3091 IQ and Immigration | Jason Richwine and Stefan Molyneux
When the subject of Intelligence (IQ) is discussed in the mainstream media - hysteria and slander from journalists often trumps the available science. Jason Richwine and Stefan Molyneux discuss media controversy in a politically correct culture, the latest science regarding human intelligence, the predictable capabilities of IQ and what this means for the success of immigrants in America and around the world. Jason Richwine has a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and is an analyst and contributor writer for National Review. Dr. Richwine's doctoral dissertation on "IQ and Immigration Policy" was the subject of media controversy in 2013, an can be read in it's entirety at: http://www.fdrurl.com/iq-and-immigrationFor more on Jason Richwine and his work, please go to: http://www.jasonrichwine.comFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donate
Richwine wrote a PhD thesis some years ago under the tutelage partially of Dr.
Charles Murray, who's also been on this show to talk about ethnic differences in intelligence scores or intelligence testing scores.
Dr.
Richwine examined Hispanics coming into America and found, of course, the first generation scored relatively low on intelligence tests relative to the people already living in America.
Of course, lots of reasons as to why that may be the case.
Second generation did better than the first, but the third generation did not maintain the gains of the second.
And so this makes a very, very big challenge towards the issues of immigration, multiculturalism, integration, and so on.
It's a challenging thesis to me.
I push back against it intellectually.
But we do have to gird our loins and screw our courage to the sticking place and follow the data where it leads.
Otherwise, we are lost in a sea of propaganda.
So we had a very enjoyable chat about immigration, intelligence, ethnicity, and so on.
And I'm very pleased to bring you Dr. Jason Richwine.
Thank you so much for taking the time today, Jason.
We really appreciate it.
Well, it's my pleasure.
So, a couple of years ago, of course, you hit the spotlight, and perhaps it could be said that the spotlight hit back.
And one of your dissertations, which I think you'd written four years previous to 2013, under the tutelage of a number of, of course, prominent Harvard academics, including Dr.
Charles Murray, who of course was also recently on this show, well, you were talking about immigration and IQ. You just went through the eyes and found what were the most potentially flame-broiled controversies that the American public could try to stomach.
And as you said, it lay dormant for a couple of years, and then as a result of a heritage study, you gained some sort of prominence.
I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the firestorm, and then we can talk about the contents of the thesis, which I would highly recommend is well worth reading.
Sure, yeah.
You mentioned that the two topics together were a bit of a controversy.
It's interesting.
I'm not the kind of person who sets out to create controversy, but I think sometimes what happens is the issues that are most interesting also happen to be the most controversial.
They say in a PhD program that you should always pick a topic that you're interested in, but beyond all else, no matter what else you're thinking about or contemplating, Pick something you find interesting because you're stuck with that topic for years, you know, at least three years, sometimes more.
And so that's really the only reason, you know, when it comes down to it that I got into the topic as a dissertation topic.
But then, of course, obviously there are some major implications for public policy that are important to discuss.
When it comes to the firestorm itself, I mean, you're right.
It's something that was, I guess, you know, sort of on the back burner for years.
And then when we came out with a completely unrelated report on immigration for the Heritage Foundation, there were a lot of people lining up against that report.
The people who were for this bill, the bill in Congress at the time, was mainly an amnesty for the illegal immigrants who were currently in the country.
There were a lot of different interest groups lining up for that bill, and they realized that the Heritage Foundation was really the only major organization that was going to stand in their way.
And so what happened was, even before we came out with that report for Heritage, it was already being attacked.
So it's remarkable how that worked.
And of course, the discovery of my dissertation was just perfect for that group of people.
I say discovery even though it's not really the right word because it was never a secret to anyone.
I've spoken quite openly about these topics throughout all the years I've been in Washington, D.C., since graduation as well.
But I really underestimated the extent to which people would try to use that as a way of implying that I was some kind of secret racist or some other kind of horrible person.
But I guess that's just the way politics works these days.
And we can talk more, I guess, about how these witch hunts have really infected the way we talk about policy and how we can hopefully Turn a corner on that and start being able to have some more open conversations.
Well, I mean, it sort of reminds me, going way back in the day, you know, the sort of Copernican revolution, the heliocentric model of the solar system, that that did challenge some special interests, to put it mildly, at the time, and there was that kind of persecution.
And if you look back, of course, to Bernstein in the 70s, to Rushton, to two people, of course, Murray and Bernstein in the 90s, There seems to be this repetition where any question of ethnicity and intelligence, it erupts.
Everyone is like freaking out completely as if they've never heard it before, although within the consensus, my understanding is the consensus within the technical discipline is fairly clear.
And then it vanishes, and then a few years later, it comes up again as if it's never happened before, and there's the same shock and appalling and witch hunt and all this kind of stuff, and then it vanishes again, and we're sort of kind of in a lull at the moment, I think, although you could argue that Donald Trump's candidacy might drag this stuff to the forefront again because, of course, he's talking about immigration so consistently.
But there's this weird repetition with the same thing that people pretend to be shocked every single time.
That's exactly right.
Exactly one of my major concerns as well.
I wrote about this in an article for Politico called, Why Can't We Talk About IQ? If there's anyone out there listening who really, really wants to read the one thing, the one good article I wrote, or I should say the best article I wrote in response to all this, that would be it for Politico.
But yes, you're right.
It's something that I think a lot of people just don't want to believe.
I can understand it to some degree that there's a feeling among The people unfamiliar with the technical literature but are nonetheless intellectuals in a sense, I'm talking about journalists or scholars in other fields, who are naturally uncomfortable with the idea of intractable differences.
And I'm not even talking about between groups, even just among individuals.
The idea that some people are funnier than other people, or some people are smarter than other people, some people are more athletic than others.
It's difficult for people to accept because we would really love to think that just hard work is enough to generate accomplishment.
But really it's not.
You have to have hard work and a lot of innate ability to do the kinds of things that people would like to do.
And because that's difficult for people to contemplate, it doesn't fit well into their worldview, they tend to just forget about it.
It's a very common thing where if you see evidence pointing in a direction you don't like, It's very easy to just kind of put that aside and not remember it until the next time someone brings it up.
And as you said, my situation was similar in many ways to past little outbursts of debate about IQ which then sort of go away for a while and then they come out again and people are upset about it again.
And I tried to make this point a lot in that political article and also in a lot of the other writing that I did in response is that people are getting upset about things that are not even a matter of controversy in the actual field of psychology.
The idea that IQ is a number that can estimate general cognitive ability, that's not controversial.
The idea that this IQ test is something that can predict future income and socioeconomic status, again, not controversial.
The idea that these tests are not biased against various socio-economic groups, again, not controversial, but all of these things just sort of repeatedly come up among people who are not familiar with that literature.
Yeah, and so the general hierarchy, correct me where I go astray as a fairly competent amateur, but the hierarchy, as far as I understand it, from decades, and I guess in some places close to a century, That's pretty stable
in terms of average IQ scores for those various ethnic groups.
It's something that hasn't changed all that much, although, of course, the magnitude of the differences have changed over time.
But yes, I mean, that's something that I touched on in my dissertation, although group differences was not the main part of my dissertation.
Certainly, you have to discuss it in any long-form piece about IQ. It's certainly important.
And I think also, you know, those group differences are something that people should think about from time to time as indicating that, you know, people are different.
Groups of people are different, and the idea that Any time there's any kind of socioeconomic disparity between identifiable groups, no matter how you're doing identification, whether it's even by ethnicity or even sexual orientation or any kind of other identifiable group delineator, the assumption that that must be due to the predations of the majority group or some kind of discrimination is quite wrong.
We need to disabuse ourselves of that notion and begin to think A little bit more maturely, I would say, about why differences exist in society because at bottom, people are different and different people have different kinds of abilities and those abilities are going to express themselves in different ways throughout society.
I think we could have a much more peaceful and cooperative society, in fact, if we just relaxed a little about these outcome differences and accepted the fact that some of these things are just going to be natural.
Right.
And I also want to insert the general caveats when we start talking about a group or ethnic differences in intelligence that you can never prejudge any individual by these characteristics.
Of course, right?
An IQ of 130, no matter where it's coming from or what body type it happens to be in, is an IQ of 130.
It will probably gain the income that is associated with that.
So you can't judge any individual ahead of time based upon these group characteristics.
However, When you zoom back to a wide enough sample set, you will see trends begin to emerge.
And because policy, public policy, is about very wide sample sets, countrywide sample sets, it is important to bring these distinctions in, not when you're sitting across from someone in the subway, but when you are looking at public policy questions, you are looking at huge sample sets.
And if you don't have this particular lens to look at it through, everything seems kind of blurry and highly conflict-ridden when in some ways it's not.
That's exactly right.
I agree with everything you just said.
When you're talking about individuals, of course, we always want to judge individuals based on who they are as themselves.
The idea that we would resort to a group average about that person, you don't have to do that if you have enough information about them to know who they are as people.
When I talk about the importance for public policy of group differences, which is one part, not of course the whole study of IQ by any means, but it's one part of it, It's really only from that top-down perspective when you say, okay, we seem to see these differences emerging.
It doesn't really matter what country you're in or what state or even what school district, these differences seem to be emerging.
And do we want to always blame that on some kind of social disparity or do we want to begin thinking about that as something that's just natural for what happens when you have different groups of people And I know that a lot of people listening are probably going to say, well, that's so pessimistic, you know, that's so bleak in assessment, but I strongly disagree.
I think that, as I said, the key to living peacefully together, because, after all, the United States is a very diverse nation, and that's not going to change, so the key to living peacefully together is beginning to just accept those differences, treating people as individuals, and not immediately blaming one group when another group does not do as well.
Well, and that, of course, is a challenge.
And I grew up in a very sort of multicultural positive environment, and I'm still very much behind that ideal.
But it is never profitable to reject empirical data and empirical reality.
Oh, I guess politically it might be profitable in the short run.
But as far as social cohesion and actually getting along, it's a very negative thing to kind of reject this information.
I think that there is a lot of sensitivity, and rightly so.
So if you say, okay, there are these different group differences, these ethnic differences in general intelligence on average...
Then people say, well, okay, but then the people who may come up a little bit short, on average, are going to be very upset.
And of course, I think everyone's sensitive to that, of course, right?
But the reality is, if these differences are real, and again, the data seems to show that they are, someone's going to get upset.
Someone's going to have to get upset.
Because if we say everyone's equal, then only group disparities will be blamed on white racism, in which case we have...
Everyone and their dog screaming racism at white people, which is not that much fun for white people.
So someone's going to get upset and I just rather we go with the data rather than what's politically correct.
I hope that people ultimately would not be upset by it and just sort of learn to embrace the diversity of the world.
This is a sense where diversity, I think, is something that we have to accept.
I would also point out that certainly there are some indicators like intelligence where you say, I would like to be more intelligent rather than less, but there's also a lot of personality traits where it's not even clear what is necessarily good or bad.
You wouldn't line up, say, aggressiveness necessarily on a good-bad continuum because some combinations can work better than others.
When you're talking about the vast set of personality characteristics that we might measure or at least be able to think about.
To be able to say, well, gee, this one set is good and this one set is bad, I don't think of it that way.
I think of sometimes just low versus high in various types of personality traits.
And so once we accept that those differences exist and that IQ is but one part of that larger set of differences, I don't think anyone should really be upset about that.
Sometimes it's easier to think about this outside the context of the very fraught history between whites and blacks in the United States and think maybe more about the difference between, say, East Asians and white Americans, where very few people are going to blame Asian Americans for their greater average socioeconomic success compared to white Americans.
It's something that Asians tend to be very good at, tend to be very good at academics.
It's a stereotype, of course, but stereotypes oftentimes are just an expression of an average characteristic of a group.
And so there really is not that much tension between whites and Asians in America, despite the fact we have these socioeconomic differences.
And it's my dream, and maybe it's just a dream, an idealistic dream, Maybe all group differences could be treated just like the white-Asian difference in America someday.
Right.
I certainly think we can hope for that.
We want to dig in a little bit before we get to your focus on Hispanics and immigration.
Just for the audience who's not that familiar, and sadly, it does seem to be quite a lot of people that we have a pretty intelligent audience.
So I wonder if you could just break down IQ and in particular the G substrata of the IQ testing, because a lot of people think, well, you know, there's EQ and there's a whole bunch of multi-facets to intelligence and so on.
But that does seem to see sort of like if these different testings of the planets, there is a sun around which they orbit, which seems to be very consistent.
I wonder if you could help people understand that a little bit.
Sure.
I mean, it goes back to Spearman, sort of the first psychometrician back in the early 20th century, Who noted something that, you know, maybe in retrospect was kind of obvious, and that is that if you give people a big battery of tests, you know, 10, 12 different tests, all of which test mental ability to some extent, but are seemingly very different in their context.
Maybe you have a vocabulary test, and then maybe you have a math test, and then maybe you have a test where you have to rotate three-dimensional objects in your mind, and maybe you have something about musical ability and so on.
You have all those different tests, and what Spearman found is that scores on those tests were fairly highly correlated, so that if you had a really good vocabulary, you also were pretty good at doing algebra, and you were also pretty good at rotating three-dimensional objects.
Of course, the correlation wasn't perfect by any means, but it was high enough that he thought there was something else going on there, and what he found was that you can, using factor analysis, which is a mathematical process to sort of isolate The factors that most explain the variance in these tests, he found that there's something that he called G, the general mental ability factor, which underlied a majority of the variance on these tests.
And that's basically the birth of the IQ test, the attempt to measure G using a full-scale IQ score.
And the more tests you have, the more subtests you have of different types of content, the better you can estimate that.
And so, as I said, that really kind of took off as a psychological tool.
And certainly, I think it's important to emphasize that no one should be an IQ determinist in the sense that if you have a certain IQ score, then we know exactly what your life is going to be like.
Not even close.
There's so many other factors as well.
But nevertheless, it is a pretty good predictor, on average, of explaining a decent amount of variance in things like income and Occupational status and also a number of behavioral outcomes.
Your likelihood of going on welfare or ending up in prison is also related to the IQ score.
That's really the basis of it.
There have been a number of challenges to that model for many years.
Probably one of the most common you've heard is the notion of multiple intelligences.
Now, it's important to note that when we talk about G, G doesn't explain everything.
It doesn't explain all the variance on mental tests.
It just explains a lot of it.
So there is room for these other factors, for sure.
Maybe there's a more specific factor for math ability compared to verbal and so on.
And so there is room for that, but only in what you might call a hierarchy of abilities with G at the top.
The attempts to To turn G into just one of many different mental abilities have really not received much empirical support.
The person most associated with the idea of multiple intelligences is Howard Gardner, a very smart man and someone who's done a lot of interesting work, but I think even he would be one of the first people to admit that there's not a lot of psychometric backing for the idea that G can be split into different types of skills because When you try to do that, you keep coming back to G itself as really the top factor explaining so many other things.
So that's where the research has been for a while now.
As I said, not extremely controversial.
Most psychologists certainly accept the G model of IQ, and really most of the debate now about IQ research has moved on from that topic.
Okay, good.
So there is a general sort of horsepower within the brain that shows up.
And we're not saying everyone has the same abilities.
You know, I think as you mentioned in your thesis that everybody knows a literary buff who's terrified at the sight of a math book and vice versa.
But in general, the intelligence factor that is common to all of these tests is basically a measure of raw processing power or speed of the brain.
Does it also not tend to show up in things as non-culturally sensitive as reaction times?
Has it not also been validated by MRI scans showing brain complexity and even by brain size?
It's more than just the test.
It also correlates, if I understand this correctly, widely with a number of other physical measures.
That's right, and that's a burgeoning topic.
It's kind of combining neurology and biology with psychology.
It's a really exciting area, actually, and I kind of wish I could get into that, although I wish I don't have a neurological training to be able to do it.
But yes, I mean, so increasingly we're finding that if you give people IQ tests, you find that you can see certain parts of the brain lighting up on the most G-loaded tests.
There seems to be a correlation between the amount of white matter in the brain and your ability to perform well on the most G-loaded, meaning the items that require the highest IQ to be able to do appropriately.
So, yeah, there's lots of interesting research like that.
And even the genetic research is becoming somewhat more sophisticated, although, to be honest, I think that it's still in its early stages.
A lot of people were hoping that there might be some gene or simple set of genes that could be identified that dictated what your general cognitive ability would be.
And I think increasingly it's becoming clear that it is likely a very, very This complicated set of gene interactions is really contributing to that, and so the quest to find the gene for G has not gone so well, but there have been certain gene combinations that people have found have been at least related to it, although not even close to explaining everything about it.
So this is an interesting field.
I think there's a lot more that can be coming out within the next decade or so, and it could have some really interesting implications for Yeah, I would assume that the complexity of the gene interactions would have to be significant, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a bell curve, right?
I mean, because, you know, switching things on and off, if it was just one big binary switch, you'd get sort of an on and off for intelligence rather than a bell curve that we see.
Right, right.
So, I guess the next question is, one of the things I think that's confusing to people about intelligence, and which they don't usually understand, is A, the degree to which it tends to diverge among groups later in life, and B, the degree to which within each particular individual's testing history, there is an astonishing amount of stability in intelligence over the course of life.
I wonder if you could break those down a little as well.
Yeah, there's just an interesting new paper on that that I think...
It brought some newer data to the question of stability over a lifetime, and it really is remarkable how stable they are from early adulthood to sort of early retirement age, you might say.
I mean, the correlation between an IQ test you take when you're at age 20 versus at age 60 is quite high.
Correcting for measurement error, I've seen it somewhere in the area of 0.9, which is actually surprising even to me.
I didn't think it would be that high.
So, yeah, these are pretty stable scores.
That's not to say that people don't see changes throughout their lives.
I mean, maybe they were sick the day they took the test or something like that.
So, you know, there's probably a lot of people listening saying, hey, I got this score this one time, and then I got this other score the other time.
You know, certainly there is individual variation, but it is pretty stable.
But before late adolescence, it's less stable, and especially in the very early stages of life, you're not going to be able to give a test to a two-year-old and Be very confident about that score remaining stable moving forward.
That's something that everyone needs to understand, especially parents.
There are a lot of parents out there who deny they're interested in the topic at all, but then as soon as they have a child, they immediately want to know what the IQ is.
It's not something you're going to be able to figure out immediately.
Just be patient and you'll quickly learn how much your children take to academic skills and such throughout their lives.
And what are the rebuttals against those who say that there is a cultural bias that excludes certain groups from doing well or there may be internal standards or internal cultural standards or a rising or I guess a lowering to stereotypes say for blacks or Hispanics who test lower on the IQs as a whole.
What are the rebuttals to the arguments that it is a subjective measure that is affected not by anything physical but by ideas within the mind or resistances within the environment or something like that?
There is a huge literature on test measurement.
And a lot of times, people who level the accusation that tests are biased because they're written by white men, supposedly, and so on, I don't think are actually aware of the fact that this is something people have been thinking about for 100 years.
And so, you know, even leaving race aside, if you think about, you know, are tests biased against the poor versus the rich or something like that, there's a very vast literature on that.
And just to sort of give you a couple points on that, One of the most basic measures of test validity is to correlate the test score with some other measure that would be supposedly related to it.
So if you're thinking maybe about SAT scores, that's oftentimes correlated with the GPA in your freshman year of college.
So you might ask, okay, if the SAT is biased against the poor, then maybe the correlation between Your SAT score and your first-year grades will be different for the rich and the poor.
But in fact, it's not, or at least not significantly so.
In fact, if anything, the SAT tends to over-predict the first-year GPA for poor students, which means, if anything, it's actually biased in favor of the poor groups.
So that's one way of looking at it.
There's also a number of different ways of looking at what might be called an internal validity of a test.
And to do that, you can look at the individual items on a test and correlate those with your overall score.
And so you can try to find certain items that may not be acting in the same way they do for different groups.
So maybe for men, maybe a particular item that men find easy, women find really hard, and the difference is greater than the overall difference on the test, then you might say, okay, well, that item maybe is biased against women.
Again, it's important to understand that these sorts of things are tested for.
This is one of the reasons why the SAT has the experimental section, the part of the test that doesn't count, but they use for further research and for future test items where they can remove those types of items if they're causing problems.
And you can get to a point where you find that all the items are functioning basically the same way for all the different groups that are involved.
So I would just say that for people who are sure that cognitive tests are biased, I want them to at least acknowledge that there is a huge literature out there that is expressly aimed at removing bias from these tests.
And to really continue to assert that bias exists, you'd have to I've come up with a number of sort of convoluted stories to explain why both the external validity, in terms of predicting other outcomes, and also the internal validity seems so strong.
Now, as far as what is desirable within a society, and of course, you know, we're not these giant monsters who can make societies at will, so we're just talking about what is preferable as a whole.
I think it's fairly safe to say, of course, can't contradict me where I go astray, but I think it's fairly safe to say that high IQ is better.
I mean, we try not to think of IQ as directly associated with moral standards.
I mean, there's a certain amount of determinism then when you start to shave down the numbers.
But as far as I understand it, when the studies are done, people who have higher IQs tend to be more law-abiding, tend to tell the truth more, tend to be more economically productive, tend to stay out of trouble more, tend to just be better neighbors.
As a whole, higher IQ for a society is preferable if you have the choice.
Yes, I think so.
It's hard to argue with that.
As I said, on an individual level, if someone said, would you like to be smarter, most people are going to say, yeah, I would like to be smarter, sure.
I'd like to go right up to the crazy envelope.
I want to fly as fast as I can before the airplane breaks up.
I want to be as smart as I can.
Before I go insane, you know, take me to the insane level and then take it back a half a point and I'll be ready.
Well, I don't know.
That might be a bit extreme.
I haven't thought about this before because I've heard people, you know, it's one of those dorm room conversations that college kids have, you know, it's like, well, you know, how many IQ points could you give up to be, you know, two inches taller?
You know, it's a question that I have difficulty, you know, even contemplating really.
But, you know, sometimes I worry that When you're talking about mental abilities, all that sort of factors into your personality.
And so if someone said, would you like to have five more IQ points, I'd say sure, but if someone suggested making a radical change, if someone wants to make me Stephen Hawking, I'm not sure, actually, just because I wonder if I would continue to be myself after that.
I know this is probably getting...
It's the Aristotelian question of essence, right?
How much of yourself can you change until you're no longer yourself?
And I think IQ is definitely one of those things because IQ, to my degree, is sort of like being able to see a little bit further over the horizon.
And so there are benefits to having a high IQ for sure.
On the other hand, you are tortured by things that most people don't even know exist.
That's true.
Actually, the relationship between IQ and suicide is a positive one.
The people who are most likely to commit suicide are East Asian countries.
You don't have to have a high IQ to be happy by any means.
Sometimes, as you said, having a high IQ can make you depressed about things you otherwise wouldn't be depressed about.
These are complicated things.
I think most people, regardless of where they stand on any of these personality traits, Can live very satisfying lives and I don't think should ever be envious because, as I said, all this goes into who you are.
To think of it another way, imagine someone said, would you like your sense of humor to be raised by 10%?
Again, I think a sense of humor is a good thing, but how much are you changing me if you're doing that?
I'm okay with me.
I'm not perfect, but I like me.
I think most people have the same kind of feeling about themselves.
I think the best thing to do is just to relax and be who you are.
And I think it's important to recognize, too, I know we're wending a little bit into philosophy territory, but that's what this show's about, so I have no problem with that.
But, you know, it's sort of, to me, it's like massive athletic ability, right?
I mean, I do not have massive athletic ability, but I'm glad that there are people who do, so I can watch it on TV. I don't have a beautiful singing voice, but I'm glad that there are people who do, so I can listen to great music, you know?
You know, so the fact that you may not have a particular ability should, I think, enhance your appreciation of it.
You know, I am not a genius at inventing vaccines, but I'm very glad that there are people who did.
So I made it to 40 without coughing up a lung and expiring in a mud swamp somewhere.
So, you know, the fact that other people have significantly greater abilities than you is something that makes you enjoy the spectacle of life.
And, of course, maybe you feel jealous or envious.
You know, we've all gone through that from time to time.
But the reality is that the fact that other people have massive abilities that we all of us don't have to some degree is what makes life such a wonderful spectacle.
I think that's right.
And I think there's also a point to be made about people remaining humble about their own abilities by seeing real genius.
I think it's particularly important, I think, for You know, gifted kids especially who sometimes go through school for a while, you know, not being challenged and they think they're on top of the world and it's always good for them to, you know, to hit their wall at some point and they realize,
you know, hey, you know, I'm not really such hot stuff and I need to be a little bit more humble and a little bit more circumspect about, you know, the way I see the world because there's a lot to learn and there's a lot of people out there who have a lot of interesting things to say.
You know, I can sort of give my own personal take on that when I When I went to graduate school, I met some people who are not merely smarter than me, but are on a different plane altogether.
At first, it was a little disturbing, but then I came to just appreciate it, as you said.
It helped me to realize that there's a lot for me to learn out there, and there's always someone who can teach you something interesting.
Oh, you can't be great unless you have someone to beat.
I mean, runners know that, right?
They get people to run with them when they want to break a record just so that they have someone that they can compete with.
In fact, they get runners to...
Some new runners show up who are fresh to make...
Anyway, so we...
Okay, so let's get to, I guess, some of the more thorny stuff around these implications.
So my understanding of the data as a whole is that...
If blacks in America, if African Americans have, in aggregate, an average IQ of 85, and they make less money and have fewer assets, say, than Asians, right?
We'll try and take out the usual black-white hysteria and so on, right?
So if blacks have, on average, a lower IQ than Asians...
Then blacks are not being paid less because they're black.
Because if you take any group that has an average IQ of 85, then that group would make as much as blacks on average.
And it's not that Asians are being paid more because they're Asians.
It's that if you take any group that has an average IQ of, say, 104, 105, 106, however it's calculated, then they would make as much as Asians.
In other words, what we're looking at When you do that, a lot of those differences either shrink or disappear.
I do think it's something important to do.
There was a paper, I guess it's back in the 1990s, an economics paper that looked at that by actually using the same dataset that was used in the bell curve.
What they looked at is A measure of labor market discrimination against blacks, but by first controlling for AFQT, the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which was the IQ test used in the bell curve.
What they found is that if you controlled only for education in these equations predicting income, What you find is that there's a big difference.
So you take a black person and a white person of the same years of education, you'll find a white person makes considerably more money.
But then when you add that AFQT variable in, it really shrinks that difference a lot.
And I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, that black women actually were seen to make more money than white women when AFQT was controlled.
I don't think that the difference was completely eliminated among men, but shrunk considerably.
That's an important thing to keep in mind from a labor econ perspective, which is that years of education can mean very different things to certain people.
If you're able to graduate from high school, say, in one of those famously not-so-challenging inner-city schools, then that's not exactly the same qualification as graduating from high school In some kind of suburban school with very high-achieving parents and students and so on.
And so, yes, once you have that IQ control, it does make a considerable difference.
And I've tried to use that in some of my own work, sort of completely unrelated to ethnicity, but just when you're comparing groups of people like, say, public sector workers and private sector workers, how does that make a difference?
Because it sometimes does.
So, yes, something definitely to keep in mind.
Well, and this, of course, is not to deny or minimize or obfuscate the significant racial barriers that blacks and other groups within America have faced and in other countries as well.
It's just a factor that is often forgotten.
And, of course, when it goes the other way, we are curious about it.
I mean, I just was supposed to interview the guy who wrote the book, Taboo, Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It.
And we couldn't yesterday.
Skype was down.
But his book makes the argument that if you look at sort of middle distance running, then those people who come from a very small area of Kenya, the blacks who come from, completely dominate the sport to the point where, like, no one else is even bothering to go.
Into that, and this arouses curiosity.
We say, well, gosh, I wonder why that is.
And they've done a number of tests and measures of, you know, fast-firing muscle mass and propensity to gain fat or not.
And we're curious about it, right?
Because what's being measured in the middle distance isn't whether you're black or white, but how fast you can run.
And if there is a group that happens to run faster, I think we should be curious about why that is.
Because if it's genetic, then—and, of course, we'll get to that in a few minutes.
There's a big contentious issue— But if it is genetic, that's important to know so other people don't try to reproduce their success if they don't have the genes.
And if it's not genetic, then maybe there's some way of transferring that skill or expertise to other people.
But either way, we really need to find it out.
Wherever we see excellence in any area, wouldn't we want to investigate its cause in order to try and disseminate it as widely as humanly possible?
I'm someone who always is interested in explaining the things around me.
Sometimes I'm sort of surprised that there are people who don't want to know about these kinds of things.
I find it absolutely fascinating.
Unlike some people, I don't fear the consequences.
I think that any self-respecting democracy should be able to deal responsibly and maturely with these issues without sinking into accusations of horrible bigotry and so on.
Unfortunately, I think sometimes we do sink into those things, and I've had some personal experience with that, but I don't think we have to, and I think it's something that is very interesting.
I also say that your example illustrates that to think of this in black and white terms, I mean, in terms of the ethnic groups, is perhaps too broad a brush to look at these, because there are a number of interesting intra-racial differences that are out there, especially in Europe.
I mean, you know, the idea that Most people don't consider Italians and Germans to be identical in the way they act and behave and achieve and so on, even though they're both within the broader term of white that we use.
So lots of really interesting differences here.
I look forward to more people investigating and discussing them because not only are they interesting from just the perspective of trying to explain the world, but they could hold some important lessons for public policy.
Well, and I think that your earlier point, Jason, about trying to find ways to reduce the hysteria and tensions between ethnic groups is really important.
There are some amazingly fantastic, incredibly tall Chinese basketball players.
On the whole, though, Chinese people are less tall than, say, blacks or whites.
And so if we looked at the paucity of Chinese basketball players and then kept screaming racism at all of the owners of the basketball teams or perhaps the audience of the basketball matches and just kept screaming anti-Chinese racist prejudice at them, that would create a lot of tension that really couldn't be solved.
And so this recognizing, okay, well, there are disparities between particular groups that are going to suit them to different things.
And again, this says nothing about any individual.
We're just talking about the sort of zoom out big picture perspective.
But if we were not to recognize any of these discrepancies and accept that the market is reflecting to some degree these discrepancies, the only thing we kind of have left is this hysterical charge of racism and this massive amount of unbelievably expensive and, if it's wrong, destructive social engineering.
From everything to forcing banks to lend money to people to affirmative action.
We have this giant...
God-awful socialist engineering project that is shoving around massive amounts of human and fixed capital around society to try and change something that may not be as amenable to change as we hope.
To me, the stakes are actually very high when it comes to this stuff.
I think you're hitting on a bigger issue that I think is important to bring up.
What's happened to the left...
You know, within the last half century or so, is that so much of it is tied up in social engineering, as you said, that that's really probably one of the roots of all the hysteria that's going on.
Because when people suggest that differences are intractable, you know, whether it's a genetic or just cultural or something that's beyond our ability to really impact much through a government program, then that puts...
A whole sort of edifice of bureaucrats and activists and scholars and so on kind of out of work because so much of that is built up around that idea.
One of the big issues these days in the U.S. is public preschool.
And there's really not a lot of good evidence that public preschool is a good investment for society because so much of what it's aimed at doing, you know, increasing incomes and, you know, increasing sort of non-cognitive outcomes and so on, It's difficult for us to affect in really any way, whether it's cultural or economic or otherwise.
And so that's something that people don't want to hear.
If you're a big advocate of public preschool, if you're a scholar who deals with that, or you're a bureaucrat who's supposed to be designing these programs, you don't want to...
Or a union member who wants to expand union contributions.
Especially if it's government preschool, right, as opposed to something else.
Then you don't want to hear that these are differences that are difficult to impossible to affect.
That's not what you want to hear.
And unfortunately, the left has gotten away from a more responsible view of human nature, because although I myself am on the right, I wouldn't necessarily say that a proper view of human nature necessarily requires that we be conservatives.
I mean, if you go back to, say, Rawls, I think he was pretty clear about the idea that People have natural differences.
And his point was, if you didn't know what you would be like in terms of your genetic endowment and everything else, wouldn't you want some kind of redistributive state to be there for you as sort of an insurance against getting the wrong end of the bell curve?
Now, I'm not someone who's a very big fan of Rawls, but you can see there that that is at least a proper interpretation of human nature, which is, okay, there are these differences here.
They exist Well, yeah, because, but I mean, I think everyone recognizes there are more intelligent people and less intelligent people.
It's just that there is this...
Alarm bells, these alarm bells that go off in people's heads when we talk about ethnicity.
One of the arguments that I've got a video called The Truth About Immigration where it sort of makes the case that a lot of the heavy socialist, progressive and even the communists back in the day wanted to destabilize the free market by minimizing group differences and therefore ascribing It was a method of simply attacking a
system because, of course, when socialism failed in the Soviet Union and Cuba and Cambodia and everywhere else it was tried, they couldn't Do a positive game of saying, well, look how great socialism is.
And of course, if you can't win a match, then you poison your opponent, so to speak.
And I think that's part of the less I don't not conscious plan for everyone, although certainly Saul Alinsky and others have made it pretty explicit that the goal is to bring down the free market by ascribing all group inequities to prejudice, which creates a massive incentive to scream at everyone who's got any kind of authority and also to to engineer to make massive amounts which creates a massive incentive to scream at everyone who's got any kind of authority and also to to engineer to make massive
But anyway, I know that's a pretty long topic for another time and you may not agree with all of that, but that's as far as I understand it part of the mechanism of why it's so attractive to the left.
Yeah, that's an interesting perspective.
I actually had not thought of it exactly that way before, but I mean, it makes sense at least to the extent that I'm reacting to it now.
Yeah, I think...
As I said, I mean, in terms of political debates, I really wish that both sides would acknowledge differences in human nature.
And I think we could have more productive debates that way.
And I'd also say that, in my view, our main goal here should be not, you know, how can we eliminate inequality, but how do we find a valued place for everyone regardless of ability?
Because, as I said, you know, there are these natural bell curves out there Our attempts to change that fact have not gotten us very far.
And so, to me, we want to say, okay, we know we have this natural distribution here, but how do we make sure that everyone, regardless of that ability, you know, finds a place, leads a satisfactory, enjoyable life that is not going to be so affected by their results of the genetic lottery?
And someone on the left might say, well, that requires a lot of redistribution.
I don't personally agree.
I think...
Where we really need to emphasize is the civil society aspect of America.
So trying to revitalize and strengthen civil institutions like churches and non-religious groups, including the family and extended family of friends and such, that will give people that kind of desired place, give people a sense of belonging and importance, even if they don't necessarily have a particular Genetic condellments, you know, that's going to allow them to be, say, university professors.
Now, I know we've taken a long circuitous route.
I appreciate your patience to the topic of immigration, which is where this started.
But what troubles me, and again, I bring this up out of genuine alarm rather than any particular knowledge, which is why it's good to have an expert to talk about this with, My big concern with immigration is, I'm certainly willing to accept that people who come from, in general, lower IQ demographics are above the mean.
Smarter, smarter people, right?
Great, fantastic, right?
But the part of your research that troubled me is the degree to which that does not seem to sustain itself over generations.
And the analogy which I inexpertly assembled in my head Is, again, sort of go back to the tall Chinese people.
So if you, say, had an open audition for a bunch of Chinese basketball players from China, you'd get a whole bunch of tall Chinese people coming over, right?
But then the regression to the mean seems to indicate that tall people have children who are taller than average but not as tall as they are and so on.
And shorter people have children who are...
Taller than they are, but not as tall as the average and so on.
And so this regression to the mean that if there is genetics involved or even if it's so cultural that it might as well be genetic.
In other words, if the culture is so encapsulated that it functions as a transmission of intelligence in a very similar way to genetics.
And again, I'm not particularly interested in the genetics versus environment debate for two reasons.
One, let's just wait for the answers because, as you say, they're plowing through the genome and hopefully finding some answers fairly soon.
And secondly, it doesn't hugely matter because let's say we find one or the other.
And this is a Murray perspective, of course.
What would we do differently?
So to me, genetics versus environment isn't particularly important, but I think the data that you've uncovered or the data that you propagated in your thesis is the degree to which there does seem to be a drop-off among immigrants, Hispanic immigrants over generations, which does not point towards integration Hispanic immigrants over generations, which does not point towards integration with an intellectually challenging society.
Is that a fair way to characterize it?
I don't want to put words in your mouth, of course.
I'd say that's fair.
Yeah.
I mean, well, I guess actually slightly different issues, really.
I guess regression toward the mean that you brought up, that's what gives me confidence that my kids will be better athletes than myself and better at music than myself because statistically it's pretty hard to go any lower.
My daughter has a lot of hair, I will tell you that.
That's certainly one thing, and there's some evidence that different groups seem to regress toward different means, but I think with the intergenerational assimilation, a little bit of a different issue in that what we do see is that the second generation of immigrants typically does a lot better than the first, and that should not be too surprising because You have people being born in the United States, educated in the United States, speaking good English usually for the most part.
And so we would certainly expect...
And probably getting a better education.
I would think so.
Having a more stimulating environment, more television, more books, whatever.
Yeah, I would think so.
And so that second generation does go further than their parents, considerably further.
But the question is, where do they go from there?
And that's one of the things I looked at and some other people have looked at as well.
And there doesn't seem to be a lot of progress beyond the second generation for a lot of the low-skilled immigrants who have been coming in for the last half-century or so in the U.S. And so that's definitely a cause for concern, and it's something that a lot of people, I think, don't really think enough about, because the nightmare scenario, I would say, you know, sort of the worst-case scenario here, is that U.S. ends up something like Brazil.
You know, Brazil has There's a very wide range of incomes.
There's a lot of income inequality and you can see pictures of Brazilian cities where you have this extremely rich downtown area and then you see these favelas, I'm probably not saying the proper accent, but these basically shanty towns outside the cities.
Extremes of poverty, one of the biggest extremes in the world, And those kinds of inequalities are sort of tinged by skin color in a sense.
The lighter-skinned people tend to be richer.
Darker-skinned people tend to be poorer in these countries.
And that is something I don't think the U.S. wants to go down.
I mean, we of course had this traditional white-black difference.
But beyond that, we tend to have been more egalitarian.
And to...
To move further into that kind of society, I think is what a lot of people don't want.
Now, don't get me wrong.
We're still far, far from Brazil.
But if we continue immigration as it's constituted now, especially as we're beginning to have immigrants from Central America, people who are more of the Amerindian descent as opposed to Spanish descent, I think you'll begin to see an even stronger kind of skin color and economic gradient there that I think it makes a lot of people uncomfortable and is probably not the kind of society we want to have.
Right.
And so the argument against that, which I've heard, and I'm sure you've heard it as well, Is that going back to 100 years ago or 120 years ago, similar concerns were raised about the Irish or the Italians or the Catholics.
There's a circle of inclusion that we have within society that if you weren't from this area in England, you were out of the map.
You were not allowed to be part of the general conception of society.
And that sort of expands to accommodate more and more groups.
But if there is genetics involved in intelligence and group differences and so on, then those kinds of prejudices, which were explicitly cultural and explicitly religious, would tend to fall away over time.
But if there are group differences that are not amenable to a general convergence of culture...
with these different groups within society.
And this is what's so alarming to me is that because we don't have an answer about this, and even more frustratingly, because those who are in hot pursuit of the answer regularly get the arrows of the media in their back tipped with a general socialist poison, we are making massive decisions throughout the West, massive decisions about immigration without the necessary facts to know whether it's going to work or not.
And that to me is like, let's say we're 10 years away from figuring out the degree to which intelligence differences among ethnicities is biological, is genetic.
And let's say that the worst fears are realized of those who are staunch egalitarians and we've got 80% genetic inheritance and nobody even knows what the other 20% is.
You know, this non-shared environment.
Who knows?
What it is, right?
Manna from heaven, who knows, right?
So if we've got 80% heritability in terms of intelligence, and it's unevenly distributed among various ethnic groups, we have a society that cannot integrate.
That's going to balkanize it, and particularly with the war of all against all, with everyone trying to grab control of the state to enforce its views on others.
We are setting ourselves up for a literally apocalyptic disaster in the West.
So for me, it's like maybe we could just hold off on the immigration and give a lot of money to geneticists or something like that to see if we can figure it out.
Because this is a huge question to be answered.
And until it's answered, to me, to continue to progress with what we're doing is reckless in a way that I don't even have the language to encapsulate.
And what happens to the American ideal, the American dream, the idea of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if it becomes so obvious that that's not something that has come true for the most recent immigrant groups, I think that's a real problem.
I'm not really a big advocate of the idea of American exceptionalism.
I think people are people.
There's nothing special about our land, but I will say that that has been a It's a common view among a lot of Americans that you pull yourself up, you start from nothing, and you make something of yourself.
That is true to some degree among previous waves of immigrants.
I think some of that has been a little bit exaggerated, but certainly you had a lot of immigrants from Europe who were low-skilled and their children and grandchildren entered the middle class in large numbers.
When that doesn't happen for new immigrant groups, That's going to be, I think, as you said, pretty difficult for a lot of people to understand.
And I think that the natural inclination for a lot of people is to say that there's something wrong with our society, that that's a problem by itself.
But that future is one that we don't have to have, or at least one that we could minimize the problems with, I think, a more reasonable look at immigration.
Right, right.
Well, I don't know, because again, I don't have any answers, and the challenge is, of course, that nobody does at this point in time, but we are proceeding as if we have answers.
Because we proceed in general.
I sort of look at the disasters of the 20th century and into the 21st century, a massive big picture view from orbit, but it seems a lot of it has to do with change the environment, change the person.
We go and invade Iraq, we give them democracy, and next thing you know, it's Manhattan.
And this idea that change the environment, change the person, the idea that give money to poor people and they'll be just like middle class people.
And this really has taken a lot of blows empirically over the last few decades, but it still seems to be like this religion that everyone gravitates back towards.
Like, well, the only reason that kids in the ghetto do poorly is because their parents don't have enough money.
So we give them more money and they'll do fine.
The idea that or that crime is the result of poverty, the idea that poverty may be a result of crime or the degree to which low IQ nations are positively correlated with things like corruption and sometimes slow or even negative economic growth and just general disasters all around.
The idea that there may be this giant lever called IQ that may have some inherited basis is Something that is of such foundational importance to the maintenance of civilization that I just feel like we've just got this brick on the gas and we're blindfolded and we're trying to navigate without enough information.
and whenever you say, you know, let's slow down and let's try and review the data, everybody just erupts in this panic.
That seems to me a very dangerous place for, I don't know, overly dramatic, but it seems to me like a very dangerous place for society to be because, you know, these decisions are impossible to reverse. - Yeah, I would say that, you know, we ignore human nature at our peril, and we don't seem to be, we ignore human nature at our peril, and we don't seem to be, you know,
Foreign policy is not my area, but certainly when you brought that up, The idea that you can impose democracy and that these ethnic groups with centuries-long disputes between themselves, that they're suddenly going to work together and be people who want to participate in a liberal democracy.
A lot of these things are fantasies.
A lot of them are.
And the more we begin to take a realistic perspective on society and on human nature, I think in the long term, the better we'll be.
It's not a utopian vision at all, certainly not, but it is one that promises, in my opinion at least, a more peaceful and cooperative society because we were acknowledging differences and working with them, keeping human nature in mind when we make policies, not trying to circumvent it, and that will hopefully lead us to a better place.
But for now, we definitely have an uphill battle.
Oh, it is, of course, the goal, I think, of all rational empirical thinkers to have idealism crash and destroy itself on the rocks of data, because idealism and the avoidance of data is truly a dangerous thing, I think, as the 20th century has repeatedly proved.
Well, Jason, I want to take up more of your time, though I feel like I've had all day, but I wonder if you could just let people know where on the web they can get your information.
And you've also written some fantastic blog posts, and, of course, you're available in I keep an archive of all my writing at www.jasonrichwine.com.
You can find all my published work there.
I also blog regularly for national review, so if you just want to go to the NR website, you can certainly find a lot of my stuff coming up there on a regular basis.
And your daily chaos articles will be coming out No, you know, I wrote one for ThinkProgress, actually.
It was a response to something I did in the middle of the firestorm or just after it.
They had done a big article on me.
And I think, you know, to their credit, they published my response fully.
And so you can also find that link to my website if you're curious about that.
Well, good for you for slipping one past the goalie.
I appreciate that.
Thanks very much for your time.
It was a real pleasure.
And, of course, I wish you the best with your future intellectual endeavors.
And, you know, the fact that you weathered the storm is of no small...
I have no small admiration for the way in which you weathered the storm.
