Bret Stephens Unites the Internet
The New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens ignited the interwebs with his latest op-ed on Ashkenazi Jews (paywalled), which, among other things, cites some highly questionable sourcing.
As it is a paywalled piece, Daily Beast summarizes thusly:
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is once again stirring outrage—this time with a piece entitled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius” that cites a paper co-authored by an academic labeled an “extremist” eugenicist and celebrated by white supremacists.
Stephens’ op-ed on Ashkenazi Jews was denounced all over social media as an example of race science bunk.“How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?” Stephens wrote.
He said that Jews “are, or tend to be, smart” and cited the 2005 paper “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, which declares that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group. Stephens’ take? “Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different,” he wrote.
As Stephens began trending on Twitter and the New York Times’ tweet of his column was ratioed, the study he cited and its authors drew new scrutiny. Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton noted that the Times itself had published an op-ed last year by a Harvard geneticist, David Reich, in which he denounced Harpending’s work.
A 2005 Times article about the paper cited by Stephens quoted a Cornell University geneticist as saying Harpending and company “make pretty much all the classic mistakes in interpreting heritability,” though also quoted scientists with a less critical view.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has Harpending, who died in 2016, on its list of extremists and lists his ideology as “white nationalist.”
“Harpending has given talks on these ideas at white supremacist conferences, and is widely celebrated among white supremacists on forums like Stormfront and the Vanguard News Network, who see a champion for their cause behind his academic rhetoric,” the center said.
What say you?
Brett Stephens is a moron and one of the things punditry a perplexing career. How did so many not so smart people end up getting paid so well for cliched anecdotes, shady sources, or stuff made up on the fly?
It is generally true that American Jews punch above their numbers in terms of educational and economic success. The reasons for this are very complicated. The paper cited by Stephens was partially written to go against Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews.
Unfortunately the Times seems impervious to criticism. Possibly because nearly everyone is dependent on their actual news reporting.Report
FWIW Brett Stephens is Jewish. Not many people seem to know this. Chuck Todd is also Jewish and this surprises people.Report
Smart people know better than to talk about IQ.
Therefore: Brett Stephens is dumb.
Q.E.D.Report
Stephens is an example of the underlying thesis of the 1619 project, where rank bigotry gets laundered and given a sheen of respectability.Report
Usually I can follow you, but you’ve lost me on this one. A quick read up on the 1619 project has not illuminated me further. The thing in the NYT seems to embody ideas such as “racism is something we will always struggle with” which is something I endorse. What am I missing?Report
The 1619 project posits that racism is deeply embedded in American culture and shapes our discourse even in ways that aren’t obviously apparent.
Stephens is repeating ideas that were long ago discredited, from a source that is a white nationalist.
In so doing, Stephens is demonstrating how persistent the idea of racial determinism is, even in 2019, long after the civil rights struggles, long after eugenics and the Holocaust.
These sorts of ideas are still, after all these years, easily accessible to groups of people who find them comforting and valuable in reassuring themselves that they possess some sort of magic essence that elevates them above other groups.Report
I’m somebody who thinks that while progress is possible, humans will always struggle with racism, because they have this thing called “affinity bias”. All humans have it. All humans are susceptible to scapegoating and racialized scapegoating and persuasion.
I don’t think there will ever be a time when I, as a white person, can just relax and say, “Hah, we’ve licked racism, I can relax and forget about it”.
To me, that sounds like it’s concordant with the 1619 thesis, even though it has no racially determinant element.
I know nothing about Stephens.Report
What’s funny is that his article is about how Jewish success is specifically *not* a result of higher IQs (although it’s not clear exactly what he attributes it to). But you can’t dip into the IQ basket with brushing against some bad stuff.Report
Culture is also not particularly heritable from generation to generation. How would you even measure “culture” anyway?Report
Culture is a set of processes or procedures for doing things. Lots of the things we do, there are potentially lots of ways to do them, but they do them the way we do them because that’s what other people do, and have done. That’s culture. It doesn’t depend on genetics for transmission, other than humans are equipped for culture and the transmission of culture.
That’s the thesis of Fred Baumeister’s book “The Cultural Animal”: https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Animal-Nature-Meaning-Social/dp/0195167031
One thing he cites is that while we say “monkey see, monkey do”, humans are far more imitative than monkeys or even the great apes. There are experiments that show this.
It’s very good. I think Jews have a culture that puts weight on study and academics far more than generic American culture.Report
The big cultural difference is that Jews don’t marry Christmas tree salesmen. A cursory glance at the Hallmark Channel shows that gentile women do this all the time. Well, you know what? As romantic as it may be, in the real world, Christmas tree salesman aren’t typically brain surgeon material. A lot of them probably screw up by replanting with acorns instead of pine cones.
Over the long haul, in terms of population genetics, it’s a lot better to marry the Jewish surgeon who sews the Christmas tree salesman back together after his epic chain saw accident, which of course sets him up to be the romantic lead in the next Hallmark special, playing a Christmas tree salesman who walks with a cane. That special again highlights the cultural differences, as gentile women swoon over him even more while Jewish women think “I want to marry the surgeon that reattached that guy’s leg!”
Maybe I’m stereotyping a bit, or maybe the Hallmark Channel is (as unbelievable as that might seem), but that’s probably the key cultural difference.Report
The thing is, IQ doesn’t have a big enough impact on life success to explain the success of Jewish people, even if it were completely heritable, which is questionable. High IQ is worth about +10% on most metrics of life. Which is good, but not as much as most people think it ought to be worth.
The Christmas tree salesman probably carries and transmits a lot of attitudes and habits, which will be passed on to his children, or other people he might influence. Not that it’s a bad thing to be a Christmas tree salesman…Report
Asian immigrants also do better than natives. Study really hard (on a subject that is useful), work hard, and invest wisely. That’s a sound strategy for a capitalist society were merit is rewarded.
If you’re going to sell Christmas trees, don’t be the guy standing in the lot hoping to make a few extra bucks and maybe pick up a lonely 30 something, be the CEO of Xmas Trees Inc [1], a major East Coast distributor that uses an innovative business model that combines lucrative contracts with local farmers with a strategy of land acquisition, using the “farm” aspect to buy up key real estate whose price will go way up as suburban areas expand, and buying up the best retail lots where the trees get sold. As Levy Meir (CFO of Xmas Trees Inc) put it, “We’re not in the Christmas Tree business, we’re in the real estate business.”
There’s been fairly extensive writing on the historical reasons that Ashkenazi Jews may have gotten so smart at symbolic manipulation, which is something that isn’t in much dispute (just look at the percentage of Nobel prizes in science). But along with that are cultural norms developed over a long time to survive and thrive among a frequently hostile European population.
What skills are the easiest to transplant somewhere else? What forms of capital are the most liquid? What forms of wealth are easy to physically transport or flip back into cash? What are the best financial strategies to maximize return and minimize risk if the local situation goes all pear shaped? What are the best ways to conduct business if building good-will (keeping a mental account of owed favors among all the villagers) won’t pay off, long term, due to being regarded as an outsider?
This cultural heritage carries lessons that are quite different from the usual norms. For much of white European society, fatherly advice can amount to “If you don’t make it playing third base for the Mets, you can always work in the mines with me.” Norms promulgated in rap culture are really disadvantageous to anyone who wants to go anywhere.
Basically, the dominant culture has a safety net where the natives don’t have to worry about being rounded up, slaughtered, or run out of town. They will always have some soil to till, and so what if they’re the 18th generation of middling peasant with no plans and no ambition? They still get by just fine, and can pass on their knowledge of smoked pork to the next generation. Non-optimal financial or life advice doesn’t get ruthlessly weeded out. Selling a few Christmas trees on the side seems like a pretty good strategy. And then they get pushed aside by Xmas Tree Inc and rage at the injustice of it all.
[1] Xmas Tree Inc was made up to illustrate a more focused and financially successful way to approach problems.Report
People can be inconsistent with their attitudes towards IQ. On my Face Book feed, there are people I know that would rage against anything relating to IQ as applied to groups but love posting about this 11 year old girl in Iran who has an IQ higher than Einstein in you go girl sort of way.Report
Brett Stephen’s piece isn’t originally. Jews in general and Ashkenazi Jews in particular have been stereotyped as very intelligent in a book learning sort of way for a very long time, with all sorts of pop cultural theorizing on it. The only anti-Semites that portrayed Jews as dumb where the WASP ones of early and mid-20th century America. What is new is the reaction against Brett Stephen’s essay. In the past, this sort of theorizing would go mainly un-noticed. Now it generates. a big strong reaction.Report
The older I get, the more I find myself saying, “WTF?! Not this shit again!”.Report
The Ashkenazi-gentile achievement gap actually exposes some pretty serious problems with The Narrative. According to The Narrative, the white-black achievement gap is caused by historical and continuing oppression of black people by white people. White people are overrepresented in positions of power and wealth, and use that position to keep black people in positions of low status and wealth.
But wait! There’s also an Ashkenazi-gentile achievement gap! Well, we’ve already figured out what causes ethnic achievement gaps, so all we have to do is change some nouns around, and we have an explanation for the Ashkenazi-gentile achievement gap.
And…we’ve just independently rediscovered antisemitism.
And there’s the problem. To explain the Ashkenazi-gentile achievement gap without sounding too Hitlery, we need to concede the possibility of ethnic achievement gaps arising from some cause other than systematic oppression of the lower-achieving ethnic group. In fact, we need to acknowledge that a systematically oppressed group can outperform the oppressor group. But this then calls into question our explanation for the white-black achievement gap.
I notice a lot of people taking great care not to think about this issue.Report
Aannd here we have the logical conclusion of Stephens’ laundry, its true aim all along.Report
You should aspire to be better than this. If you have something intelligent to say, say it. If you don’t, sleazy innuendo is not a valid substitute.Report
If we waited for someone with something intelligent to say, the internet would be a very quiet place. And this topic, in particular, invites people with nothing intelligent to say to say it at length.Report
“We need to concede the possibility of ethnic achievement gaps arising from some cause other than systematic oppression”
What is this “other cause”?
Or are you “just asking questions”?Report
Also, for funsies, here’s the NYT’s write-up of the 2005 paper they apologized for Bret Stephens linking to.Report