people are not favored or held back simply because of their race. Nothing in nature or knowledge, however, says that all groups should be equally successful in every walk of life. This may be ‘unfair’ in the same sense that life is unfair, but it need not mean that human beings are treating one another unfairly” (500). “People who bring equal qualifications to a job should have an equal shot at being hired, and affirmative action regulations, originally intended to promote precisely that goal, now impede it” (501). “If tomorrow all job discrimination regulations based on group proportions were rescinded, the United States would have a job market that is ethnically fairer, more conducive to racial harmony, and economically more productive, than the one we have now” (505). Government should ensure equality of opportunity, not outcome (505).
“Job hiring and promotion procedures that are truly fair and unbiased will produce the racial disparities that public policy tries to prevent” (479). That’s why liberals don’t want color blind (fair) admittance; they know that most blacks and Latinos can’t compete on a level playing field. Since 1971, employers have been prevented with fines and lawsuits from using tests in the employment process in which the results lead to different results for different protected groups (mainly blacks, Latinos, and women) (482). Because of this, the same racial IQ differences exist in jobs as they do in regular life, with 1.1-1.5 SDs separating whites and blacks in all job categories (488). Interestingly, a majority of blacks favor ability test scores over preferential hiring (505).
Dysgenesis: Children resemble their parents in IQ, and women with low IQ are reproducing faster, so the distribution of scores will decline no matter whether IQ is caused by nature or nurture (342). In the 1930s, the eminent psychometrician Raymond Cattell was predicting a loss of 1.0 to 1.5 IQ points per decade, while others were publishing estimated losses of 2 to 4 IQ points per generation” (345). A 1980s study of mostly whites in the upper Midwest found a .8 drop in IQ per generation (347). “Since the main ethnic groups differ in average IQ . . . The shifting ethnic makeup by itself would lower the average American IQ by .8 point per generation” (347-348). “The higher the education, the fewer the babies” (349). Dumber women give birth at earlier ages (352). Blacks and Latinos have more babies than whites, even if they have the same education level (353). Blacks and Latinos have dumber children than whites (354). There is a wider gap between the IQs of the children of different races than between the IQs of their mothers (356). “The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility” (548). One way to stop dysgenesis is to give free birth control to the poor but not to wealthier people. Not only that, but make it easier for them to get it; make it able to be purchased on the EBT card.
“Large proportions of the people who exhibit the behaviors and problems that dominate the nation’s social policy agenda have limited cognitive ability. Often they are near the definition for mental retardation (though the NLSY sample screened out people who fit the clinical definition of retarded). When the nation seeks to lower unemployment or lower the crime rate or induce welfare mothers to get jobs, the solutions must be judged by their effectiveness with the people most likely to exhibit the problem: the least intelligent people” (386).
IQ is not very malleable. It’s difficult to change IQ through environmental interventions (314). “Formal schooling offers little hope of narrowing cognitive inequality on a large scale in developed countries, because so much of its potential contribution has already been realized with the advent of universal 12-year systems. Special programs to improve intelligence within the school have had minor and probably temporary effects on intelligence” (389).
“Year-to-year correlations in mental test performance were close to zero in the first few years of life” (403). IQ stabilizes at around six years old (402). “These findings conformed with the intuitive notion that, in the poet’s words, ‘as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’ Any intervention designed to increase intelligence (or change an other basic characteristics of the child) must start early, and the earlier the better” (403). This is good to know for discipline as well.
Head Start does not improve cognitive functioning (389, 404). “Cognitive benefits that can often be picked up in the first grade of school are usually gone by the third grade. By sixth grade,t hey have vanished entirely in aggregate statistics” (403).
“More intensive, hence more costly, preschool programs may raise intelligence, but both the size and the reality of the improvements are in dispute” (389).
“The one intervention that works consistently is adoption at birth from a bad family environment to a good one. The average gains in childhood IQ associated with adoption are in the region of six points—not spectacular but not negligible either” (389). But adopted children tend to not score as high as the biological children of their adopting parents (411). So a better environment improves IQ a small amount but not enough to close the gap caused by genes.
Vitamins seem to work too: Giving children vitamins for several weeks gained them eight points in nonverbal IQ, but verbal IQ didn’t improve. “Youngsters getting exactly the RDA had the largest gain ins cores; those taking either more or less of the supplement benefited less, if at all” (392).
“One basic error is to assume that new educational opportunities that successfully raise the average will also reduce differences in cognitive ability” (394). Improving education may improve the IQ of all the students, but the gap between the dumbest and smartest would remain. “A second broad difficulty with relying on improvements in education is that although they make some difference in IQ, the size of the effect is small. this conclusion is supported by evidence from both natural variation in education and planned educational experiments” (394). Providing disadvantaged students with compensatory education has had no effect in closing the gap between them and their more able peers (398).
“Because the schools that most minority children attended were measurably subpar in facilities and staff, it was assumed that the minority children fortunate enough to attend better schools would also sho improved cognitive functioning. But the report, issued in July 1966, announced that it had failed to find any benefit to the cognitive abilities of children in public primary or secondary schools that could be credited to better school quality” (395). “Parochial schools generally do a better job of developing the cognitive abilities of their students than public schools, which pointed to at least some factor in schooling that might be exploited to improve intelligence. Yet the basic conclusion of the report has stood the test of time and criticism: Variations in teacher credentials, per pupil expenditures, and the other objective factors in public schools do not account for much of the variation in the cognitive abilities of American school children” (395). I think private schools tend to have smarter students because the parents who send their kids there value education more than the public school parents, which is evidenced by the fact that the private school parents are willing to pay a lot of money for the kids to attend there. Also, parents who can afford to tend to be in a well paying job, and well paying jobs go to people of high intelligence, and high IQ parents are likely to produce high IQ kids. Throwing newer books and computers at public school kids is so obviously not going to make a difference. Schools just want more funding so they can raise their own wages. Another democrat scam.
“Large test score increases in local schools that are widely and routinely reported by the media have been plagued by fraud” like improper coaching on the tests by school employees, allowing extra time for students to complete the tests, and staff replacing wrong answers with right ones (399). Marva Collins got a lot of publicity about supposedly getting her Chicago pupils to do very well, but the authors found no hard evidence (399). “In the media, the good news is trumpeted as if there were no ambiguity; in the technical journals, the good news is viewed with deep suspicion and discounted. . . . The people who run these programs want them to succeed, so it’s hard for them to be objective. . . . Often the raw data from these [intervention] programs are not easily accessible to outside scholars. Not infrequently, when such data finally are made available, they reveal a different and less positive way of viewing the successful results than the one that had previously been published” (409).
Studying for the SAT improves scores, but not very much:
60 hours of studying earns 41 points on the combined verbal and math
100 hours of studying earns about 24 points on verbal and 39 points on math
300 hours of studying earns 70 points on the combined score
600 hours of studying earns 85 points (401-402)
In Venezuela, kids studied for IQ tests. 45 hours of study added .1-.4 SDs. 45 hours of studying for the SAT adds about .16 SD to the verbal score and .23 SD to the math score (402). Studying produces temporary increase in knowledge. The gains fade out over time as people forget what they study (402).
Education has been dumbed down, and the kids are getting dumber. More young people go to college than ever before, but a college degree has less meaning. It used to be that not all kids went to high school, and getting into high school had tough intellectual requirements (419). “It was not until 1963 that the dropout rate fell below 30% of all 17-year-olds” (436), but what does a low dropout rate matter if the kids who graduate are less intelligent than they were in the years when they were dropping out? “Achievement in high school does not pay off in higher wages or better jobs. Many employers assume that the high school diploma no longer means much more than the student warmed a seat for 12 years” (438). Guaranteeing college education like Bernie Sanders wants to do will merely increase the people with degrees but not increase intelligence. The smart students can already get into college even if they’re poor, through scholarships, loans, and grants. “Credentialism—unnecessarily limiting access to jobs to people with certain licenses and degrees—is part of the problem, not a solution” (445).
A study of “six textbooks over a 12-year period demonstrated that they had indeed been simplified, and students performed significantly better on the current, dumbed down texts” (433). 92.2% of the federal education budget in 1993 went to programs for the disadvantaged while only .1% went to programs for the gifted (434). The authors say that the gifted “are important not because they are more virtuous or deserving but because our society’s future depends on them” (442).
Among gifted students, SAT math scores have risen since about 1980, but SAT verbal scores dropped in the late 1960s and stayed low (429). I bet the reason is because the SAT verbal is all about vocabulary, and exposure to all those SAT words only happens if you read a lot of books. TV is again to blame because the more TV gets watched, the less books are being read. Math gets taught in school, but vocabulary isn’t really. High school English classes are all about writing essays and sometimes cramming for tests on remember what happened in books and why it was important, less focus on the meanings of words. The authors agree: “Television, rather than the printed page, became the primary medium for getting news and recreation at home after mid-century, and that process was also reaching full flower in the 1960s. Telephones displaced letter writing as the medium for long-range communication. Such trends are hostile to traditional definitions of excellence in verbal skills” (433).
Low verbal skills are a concern because the authors say that they encompass the ability to analyze, pick apart, disaggregate, synthesize, and ultimately to understand difficult problems (443). We need more wisdom, and wisdom doesn’t come naturally with a high IQ. It has to be added through education of a particular kind (443). To be truly educated, one must be “able to write competently and argue logically” (443). Long ago, “children were taught the inner logic of grammar and syntax because that kind of attention to detail was believed to carry over to greater precision of thinking. They were expected to learn Aristotle’s catalog of fallacies, because educators understood that the ability to assess an argument in everyday life was honed by mastering the formal elements of logic. Ethics and theology were part of the curriculum, to teach and to refine virtue” (443-444).
People might agree that more effort needs to be made in making kids smarter and improving education, but they seem to want those things with no effort. “Most American parents do not want drastic increases in the academic work load” (437). Parents don’t want their children burdened, and yet they want their children better educated. They want the better education to come from outside sources, like better teachers, more school funding, etc. Things that take responsibility away from the student and lay it on unaccountable others. Teachers are unlikely to improve, since “powerful teachers’ organizations will not tolerate certification tests that flunk large numbers of teachers. Organizations that represent minority groups will not tolerate national educational standards that cause large numbers of minority children to flunk. These are political facts of life that will not change soon, no matter who is in the White House” (440).
So what can be done about the problem of poor people and people with low IQ? Low IQ parents are more likely to raise their children worse than higher IQ parents. Should low IQ people, who are often poor, be given free childcare and public school while the wealthier people, who are more likely to be smarter and better parents, are forced to pay for childcare and private school or homeschool? Sounds like not a bad idea, except that the freeness of those things will make the poor uncaring/irresponsible about having lots of kids, thus increasing the poor children population and adding to the problem. Perhaps allow free childcare and school for the poor parent for the first child they have, on the condition that they get sterilized? Doubtful that this will ever happen since the government likes to have lots of idiots around to vote for them, pay taxes, and work the low skill jobs like fast food or retail. “Many low-income parents who try to do all the right things and pass their values on to their children will be increasingly unable to do so. They cannot propagate their norms in the face of a local culture in which illegitimacy, welfare, crime, and drugs are commonplace” (525). Yes, which is one reason why school is a bad thing because it undermines everything the parent tries to teach the child and replaces it with peer pressure to conform to whatever’s cool. School is only beneficial for kids who are being neglected or abused at home, and that’s a small percentage of the population. Once the neglect or abuse is known, those kids are removed from their homes anyway. So public school should probably be abolished. Education can still be compulsory as private school or homeschool only. Making private school the norm would make parents think twice before having kids, and probably also help to ensure that only parents who can afford it will have kids. That would help solve the dysgenesis problem (548).
“Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities we admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and incompetences, assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that of all the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen” (552).
Where I disagree with the authors:
I disagree with the authors when they talk about the emergence of a cognitive elite and that this is a bad thing (25, 510). I think that the people in the “elite” category who make all the decisions about society are more of the wealthy than the intelligent. Many politicians come from wealthy backgrounds and aren’t necessarily smart. Doctors and scientists are smart (and become wealthy if they weren’t already), but they don’t make policy decisions, and therefore don’t affect society much. The wealthy have always segregated themselves from the poorer people of society though, and that’s been the case since before the US became a country, so it’s not a new “problem.” Also it doesn’t make sense that the authors say a cognitive elite is a problem while also advocating for improving IQ and connecting high school performance with payoffs after graduation (438). Wouldn’t the latter just add to the cognitive elite where only the intelligent are wealthy?
The authors assume that people vote out of duty and neighborliness (256). I doubt that’s the reason. People vote to have a say in what goes on their neighborhood and on who gets elected. Less intelligent people are either too lazy or don’t care.
I disagree with the authors’ optimism that cognitive ability will remain important to jobs under any social policy and that the smart will continue to be successful (92). As of 2021, there has been a lot of pressure to increase affirmative action at the expense of hiring qualified, competent workers. I recall hearing about air traffic controllers no longer needing a test to get hired for the job because the test was deemed a barrier for blacks.
“Under what circumstances can a thoughtful, coolheaded appraisal lead one to conclude that it is better to conceive a child outside marriage?” (180) As a person with an IQ of 126 who chose to to conceive outside of marriage, I can answer this question. Marriage is an outdated tradition that doesn’t mean much anymore. It used to be required to marry in order for a couple to live together and start a family, but that’s not the case anymore. Marriage no longer ensures that the couple and their children will stay together forever. Nowadays it’s common for marriages to end in divorce. Both marriage and divorce cost money. It is stupid to waste your money conforming to an outdated practice which is not guaranteed to keep you together with your partner. You can make informal vows to stay together without it being blessed by the church or state. Whether you keep those vows, official or unofficial, is up to you. Making the vows official may not increase their likelihood of the couple staying together. By not marrying the partner you live with, you save yourself money from the marriage and potential divorce. By not marrying, you can live with someone for free, and you can separate from them for free. I believe that it is staying together with the partner which improves outcomes for children, not necessarily marriage. Marriage just legally and religiously acknowledges the relationship. This acknowledgement is unnecessary and expensive.
The authors seem to admit the stupidity of modern marriage later on: “Once the law says, ‘Well, in a legal sense, living together IS the same,’ what is the point of getting married?” (545) Exactly. There is no point. Marriage is supposed to be a promise to stay together, but since divorce is allowed, then spouses can break their promise just as any couple can break up. The reason married people have kids with better outcomes is because it’s a more stable home environment on average, since people who marry are more likely to TRY to stay together compared to unmarried couples. I, however, am an outlier who chooses to form lifelong committed relationships without the official stamp of marriage. But even marriages that stay together can have problems like domestic abuse. Probably the reason kids turn out better living with both parents is because the father is around to be the firmer disciplinarian. And daughters may feel a hole in their life without a father figure, so she may attempt to fill it with sexual partners.
The authors propose increasing marriage rates by making marriage the only way a woman can collect child support and the only way a father can see the child or claim it’s his or that he’s a father (545). I agree that this would increase the desire for marriage, especially among women. I don’t think those incentives for the men would work on many men though, but I have an idea that would: make it a crime for a man to have sex outside of marriage. And here’s the incentive I would find most compelling: make it free to marry and free to divorce! But with it free, would people just get married willy nilly? Probably, and that would take away the value of marriage, unfortunately. Maybe make marriage free but divorce cost a lot.
My opinion on multiple intelligences theory (20): I agree with the authors that linguistic/verbal and logical/mathematical are covered by IQ and are important skills for functioning in the world (558). The only important one of the multiple intelligences besides these two which is not covered by IQ is interpersonal skills. Skills in other multiple intelligences such as music and nature are not necessary for success in life. Interpersonal skills are very important for success in the world, and it explains why autistics can be geniuses in IQ but still unsuccessful because they lack interpersonal skills. But it could be that before autism (a relatively recent phenomenon brought about by external factors [toxins impair the social ability of otherwise bright people]), interpersonal skills correlated with mathematical and linguistic skills as well. Indeed, the book says “one of the earliest findings about mental tests was that the results of different tests of apparently different mental skills are positively correlated” (559). Intelligence in anything requires ability to learn and remember knowledge, so that can apply to music and nature too.
When I took the multiple intelligences quiz, I scored high in musical talent. But it wasn’t because I had any natural talent in it, it was only because I was taught music. I think intelligence is best assessed by what one knows without having been taught anything, and definitely without studying. The beauty of the IQ test is that it tries to assess knowledge that isn’t taught or studied for.
(Just for fun and out of curiosity, I took a multiple intelligences quiz again to see my results: 100% intrapersonal, 69% logical/mathematical (higher than I expected), 56% verbal/linguistic (lower than I expected), 56% naturalist, 44% musical (I used to score higher on this when I took these quizzes in the past), 44% visual/spatial, 34% bodily/kinesthetic, 25% interpersonal. I think I have pretty high interpersonal intelligence—like reading people—but it’s just that I don’t like socializing. On an Okcupid test I took years ago which only assessed logic, language, and social IQ, I scored highest in social.)
More interesting statistics:
“Statistically, smart men tend to be more farsighted than dumb men” (160). This is in line with my opinion that the N type in Myers-Briggs being smarter than S types. It’s also smarter to be a thinker rather than a feeler. And it’s smarter to be a planner (“judger”) than a spontaneous person (“perceiver”). But whether it’s smarter to be an introvert or an extrovert, I’m not sure. ENTJs would probably be more successful in life since much success depends on people interaction. But INTJs would probably have more self-knowledge and book knowledge. Depends what you value, I guess.
“Over 90% of Americans of both sexes have married by the time they reach their 40s” (169). “Opposites do not really attract when it comes to love and marriage. Likes attract. . . . The average correlation of 43 spouse correlations for various tests of cognitive ability was +.45, almost as high as the typical correlation of IQs among siblings” (110).
bssmmle's review against another edition
2.0
Наложи се да я слушам по повод есето ми по предмета "Педагогическа психология". Ще пиша за интелигентността, IQ-то и как да ги мотивира учителя в рамките на задълженията му в училищната система. Темата ми крайно интересна. Тази книга в началото ми даде интересни насоки, и ще използвам един-два цитата от нея, но разбирам, защо е свързана с редица проблеми. Писана е през 1994г. и личи, че е от едно различно време, и е писана от различна от работническата прослойка (в икономически, не в политически смисъл). Твърде политически коректна, но едновременно с това на границата на подкрепата за сегрегацията. Не ми допадна това подкрепяне на статуквото. Нещата според статистиката стоят така и така в проценти и това е константа. Мисля, че това в днешно време, дори в бюрократичната образователна система у нас, е отживелица. За да имам място сред "новото поколение учители" съм длъжна да мисля така! Иначе няма с какво да допринеса.
ericwelch's review against another edition
2.0
minor editing 3/10/10
One would hope that decisions are made based on solid evidence and a modicum of rational thought. Often that is not the case, however Sometimes rehashed data and superficial analysis, particularly in the area of social policy, appeal to society because they reflect changes in society's perceptions of reality To some extent that explains the popularity of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. There seems to be an unconscious desire to locate society's ills in our genes. Perhaps another misplaced wish is to allocate blame on something or someone else. The premise of The Bell Curve is that there are inherent genetic differences in intelligence between groups and races, e.g., whites, on the average, score lower than Asians; blacks, score lower than whites, etc. and that intelligent people are more succesful, i.e. make more money. (Surely, mixed races score higher than everybody, so score one for interracial marriage.)
Charles Lane ("The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve," in The New York Review of Books, December 1, 1994) and Stephen Jay Gould ("Curveball" in The New Yorker, November 28, 1994) have taken the trouble to actually look at the documentation Herrnstein and Murray used to support The Bell Curve, and they have found it wanting.
The Bell Curve does not purport to be a piece of original scholarship, but a review of the literature, so examination of the sources is certainly relevant. One source for the book was a publication entitled The Mankind Quarterly or, more specifically, articles written by contributors to that journal. Unfortunately, that magazine was founded for the sole purpose of selling the idea that whites are genetically superior to other races. Its founder and editor-in-chief was a vocal supporter of apartheid and segregation in the United States. Most reputable anthropologists have denounced the magazine. One of the major sources that Herrnstein and Murray use to show evidence of lower I.Q. scores of African blacks is an I.Q. test that had been declared invalid for non-Americans. (One of the questions, for example, showed a tennis court without a net and the test taker was supposed to sketch in the net to get credit for the answer) Lane also discovered that the source Herrnstein and Murray used to document the higher scores of Asians sampled the children of only wealthy Japanese, compared to a much broader sample of American children. A study done by a prominent social scientist in Minnesota that carefully matched socioeconomic and demographic factors found no difference in I.Q. at all between Japanese, Taiwanese and American children. (It is interesting to note that Herrnstein was the author of a 1971 Atlantic article that promoted paying well-educated mothers for higher birth rates.)
But it remains for that most lucid of commentators, Stephen Jay Gould, to put the whole issue of heritability of I.Q. into perspective; "Take a trait that is far more heritable than anyone has ever claimed I.Q. to be but is politically uncontroversial - body height. Suppose that I measure the heights of adult males in a poor Indian village beset with nutritional deprivation, and suppose the average height of adult males is five feet six inches. Heritability within the village is high, which is to say that tall fathers... tend to have tall sons while short fathers tend to have short sons. But this high heritability within the village does not mean that better nutrition might not raise average height to five feet ten inches in a few generations. Similarly, the well-documented fifteen-point average difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites in America, with substantial heritability of l.Q. in family lines within each group, permits no automatic conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average enough to equal or surpass the white mean.
Herrnstein and Murray conveniently ignore documented high I.Q. scores of poor black children adopted into affluent, intellectual white families. They also overlook average I.Q. increases in some nations since the Second World War equal to the entire fifteen-point difference now separating blacks and whites in America. Gould has another gripe; the failure of lay readers to penetrate the authors' scientism. He quotes many reviewers who said in their reviews that they were unable to judge the adequacy of the arguments because of their lack of scientific training. Gould says, "The book is a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism, and it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on nonprofessional commentators. It runs to eight hundred and forty-five pages, including more than a hundred pages of appendixes filled with figures. So the text looks complicated, and reviewers shy away with a knee-jerk claim, that while they suspect fallacies of argument, they really cannot judge." Yet the central premise of The Bell Curve rests entirely on two entirely unsupported assumptions; "(1) that there is a single, general measure of mental ability, and (2) that the I.Q. tests that purport to measure this ability... aren't culturally biased." Ironically, Herrnstein and Murray fail to document these assumptions in their book. According to Gould, "they simply declare that it has been decided."
Gould examined their statistical methodology and found it, too, lacking in precision and accuracy. But he finds their solutions completely abhorrent. They actually write in The Bell Curve that those with lower I.Q.s should be placed in a custodial state ... a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business." Do you suppose they would let them have guns or TV's?
Gould quotes John Stuart Mill; "The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious." And Gould ends his review; "How strange that we would let a single and false number [I.Q.:] divide us, when evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry-thus undergirding with a shared humanity that infinite variety which custom can never state. E pluribus unum."
Interestingly, there is a very revealing piece of data contained in Appendix 5 of The Bell Curve (and yes, I have read the book) and that is the results of ACT, SAT, and GRE scores of whites and blacks between T 970 and 1990. Blacks score on average generally lower than whites, but what is interesting is that the difference has narrowed. "Overall the evidence seems clear beyond a reasonable doubt... the narrowing was achieved because black scores rose more than white scores, not because white scores were falling." That would seem to provide evidence that perhaps some of the social tinkering may have been working, contrary to Murray's thesis in Losing Ground, a book he published some years ago that was an indictment of the welfare system as a failure.
Murray and Herrnstein make some statements in The Bell Curve that made me wonder about their cognitive ability. For example, on page 201 they state; "Going on welfare really is a dumb idea, and that is why women who are low in cognitive ability end up there; but also such women have little to take to the job market, and welfare is one of their few appropriate recourses when they have a baby and no husband to help." So I guess it was pretty smart, huh.
A recent study that bears on the problems raised by Herrnstein and Murray reports that many children suffer permanent intellectual damage before they enter first grade. "Neuroscientists now believe that a child's future intellectual growth is shaped during these years by the kind of stimulation a child gets." The child's brain can only become organized and make associations if stimulated early in life, which makes the role of the parent crucial.
Studies done on kittens where one eye was sutured shut - we'll discuss cruelty in laboratory experiments in another issue - and then returned to a normal sensory world left the kittens now permanently blind.
"In 1991, 53 percent of all women with one-year old babies were in the workforce, up from 17 percent in 1965, and nearly half of the children under three were being looked after by someone other than their parents."
The report ["Starting Points; Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children." Carnegie Corporation, 1994:] cites studies that show the "care infants and toddlers get is often of such substandard quality that it adversely affects their development." The most discouraging aspect suggests that there may be little that educators and parents can do after age three. "There may be a permanent gap between youngsters who have had the stimulation necessary to their mental development and those who have not - no matter what schools and teachers do." And' of course, since they would never take I.Q. tests that early, the differences in I.Q. may stem from early deprivation of stimulation rather than an innate cognitive difference, yet the outcome may be depressingly similar.
Cont. in the next comment. Goodreads, doesn't like my verbose reviews. :)
One would hope that decisions are made based on solid evidence and a modicum of rational thought. Often that is not the case, however Sometimes rehashed data and superficial analysis, particularly in the area of social policy, appeal to society because they reflect changes in society's perceptions of reality To some extent that explains the popularity of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. There seems to be an unconscious desire to locate society's ills in our genes. Perhaps another misplaced wish is to allocate blame on something or someone else. The premise of The Bell Curve is that there are inherent genetic differences in intelligence between groups and races, e.g., whites, on the average, score lower than Asians; blacks, score lower than whites, etc. and that intelligent people are more succesful, i.e. make more money. (Surely, mixed races score higher than everybody, so score one for interracial marriage.)
Charles Lane ("The Tainted Sources of The Bell Curve," in The New York Review of Books, December 1, 1994) and Stephen Jay Gould ("Curveball" in The New Yorker, November 28, 1994) have taken the trouble to actually look at the documentation Herrnstein and Murray used to support The Bell Curve, and they have found it wanting.
The Bell Curve does not purport to be a piece of original scholarship, but a review of the literature, so examination of the sources is certainly relevant. One source for the book was a publication entitled The Mankind Quarterly or, more specifically, articles written by contributors to that journal. Unfortunately, that magazine was founded for the sole purpose of selling the idea that whites are genetically superior to other races. Its founder and editor-in-chief was a vocal supporter of apartheid and segregation in the United States. Most reputable anthropologists have denounced the magazine. One of the major sources that Herrnstein and Murray use to show evidence of lower I.Q. scores of African blacks is an I.Q. test that had been declared invalid for non-Americans. (One of the questions, for example, showed a tennis court without a net and the test taker was supposed to sketch in the net to get credit for the answer) Lane also discovered that the source Herrnstein and Murray used to document the higher scores of Asians sampled the children of only wealthy Japanese, compared to a much broader sample of American children. A study done by a prominent social scientist in Minnesota that carefully matched socioeconomic and demographic factors found no difference in I.Q. at all between Japanese, Taiwanese and American children. (It is interesting to note that Herrnstein was the author of a 1971 Atlantic article that promoted paying well-educated mothers for higher birth rates.)
But it remains for that most lucid of commentators, Stephen Jay Gould, to put the whole issue of heritability of I.Q. into perspective; "Take a trait that is far more heritable than anyone has ever claimed I.Q. to be but is politically uncontroversial - body height. Suppose that I measure the heights of adult males in a poor Indian village beset with nutritional deprivation, and suppose the average height of adult males is five feet six inches. Heritability within the village is high, which is to say that tall fathers... tend to have tall sons while short fathers tend to have short sons. But this high heritability within the village does not mean that better nutrition might not raise average height to five feet ten inches in a few generations. Similarly, the well-documented fifteen-point average difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites in America, with substantial heritability of l.Q. in family lines within each group, permits no automatic conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average enough to equal or surpass the white mean.
Herrnstein and Murray conveniently ignore documented high I.Q. scores of poor black children adopted into affluent, intellectual white families. They also overlook average I.Q. increases in some nations since the Second World War equal to the entire fifteen-point difference now separating blacks and whites in America. Gould has another gripe; the failure of lay readers to penetrate the authors' scientism. He quotes many reviewers who said in their reviews that they were unable to judge the adequacy of the arguments because of their lack of scientific training. Gould says, "The book is a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism, and it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on nonprofessional commentators. It runs to eight hundred and forty-five pages, including more than a hundred pages of appendixes filled with figures. So the text looks complicated, and reviewers shy away with a knee-jerk claim, that while they suspect fallacies of argument, they really cannot judge." Yet the central premise of The Bell Curve rests entirely on two entirely unsupported assumptions; "(1) that there is a single, general measure of mental ability, and (2) that the I.Q. tests that purport to measure this ability... aren't culturally biased." Ironically, Herrnstein and Murray fail to document these assumptions in their book. According to Gould, "they simply declare that it has been decided."
Gould examined their statistical methodology and found it, too, lacking in precision and accuracy. But he finds their solutions completely abhorrent. They actually write in The Bell Curve that those with lower I.Q.s should be placed in a custodial state ... a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business." Do you suppose they would let them have guns or TV's?
Gould quotes John Stuart Mill; "The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious." And Gould ends his review; "How strange that we would let a single and false number [I.Q.:] divide us, when evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry-thus undergirding with a shared humanity that infinite variety which custom can never state. E pluribus unum."
Interestingly, there is a very revealing piece of data contained in Appendix 5 of The Bell Curve (and yes, I have read the book) and that is the results of ACT, SAT, and GRE scores of whites and blacks between T 970 and 1990. Blacks score on average generally lower than whites, but what is interesting is that the difference has narrowed. "Overall the evidence seems clear beyond a reasonable doubt... the narrowing was achieved because black scores rose more than white scores, not because white scores were falling." That would seem to provide evidence that perhaps some of the social tinkering may have been working, contrary to Murray's thesis in Losing Ground, a book he published some years ago that was an indictment of the welfare system as a failure.
Murray and Herrnstein make some statements in The Bell Curve that made me wonder about their cognitive ability. For example, on page 201 they state; "Going on welfare really is a dumb idea, and that is why women who are low in cognitive ability end up there; but also such women have little to take to the job market, and welfare is one of their few appropriate recourses when they have a baby and no husband to help." So I guess it was pretty smart, huh.
A recent study that bears on the problems raised by Herrnstein and Murray reports that many children suffer permanent intellectual damage before they enter first grade. "Neuroscientists now believe that a child's future intellectual growth is shaped during these years by the kind of stimulation a child gets." The child's brain can only become organized and make associations if stimulated early in life, which makes the role of the parent crucial.
Studies done on kittens where one eye was sutured shut - we'll discuss cruelty in laboratory experiments in another issue - and then returned to a normal sensory world left the kittens now permanently blind.
"In 1991, 53 percent of all women with one-year old babies were in the workforce, up from 17 percent in 1965, and nearly half of the children under three were being looked after by someone other than their parents."
The report ["Starting Points; Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children." Carnegie Corporation, 1994:] cites studies that show the "care infants and toddlers get is often of such substandard quality that it adversely affects their development." The most discouraging aspect suggests that there may be little that educators and parents can do after age three. "There may be a permanent gap between youngsters who have had the stimulation necessary to their mental development and those who have not - no matter what schools and teachers do." And' of course, since they would never take I.Q. tests that early, the differences in I.Q. may stem from early deprivation of stimulation rather than an innate cognitive difference, yet the outcome may be depressingly similar.
Cont. in the next comment. Goodreads, doesn't like my verbose reviews. :)
shoaibmnagi's review
1.0
This book aims at tackling a very broad issue, but its lack of impartiality and its reliance on questionable studies makes it nothing more than erotica for those on the alt-right.
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