Showing posts with label race iq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race iq. Show all posts

October 29, 2012

The Gap is closing!

Speaking of Arthur Jensen, Occidentalist has a table listing all 40 academic studies he could find of the white-black gap in average IQ in the U.S. They range from 1918, when it was measured at 17 points, to 2008, when it was found to be 16 points. So, don't let anybody tell you The Gap hasn't closed over the last 90 years.

Seriously, is there anything in the human sciences more stable than La Griffe's Fundamental Constant of American Sociology? It's really odd when you stop to think about how stable it has been. I suspect that differences in average height have changed significantly more over the generations. For example, when I was a kid, the Dutch weren't particularly tall, not the way they are now.

Things change.

Except this ...

Indeed, I'm wondering whether there isn't some kind of behavioral feedback at work regarding IQ that somehow keeps The Gap about the same. I don't have any candidates in mind for what that stabilizing mechanism might be, but it's worth considering.

October 25, 2012

Dr. Betty Hart, RIP: Scientifically proved blacks don't talk enough or watch TV enough

From the NYT:
Betty Hart Dies at 85; Studied Disparities in Children’s Vocabulary Growth 
By WILLIAM YARDLEY 
Published: October 25, 2012 
Betty Hart, whose research documenting how poor, working-class and professional parents speak to their young children helped establish the critical role that communicating with babies and toddlers has in their later development, died on Sept. 28 in hospice care in Tucson. She was 85 .... 
Dr. Hart was a graduate student at the University of Kansas in the 1960s when she began trying to help poor preschool children overcome speech and vocabulary deficits. But she and her colleagues later concluded that they had started too late in the children’s lives — that the ones they were trying to help could not simply “catch up” with extra intervention. 
At the time, a prevalent view was that poor children were essentially beyond help, victims of circumstances and genetics. But Dr. Hart and some of her colleagues suspected otherwise and revisited the issue in the early 1980s, beginning research that would continue for a decade. 
“Rather than concede to the unmalleable forces of heredity, we decided that we would undertake research that would allow us to understand the disparate developmental trajectories we saw,” she and her former graduate supervisor, Todd R. Risley, wrote in 1995 in “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children,” a book about their findings, which were reported in 1992. “We realized that if we were to understand how and when differences in developmental trajectories began, we needed to see what was happening to children at home at the very beginning of their vocabulary growth.” 
They began a two-and-a-half-year study of 42 families of various socioeconomic levels who had very young children. Starting when the children were between 7 and 9 months old, they recorded every word and utterance spoken to them and by them, as well as every parent-child interaction, over the course of one hour every month. 
It took many more years to transcribe and analyze the data, and the researchers were astonished by what they eventually found. 
“Simply in words heard, the average child on welfare was having half as much experience per hour (616 words per hour) as the average working-class child (1,251 words per hour) and less than one-third that of the average child in a professional family (2,153 words per hour),” Drs. Hart and Risley wrote. 
“By age 4, the average child in a welfare family might have 13 million fewer words of cumulative experience than the average child in a working-class family,” they added. 

Isn't there a giant assumption in this famous calculation: that the one hour per month of child-parent interactions that Hart & Risley recorded are representative of the entire month? Don't some of these non-welfare parents have jobs, during which periods they can't be talking to their children?

Let's try the math. Say the average 0 to 4 year old is awake 10 hours per day, or 3,600 hours per year, or 14,400 hours in those four years. If the working class family talks at the child 635 more words per hour than those famously laconic welfare families, then that comes out to a differential of 9,144,000 words, not 13,000,000 words. So the working class family must be talking at their children not just ten hours per day, but more like 14 hours per day, leaving only 10 hours per day for the poor child to sleep (or to talk himself or to watch TV or to play with his blocks or to watch the cat or to daydream).

Shouldn't somebody call Child Protective Services and report all the non-welfare families in the country for child abuse due to incessant chatter?
They also found disparities in tone, in positive and negative feedback, and in other areas — and that the disparities in speech and vocabulary acquisition persisted into school years and affected overall educational development. 

So, parents with big vocabularies tended to have children with big vocabularies. (Also, I would imagine, parental skin tone, height, and hair color tended to correlate with their children's skin tone, height, and hair color.)
“People kept thinking, ‘Oh, we can catch kids up later,’ and her big message was to start young and make sure the environment for young children is really rich in language,” said Dr. Walker, an associate research professor at Kansas who worked with Dr. Hart and followed many of the children into their school years. 

I recommend taking your preschoolers to Tom Stoppard plays. Start with The Real Thing no later than 30 months and work up to Arcadia by at least the fourth birthday. Also, read to them every night from Nabokov. Pnin is an easy start, but they should be finished with Ada by the time they enter kindergarten.
The work has become a touchstone in debates over education policy, including what kind of investments governments should make in early intervention programs. One nonprofit program whose goals are rooted in the findings is Reach Out and Read, which uses pediatric exam rooms to promote literacy for lower-income children beginning at 6 months old. 
Prompted by the success of Reach Out and Read, Dr. Alan L. Mendelsohn, a developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital and New York University Langone Medical Center, pushed intervention even further. He created a program through Bellevue in which lower-income parents visiting doctors are filmed interacting and reading with their children and then given suggestions on how they can expand their speaking and interactions. 
“Hart and Risley’s work really informed for me and many others the idea that maybe you could bridge the gap,” Dr. Mendelsohn said, “or in jargon terms — address the disparities.” ...

I don't see any mention here of experimental research, just tracking of existing differences that are compatible with most combinations of nature and nurture theories.
“Today, much of her research is being applied in many different ways,” said Dr. Andrew Garner, the chairman of a work group on early brain and child development for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I think you could also argue that the current interest in brain development and epigenetics reinforces at almost a molecular level what she had identified 20 years ago.”

Epigenetics!

One obvious but little mentioned implication of this popular line of thought is: White professional mothers who hire semi-literate nannies who have smaller vocabularies in English than in Spanish and smaller vocabularies in Spanish than in Mayan to raise their children for them while they put in the hours to make partner or get tenure are dooming their offspring to only getting into State U. You see, by not personally speaking to their small children for much of the day using their high level vocabularies, Hart & Risley's logic says their kids are in big, big trouble.

And, indeed, many white mothers behave exactly as if this were true.

For example, one of my early bosses in the marketing research business was Kathie, a hard-charging, funny, foul-mouthed MBA who let nothing stand in the way of our team making the numbers. Then I heard a rumor that she and her boyfriend, an MBA at a big corporation, were going to take a little time off from each other. Then she started going to the gym at lunchtime, lost ten pounds, and then showed up one Monday morning wearing an engagement ring and a big smile: her ex-boyfriend was now going to be her husband. Marriage and a baby ensued, but she was right back on the job a month after giving birth. Then she got pregnant again, and came back to the job a couple of months after giving birth. But within a week of her return, she announced she was permanently retiring to be a housewife. Management tried hard to talk her into part-time work or taking just a couple of years off or whatever she wanted, but she was adamant that she was done with working: she was a full-time mom from now on.

Of course, Kathie's trajectory was feasible because her husband was making good money. But, her emotions are common.

Of course, this pro stay-at-home-mom implication of the Hart & Risley conventional wisdom is not played up in the press, which is largely run by women who are not stay-at-home-moms and who frequently feel guilty about it if they do have children or resent those women who are mothers, and thus try to put them down by emphasizing how glamorous and politically important it is to be a working woman.

What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development? I haven't looked in a long time, but my recollection was that it's inherently uncertain because nobody can run a controlled experiment. Mothers are constantly adapting to what they think is best for their children (e.g., Kathie), trying to optimize a variety of factors that differs for each family and, indeed, for each child.

That moms refuse to follow experimental methodologies when it comes to their own kids is bad for science, but good for children.

February 10, 2012

Is the white-black cognitive / achievement gap smaller in the U.K.?

Probably. 

Chuck at Occidentalist assembles a bunch of test reports, here and here. It's not as well-studied of a subject as it is in the U.S., so it's hard to make sense of all the data, but most point toward the white-black gap in the U.K. being well under a standard deviation.

I haven't seen a good meta-analyses by a British researcher who knows the ins and outs of all these acronyms like GCSE. (For example, a few years ago a British researcher slipped up on writing about regional differences in performance on the SAT in the U.S. because he didn't know that only the most ambitious students in the Midwest take the SAT instead of the ACT -- so what pitfalls await American kibbitzers among British test scores?) But most of the data seems to suggest a smaller cognitive and/or achievement gap in the U.K. than in the U.S.

It has been apparent for some time now (see this post at Racial Reality) that in Britain, the lads are not all right. In the U.S., we've become familiar with gender gaps on school achievement tests favoring black and Hispanic girls over their brothers, but we see less of this among whites and Asians. This is among the better evidence that culture -- fear of being put down by your co-ethnics for Acting White, etc. -- is depressing NAM performance. 

On a lot of tests, in Britain, there's even a bigger gender gap favoring the distaff side, but it seems to go across all ethnicities, even Chinese. We see weird things like girls whose parents are from Africa outscoring white boys and maybe even East Asian boys on some tests. 

As I pointed out in a couple of articles in 2005, class is the big divide in Britain rather than race. "Class" is a 1500-year-long project to civilize the Conan the Barbarian warlords who inundated the Roman Empire to act like "gentlemen." By the late 20th Century, all that politeness, all that studying, all that self-discipline, was striking young males of the lower classes as pretty gay. Thus, chavism. 

In contrast, there isn't all that much of an oppositional culture among blacks in Britain, since assimilating into the white working class isn't terribly hard: You like 'aving a pint while watching footie on the telly, too? The proportion of mixed race children appears much larger than in the U.S. As historian David Starkey pointed out during the English looting last summer, that blacks were in the lead, but whites were right behind in the looting -- something you don't see in the U.S much at all.

Moreover, blacks in Britain are of immigrant origin: West Indian and African, with the Africans doing better on tests, typically. Some not insignificant fraction of Africans in Britain were brain-drained from Anglophone ex-colonies to work in National Health as nurses and doctors. In the U.S., West Indians and African immigrants tend to outperform native blacks. The Bell Curve found that in the NLSY79 longitudinal study, blacks who were immigrants or the children of immigrants outscored native African-Americans by an average of 5 IQ points. 

But, those are just a few speculations. It's an interesting question that, as far as I know, hasn't been studied terribly systematically.

Update: lots of good stuff in the comments from people who know more about what they are talking about when it comes to Britain than I know.

September 15, 2011

SAT score changes by race since 1996

The oldest SAT score report on the College Board website is from 1996, right after the "recentering" in 1995 that raised scores about 100 points on a 400 to 1600 scale. Over the last 15 years, the average overall score on the original two-part Verbal + Math SAT (i.e., ignoring the new-fangled Writing section of the test introduced in the last decade) fell a grand total of two points, from 1013 to 1011. (See what I mean about baseball statistics being more volatile?)

1996 v. 2011 College-Bound Seniors Avg SAT Scores










Total (V+M)
Verbal

Math

1996 2011 Chg 1996 2011 Chg 1996 2011 Chg
ALL 1013 1011 (2) 505 497 (8) 508 514 6
Female 995 995 0 503 495 (8) 492 500 8
Male 1034 1031 (3) 507 500 (7) 527 531 4
Asian 1054 1112 58 496 517 21 558 595 37
White 1049 1063 14 526 528 2 523 535 12
Black 856 855 (1) 434 428 (6) 422 427 5
AmerIndian 960 972 12 483 484 1 477 488 11
Mexican 914 917 3 455 451 (4) 459 466 7
PR 897 904 7 452 452 0 445 452 7
Other Hisp 931 913 (18) 465 451 (14) 466 462 (4)

You'll note that the average white score went up 14 points form 1049 to 1063. Did white people get smarter over that period? I don't know. The SAT changed a lot over those 15 years, with analogies being dropped and some Verbal multiple choice questions being exiled to Writing. Also, kids appear to have cared more about prepping in 2011, although the College Board doesn't like to talk about this.

Asians went up 58 points, which is pretty striking. Everybody else fell farther behind whites, which wasn't supposed to happen.

Now, it could be that scores actually did pretty well over this 15 year stretch, because the College Board scraped the bottom of the barrel harder. In 1996, 1,085,000 college-bound seniors took the SAT. In 2011, there were 1,647,000 senior SAT-takers. Just between 2006 and 2011, the College Board let an incremental 150,000 students take the SAT free or at reduced cost.

On the other hand, my impression is that it became a lot more common for students to take both the SAT and ACT over that 15-year stretch, so some of the increase in the number of test-takers comes from people who would only have taken the ACT in 1996. It used to be that East and West Coasters took the SAT and Midwesterners the ACT, but by 2011, lots of students try both to see which one they'll do better on. These kids who take both tests probably tend to be fairly ambitious ones who are looking to game the system by taking both tests, then submitting only the test score they did better upon. So, double-dippers likely scored reasonably well (although, of course, not so 2400 / 36 outstanding that they wouldn't bother taking any test again).

(Has anybody recently done an authoritative study of the trend in overall SAT scores considering all the factors driving scores up or down?)

Between 1996 and 2011, everybody except Other Hispanics got a little better in Math. (I suspect that Other Hispanics used to be mostly Cubans and random fairly well-to-do South Americans, but now it includes a lot of Central Americans.) But Asians got a lot better: 37 points, from 558 to 595.

Verbal scores stagnated or declined slightly, except for Asians, who went up 21 points from 496 to 517. 

Now, let's look at scores relative to the white scores in 1996 and 2011. A decade and a half ago, the overall score for everybody was 36 points lower than the white score. Today, it's 52 points lower. Most of that 16 points of relative decline is due to the demographic composition of America's SAT-takers changing for the worse.

Difference v. whites


Total (V+M)

1996 2011 Chg
ALL 36 52 (16)
Female 54 68 (14)
Male 15 32 (17)
Asian 5 49 44
White 0 0 0
Black 193 208 (15)
AmerIndian 89 91 (2)
Mexican 135 146 (11)
PR 152 159 (7)
Other Hisp 118 150 (32)

The Gap got worse for most of the minority groups that the press gets worked up over. Blacks fell from 193 points behind whites to 208 points (a 15 point relative decline, or a point per year). Mexicans fell from 135 lower to 146 lower. Other Hispanics fell the most, from 118 behind to 150 behind.

These declines are probably mostly due to society (especially the College Board) scraping the bottom of the barrel harder in 2011. What with the recession and all, everybody is convinced that they must go to college, so they try the SAT. The number of people who scored below 400 on Verbal grew from 179,000 to 302,000 and on Math from 172,000 to 251,000.

The number who scored 700 or higher also shot upwards, but that might be due in part to kids taking the SAT more times or taking both the SAT and ACT to see if they can shoot the moon. The number scoring 700 or higher on Verbal went up from 47,000 to 77,000 and on Math from 58,000 to 112,000. High scorers are presumably the most likely to do a lot of test prep and otherwise try to game the system.

In contrast to all other ethnic groups, who fell farther behind whites over the last 15 years, Asians had a 5 point advantage over whites in 1996, which blossomed to a 49 point lead by 2011, a relative change of 44 points.That's a big change, relative to the near-stasis on everything else.

May 30, 2011

Why do Republicans hate thinking about race and IQ, too?

Here's my new VDARE essay

It's no surprise why Democrats tend to be so angry at anybody who mentions the race-IQ link, but why do so many Republicans now feel the same way? There are a number of reasons, but one is often overlooked. I explore an aspect of the sociology and psychology of Republican voters.

Read it there.