Slate on Sailer
- From: ixtarbrules@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 21:47:10 -0700 (PDT)
Slate on Sailer
"From Slate:
Mental Segregation
Inequality, racism, and framing.
by William Saletan
May 4, 2009
People vary in their abilities based in part on genetic
differences. Suppose these differences at the individual level
sometimes add up to differences in average ability between people of
one race and people of another. Should we say so?
Here are three perspectives on the question. On Wednesday, the New
York Times ran the following story:
‘No Child’ Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap …
On Thursday, I raised a question about the Times story:
Why categorize and measure students by race? Aren’t there
better ways to organize the data? … [Parts of the test report]
organize the data by factors that can help us target and adjust
educational policy: kids with low scores, kids in public school, kids
in high school, kids whose parents didn’t graduate. … But race? Does
that category really help? And what message does it send to kids when
headlines assert a persistent “racial gap”?
On Friday, Steve Sailer, the founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute, responded to my question. He argued that I was wrong to
propose to “stop counting” scores by race:
The reason people all over the world and of all different
ideologies can’t help but be interested in race is [that] a racial
group is, fundamentally, an extended family. So, race is about who
your relatives are, which is an inherently interesting topic.
Saletan has been arguing that we should just group people by
looking at one gene at a time. (Of course, on average, individual gene
differences will tend to follow racial lines.) But, more
fundamentally, what he doesn’t get is that racial groups have an
existence independent of genetics. They are fundamentally genealogical
entities—who begat whom. Unsurprisingly, when you stop and think about
it, the genes tag along with the begats.
Sailer, like the Times, is embracing racial averaging of test
scores. But unlike the Times, he’s doing so in the belief that
differences in the resulting averages are in large part genetic. He’s
arguing not just that some people do better than others based on
inherited ability (the genetic question) and that this ability is more
prevalent among people of one race than among people of another (the
distribution question), but that this is how the data should be
aggregated, averaged, and compared (the framing question).
To be precise, I am arguing that this is how the data is aggregated,
averaged, and compared … by law. The No Child Left Behind legislation
godfathered by Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush is explicitly concerned
with narrowing racial achievement gaps.
More generally, that mainstay of the civil rights industry, the
concept of “disparate impact” — as exemplified by the EEOC’s four-
fifths rule, which, in the Supreme Court’s Ricci case was cited by the
city of New Haven to justify throwing out a firefighter promotional
test that no blacks passed — requires the government to maintain vast
statical offices for sorting employees by race. Similarly, the
Community Reinvestment Act requires millions of mortgages to be sorted
by race in the government’s giant Home Mortgage Disclosure Act
database in order to lean on the mortgage industry to lend more money
to minorities. (How’s that working out for us lately?)
Should the government count by race? In 2002, I endorsed and voted for
Ward Connerly’s California initiative that the state government should
stop counting by race. I reasoned by analogy to religion. In the
1950s, the Census Bureau proposed adding a religion question to the
Census, but Jewish groups protested, so the Census doesn’t count
people by religion. And that makes it very hard to file a disparate
impact lawsuit over purported religious discrimination based on
statistical differences. There simply aren’t any government statistics
on religion today, so religious discrimination cases require direct
evidence of discrimination, so there are fewer lawsuits over religious
discrimination than over racial discrimination, and so employers
seldom impose religious quotas on themselves.
But, Connerly’s initiative to eliminate data collection by race went
down to defeat badly, and I haven’t expressed much of an opinion on
the subject of whether or not the government should collect data by
race since. But if the government’s going to collect colossal amounts
of data by race and impose legal differences by race, then I think
it’s my duty as a citizen to look at the government’s numbers and see
what they say.
It’s important to separate these three questions. We know that
genes influence many abilities. We also know that some of these genes
vary considerably in prevalence between ethnic groups. One example is
the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of
muscular force and correlates with excellence at speed and power
sports. The opposite variant of the gene is called XX. Tests indicate
that the ratio of people with RR to people with XX is 1 to 1 among
Asians, 2 to 1 among European whites, and more than 4 to 1 among
African-Americans.
We shouldn’t overstate the case. Genes don’t determine everything,
and most genes don’t vary significantly between populations. But
research is constantly finding new gene-trait correlations and group
differences. If your faith in equality depends on an ethnically or
racially even distribution of all ability-influencing genes, you’re in
trouble.
That’s why the framing question matters. People of your race may
be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my
race. But the opposite pattern may turn up if you and I are classified
in some other way. My dad was black, my mom was white, I was born in
Hawaii, I was raised in a broken home, I grew up in Indonesia, I went
to private school, I played basketball, I used drugs, my grades were
unspectacular, and I went to Harvard Law. Guess my IQ.
Rather than focus on an exotic such as the President, who wrote a 460-
page book (helpfully subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance so that
you don’t miss the point) justifying to himself that he was “black
enough” to be a leader of blacks, I think it’s more helpful to state
what I’ve often pointed out: “Somewhere around eleven million
Hispanics and seven million African Americans have higher IQs than the
average white American.”
I put a lot of effort a decade ago into trying to come up with broad
evidence for Saletan’s argument that the government’s system of asking
people to check off little race and ethnicity boxes is too error-prone
and illogical to work, but I eventually had to admit to myself that,
on the whole, it was good enough for government work. Sure, there are
more than a few exotics like Tiger Woods (who came up with 1 word to
describe himself: “Caublinasian”) and Barack Obama (who came up with
150,000 words in Dreams from My Father to rationalize his claim to
being “black enough”), but most of the time, the government’s system
kind of sort of works.
The distribution question doesn’t settle the framing question,
because race is just one way in which ability can be unevenly
distributed. To answer the framing question in the affirmative, you
have to show something more. You have to show that classifying and
comparing by race, rather than using some other classification system
or judging each person as an individual, does more good than harm.
It’s Ward Connerly’s view that the government classifying people by
race does more harm than good. Judging from the Obama Administration’s
amicus curiae brief in the Ricci case, it’s definitely not Barack
Obama’s view. Perhaps Mr. Saletan should take up his argument with the
President of the United States rather than with me.
Sailer’s argument is that racial classification is natural—that we
“can’t help but be interested in race” because we tend to define
others as in or out of our extended family. I think he’s right about
that. We’re prone to tribalism. But that’s not a reason to encourage
racial classification. It’s a reason to beware it.
In other words, Steve Sailer will more or less win on the scientific
grounds any debate over race he choose to engage in seriously, so it’s
best not to debate the topic at all.
Fine. But can we first get rid of all the government’s laws,
institutions, and regulations that not only count by race but then
discriminate by race, such as the EEOC, the four-fifths rule, the CRA,
and so forth?
Saletan continues:
Consider Sailer’s views on immigration. A few months ago, he
wrote:
Typically, the two most important factors influencing the long-
term success of an organization are the quantity and quality of people
involved. … This is particularly true for a country. Yet there has
been barely any discussion in the U.S. prestige press on the
implications of the demographic change imposed by immigration. … Is
adding 100 million Latinos to the U.S. population a good idea? …
And there has been little change in the racial disparities in
crime rates. Racial and ethnic differences of all kinds have been
strikingly stable since the 1970s. In particular, the word that best
sums up Latino America is inertia. Things just sort of keep on keeping
on in the general direction that they were already moving. What we do
know is that all of these troubles are exacerbated by the mass
immigration of people with low human capital.
This is what can happen when you constantly look for racial angles
in data on crime, IQ, and other measures of the “quality of people.”
You start aiming policies at ethnic groups. But I don’t think this
kind of racism is a product of uneven distribution. It’s a product of
bad framing.
In other words, Sailer has all the government data on his side, but
that just makes it worse!
By this point poor old kicked-around Saletan has finally collapsed
into just plain pointing and sputtering about how I, and anybody else
who notices the massive demographic changes brought about by our
Establishment’s immigration policy, is some kind of evil racist.
Okay!
(I will admit that it’s also possible that Saletan has come around to
agreeing 100% with me and he’s just picking a fight with me to give my
sensible views more publicity.) " <<
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2009/05/05/slate-on-sailer/
.
- Prev by Date: Is Sailer A Nice Guy?
- Next by Date: Marilyn Monroe Jumps Right Out At You
- Previous by thread: Is Sailer A Nice Guy?
- Next by thread: Marilyn Monroe Jumps Right Out At You
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
