“Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.”
This is one of the best essays ever published, read The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray.
The Bell Curve is pseudo-scientific racism. Charles Murray admits in the article you link to that part of the black-white difference is due to environmental and cultural factors. The argument is over whether any part of it is genetic and if so how much.
The average IQ difference that we are talking about here is between 10 and 15 points. Everyone agrees that part of that is because of environmental factors, so the genetic portion of this is what? 5-7.5 points maybe?
What does all that mean. Asian Americans score better on achievement tests, like the SAT, and on average have higher incomes and higher management positions than white Americans. Is that difference explained because whites have lower IQ scores? One study showed that if the Asian American “over achievement” were because of IQ, it would require that Asian Americans to average 10 to 20 points higher IQ than whites, but in fact Asian Americans and whites have the same average IQ scores. (Asians in Japan and Taiwan do score slightly higher on IQ tests in some studies, but because of language differences it is difficult to normalize those IQ tests with English IQ tests. Other studies show no differences.)
There are other environmental and cultural factors that contribute to the success of Asian Americans in the US. IQ is not that good a predictor of success in life. There are many factors such as creativity, wisdom, practical sense and social ability that contribute to success in life but are not measured by IQ tests. Almost all researchers agree that there are other environmental and cultural factors that contribute to the under achievement of Blacks in the US, and those environmental and cultural factors are what social policy should be trying to correct.
If there is a real genetic difference in IQ between blacks and whites, so what? It is clearly very small. The range of IQ test scores among whites and blacks is much larger than the difference between the averages. No matter how smart you thing you are, there are blacks that are smarter than you are. For hundreds of years blacks were discriminated against in the US. People are trying to use the pseudo-science in the Bell Curve to justify the under achievement of blacks rather than address the environmental and cultural problems that still exist because of that history of discrimination.
Posted by: mikeca | August 28, 2005 at 05:06 PM
If you need further evidence of black inferiority than the state of Africa, the land they control, then there is no hope for you.
Pestilence, murder, anarchy . . . wow, what a success black rule has been. even if i were black, i would beg for the return of colonies.
Posted by: pierre | August 30, 2005 at 10:04 PM