The Pointlessness of the Central Flaw in Current Thought

In the latest brouhaha over new Nixon tapes, I saw something in passing by Slate writer Jack Shafer that is illustrative of the most fundamental weakness in modern thought. So, let me set the stage for a bit before getting to the key bit that wouldn't even be noticed by a non-crimethinker.

Jack Shafer writes in Slate:

From his throne in hell, Richard Nixon commands our attention once again with newly released White House tapes from February and March 1973 that drop another tanker load of piss and bile on Jews. ...

After recounting various private remarks of Nixon about Jews, Shafer turns to consider the arguments of Nixon's Jewish defenders:

Nixon has never lacked Jewish defenders. Just six months ago, writer Ben Stein, the son of Herbert Stein, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon, pooh-poohed the Jew-counting story that Noah has so determinedly tracked. Wrote Stein:

Now, bear in mind, Nixon was by far the best friend the Jewish people have ever had since Abraham. He had the most Jewish appointees to high offices, the most pro-Israel foreign and defense policy in history, saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War, put Russia at bay about helping Egypt in that war—was just the best friend Jews have ever had, including Jews themselves.

Alas, being actively pro-Israel doesn't automatically exonerate Nixon from anti-Semitism. For one thing, he and Kissinger were playing a global board game with the Soviets in those years, and the Soviets were backing Egypt. An Israeli defeat would have been an American defeat, too. For another, Nixon didn't want to go down in history as the American president who "lost" Israel and put the Jewish people in peril.

True, but Nixon and his chief domestic policy adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan of 1969-70 were also simultaneously playing a domestic board game with New York intellectuals in those years. Nixon and Moynihan had long conversations in 1969 about how they could promote a self-conscious neoconservative tendency among Moynihan's fellow New York intellectuals. Portraying Israel as a crucial bastion of the Cold War (a position that Ike and, perhaps, JFK would have regarded as objectively silly) was intended by Nixon and Moynihan to encourage at least some intellectual Jews to take the Cold War more personally, just as the British government had found it expedient to issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to appeal to Jewish opinion during Britain's struggle with Germany and Austria. Nixon's considered judgment was that he didn't need all the Jewish intellectuals on his side, just some of them, and he devoted a lot of effort to wooing them. As we can tell by reading Commentary and The Weekly Standard in 2010, Nixon and Moynihan had a fair degree of success with with wooing a vocal minority of Jewish intellectuals toward supporting an aggressive American foreign policy.

To be open-minded about Nixon, let's go ahead and put his support of Israel in the asset side of his anti-Semitism account.

What then to make of his long list of Jewish appointees? In a newspaper interview last year promoting his book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz beat Stein to the punch on Nixon's defense of Israel but added that Nixon "was the kind of anti-Semite who thought that Jews were smarter than everybody else. That's why he had Kissinger. That's why he had Arthur Burns, Herb Stein. … A lot of Nixon's anti-Semitism is talk. ... His anti-Semitism consisted of resentment of Jews for being liberals and hating him. It's not the traditional kind of anti-Semitism." [Emphasis added.]

Podhoretz is half, maybe three-quarters right. Nixon did seem to believe Jews were exceptionally smart, although these views were obviously colored by the fact that most of his encounters with Jews in his adult life were with successful Jews. Did he similarly extrapolate from his encounters with successful Catholics that they were brilliant, too? Mormons? Cubans? Armenians?

This last paragraph is worth re-reading. Shafer is attempting to first construct, then debunk a socially acceptable Occam's Butterknife defense of Nixon's opinion that American Jews tend to be smart. Let me flesh out the argument:

How could Nixon have ever come to the conclusion that Jews tend to be above average in intelligence? Well, perhaps he was an unwitting victim of selection bias [as outlined at length by novelist Michael Chabon in the NYT last June], which caused him to be unintentionally wrong. See, Nixon employed brilliant Jews like Kissinger, so he must have wrongly inferred from how smart Kissinger was that Jews on average were above average in intelligence. On the other hand, he also employed brilliant Catholics like Moynihan. And yet he does not appear to have inferred from long talks with Moynihan that Catholics were notably above average in intelligence. Therefore, Nixon can't be convicted of merely a lesser charge of Anti-Semitism by Error. Nixon was instead guilty of Anti-Semitism in the Highest [contemporary] Degree: noticing that American Jews tend to be smarter than average! Case closed!

Of course, Occam's Razor would suggest that just maybe Nixon, who was on a national ticket five times, winning four times, actually had a decent empirical grasp of social realities. And, if Nixon had had any questions about average Jewish intelligence, he could have asked Moynihan, who, with Moynihan's co-author Nathan Glazer, was academia's leading expert on white ethnics.

Now, you could say that Shafer's assumption that Nixon noticing the overwhelming evidence for Jews being smarter on average renders him odious is just an example of the contemporary aversion to realistic thought epitomized by how calling something a "stereotype" is now assumed to automatically refute its empirical truth.

But, over the last decade and a half, the evidence keeps piling up that the Jewish IQ advantage is not just an example of what's wrong with intellectual life today, but the single most important cause for contemporary thinking going off the tracks.

While I was reading all the frenzied reaction to The Bell Curve sixteen years ago, I noticed that not much of it was actually coming from blacks. Thomas Sowell had a response, we know now that Barack Obama broke his Vow of Silence to comment on NPR upon The Bell Curve, and so forth, but those were mostly the exceptions. There really aren't that many black intellectuals that other intellectuals pay attention to.

Those most vocally enraged by The Bell Curve were white intellectuals, especially Jews. To them, the assertion that the average black IQ was equal to the average American IQ serves as the outer bulwark defending the inner sanctum: the belief that the average Jewish American IQ is equal to the average American IQ. If you let the peasants realize that blacks are on average could be less smart, eventually they'll figure out that Jews on average could be more smart, and then they'll be coming for us with pitchforks!

Of course, this dominant belief about smarts held by contemporary intellectuals is about 99% stupid. Practically everybody in America already realizes that Jews tend to be smarter. And, guess what, they're okay with it. Most Americans appreciate Jewish intelligence.

Consider the example of, say, Richard Nixon, a powerful and congenitally angry man who was well aware of the facts about Jewish intelligence. What was his response to this knowledge?

He searched out ways to do more favors for Jews.

So, the central, underlying flaw in the edifice of current intellectualizing is pointless. 

On the other hand, an intellectual climate that says, in effect, you can't be a genuine intellectual unless you publicly humiliate yourself by saying things like Nixon must have assumed Jews tend to be smart because he only met smart Jews has a lot of usefulness as a loyalty test. It's like a fraternity initiation in which they'll only let you in if you run around campus dressed as a marshmallow. It shows how much you want to be one of us. You won't let self-respect get in your way.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rindermann's "Smart Fraction" paper

I should have gotten around to posting on this before, but here, via Steve Hsu, is the 2009 paper The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competences of peoples on social development by Heiner Rindermann, Michael Sailer (no know relation), and James Thompson.

To test La Griffe du Lion's "smart fraction" theory, they first synthesize a large number of results from international school achievement tests (PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS), then convert them to an IQ-like scale where Britain has a mean of 100 and the standard deviation is 15. (They don't use Lynn and Vanhanen's database of IQ tests, but Rindermann previously showed strong correlations between L & V's numbers and performance on international school achievement tests. Just looking through this data from international school achievement tests, it's remarkable how few surprises there are if you are familiar with Lynn and Vanhanen's data from IQ tests.

The most notable difference that jumps out at me is that the Irish do fine on school achievement tests (100), where they've done mediocre on some IQ tests, which I never quite believed. It might be worth investigating this discordance. For some reason, I'm reminded of the story of the English traveler in County Kerry who asks the Irish stationmaster why the clock at the north end of the railway station platform says 12:00 and the clock at the south end of the platform says 12:10: "And what would we be needing two clocks for if they both told the same time?" says the Irishman.

There are big concerns about school achievement tests, such as clarity of translations. Or, what does it mean to test fourth graders? For example, Finland doesn't start kids at regular school until seven. And how do we know the tests are nationally representative? And how do we know how hard the kids worked on the tests? Rindermann's aware of these problems (see his 2007 paper) and he's given it a pretty good shot at working out adjustments. But, the point is that we shouldn't put too much weight on any single number. For example, the Kazakhstan score is based on a single test of a single grade for a single year. (Rindermann should try to come up with a way to summarize how many datapoints he has for each country.)

Since these tests report performance at the 5th and 95th percentiles, we can see not only the means but also the performance at the top and bottom by countries. Here, for example, is the last page of their results, Singapore to Yugoslavia/Serbia.

Singapore, a high-income high-cost, well-administered city-state, has the highest school achievement test scores in the world at their 95th percentile. It would be interesting to compare a metropolitan area, such as Silicon Valley, to Singapore. Judging by National Merit Scholar awards, the southern half of Silicon Valley would blow away even Singapore at the 95th percentile.

They write:

The highest values for the smart fractions are found in East Asia (1. Singapore IQ 127, 2. South Korea IQ 125, 3. Japan IQ 124, 5. Taiwan IQ 123, 9. Hong Kong IQ 122). A similar result was found in psychometric (average) intelligence or in student assessment studies (see Rindermann, 2007a). Different from the SAS, Scandinavia reaches in the cognitive elite not such a good rank (11. Finland IQ 121, 12. Estonia IQ 121 [the Baltics are added here], 16. Sweden IQ 120, 25. Denmark IQ 118, 34. Latvia IQ 117, 38. Lithuania IQ 116, 39. Iceland IQ 116, 41. Norway IQ 116). Maybe a homogenizing educational policy furthering weaker but disadvantaging high ability pupils leads to a smaller standard deviation and lower values for a gifted subgroup. Better are the traditional Commonwealth countries (5. New Zealand IQ 123, 7. Australia IQ 122 and 8. United Kingdom with IQ 122). They are followed by Western and Eastern European and North American countries, by South European countries, Arab or Muslim and Latin American countries and finally by sub-Saharan countries.

Most of the Gulf Arab countries do awful, but United Arab Emirates does quite well (mean 92).

The countries with the lowest results [at the 95th percentile] are 84. Botswana (IQ 96), 85. Saudi-Arabia (IQ 95), 86. Morocco (IQ 95), 87. Kyrgyzstan (IQ 94), 88. Belize (IQ 90), 89. Ghana (IQ 89) and 90. Yemen (IQ 84). Presumably many not participating countries would have lower values.

Some astonishing results are observable like the high level of Kazakhstan (6., IQ 122) and the comparatively low for Israel (31., IQ 118, mean 93).

You mean, we were lied to by the movie Borat?

For Kazakhstan we have only results from TIMSS 2007 (4th grade); Mullis et al. (2008, p. 34) describe sample anomalies, a correction would be necessary. Israel has participated in several studies, compared to older studies and [for?] Jews in the Western World the results are deteriorating (e.g. Lynn & Longley, 2006). Most probably multiple reasons are responsible and not only the 20% fraction of Arabs (a thorough analysis would be necessary).

Israel's score at the 95th percentile is ahead of Norway's, so it's not that bad, but Long Island would probably do better. Israel is a country where Zionist intellectuals designed a populist, non-intellectual culture, so smart kids don't get as much cultural backing in Israel as in other parts of the Jewish diaspora.

There are also characteristic differences between mean, upper and lower levels. For instance between Canada and USA there is no difference in the upper level (IQ 120 and 120), but in the lower level (IQ 80 and 75). The past history of slavery and a different immigration policy (or different success of migration policies and geographical distance to societies with lower mean abilities) may be reflected into this difference. A similar pattern could be found for Finland and Germany: The difference in the upper level is only 1.20 IQ-points (IQ 121 and 120), but at the lower level 9.60 IQ-points (IQ 85 and 76). Most likely different immigration histories are reflected here, furthermore differences in educational policy (age of tracking, in Germany between age 10 and 12, in Finland at age 16). Early tracking increases ability variance.

I presume Thilo Sarrazin was thinking about results like this? It would be fun to see Jurgen Habermas respond to Rindermann.

Using regression analysis (as predictors mean and lower level) the largest residual (standing for difference between upper level and the rest) is found in South Africa (with its heterogeneous population of European, Asian and African descent), inverted the largest residual (standing for difference between lower level and the rest) is found in Belgium (probably a result of immigration and educational policy).

A few other notes: Armenia has a low bottom but a decent high end, close to Norway and Belgium. Armenia scores better than Georgia. Oddly, Azerbaijan beats Armenia at the bottom but has a very poor top.

Ireland, which has lagged in some IQ tests in the past, does fine (99.9), almost exactly the same as the U.K. (by definition, 100.0).

Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105). If you want to complain about teacher's unions, start with Mexico, where teachers have a hereditary right to pass their jobs down to their offspring! Mexico ought to be able to bump these numbers up. Brazil is another country with a weak high end (105).

China and India aren't on the list.

Estonia and Finland, neither of which has many immigrants, have about the narrowest 5th to 95th percentile gaps among smart countries: 36 points. In contrast, Japan, which we like to think of as homogeneous, is 41 points, Taiwan 41, South Korea 39, Hong Kong 38, and Singapore 48.

South Korea (106) has the highest mean and highest 5th percentile (86).

They go on to evaluate La Griffe's Smart Fraction theory. Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rushton & Jensen v. Flynn on Flynn Effect

Here are the abstract of papers in Intelligence debating the relevance of the Flynn Effect to the white-black IQ gap. J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen write:

In this Editorial we correct the false claim that g loadings and inbreeding depression scores correlate with the secular gains in IQ. This claim has been used to render the logic of heritable g a “red herring” and an “absurdity” as an explanation of Black–White differences because secular gains are environmental in origin. In point of fact, while g loadings and inbreeding depression scores on the 11 subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children correlate significantly positively with Black–White differences (0.61 and 0.48, Pb0.001), they correlate significantly negatively (or not at all) with the secular gains (mean r=−0.33, Pb0.001; and 0.13, ns, respectively). Moreover, heritabilities calculated from twins also correlate with the g loadings (r=0.99, Pb0.001 for the estimated true correlation), providing biological evidence for a true genetic g, as opposed to a mere statistical g. While the secular gains are on g-loaded tests (such as the Wechsler), they are negatively correlated with the most g-loaded components of those tests. Also, the tests lose their g loadedness over time with training, retesting, and familiarity. In an analysis of mathematics and reading scores from tests such as the NAEP and Coleman Report over the last 54 years, we show that there has been no narrowing of the gap in either IQ scores or in educational achievement. From 1954 to 2008, Black 17-year-olds have consistently scored at about the level of White 14-year-olds, yielding IQ equivalents of 85 for 1954, 82 for 1965, 70 for 1975, and 81 for 2008. We conclude that predictions about the Black–White IQ gap narrowing as a result of the secular rise are unsupported. The (mostly heritable) cause of the one is not the (mostly environmental) cause of the other. The Flynn Effect (the secular rise in IQ) is not a Jensen Effect (because it does not occur on g).

Here's Rushton's VDARE.com article on his latest paper with Jensen.

Flynn responds:

The ranking of Wechsler subtests in terms of their g loadings is equivalent to ranking them in terms of the cognitive complexity of the tasks measured. Lower performing groups do not always fall behind higher performing groups the more complex the task. But that is the general rule, no matter whether the cause of the lower performance is genetic or environmental. Complex tasks tend to be more affected by genetic differences in inherited traits, have higher heritability, and be more sensitive to inbreeding depression. Therefore, the method of correlated vectors sheds no light on the race and IQ debate. It is irrelevant that black/white score differences on Wechsler subtests rise as their g loading, heritability, and inbreeding sensitivity rise.

Here's my review of Flynn's book on the Flynn Effect on VDARE, which Flynn thought did a pretty good job of making Flynn's thinking accessible.

Flynn always uses basketball analogies in arguing against the necessity of genetic causes in IQ differences, but that obviously raises issues unhelpful to Flynn's cause. Other sports can provide better examples. For example, in golf, it's widely acknowledged that the hardest clubs to hit well are the long irons. And the long irons are precisely where Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, the two greatest golfers, distanced themselves from the field, by reaching par-5 greens accurately in two to give themselves putts for eagles. Nature or nurture? Well, certainly a lot of both, but the exact balance is hard to say.

Flynn sums up that he doesn't believe either his own Flynn Effect or Jensen's g-factor analysis is very persuasive in determining the nature-nurture breakdown in the racial IQ gap:

American blacks are not in a time warp so that the environmental causes of their IQ gap with whites are identical to the environmental causes of the IQ gap between the generations. The race and IQ debate should focus on testing the relevant environmental hypotheses. The Flynn Effect is no shortcut; correlations offered by Rushton and Jensen are no shortcut. There are no shortcuts at all.

Flynn has a Blind Side / Stolen Generation-style theory that black culture doesn't lead to strong cognitive demands, although he's leery about spelling out the policy implications, although you can see it made a little more explicit in the increasing enthusiasm in, say, the New York Times Sunday Magazine for taking black children away from their mothers as many hours per day as possible and turning them over to Ivy League Teach for America workers to raise in a white-run world.

Maybe it will work, I dunno. Yet, I suspect we'll just be seeing in a few decades a replay of the Australian experience, with whites issuing an apology to blacks for the "Borrowed Generation."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Why Do IQ Scores Vary By Nation?"

Newsweek asks:

Why Do IQ Scores Vary By Nation? 

Global differences in intelligence is a sensitive topic, long fraught with controversy and still tinged by the disgraceful taint of pseudosciences such as craniometry that strove to prove the white “race” as the most clever of them all. But recent data, perplexingly, has indeed shown cognitive ability to be higher in some countries than in others....

Using data on national “disease burdens” (life years lost due to infectious diseases) and average intelligence scores, the authors found a striking inverse correlation—around 67 percent. The countries with the lowest average IQ scores—Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Mozambique, Gabon—have among the highest disease burdens. In contrast, nations with low disease burdens top the IQ list, with Singapore, South Korea, China, Japan, and Italy in the lead.

There's no question that hookworm and many other diseases sap mental energy. But Singapore is as close to the equator and as low in altitude as those African countries, so its inherent disease burden potential is about as bad.

Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term the Matthew Effect from the Gospel:

"For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away."

But the passive voice here is misleading. The Singaporeans, under the guidance of their supersmart control freak leader Lee Kwan Yew, weren't given a low disease burden, they earned it. They worked very hard to improve hygiene and health. What would be a more important use for spare IQ points than to fight disease?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Chinese science, technology, and IQ

From the Washington Post last week:

China pushing the envelope on science, and sometimes ethics
By John Pomfret

SHENZHEN, CHINA -- Last year, Zhao Bowen was part of a team that cracked the genetic code of the cucumber. These days, he's probing the genetic basis for human IQ.

Zhao is 17.

Centuries after it led the world in technological prowess -- think gunpowder, irrigation and the printed word -- China has barged back into the ranks of the great powers in science. With the brashness of a teenager, in some cases literally, China's scientists and inventors are driving a resurgence in potentially world-changing research.

Unburdened by social and legal constraints common in the West, China's trailblazing scientists are also pushing the limits of ethics and principle as they create a new -- and to many, worrisome -- Wild West in the Far East.

A decade ago, no one considered China a scientific competitor. Its best and brightest agreed and fled China in a massive brain drain to university research labs at Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

But over the past five years, Western-educated scientists and gutsy entrepreneurs have conducted a rearguard action, battling China's hidebound bureaucracy to establish research institutes and companies. Those have lured home scores [i..e., at least 40] of Western-trained Chinese researchers dedicated to transforming the People's Republic of China into a scientific superpower.

"They have grown so fast and so suddenly that people are still skeptical," said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley who collaborates with Chinese counterparts. "But we should get used to it. There is competition from China now, and it's really quite drastic how things have changed."

... China has jumped to second place -- up from 14th in 1995 -- behind the United States in the number of research articles published in scientific and technical journals worldwide.

Backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Chinese medical researchers, partnering with a firm in the United States, beat out an Indian team last year to develop a new test for cervical cancer that costs less than $5. The goal is to test 10 million Chinese women within three years. ...

Meanwhile, Chinese military researchers appear to be on the cusp of a significant breakthrough: a land-based anti-ship ballistic missile that is causing concern within the U.S. Navy.

In 2007, Chinese geneticists discovered vast differences in the genetic makeup of Africans, Asians and Caucasians. They will soon report a breakthrough showing why some people -- such as Tibetans -- can live effortlessly at high altitudes while others can't.

There are challenges. China is still considered weak at innovation, and Chinese bureaucrats routinely mandate discoveries -- fantasy-world marching orders that Western scientists view as absurd.

In 2008, the Ministry of Science and Technology gave researchers two years to come up with 30 medicines ready for clinical trials and only five days to apply for grants to fund the work. That's despite the fact that since the communist revolution in 1949, China has developed only one internationally recognized drug -- Artemisinin -- to fight malaria.

Chinese science and technology is also awash in scams and sometimes-troubling practices. More than 200 institutions in China practice controversial stem cell therapies for people suffering from injuries, diseases or birth defects. Although the government moved last year to regulate the industry, none of the techniques has been subjected to rigorous clinical trials.

China is also the leading source of what are known as "junk" patents -- ridiculous claims of "inventions" that are little more than snake-oil scams.

"This discovery is going to shake the world!" bellowed Liu Jian, chief executive of Hualong Fertilizer Technique Co. Liu says he has developed a method to reduce fertilizer use by half through the use of nanotechnology, although officials at the Agriculture Ministry mock the claim. "Will you help us raise some capital?" Liu asked in an interview.

Finally, plagiarism and doctored results seem to be as common as chopsticks. A study by Wuhan University uncovered an entire industry of bogus report and thesis writers who raked in $145 million last year, a fivefold increase since 2007.

The emergence of China as a nascent scientific superpower raises questions about the U.S. relationship with Beijing. Ever since the United States opened the door to Chinese students in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands have flocked to America. Most have studied science or engineering and have been welcomed in research institutions across the land. But with China becoming a competitor, U.S. experts have begun to question that practice.

FBI officials allege that there is a large-scale operation in the United States to pilfer American industrial, scientific, technological and military secrets. In the past few years, dozens of Chinese have been convicted of stealing American technology and shipping it to China.

"The science and technology relationship with China has always stood up against all kinds of political pressures," said Richard P. Suttmeier, who has researched China's rise for the National Science Foundation. "Now that you have competition going on, finding the basis for cooperation in the absence of trust is an issue. It goes to questions of espionage and a hunger for technology."

That hunger is evident in the halls of BGI, home to Zhao Bowen and more than 1,500 other Chinese scientists and technicians. Located in an industrial zone in the southern Chinese megalopolis of Shenzhen, BGI has grown into one of the world's leading genomics institutes devoted to deciphering the genetic blueprint of organisms.

Over the past few years, scientists at BGI sequenced the genes of a chicken, a silkworm, a panda, a strain of rice and 4,000-year-old human remains from Greenland.

In January, BGI made the biggest purchase of genome sequencing equipment ever, buying 128 ultra-high-tech machines from California-based Illumina. With that one acquisition, BGI could very well surpass the entire gene-sequencing output of the United States.

Inside the 11-story facility, the vibe is pure Silicon Valley start-up: shorts, flip-flops, ankle bracelets, designer eyewear and a random tattoo. Zhao came to BGI on a summer internship last year to work on cucumbers. Now a full-time employee while continuing his studies, Zhao is turning his attention to a topic Western researchers have shied away from because of ethical worries: Zhao plans to study the genes of 1,000 of his best-performing classmates at a top high school in Beijing and compare them, he said, "with 1,000 normal kids."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability"

A reader writes in reference to the new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability by Christopher Eppig, Corey L. Fincher and Randy Thornhill.

Steve, did you notice that The Economist finally decided to inform its readers about Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ estimates?

When Dr Lynn and Dr Vanhanen originally published their IQ data, they used them to advance the theory that national differences in intelligence were the main reason for different levels of economic development. This study turns that reasoning on its head. It is lack of development, and the many health problems this brings, which explains the difference in levels of intelligence. No doubt, in a vicious circle, those differences help keep poor countries poor. But the new theory offers a way to break the circle.

Of course it's only now that a politically correct explanation has been found 8 years later.

A subscription to The Economist is expensive, so subscribers should complain that the editors were covering up important information until a more polite spin could be found.

Actually, The Economist did cite "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" once before, in its May 15, 2004 issue (p. 26) when The Economist fell for that lowbrow Internet hoax about high IQ blue states and low IQ red states!

The Economist is doing a disservice to the long-term reputations of Eppig, Fincher, and Thornhill, since it's an interesting paper, and I recommend that you read it. I don't find anything novel about the idea that improvements in health are one of the reasons for rising raw IQ scores, but it's a good point to reiterate. 

Eppig et al don't actually support the Economist's spin, writing:

A nation of more intelligent individuals is likely to produce a higher GDP, but a wealthier nation is also more able to pay for public education, as well as public medical and sanitation services. An indirect link between education and intelligence may also exist, as a better-educated population may be more interested in public health measures—leading to increased IQ by reducing parasite stress—provided that education includes information about germ theory and hygiene. These sources of endogeneity must be considered when interpreting our findings (and see below). It should also be mentioned that we are not arguing that global variation in intelligence is only caused by parasite stress. Rather, variation in intelligence is probably caused by a variety of factors, including those we have mentioned here as well as factors that are yet unknown.

They make the point that I made last week:

We also propose a complementary hypothesis that may explain some of the effects of infectious disease on intelligence. As we mentioned, it is possible that a conditional developmental pathway exists that invests more energy into the immune system at the expense of brain development. In an environment where there has consistently been a high metabolic cost associated with parasitic infection, selection would not favour the maintenance of a phenotypically plastic trait. That is, the conditional strategy of allocating more energy into brain development during periods of health would be lost, evolutionarily, if periods of health were rare. Peoples living in areas of consistently high prevalence of infectious disease over evolutionary time thus may possess adaptations that favour high obligatory investment in immune function at the expense of other metabolically expensive traits such as intelligence.

Still, there are some problems with the paper. 

Their model correlates national average IQ and "disability adjusted life-years lost" owing to infectious disease. (Unfortunately, I can't find from following their footnotes where they got this data for 192 countries. I can only find it summarized by WHO by regions. If you can find the data for each country, please let me know.) 

But, of course, the obvious question is: Does Singapore have a high average IQ because it has a remarkably low infectious disease burden for it's tropical, sea-level, humid location, or does it have a remarkably low infectious disease burden because it's run by high IQ and hard-working officials, such as Lew Kwan Yew? 

In contrast, Afghanistan has terrible life expectancy and longevity figures compared to Singapore, indicative of terrible disease burden, despite having a climate rather like Colorado's. (Afghanistan's problem is less that its residents are empty-headed as that they are bloody-minded, with one of the most selfish, nasty cultures in the world.)

If Lagos has a similar climate to Singapore but worse disease burden, it that the cause or the symptom of the difference in average IQ? (Most likely both, of course, but it should be possible to allot causality.)

I think this key problem of causation could be tackled by using not the actual current disease burden but the predictions of a theoretical model of what disease burden would be based on the natural factors of each country. Eppig et al write:

The worldwide distribution of parasites is well known. Disease-causing organisms of humans are more prevalent in equatorial regions of the world and become less prevalent as latitude increases. Ecological factors contributing to this distribution include mean annual temperature, monthly temperature range and precipitation (e.g. Guernier et al. 2004). Similar trends of parasite distribution have been shown in other host species (e.g. Møller 1998).

So, there must be models that would predict that Singapore and Lagos would have similar disease burdens. Therefore, use the theoretical predictions of disease burden to correlate with IQ, not the current actual disease burdens.

My commenter goes on:

Eppig et al report a strong correlation between infectious disease burden and national IQ, using either Lynn's estimates or Wicherts revised estimates for sub-Saharan Africa.

Eppig et al repeat a number of related analyses to show that infection disease is the strongest, but they decided not to reanalyze the one variable that's stronger than infectious disease: skin color (r = -.92). Their argument for why they can ignore the results of Templer & Arikawa (2006) is an amazing feat of intentional misunderstanding:

"Although Templer & Arikawa (2006) found a positive relationship between IQ and skin darkness, we will not use skin darkness in our analyses for three reasons: (i) although evidence suggests that skin darkness is a measure of historical infectious disease intensity over evolutionary time, it is unclear exactly what kind of infectious diseases it is indicative of (see discussion); (ii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) argued that the relationship between skin darkness and IQ is not causal; and (iii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) did not sufficiently explain why the association between intelligence and skin darkness exists. Without a reasonable theoretical framework for this association, we did not feel it was appropriate to compare it with other variables for which there is a better theoretical rationale."

Obviously the explanation for the relationship between IQ and skin color given by Templer & Arikawa (2006) was a population's evolutionary history of cold climate with adaptation to UV exposure -- a genetic model.

Again, the correlation found by Templer & Arikawa (2006) for IQ and skin color (-.92) exceeds that found for IQ and infectious disease (-.82), but this fact is avoided by Eppig et al and by The Economist.

Interestingly, Eppig el al note:

Mackintosh (2001) presented comprehensive evidence that skin darkness and the associated cellular components (e.g. melanocytes) have an important role in defending against infectious disease. Moreover, Manning et al. (2003) found that, in sub-Saharan Africa, rates of HIV infection were negatively associated with skin darkness. Manning et al. (2003) attributed this relationship in part to lower infection rates of other parasites, especially bacteria and fungi, that lead to tissue damage in the genital tract and hence increased opportunity for contracting HIV. Templer & Arikawa (2006) concluded that, despite the strong negative correlation between skin colour and average national IQ, there must be an unknown mediating factor accounting for both because there is no obvious reason for skin darkness to reduce IQ. Given the previous research linking skin colour to infectious disease (Mackintosh 2001; Manning et al. 2003), the unknown factor linking skin colour and IQ may be infectious disease.

Also, Eppig et al admit that the Usain Bolt-producing part of the world is a pretty healthy place but just isn't all that super-smart.

The only world region in which this relationship [between IQ and disease] was not significant was South America [defined here to include the West Indies]. This exception may be owing to the presence of several outliers. The group of conspicuous outliers in which IQ was much lower than expected in the worldwide trend (figure 1) are all Caribbean countries (St Lucia, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Vincent and Grenadines, and Jamaica), which represent 4 of 23 nations in the South America analysis (St Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines). Because these outliers are in the same geographical location, it is possible that local parasites that are not included in the DALY owing to infectious disease variable are causing these outliers.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Guardian: Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim

From The Guardian:

Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim
Energy can be diverted away from brain development to fight infection, explaining 'lower intelligence in warmer countries'

People who live in countries where disease is rife may have lower IQs because they have to divert energy away from brain development to fight infections, scientists in the US claim.

The controversial idea might help explain why national IQ scores differ around the world, and are lower in some warmer countries where debilitating parasites such as malaria are widespread, they say.

Researchers behind the theory claim the impact of disease on IQ scores has been under-appreciated, and believe it ranks alongside education and wealth as a major factor that influences cognitive ability.

Attempts to measure intelligence around the world are fraught with difficulty and many researchers doubt that IQ tests are a suitable tool for the job. The average intelligence of a nation is likely to be governed by a complex web of interwoven factors.

The latest theory, put forward by Randy Thornhill and others at the University of New Mexico, adds disease to a long list of environmental and other issues that may all play a role in determining intelligence. Thornhill made the news in 2000, when he coauthored a provocative book called A Natural History of Rape in which he argues that sexual coercion emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.

Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Thornhill and his colleagues explain that children under five devote much of their energy to brain development. When the body has to fight infections, it may have to sacrifice brain development, they say.

In the American South, for example, hookworm, an energy-sapping infection that can cause cognitive impairment, was a giant problem until John D. Rockefeller funded a campaign against it starting in 1909. Poor Southerners seemed to have a lot more pep, physical and mental, once they started wearing shoes and taking other steps to avoid hookworm.

Hookworm is still a big problem in some of the warm-weather parts of the world. I'm sure there are other nasty parasites, and they tend to be more common in the tropics.

As Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald pointed out in the 1990s, there are probably numerous chronic infections that don't attract as much attention as major acute ones, but do often add up to trouble. A lot of things in the modern world, such as clean tap water, probably diminish their impact. Little kids get a lot of antibiotics these days for acute infections like earaches. The antibiotics might be killing off low-level infections at the same time. Who knows?

Likewise, Darwinian selection under conditions of heavy infectious disease burden will tend to be oriented toward improving the immune system more than raising intelligence, which will tend to have long term effects on tropical populations.

To test the idea, Thornhill's group used three published surveys of global IQ scores and compared them with data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on how badly infectious diseases affect different countries. The list included common infections, such as malaria, tetanus and tuberculosis.

The scientists found that the level of infectious disease in a country was closely linked to the average national IQ. The heavier the burden of disease, the lower the nation's IQ scores. Thornhill believes that nations who have lived with diseases for long periods may have adapted, by developing better immune systems at the expense of brain function.

"The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at," said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. "Disease is a major sap on the body's energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don't have enough, you can't do it properly."

"The consequence of this, if we're right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease," Eppig added.

"It's an interesting and provocative finding," said Geraint Rees, director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. "It explains about 50 to 60% of the variability in IQ scores and appears to be independent of some other factors such as overall GDP."

"The authors suggest that more infectious disease could lead to lower IQ scores through an impact on brain development. This is an interesting speculation, but the data don't prove it one way or the other," he said. "A bigger problem is that it might be driven by a third factor, that affects both infectious disease prevalence and IQ test scores."

Right. Multicollinearity is always a problem with correlation studies, and this topic especially: are lower IQs in the tropics caused by tropical diseases or by the tropics that cause the tropical diseases themselves?

For example, I've long hypothesized that one general problem that brains need to deal with is shedding heat and that is of course a bigger problem in the tropical than the temperate world. 

How to dissipate heat generated by computer chips is a huge issue in computer design. As I type on my laptop computer, the surface of the machine that is touching my wrists is about 100 degrees F. The bottom of my laptop must be 150 degrees or more. A fan is running full speed to shed heat to keep the CPU chip from melting. My office is heating up from the combination of my PC and myself, both working hard. I have just now opened my window to disperse the heat. It is a cool evening here, so the temperature is palpably dropping by the minute. If I was in a tropical climate, I'd need to turn on the air conditioning or start the fan or whatever.

Intel had driven up the power of CPU chips largely by increasing the clock speed, but when they hit four gigahertz, Intel found that chips were melting down. So, Intel  had to revamp massively and find other way to follow Moore's Law, such as multiple cores.

Similarly, your brain generates more heat when you are thinking hard than when it is idling.

Not surprisingly, skull shapes seem to be somewhat related to heat dissipation problems. Eskimos have round heads to conserve heat, while Kenyan marathoners tend to have narrow heads with a lot of surface area that dissipate heat more easily.

For reasons that are unclear, IQ scores are generally rising around the world. Thornhill suggests monitoring rates of infectious diseases in nations as they develop, to see if they decline and IQ tests scores rise.

Singapore would seem to be an example of a tropical place where public hygiene, antibiotics, air conditioning, education, and so forth combine in a virtuous circle.

Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at Ulster University, and author of the 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, said disease and IQ is a two-way relationship, with low national IQs being partly responsible for widespread infectious diseases.

Right, it's hard to get started turning, say, Equatorial Guinea into Singapore without Singaporeans to get you started.

Here's the abstract of Thornhill's paper:

In this study, we hypothesize that the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability is determined in part by variation in the intensity of infectious diseases. From an energetics standpoint, a developing human will have difficulty building a brain and fighting off infectious diseases at the same time, as both are very metabolically costly tasks. Using three measures of average national intelligence quotient (IQ), we found that the zero-order correlation between average IQ and parasite stress ranges from r = −0.76 to r = −0.82 (p < 0.0001). These correlations are robust worldwide, as well as within five of six world regions. Infectious disease remains the most powerful predictor of average national IQ when temperature, distance from Africa, gross domestic product per capita and several measures of education are controlled for. These findings suggest that the Flynn effect may be caused in part by the decrease in the intensity of infectious diseases as nations develop.

Afghanistan would be the leading example of a cold winter place that seems pretty dim, perhaps due to disease burden. It's second in the world in infant mortality. (The rest of the Worst 20 are black African countries, while Afghans are, as Daniel Dravot notes in the Man Who Would Be King, a bunch of more or less white people. But how did that Civilizing Mission thing work out for you, Danny boy?)

James Michener's 1963 novel about Afghanistan, Caravans, has an Afghan leader arguing, with some pride, that while children die like flies in Afghanistan, if they survive past childhood, they grow up to be tough, mean bastards with well-tuned immune systems.

But, it's stupid of Afghans to have so much disease burden. So, I'm not sure that says much about causality. Are they so knuckleheaded because they are sick so much, or are they sick so much because they are so knuckleheaded?

But, even when it proves hard to determine ultimate causation from correlation studies, correlation itself is worth knowing. The general rule is that, as Kingsley Amis said in Lucky Jim: "There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Michael Chabon on Jewish IQ

My new VDARE.com column is a response to an essay by novelist Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, on Jewish intelligence. Here are a few excerpts from Chabon's eloquent Chosen, but not Special:

“GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news.

Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic cast his startled regard back along the length of Jewish history looking for a parallel example of arrant stupidity and found, instead, what Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power.

“There is a word in Yiddish, seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head,’ is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.”

This is nonsense, of course — nonsense to which, I hasten to assure Mr. Goldberg, I have always avidly subscribed. In the aggregate, Jews may or may not be smarter than other groups, but the evidence in favor of granting some kind of inherent or culturally determined supernatural abilities of seichel to the yiddishe kop certainly cannot be found in our history, which is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.

... As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. ...

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people — stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel — that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

This sense of widespread shock at Israel’s blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid seemed not to be confined, in fact, to Jews. Even Israel’s sternest critics will concede that the Jewish state knows how to go about the business of survival in a hostile world with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility and preternatural control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media).

Indeed anti-Semites and the enemies of Israel have often been found among the most devout believers in the myth of seichel, of a special — O.K., a diabolical — Jewish intelligence.

For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled “Jewish Genius,” or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.

Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction.

This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.

You can read my response here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

IQ & Harvard Law School

The Dean of the Harvard Law School who condemned law student Stephanie Grace's private email displaying openmindedness on the heritability of IQ differences is not the same person as the HLS Dean nominated by Obama to the Supreme Court yesterday -- Martha Minow was Elena Kagan's replacement as Dean when Kagan became Obama's Solicitor General. 

It's hard to imagine, though, Dean Kagan acting less weaselly about IQgate than Dean Minow did. A Senator should ask Kagan what she thought of her successor's actions (although I doubt that will happen, since the growing tradition is to make Supreme Court nomination hearings as soporific for the public as possible).

But, where do such people as Elena Kagan come from?

Why, in her case, from a public grade school and high school!

Of course, it's a rather different kind of public school, one that you have to pass an I.Q. test to get into when you are in nursery school. From the NYT:

Tenth graders at Hunter College High School in Manhattan had a substitute teacher in their American history class on Monday for an unusual reason: Their regular teacher, Irving Kagan, was in Washington, watching his sister, Elena, accept President Obama’s nomination for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Both siblings attended Hunter, and Mr. Kagan returned to be a social studies teacher there. Their mother, Gloria, taught for years at the affiliated elementary school. So it was with a special sense of pride that students and teachers in the schools on East 94th Street welcomed the news that Ms. Kagan, the nation’s solicitor general, had risen even higher on the school’s long list of notable alumni.

Hunter College High School is highly unusual among public schools in New York City. Affiliated with Hunter College, part of the City University of New York, the high school is publicly financed and managed, but not run by the city’s Department of Education.

To attend the elementary school, children must excel on an I.Q. test and in a class observation to win one of its coveted 50 kindergarten seats. The high school starts in the seventh grade, and attracts some of the brightest students from around the city. Cram schools have popped up to help students prepare for the combined math, reading and essay test required for admission.

For those who get in, the competition does not let up. Juniors and seniors fret over a phenomenon common to high-achieving schools: Among so many outstanding students, it is hard to distinguish oneself.

Dozens of seniors this year were National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalists. “It’s like embarrassing if you aren’t a National Merit winner,” said Joseph Pearl, 16. About a third of graduates go to Ivy League schools. 

Do you ever get the impression that there is a certain conflict between what elites, such as Harvard Law School deans, say about IQ and what they really believe deep down? Perhaps the witch-burning fervor they display against heretics stems from their desire to cover up their own Doubts?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Rage of the Privileged Classes

Here's the opening of my new VDARE.com column:

Freud noted that human beings like to "project"  their own undesirable feelings onto others. The wisdom of that observation became clearer than ever last week as a mounting hysteria infected the elites of the English-speaking world. The rage of the privileged classes was on full display as they projected onto citizens their own vices: ignorance, resentment, and irrational anger.

- The signing of the Arizona immigration law, followed by the slow realization from opinion polls that it was broadly popular, elicited paroxysms of hatred for the American people from the Establishment.

For example, veteran New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s May 1 op-ed included a full helping of the standard code words that enraged members of the media traditionally use to denounce voters who aren’t obeying their rightful masters: "angry," "virus," "hysteria," "vicious," "bigoted," "apoplexy," "slimed," "snarling," "notorious," "incendiary," "rage" and so forth and so on.

- Meanwhile, in Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a cheeky voter "bigoted" after she dared question his immigration policy. 

- And in Massachusetts, , the dean of the Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, one of President Obama’s oldest confidantes, denounced one of her own students for writing an email expressing open-mindedness on the forbidden topic of race and IQ.

Bizarre as it may seem, the potential Supreme Court nominee publicly condemned a private message to a few acquaintances written six months ago—even though it had only been dug up and leaked to the Black Law Students Association by a romantic rival in a petty catfight!

In other words, citizens are winning the debates, so elites would rather demonize than discuss.

Yet, as comical as the last week has been, the power of elites to shut down freedom of speech, to ostracize, to impose dumb dogmas as loyalty tests, must never be underestimated.

Arizona’s SB1070 and immigration: by the end of a tumultuous week, Democratic Party leaders were in disarray as their efforts to turn the illegal immigration controversy into a racial struggle between Hispanics and whites had badly backfired.

The Democrats have long tried to goad Latino voters into viewing enforcement of the laws as a racial insult. But there has never been overwhelming evidence that the average Hispanic-American citizen really shares the Latino Democratic elites’ obsession with opening the border.

For example, in 2006 Arizona voters passed—over the usual bipartisan opposition of the states’ elites—Proposition 200, which required individuals to furnish proof of citizenship when applying for benefits or to vote. Latinos gave it 47 percent support. That’s far more than you would expect from elite assumptions that Hispanic voters' race makes them mindlessly biased in favor of illegal immigration.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The political paradox of Harvard and IQ

Why did Harvard Law School dean libel her own student Stephanie Grace over Grace's private email expressing agnosticism over whether there might be some genetic basis for the pervasive differences in IQ observed between the races?

I explained in a 2005 American Conservative article during the Larry Summers brouhaha, when Larry immediately handed out $50 million to the feminist who wound up replacing him as reparations for speaking honestly and intelligently about sex differences in high end intelligence:

Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting  class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century.

Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't.

Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb.

Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities.

So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ.

What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else. So, Summers bought peace fast.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Harvard Law student crimethinks

A woman who is a third year Harvard Law School student and in line for federal clerkships, is in trouble for sending out the following email (From "Harvard Law School 3L's Racist Email Goes National" on Above the Law:

… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)

Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

Of course, the Black Law Students Associations are attempting to pull a Larry Summers on her and deny her a clerkship.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tom Friedman repeats phrase "High I.Q. risk-takers" 8 times

Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times:

After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”

 

... In its heyday, our unique system also attracted a disproportionate share of high-I.Q. risk-takers to high government service. So when you put all this together, with our free markets and democracy, it made it easy here for creative, high-I.Q. risk-takers to raise capital for their ideas and commercialize them. ...

“When you get this happy coincidence of high-I.Q. risk-takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-I.Q. risk-takers, you get these above-average returns as a country,” argued Mundie. “What is common to Singapore, Israel and America? They were all built by high-I.Q. risk-takers and all thrived ...

It isn’t drastic, but it is a decline — at a time when technology is allowing other countries to leverage and empower more of their own high-I.Q. risk-takers. If we don’t reverse this trend, over time, “we could lose our most important competitive edge — the only edge from which sustainable advantage accrues” — having the world’s biggest and most diverse pool of high-I.Q. risk-takers, said Mundie.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"This is weirdly fascinating."

A friend comments:

This is weirdly fascinating. The proposition that individuals can differ by innate mental ability and that races can differ by the average of such abilities:

1) conflicts with no major Western religious tradition;

2) conflicts with no major Western philosophical tradition;

3) is consistent with everyday experience;

4) is probably believed by the majority of ordinary people of all races;

5) is consistent with the weight of evidence from the most exhaustive and sophisticated empirical studies;

6) is consistent with, indeed is an almost inevitable implication of, the most basic version of evolutionary theory, which theory all educated people are supposed to accept.

And yet the operative assumption of government policy and the protocols of almost all public journals are that this proposition cannot be true.

Here is another, perhaps related paradox. The overwhelming majority of black people I see who work in the private sector, whether in prestigious or decidedly un-prestigious occupations, are efficient and friendly and seem reasonably happy. Disgruntled and dissatisfied blacks are common, on the other hand, in 1) government, 2) education and 3) on street corners, begging.

In other words, we have actually constructed a society in which it is possible for almost everyone who practices a modicum of self-discipline, whatever their innate mental gifts, to earn a reasonably decent living doing not terribly onerous work.

So the question becomes, when will American government, media and educators stop hitting America over the head with a hammer about a problem that is not really a problem anymore?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's Race to Nowhere

My new VDARE.com column is a far-ranging review of Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. It's particularly timely in light of today's Washington Post story:

Delaware and Tennessee won bragging rights Monday as the nation's top education innovators, besting D.C. and 13 other finalists to claim a share of the $4 billion in President Obama's unprecedented school reform fund.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan picked the winners after a team of judges in the Race to the Top competition unexpectedly gave tiny Delaware the highest ranking, with Tennessee close behind. Delaware won as much as $107 million and Tennessee could be awarded $502 million.

Leaders in both states pledged to establish national models for data-driven reform, tying teacher evaluation to student performance in an all-out effort to close achievement gaps....

In my review, I explain why this obsession with closing racial gaps that has been central to the Bush-Kennedy-Gates-Obama-Duncan mainstream consensus on education is fundamentally wrong-headed, and I conclude by offering a new, more practical, and more just alternative goal. The WaPo story continues:

The competition has generated enormous buzz in education circles and a flurry of action in statehouses to ease limits on autonomous public charter schools, revamp teacher pay and evaluation, expand the collection of student achievement data and take other steps in line with Obama's agenda. ...

Delaware's bid, backed by teachers unions statewide, indicates that the state will send a corps of "data coaches" into schools to help teachers track student performance and target lessons where needed. The state will begin new tests in the coming school year, generating achievement data to help evaluate teachers and principals.

Under the plan, student growth must be considered satisfactory for educators to be rated effective. Those rated ineffective could be denied tenure or face other consequences. The state will also offer bonuses to highly effective teachers to work in struggling schools and take other steps to link performance ratings to compensation.

I've been thinking about education statistics a lot longer than Arne Duncan has. My new VDARE.com column offers a longer perspective on these issues. Here's an excerpt pointing out that the purported research behind Duncan's trendy idea that developing data systems to find the best teachers in white schools and then assign them to Non-Asian Minority schools would, finally, Close The Gap is wholly conjectural.

According to Diane Ravitch:

"So, depending on which economist or statistician one preferred, the achievement gap between races, ethnic groups, and income groups could be closed in three years (Sanders), four years (Gordon, Kane, and Staiger), or five years (Hanushek and Rivkin). "

Ravitch marvels:

"Over a short period of time, this assertion became an urban myth among journalists and policy wonks in Washington, something that that ‘everyone knew.’ This particular urban myth fed a fantasy that schools serving poor children might be able to construct a teaching corps made up exclusively of superstar teachers, the ones who produced large gains year after year."

The hot new idea embraced by the Obama Administration and the Gates Foundation is to develop statistical techniques to find effective teachers, so that they can be taken out of white schools and sent to black and Hispanic schools.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that these influential papers are not studies of actual success stories of school districts that closed the racial gaps. Nobody has done that. Instead, they are merely mathematical projections of what might happen if all else remained equal. The authors are just assuming that the effect seen in one year of a good teacher over a bad teacher can be multiplied by any number of years.

For example, Gordon, Kaine, and Staiger write:

"Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap."

But that turns out to be a big "if." Ravitch notes:

"The fact was that the theory had never been demonstrated anywhere. No school or school district or state anywhere in the nation had ever proved the theory correct. Nowhere was there a real-life demonstration in which a district had identified the top quintile of teachers, assigned low-performing students to their classes, and improved the test scores of low-performing students so dramatically in three, four or five years that the black-white test score gap closed."

Ending the black-white disparity has been the Holy Grail of education reform since LBJ. Considering all the rewards that would befall any educator who could achieve it, you might assume that absence of evidence after all these decades is evidence of absence.

And, theory alone suggests we should be skeptical that the effects of star teachers would "accumulate" for three, four, or five years in a row. That’s due to one of the most famous concepts in economics: diminishing marginal returns.

Consider a hypothetical example from a different kind of teaching: golf instruction.

These days, I have the money and time to only play golf about twice a year. I now average about 40 strokes per round worse than the superstars of the game.

But imagine that I somehow convinced the swing coaches of Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Pádraig Harrington, and Jim Furyk to drop their most famous clients and instead each work with me intensively for one year in succession.

Assume that during the first of these four years, Tiger’s new ex-coach Hank Haney helps me cut 10 strokes off my average score, from 108 to 98. Does that mean I would therefore be on track over four years to cut 40 strokes, all the way down to 68, and thus challenge my teachers’ former pupils for the green coat at the 2014 Masters?

Of course not.

That’s almost as mindless as saying that if I then got a fifth year of world-class golf instruction, I’d be averaging 58 strokes per round and winning every pro tournament by 20 strokes.

Read the whole thing here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Flynn Anti-Effect

Here's a 2007 New Zealand Herald article quoting James Flynn, of Flynn Effect fame:

Brainier mums needed to maintain future generations' intelligence, says professor
8:21 AM Sunday Jul 8, 2007

An internationally recognised expert on intelligence warns New Zealand children could get dumber in three or four generations unless women with higher education started producing more babies. Otago University emeritus professor Dr Jim Flynn was commenting on census figures that show mothers without a higher education were the anchor of New Zealand's current fertility rate.

"Everyone knows if we only allowed short people to reproduce there would be a tendency in terms of genes for height to diminish. Intelligence is no different from other human traits," he told the Sunday Star-Times. "A persistent genetic trend which lowered the genetic quality for brain physiology would have some effect eventually."

Statistics show women without tertiary qualifications who had reached their early 40s had produced 2.57 babies each. In contrast, women with a higher education were producing just 1.85 babies each.

Dr Flynn said at 73 he was too old to worry about offending anyone.

Unplanned pregnancies by less educated women could be reduced, perhaps by future scientific advances. "I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote," he said. "You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child."

Commissioner for Children Cindy Kiro said Dr Flynn was getting into "dangerous territory". "Rather than talking about encouraging smart women to have babies and dumb women not to have babies, what we do need to do is make the commitment to good quality education."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

IQs by state in 1960

Interestingly, Texas high school students were outscoring California high school students way back in 1960, just as Texan 8th graders consistently beat Californian 8th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in recent years.

After Sputnik, the federal government funded in 1960 a vast survey of 15-year-olds' "aptitudes and achievements" called Project TALENT. Across the country in over 1300 high schools, five percent of all high school students, plus a bunch of dropouts they rounded up, took two dozen tests over four half-days.

They gave almost 400,000 students two dozen different tests. This was an era when psychometricians loved to give a wide variety of tests -- think of in The Right Stuff how the scientists loved to try out anything they could think of on the applicants for astronaut training. Since then, testing has tended to narrow as the dominance of the g-Factor has shown that two days worth of testing is redundant.

The overall scores would be a combination of aptitude and achievement, so not exactly like IQ, but no doubt reasonably well-correlated with IQ.

The data are available upon request.

I suspect that more Mexican-American 15-year-olds were enrolled in high school in California than in Texas in 1960, so this might be a biasing factor. Yet, both states were predominantly white in 1960.

One thing to keep in mind is that Project TALENT mostly measured students who were born during the Baby Bust of WWII rather than the famous Baby Boomers, the first of whom were 14 in 1960.

The fact that Texans scored about 1/10th of a standard deviation above Californians in 1960 suggests to me that the more famous accomplishments of Californians in science and technology (e.g., aeronautics) in the first half of the 20th Century were rather narrowly based demographically. In contrast, perhaps Texas's oil industry, which began in 1901 and sped up with the huge find in 1930, brought in to Texas a broad influx of technically skilled mechanics, engineers, and entrepreneurs, especially during the Depression. Anyway, it's interesting that as far back as 1960, there wasn't much evidence in Texas for the educational lassitude that afflicted much of the South outside of Virginia.

Here's something about Project TALENT that I posted in 2004:

IQs by State, 1960 -- You probably remember the notorious "Democratic states have higher IQs" hoax from last May. Well, here, thanks to Prof. Henry Harpending of the U. of Utah anthropology dept., might be the closest thing to a national sample of IQ scores ever: the Project Talent database of 366,000 9th-12th grade students. Unfortunately, it is 44 years years old. Nonetheless, it correlates reasonably with 2003 NAEP 8th grade achievement test scores (here are the 2003 scores). As you can see, in this list of kids' IQs back in 1960, of the top 10 smartest states, in 2000, Bush and Gore each won five. So, we're back to my original conclusion: red states and blue states are similar in average IQ, as are, on average, Republican and Democratic voters.

Some caveats: These IQ scores are set with the national mean of the 366,000 high school students equal to 100 and the standard deviation set to 15. But, keep in mind that we are only beginning to explore this huge database, so take everything with a grain of salt. [These scores are for all students across all races.]

Montana 104.9
New Hampshire 104.5
Connecticut 104.3
Idaho 104.3
Nevada 103.8
Massachusetts 103.7
Minnesota 103.2
Iowa 103.2
Virginia 103.1
Oregon 102.7
Washington 102.7
New Jersey 102.6
New York 102.5
Michigan 102.4
Kansas 102.2
Ohio 101.9
North Dakota 101.8
Illinois 101.7
Texas 101.6
Missouri 101.4
Vermont 101.3
Oklahoma 101.1
Utah 101.0
Colorado 100.8
Wyoming 100.6
Wisconsin 100.5
Maine 100.4
Nebraska 100.4
California 100.1
Pennsylvania 99.9
Hawaii 98.9
New Mexico 98.9
Delaware 98.8
Indiana 98.4
Rhode Island 98.1
Florida 97.4
Arizona 97.4
Maryland 97.2
Mississippi 96.9
Tennessee 96.6
West Virginia 95.6
Kentucky 94.2
Alabama 93.4
North Carolina 92.7
Louisiana 91.9
Georgia 91.5
Arkansas 89.1

There weren't adequate sample sizes from Alaska, Washington DC, and South Carolina, and I excluded South Dakota because the result was too different from North Dakota. (I think something might be confused about both South Carolina and South Dakota -- I'll try to find out more.)

Harpending also looked at whites only data (unfortunately, the majority of participants don't have a race recorded) with the smartest whites (which I suspect is all that white liberals care about -- feeling smarter than white conservatives) were (in descending order): Connecticut, Montana, Nevada (I bet that's not true anymore!), Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Virginia. The dumbest whites were in (in descending order): Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

The overall results by state in 1960 follow Daniel Patrick Moynihan's insight that the easiest way to improve social indicators in your state is to jack up your entire state, slide wheels under it, and haul it north up close to the Canadian border.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer