Thomas Sowell, an economist, scholar and black right-wing thinker, says that Herrnstein and Murray’s “The Bell Curve” (1994) was an honest, fair-minded and well-written book, one that was far more level-headed than many who disagreed with it. It is certainly nowhere near as extreme as many made it seem. It has its faults, but it raises important questions and needs to be taken seriously.
The part that got everyone upset, of course, was the part on IQ and race, even though it is a small part of the book. Black thinkers and “leaders” (those are Sowell’s air quotes) made two mistakes in how they reacted to the book:
- Straw man arguments: They painted the book’s position as being more extreme than it was. The book never says that the difference between black and white IQs is necessarily genetic or that genetics determines intelligence. It leans in that direction, certainly, but the science is not clear-cut enough to go that far.
- Name-calling and mud-slinging: By reacting more with anger than with substance, they made it seem like the substance lay mainly with Herrnstein and Murray.
Blacks mainly argued that IQ tests are too cultural – they are written by middle-class whites, so they do not work well on blacks.
Sowell disagrees:
- Blacks do best on the more cultural parts, the very parts that do in fact assume middle-class vocabulary and experience, and worse on the parts that do not, like those that test reasoning.
- Any functioning IQ test should give blacks a lower score. Because blacks generally do worse at school than whites. The tests should catch this and they do. As it turns out, the tests work all too well.
- A “culture-free” test would be useless because no one lives in a “culture-free” world. IQ tests, to work properly, have to be written by the mainstream culture.
But “The Bell Curve” has holes of its own:
- Correlation is not cause. There are plenty of correlations between IQ and interesting things like future success in school, future income, divorce, infant mortality, crime, etc. But none of it proves cause. Nor are some of these correlations particularly strong.
- The Flynn Effect: IQs have risen by 10 to 15 points in many countries in the space of 30 years. For some, like Jewish Americans, it has risen even faster. Genetics cannot account for this. The book brings up the issue, but avoids drawing the common sense conclusions.
- Herrnstein and Murray fear that overall IQ will drop because low-IQ women tend to have more children. That makes sense but it is dead wrong: the Flynn Effect more than cancels it out.
- There are way more black women with IQs over 120 than black men. That cannot be genetic either. Among whites there is no difference. The book does not even touch this one.
Sowell says the book should not be accepted unquestioningly, but then neither should it be dismissed out of hand.
See also:
I think IQ tests are very funny. At least the ones I have taken. You know: “1,3, 5, 9… Fill the missing numbers”. And I’m like, ok, 2 is definetly missing there and 4, and also 6,7,8. Something like that. I’m not sure but it is funny as hell.
Also these: here you see two different images. Which one is bigger. Eehhh… The bigger one?
I don’t know how many take these tests for real but if they do, they are in deep scheisse indeed.
Which image is bigger? I have no idea, in these pictures in this piece of paper they look like about one inch long. Eeh…
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“Correlation is not cause.”
That’s a mighty big hole.
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Abagond,
I see there’s hope for you after all, LOL. Seriously though, thanks so much for this post, and by a highly respected Man of Letters, Thomas Sowell, no less. He is no friend of HBDers, by the way; he has said as much in his many writings.
Let’s see if we can now actually focus on what TBC said and grapple with the implications of what it can mean…
O.
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Does this mean, according to their theories, that something is “wrong” with black PhD and MD scientists, engineers and physicians?
Black extremists have their Leonard Jeffries of the world and white have the Hernsteins and Murrays.
If blacks were in power, we would be discussing the genetic underpinnings of the “ice people” and “sun people” hypotheses.
This crap is easier to get into bread and circuses mode when both populations are minimally educated….
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“There are way more black women with IQs over 120 than black men.” Wonder why.
I don’t recall taking an IQ test in Canada — must be an American thing, since I’ve never seen an IQ test and have no idea why it is so essential here.
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Sam,
That is not an IQ test, as I said in a comment on an earlier post. Those test are designed to test only certain abilities and Abagond mentioned here. Schools use them to access the level of the students as compared to the rest of the country. They are graded in percentiles of only those who have taken the specific test.
The example you gave, 11 would be the expected number. That is a mathematical concept of a series in which you have to figure out what arithmetical action is to be taken. It could also be a progression of prime numbers or an exponential one. If you had Algebra you would be expected to do well on that kind of test, it doesn’t have anything to with overall intelligence, it only has to do with what you learned in Algebra. Some of those concepts might be taught earlier, dependent where you went to school.
I have noticed that a subject like Calculus is hardly ever taught in schools where the school’s population is predominately Black. Blacks would do less well on those type of test, because of no exposure. But that crap is never plotted or put into any data analysis which use more than one data source. You see most of the psychologist and pundits have no idea how to use statistics to its fullest or even know when they are comparing apples to oranges.
You would think that Shockley would know, but he wasn’t interested in the data of the math, only putting forth his ideas of race. What is even more puzzling is someone like James Watson. I would think in both instances, that their boyhood myths prevail over their scientific achievement.
I think someone like Sowell gives some credence to the bell curve, so that he can remain special. I think many of the Black neo conservatives, really think they are something special, one of a million.
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I agree with Sowell’s balanced view. Before you can dispute you must thoroughly understand what it is you’re up against, and clearly the “black leaders and thinkers” did not do this. Instead, they launched into hysterics over something the book never stated, at least according to Sowell. It also seems pretty clear that IQ really measures what you learn in school more than anything.
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@hator: yeah, I knew that, I was just joking there, but seriously; Why this whole subject is so friggin important in USA?
They don’t do these tests in finnish schools at all and according the last PISA results, finnish kids did allright again there. So why the huge importance of this whole shabang in USA?
From my perspective, this is all just mumbo jumbo and a big scale. I don’t see any value in this. Seriously, I don’t.
Maybe I’m just dumb 😀
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Sam,
Americans always want to quantify everything and when schools started getting state and federal money it had to conform to these standard of education. I think after WWII more and more districts needed non local tax money, more and more strings became attached. The funny thing is that Americans aren’t any better educated, in fact taking a foreign language and learning the Latin and Greek classics are hardly required and little or no significant history, music and art have gone the way of the DoDo. So America produces a bunch of technocrats and aren’t really good at that. It seems 50 percent of Americans think that one is an elitist if one has a college degree.
Americans spout what the think tanks and pundits tell them about the founder, but do not actually read their letters or other writings. It amuses me when they speak of Jefferson and privatize education. He was a huge proponent of public education and instrumental in creating the first public university.
I think some keep the notion of the IQ test to keep them in that fantasy that they are superior to certain groups and the rest of the world. Most couldn’t even compete if there were no other groups.
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To Abagond:
Herrnstein and Murray fear that overall IQ will drop because low-IQ women tend to have more children. That makes sense but it is dead wrong: the Flynn Effect more than cancels it out.
It would appear that Flynn agrees with Herrnstein and Murray:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10450313
“Brainier mums needed to maintain future generations’ intelligence, says professor
8:21 AM Sunday Jul 8, 2007
Share32
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.”
Note, the Flynn effect has been hitting a plateau (and even marginally regressing..) in multiple developed countries (Great Britain and Denmark..) but still seems to be progressing in developing countries.
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What ever happen to the Nobel Laureate fertility clinics? Too many average babies?
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As much as I want to be able to close the books on this topic and say every group has the same IQ average, objectively speaking, it’s hard to look at something like the Minnesota trans-racial adoption study and not have doubts.
I would doubt that all the gap between the races is biological, but biology is likely a factor. The culturally biased argument doesn’t seem to hold water because the gap is biggest on tests of abstract reasoning and problem solving where there is less cultural loading.
So if Rushton and Jared Taylor and all these guys are right, well I guess it would certainly explain a lot of differences in performance across the globe. For example, I was recently read that Lebanese in Haiti run many small businesses. Much like you had Jews in the past and Koreans today running businesses in black areas that for some reason blacks aren’t running. Essentially an exploitative relationship. It’s like we are colonized and exploited by others no matter where we are, be it in Africa, the Caribbean, S. Central, it doesn’t matter. The same was true with Indians in Uganda. It pains me to see this. Why aren’t the Haitians running these businesses, why are there ANY Korean businesses in black areas? Why aren’t we doing these things for ourselves?? To me that’s shameful. Why are we exploited time and time again??
I hope the HBDers are wrong(or mostly so), and the biological differences if they are there are less significant than what many think. But what if they are right? It would basically mean blacks are doomed to perpetually lag behind in achievement. Today, test scores taken from Shanghai show that Chinese kids(at least in the major urban areas) are kicking the world’s ass academically. It’s interesting that NE Asian academic performance is high no matter what country they reside in. China is poised to be a serious power to contend with as this century unfolds. They have the academic performance, they have the work ethic and they have strong sense of nationalism and purpose. Meanwhile, poor Africa will find itself exploited for resources once again by rising China and powerless to do much about it.
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@tulio: first of all, Africa is not a country, it is a continent. Secondly, there are massively rich black africans, billionaires actually, who have stolen a lot from the riches and their countries. There are litterally thousands of bank accounts in Switzerland and other places full of millions from Africa.
I see this whole problem a social one. Take away the poverity and things would look totally different. In New Zeeland the most of the poor are maoris, the blacks of that country. In US the blacks have done better in recent decades, some are millionaires and big bosses, but majority is still struggling. Native Americans are down the tubes mostly and among the poorest of the nation. Are they all dumb?
In Finland after the WW2 there was a consentrated effort to create a society where all have a healthcare, education and such. The results were better than expected. We rose from poor agrarian country on the edge of Europe to one of the healthiest and richest countries in the world in litterally three decades. No bad from a the only country which paid all its debts after the war, lost the whole Carelia, had 400 000 refugees, lost the third largest city, much of its fertile land, 80 000 dead and much more injured and invalids etc.
Now, our rightwing liberal-conservativce goverment is slowly dismantling all of this in the name of global capitalism and economical effectiveness. The gap between the rich and the poor is back again, there are hundreds of thousands of low income people again, healthcare is brought down, and lo behold, the finnish kids who were number one in PISA few years ago are no more No1! So, bringing the poverty back, the results in education are starting to erode. Funny, huh?
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@Tulio,
I’m not sure either about “group” differences in IQ. It seems likely that there would be at least minor divergences in innate intelligence between those populations that society construes as “races.” Then again I’ve read some comments by experts who believe that since intelligence is controlled by so many different genes, that the “races” pan out in the end. I wouldn’t put too much stock in studies like the one carried out in Minnesota. If I remember correctly, the black kids who were adopted into white homes scored substantially lower on IQ tests then the white kids adopted into similar homes. The problem with concluding that this is a reflection of innate differences is that environmental influences were not completely controlled for. The black kids were probably treated differently by their adopted parents than the white kids were (because they were black), and the black kids certainly experienced a very different social environment when they moved out into the world. The IQ differences expanded as the children grew into adolescents, perhaps reflecting the non-white youths’ assimilation into reactive subcultures. I think the studies of admixture-IQ correlation among African Americans may be more reliable because the members of this group tend to be treated pretty similarly by society even though they their underlying genetics is quite diverse. The fact that there is no positive correlation between white ancestry and IQ among members of the African American ethnopolitical group, after controlling for phenotype, strongly suggests that racial differences in IQ aren’t driven by genetics.
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I’ve never been able to abide Thomas Sowell. Even on those few and rare occasions when I agree with his conclusion, I chafe at his wack reasoning. Most of the time, though, I can’t even be bothered to read his drivel. Mainly, he sees himself as a scold of the left.
As to IQ or whatever, (a) I don’t believe IQ is a useful measure of whatever combination of things it takes to be “successful” in life, and (b) why is there never a mention, in these types of “Bell Curve” discussions, of the fact that African Americans invented Be Bop Jazz music during a period of horrific official oppression against them? This is arguably America’s only significant contribution to the world of serious music. It is highly cerebral and complex, while at the same time viscerally powerful. It is one of the finest jewels of human creation. I mention it because it is evidence of the fact that African Americans are capable, even under horrific conditions, of the very highest levels of intellectual and artistic acheivement. In other words, the baseline assumption of all of these HBD and Bell Curve types — that African Americans aren’t capable of high levels of intellectual acheivement — is simply wrong. History shows this.
Of course that then begs the question of why we see such a large achievement gap in our educational system today.
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interesting good points never read the book not my type of read but sounds interesting…maybe i should check it out
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@Blanc2
HBDers don’t claim that blacks aren’t capable of high intelligence or creativity, the claim is that individuals of superior intelligence are less numerous. At least by any way that we currently measure intelligence.
@FG
Those blacks kids may have been treated differently in some way, or had lower expectations placed upon them, or the Stereotype threat phenomena may have played a role or a number of things. That’s why I say the study makes a strong case for IQ differences between the races, but not a slam-dunk beyond a reasonable doubt case. It could that you could equalize treatment and still have some gap, but maybe the gap would be smaller than it currently is. Southern whites score 10pts less than New England whites and there’s no way that could be genetic, meaning that a Northern black is about as intelligent as a southern white. However the gap still exist when comparing southern white to southern black and northern white to northern black. It’s also common across the world that in nations where there is a historically subjugated minority, that minority will often have a significantly depressed IQ score.
So IMO, the jury is still out on the matter. There are compelling arguments on both sides.
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There are way more black women with IQs over 120 than black men.
Where does Sowell get this? He seems to be the origin of this meme – I’ve never seen it attributed to anyone but him.
I’m pretty dubious about it, especially in g loaded IQ tests.
If it’s derived from less g loaded and more school learning loaded tests like the SATs or even more so national educational assessment tests, then it seems more plausible, given rates of attending college by gender among blacks. I.e., esp. post puberty many more black males seem to have a lot of trouble concentrating or wanting to concentrate in school than black females.
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I compiled some data on the Black-White IQ gap. The following conclusions are unavoidable:
1. The gap represents a real difference in general intelligence (IQ tests are measures of general intelligence)
2. The gap is socially important
3. The gap has a substantial biological basis (which doesn’t imply a genetic basis)
4. The gap has closed somewhat
5. The gap has closed more for younger kids
6. The gap increases with age — a phenomena which can be explained by environmentalists and hereditarians (h^2 increases with age.)
http://stuffliberalshate.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/cant-swim-free-of-that-g-factor/
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@ Chuck
1) What exactly is “general intelligence.”
3) How have you determined the biological basis for the gap?
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[…] Sowell's review and I found his take interesting. The man is definitely a genius of controversy. https://abagond.wordpress.com/2010/12…he-bell-curve/ I had never heard of the Flynn affect either. I still say it's dangerous to pass off social […]
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Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it!.
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Thomas Sowell writes his last column.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell122816.php3
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A shame. One of the few Conservative blacks whose wisdom manages to exceed his tomfoolfery. At least Armond White is still putting up the good fight.
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I personally don’t perform well on standardized tests. However, in all subjects, except math, I typically finish in the top five percent on tests given by a teacher who taught the class. This was my experience in high school where I usually made honor roll, and in college where I graduated Suma Cum Laude. For me, tests have to do with familiarity, and I find the better the teacher, the better I perform. For many years, I worked with 16-18 year old youth. When presented with problems (overcoming obstacles requiring critical thinking and technique) I typically observed at boy scout camps, the smartest individual academically did not distinguish him or herself when face with problems never before encountered. It appeared that the one with prior experience with something akin to the situation did better at solving the problem. So for me, and many others, tests seem to measure familiarity to a great extent. Also culture, beginning at birth the parent, school, and the child’s entire network’s teaches how to are to behave and how to think and what to think. This network also promotes and prioritizes academics. In my family and the black community in which I grew up, there was little emphasis on education excellence; therefore, the only pressure was to finish and to get a job, and failing a grade would separate yourself from your best friends. Going to college was never part of any conversation I ever had with anyone, including my teachers. I was in the top five percent in my high school class academically. One of my best friends was near the bottom, but he played guitar at the level of Jimmy Hendricks. Go figure.
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