The Bigger Question To The Richard Hanania Kerfuffle
Writing in The New York Times, OT Alum Jamelle Bouie answers the seemingly obvious question of the Richard Hanania online discourse: “Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires”
Read the whole piece here, but an excerpt:
Hanania sees his claims as uncomfortable truths. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races,” he recently wrote. But his supposedly transgressive views are little more than the warmed-over dogmas of the long-dead ideologues who believed in the scientific truth of race hierarchy. Of course, those men, their peers and their followers lost their appetite for that talk in the wake of the Holocaust, when the world got a firsthand look at the catastrophic consequences of state-sponsored racism, eugenicism and antisemitism.
But more interesting than either Hanania — whose recent notoriety has not lifted him too far from his previous obscurity — or his rancid views are his backers. According to Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist, Hanania’s organization, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, has received at least $700,000 in support through anonymous donations. He is also a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin — funded by Harlan Crow.
A whole coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires have lent their time and attention to Hanania, as well as elevated his work. Marc Andreessen, a powerful venture capitalist, appeared on his podcast. David Sacks, a close associate of Elon Musk, wrote a glowing endorsement of Hanania’s forthcoming book. So did Peter Thiel, the billionaire supporter of right-wing causes and organizations. “D.E.I. will never d-i-e from words alone,” wrote Thiel. “Hanania shows we need the sticks and stones of government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican presidential candidate, also praised the book as a “devastating kill shot to the intellectual foundations of identity politics in America.”
The question to ask here — the question that matters — is why an otherwise obscure racist has the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve?
Look back to our history and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities, and capitalist inequality in particular.
If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.
If some groups — and really, if some individuals — are simply meant to be at the top, then there are no questions to ask about their wealth, status and power. And as my friend John Ganz notes in his newsletter, the idea of race hierarchy “creates the illusion of cross-class solidarity between these masters of infinite wealth and their propagandist and supporter class: ‘We are of the same special breed, you and I.’” Relations of domination between groups are reproduced as relations of domination between individuals.
This, in fact, has been the traditional role of supremacist ideologies in the United States — to occlude class relations and convert anxiety over survival into the jealous protection of status. The purveyors of supremacist ideologies have worked in concrete ways to bound the two things, survival and status, together; to create the illusion that the security, even prosperity, of one group rests on the exclusion of another.
One of the overlooked aspects of the slave-era South is how the idea of a natural hierarchy placed everyone, white and black, men and women, along a spectrum from low to high.
While enslaved black people were at the bottom, only slightly above them were landless whites.
And while this might seem to indicate a natural alliance of black slaves and poor whites, the reverse was true.
Racism gave even the poorest, most mediocre white person a sort of aristocracy over even the most gifted and succsessful black person.
Note the way Pap talks about black people in Huckleberry Finn, bitterly complaining that an educated black man is allowed to put on airs over an illiterate drunkard like himself.Report
This is not overlooked. It’s a talking point that I’ve seen mindlessly regurgitated and harped upon literally hundreds of times, generally in the form of leftists with a frustrated sense of entitlement quoting quoting Lyndon Johnson while vigorously stroking their own Johnsons. “Lowest white man” gets four hits on this site alone, all referencing the quote.
The quote invokes the Biggest Lie of leftism, that the net direction of wealth transfer in the US is upwards. In fact, it is overwhelmingly downwards. The government takes from the rich and gives to the lower and middle classes, to the tune of trillions of dollars per year. Leftists have a deep psychological need to believe that they’re being cheated, because the alternative is accepting that they’re being paid fairly and that their labor legitimately isn’t worth that much.Report
I want to point out the deliberate lie here, where Brandon Berg confuses ‘wealth transfer’ and ‘governmental wealth transfer’.
Money is, objectively, without the slightest doubt, moving upward. We can tell this by literally checking who has money and how much. Unless the poor are burning money and the rich creating it out of thin air, it definitionally has to be moving from the poor to the rich because every year the poor have less, percentage-wise, and the rich have more.
The government counters this to some extent, but not enough to undo it.
The left understands this, he pretends he doesn’t.
Or, alternately, leftist believe that some fractions of the population shouldn’t be allowed to claim that they own basically everything and enforce that at gunpoint.
It’s worth pointing out that, as technology increases, _everyone’s_ labor is worth less. Literally everyone’s. Because supply of labor increases as it becomes automated.
The problem is the basic fact that some percentage of the population wasn’t making money due to their labor, but due to little pieces of paper that assert they own all the housing and all the capital.Report
Pretty much every billionaire out there claims to have hit a home run, when they started the game on Third base with the pitcher chained to the mound and the ball glued to the first baseman’s glove.Report
As the amount of wealth going to infinity everyone has more, that the rich get more doesn’t change that the poor are better off. For that matter we lose more of the middle class to them becoming rich than them becoming poor.
There’s also the non-trivial issue that who is rich and who is poor can change from year to year.
If you’re going to claim the Luddites were correct you have a lot of work to do.Report
Middle class is generally defined as ‘between two-thirds and twice the median income’, so all it takes to move people around is to change what the median income is. Which, incidentally, has vastly decreased over the last five decades after inflation, by about 45%. A full time worker at the median income is making about 55% of what they were making in 1970 and middle class is defined based off that, so ‘middle class’ is actually much worse than it used to be.
Trying to assert that movement between the categories, or that categories are even relevant in any sense except ‘talking about people in the present’ is kinda silly.
Hell, the distribution has tilted now so heavily that someone at _95%_ of the income distribution, way up there, is making only 96% of what someone there would have made in 1970! Income has tiled so badly towards the superrich, the top 1%, that even people at the top 5%s, the people who back in 1970 would have made $196,000 (In current dollars) a year are now only making $191,000!
I mean, I don’t really care, but it’s worth pointing out the super-concentration of income actually gotten that bad, that the top 5% are getting hit with it just a little.
Actually, I’m asserting that Piketty was right. I have no problems with less labor being demanded, I have a problem with that not resulting in lower priced goods, but the owners of capital pocketing more.
Unless the wealth’s share of the pie is increasing _faster_ that the size of the pie, which is what what Piketty said, and clearly seems to be true.
Aka, the rate of return on capital is indeed higher than the rate of return on economic growth, and thus it is completely inevitable for less and less people to own more and more as their ownership of everything causes them to get a slice of the pie that increases _faster that the size of the pie does_.Report
Source? Because my one minute google search found an increase in 33% for median household income adjusted for inflation from 1967.
https://www.financialsense.com/jill-mislinski/us-household-incomes-50-year-perspective
??? Someone sells their house of 20 years and makes the top 1%. How is it irrelevant to point out that there’s churn in the numbers or that this has massive implications for inequality?
This is assuming something that should be proven.
You want deflation? My strong expectation is the percent of income spent on food over the last 50 years has gone down a lot. What yardstick do you want to use here?
Back this up.Report
I’m not sure what stats DavidTC is talking about. Typically you don’t see much about median individual income. It’s usually average (mean) personal income or median household income. Most measures I can find of real median income are flattish from 1970 to about 1985 but then greatly increase. See for instance: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N There are inflation rate conspiracy theorists out there, but otherwise I think these numbers are pretty well accepted.Report
We don’t see much about median individual income because it doesn’t reflect how much money an individual has access to nor their lifestyle.
My wife and at-home children have non-serious jobs. The median income in our family is below the poverty line. That’s a meaningless evaluation since our family income is quite high.Report
Sorry, due to me rearranging some stuff there last minute, part of that got lost: In the first set of numbers, I was talking about things _relative to the GDP_. I.e., something that’s gone up over 118% in that time. (Adjusting for inflation.)
If the median household was making the same amount relative to the GDP that they made in 1970, they’d be making $57,000, not $36,000.
I.e., they are only making 55% of what they should be making, after inflation.(1) And the rest of the money has been transferred upward.
Same at every level, including all the way up to the ‘bottom’ 95%, who have even managed to lose ground compared to the 1%.
Meanwhile, the top 1% are making roughly double, WRT to the GDP, as they made 50 years ago.
Here: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
Here’s a fun quote from it: ‘According to Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, the median male worker needed 30 weeks of income in 1985 to pay for housing, healthcare, transportation, and education for his family. By 2018, that “Cost of Thriving Index” had increased to 53 weeks (more weeks than in an actual year).’
1) Which is actually underestimating it. Because pay is so low, huge chunks of the population have large debts which result in even more money going upward. It’s not just income they’re losing, the reduction of income causes them to lose money in cascading ways. But that’s an entirely different discussion.Report
Current median household income is $70,784.
Median personal income might be $36k but my teenage children don’t have serious jobs and have access to someone who does.
I don’t see why we’d want to adjust that to GDP. GDP captures various things that are irrelevant for checking how well off households are.Report
My claim was not about how ‘well off’ households are doing(1). It it was ‘Money is, objectively, without the slightest doubt, moving upward. We can tell this by literally checking who has money and how much’.
Of the wealth being created in this country, the rich are taking more and more of it.
1) Although I disagree with that, and moreover the idea we should be looking at ‘household income’ instead of ‘individual income’ is kinda silly…while the number of earners in a household has slightly increased over the years, it has mostly done so because people cannot _afford_ to live on their own.
Saying ‘This household makes enough to live, exactly like one in 1975, and thus is as well off as them’ when the reason it makes that amount is because that the working 28-year-old son cannot afford to move out and the parents couldn’t afford the mortgage if he didn’t contribute some rent is, uh, weird.
There are households that are literally just three roommates who are just friends who have basically resigned themselves to never being able to afford their own place, but at least the other two are mostly neat and pay their share of the rent on time.
Compared to a household in 1975 which was just…two married adults living together.Report
Median individual income data is hard to come by, at least in the US. Anyway, money doesn’t move upward. Wealth is created everywhere, and when it’s created fast, the ones who are creating the most of it get more value faster, while others get more value slower.Report
You are using percentage of GDP evaluations because you want to ignore improvements in how well off people are.
The argument needs to be structured this way because the reality is everyone is better off.
So no, money is not “moving upward”, i.e. the rich are not stealing from the poor or getting that way by making the poor worse off.
Further, implied in this line of reasoning is the rich and poor are stable groups. This is untrue on the face of it. It is normal and expected that a 60 year old at the peak of his career will earn more than he did when he was 20 years old.
We also expect people who cash out at retirement to also have a really good year but only that year.Report
Bouie’s piece is creepy. I feel dirty having read the excerpt.Report
Archive link, for those who would prefer to do their intellectual rubbernecking without giving clicks to this garbage. In characteristically dim-witted manner, Bouie touches on what this is really about, but then takes it in a profoundly stupid direction.
The thing that Bouie gets that most people are missing is that talking about crime stats and IQ and heredity is not a gratuitous attack on black people, but a necessary and legitimate defense against a great libel perpetrated by the left: That inequality in socioeconomic outcomes, whether along or within racial lines, is necessarily an illegitimate product of exploitative systems of privilege and oppression, rather than the product of natural differences in talent and productive ability.
A curious property of white supremacist policies, by the way, is how selective they are in their effectiveness. They haven’t been able to stop Asians from outperforming whites on virtually all dimensions. They haven’t been able to stop Jews from outperforming gentile whites. They haven’t even been able to stop blacks from succeeding in sports and entertainment. In fact, they act much as Young Earth Creationists imagine Satan to act, planting false evidence that aligns precisely with hereditarian accounts of achievement gaps.
Anyway, this is why socioeconomic creationists like Bouie get so triggered by stuff like this. Their ideology is built on extremely weak intellectual foundations, and they cannot tolerate anyone poking at them. People like Charles Murray and Richard Hanania (vintage 2023) must be smeared as unclean, lest anyone give their arguments a fair evaluation and realize that they’re broadly correct.Report
One of the talking points of the Trumpists is that coastal elites like Hillary Clinton and Jamelle Bouie smugly look down their nose at the “Real Americans”, the uneducated white working class in flyover states.
Apparently this is false. Apparently us liberal coastal elites really are more talented and productive and deserving of better lives than everyone else.
Given this seemingly irrefutable fact, it is clear that we, the educated ubermensch must undertake a program to enlighten and educate the rubes who cling to their guns and Bibles, you know, to bring them up and into the bright light of progressive multicultural tolerance and diversity.Report
The coast has a much higher cost of living.
Measure “better off” adjusted for that and there may be some surprises. If the comparison needs to include the phrase “excluding housing costs” then it’s a huge tell that the answer wasn’t what the author wanted.Report
40% of the US population lives within 50 miles of the coast – including the Great Lakes. Widen that to 100 miles and you get over 2/3rds or 240 million Americans. This isn’t the flex you think it is.Report
Remember when Kevin Williamson wrote this essay, and the left lost their minds at the prospect of having their “Conservatives don’t actually have a problem with drug addicts and welfare dependents; they just hate black people” talking point taken away?Report
I was there and remember no such thing. The lefties I know found Williamson’s essay interesting and largely consistent with their own views of what conservatives were getting up to.Report
Too bad Brandon didn’t successfully link to the essay in question so we could all look at it.Report
“…talking about crime stats and IQ and heredity is not a gratuitous attack on black people, but a necessary and legitimate defense against a great libel perpetrated by the left: That inequality in socioeconomic outcomes, whether along or within racial lines, is necessarily an illegitimate product of exploitative systems of privilege and oppression, rather than the product of natural differences in talent and productive ability.”
The word “defense” is the telling part here.
Because no matter how its worded, the IQ/Heredity theory of outcomes is just that, merely a defense of the status quo. Or to put it more starkly, a “Just So” story of How the Leopard Got Its Spots.
It suffers from the same problem as a lot of other sociological theories, that it can’t be replicated, can’t explain past eras, and has no predictive power for the future.
For example, in past eras around the world, all societies had classes, ranging from the aristocracy to the peasantry. And in almost every case, the peasant classes were much as we describe the white trash/ ghetto culture of contemporary America. They were more violent, more prone to social ills like family breakup and more likely to be lawless.
But when these class systems or heredity and privilege were broken up, in almost every society, there was a lot of class mobility and difference of outcomes.
The IQ/ Heredity theory can’t explain this.
Further, it doesn’t offer any suggestions for policy which can produce predictably reliable results.Report
Broken up how? Or more specifically, what are we missing?
We’re not using the law to enforce segregation. We’re not preventing people from learning to read nor are we limiting educational opportunities to the rich. Everyone can move anywhere in the US, two of my daughters have moved to the EU. We’ve outlawed employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and so on.
I can think of massive shake ups that might would change things, war on a stupidly large scale and the destruction of society on a vast scale. But if that’s what we need to do to change the cultural habits creating the current situation then I’d rather not.Report
Ah yes – culture. Tell me – whose culture is suspect when a black man has to send five times as many resumes as a white man with the same experience and education to get the same job? Whose culture is suspect when black Ho owners get their houses appraised routinely below market unless they strip family pictures and “ lack culture” from the house? I hose culture is suspect when black children are punished in schools for things white children aren’t? Whose culture is suspect when black high school athlete are made to cut their hair or risk being ejected from their sport?
And on what planet does simply passing laws mean everything is alright? I work with people who were born under Jim Crow – do you really believe that one generation later all that damage is gone?Report
RE: whose culture is suspect
Which do you think has a higher impact, needing to send out more resumes or having schools with a zero percent literacy rating? And you can apply that question to any of the other cultural issues you raised.
RE: do you really believe that one generation later all that damage is gone?
I think the damage to current children comes from current things and not things which stopped 50 years ago.
IMHO those current things are vastly more important, more relevant, and have gotten much worse since we got rid of Jim Crow.
And this brings back my above question, what are we missing? If you’re pointing to the owners of pro-athlete teams wanting to control their employees hair styles for marketing purposes, then I don’t see how we draw a line from that to the levels of inequality that we observe.Report
I’m talking about numerous black and brown and Indigenous children being forced to cut their hair – dreads, cornrows, ponytails – to compete in highschool track and field competitions. Where hair makes ZERO difference. Where those kids are made to fell LESS THEN because they aren’t wearing their hair in a way some idiotic official thinks they should.Report
What are you claiming here?
If you want to claim that the existence of racism is a binary thing and this proves it still exists, then ok.
If you’re using this as evidence that racism is the source of modern inequality, then I don’t understand the reasoning.Report
I know I should be above this, but “black Ho owners” is going to have me laughing all night.Report
I’ve never seen a study showing black people have to send out 5x as many resumes. I need to see some documentation on this claim.Report
I found this.
Here’s from the article:
I think that the 5x is the assumption that if the progressives cities were this bad, conservative cities would be even worse.Report
The “typical” black names in these studies usually indicate not just Black, but poorer inner-city Black. See e.g. this UCLA study. So it’s a good bet that the results are more based on what the names might indicate about SES rather than race.Report
I think the usefulness of those sorts of studies is increasingly constrained by their own parameters that seem designed to reach a particular result. My understanding is the gold standard was the Pager study that looked at entry level non affirmative action private sector jobs at white owned businesses in Milwaukee around the year 2000. Maybe it still replicates, and it’s not justifiable on the merits to discriminate that way in any sector. But it’s telling no one ever does a study on this for hiring in government, the massive NPO/NGO sector, fortune 500 companies, the mwbe sector, or other places where everyone knows there are varying degrees of bending over backwards for diversity hiring. Point being it’s at best pretty hard to know what to make of them or how it scales across the economy.Report
WRONG
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/black-women-hiring-discrimination.htmlReport
I can’t get behind the paywall but what you quoted cites a ‘report’ (as opposed to a published study showing methodology with controls and variables) from a job listing website. It isn’t evidence of anything.Report
16million experiences over a two year period isn’t evidence of anything? Political pollsters make judgements about candidate success or failure on sample sizes an order of magnitude – sometimes 2 – smaller then that.
Here’s the link to the actual report: https://www.neogov.com/hubfs/NEOGOV-2021-Diversity-Report.pdfReport
In order to mean anything you’d have to drill down to where you’re comparing apples to apples and try to see what’s going on. Comparing all whites to all blacks doesn’t even come close to doing that.
We see this same statistical trick when it’s claimed women made less than men.
Drilling down to the root cause and finding out that you’re comparing a male doctor in a high demand specialty working 60 hours a week to a female doctor working 40 doesn’t fit the narrative so we mostly don’t hear that. Nor do we want to hear that Uber’s algorithm (which can’t tell the sex of it’s drivers) results in males making more.Report
The word “qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
I’ve done 3rd round interviews. Everyone I talk to was deemed “qualified” by HR in the previous rounds. Many of them aren’t.Report
It doesn’t even matter. From that quote it’s trying to draw a broad based conclusion from statistics on a website. This isn’t real research, just a journalist uncritically restating something self reported by some business.Report
Class based avoidance rather than race based. NPR did a deep dive on this, maybe on this study, and said the same.
We could obscure names and such on resumes, even go to double blind, but this hits the radar as a tiny issue and fixing it would run counter to DEI.Report
Funny that none of these studies detected any impact among poor whites that matched the poor blacks.
But sure, lets go with a class interpretation instead of a racial interpretation.Report
There is always room in unasked questions to undo everything we think we know.
The quoted study suggests we’d find out that a resume with Jim-Bo would fare poorly. Perhaps we’d find out it’s fine.
However, long ago I instructed my girls to use their formal Americanized names at the top of their resumes rather than their Polish equivs.Report
No racial preference there . . .Report
The Polish became White a long time ago. That makes this a class thing.Report
Ironically it still proves my point. You have instructed your daughters to mask their heritage for economic advantage. Black men have to mask their heritage for economic advantage. Black home sellers have to mask their racial heritage and status for economic advantage. Its still a system that REQUIRES hiding who you are to fit and achieve.
I’d think you of all people would be more disgusted by that.Report
Has anyone ever tried it with Billy Bobs and Betty Lous?Report
Why would they need to? The statistics available show that white men and white women still fair much better in terms of hiring and associated economic outcomes. Because we take white success and white norms as the baseline in this country.Report
You said
“Funny that none of these studies detected any impact among poor whites that matched the poor blacks.”
I’m asking if they ever did such studies.
If people with poor black names fare worse than people with income-neutral race-neutral names, then there are three possible causes: race, poverty, or a combination. If you want to test this, you’d look at poor white names.Report
So not 5X but rather 1.5X?Report
According to what I’ve found, yes.Report
It was a combination of breaking up class systems with their hereditary privileges and also the state deciding to impose a basically uniform standard of behavior on the people through law and social engineering methods. The imposed standard of behavior being that of the middle class.Report
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this man stands before you accused of murdering his wife. He claims to have been overseas during the time of the murder, and yes, he does have airline tickets, passport stamps, hotel receipts, and testimony from several unrelated witnesses who saw him in Europe on the day of the murder. He claims that his wife is in fact alive and well, and is sitting across the room, waving at you and holding several forms of government-issued ID.
“A pretty strong defense,” you might think. But that’s just the thing! It’s a defense! A defense of a crime so heinous that there can be no defense!
You see how nuts this is, right? Offering a defense is not proof of guilt.
And the status quo deserves defense. The status quo is amazing! It’s given us wealth our ancestors could not possibly have dreamt of. It’s given us long lives. It’s made the existence of fat (relatively) poor people possible! Do you know how amazing it is to live in an era where body fat percentage is limited by willpower instead of the availability of food?
Could we do better than the status quo? Sure. But a great many the specific criticisms of the status quo advanced by people like Jamelle Bouie are mostly wrong, and rooted in self-assured ignorance. Historically, putting power in the hands of people like Bouie has produced results much, much worse than the status quo. The status quo deserves to be defended from the outrageous charges they’re pressing. And we deserve to live in a society where the status quo is successfully defended from these libels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUeybwTMeWo?t=11
Why do you bait me like this? Do you really think that I can’t answer this challenge off the top of my head? Why don’t you just ask, “Hey, Brandon, how can you reconcile the model you’re advancing now with this stuff that happened in the past?” instead of going full Bill O’Reilly?
I’ll break the actual explanation into another comment because I have a link to a lit review, and The Man doesn’t want me dropping too much knowledge into a single comment. I haven’t typed it up yet, so it’ll probably be half an hour or so, more if I go deep or have trouble finding the paper.Report
Here’s the deal: The heritability of a trait or outcome is not an timeless, universal truth. It’s a measure of the extent to which variation in the outcome of interest is causally attributable to genetic variation in a particular time and place. Bizarrely, this point is often brought up by environmentalists (anti-hereditarians, not Greenpeace) as if it were a gotcha, when it’s actually crucial to reconciling high heritability estimates found today with a past in which heritability of many traits appears to have been much lower.
In general, when environment is more variable in developmentally important ways, heritability will be lower. For example, in wealthy countries today, height is very strongly heritable. But in the past, in a time when access to food was much more problematic, it was very likely much less heritable, because height would have been largely determined by getting adequate nutrition during childhood. Why did the heritability of height increase in wealthy countries? Because even though childhood environments in wealthy countries vary in many ways, they do not vary much in ways that are important to the development of height. There is a certain nutritional threshold that has to be met to allow a child to reach his or her full genetic potential for height, and even most (relatively) poor children in wealthy countries reach that threshold.
Similarly, the heritability of IQ in wealthy countries is very high today, but was probably lower in the past. What caused the heritability to increase? Likely a combination of improvements in nutrition and universal schooling. Again, childhood environments vary quite a bit. But the high heritability and low shared environment contributions consistently found for adult IQ in twin studies show that they do not vary much in ways that substantially affect cognitive development. You can tell yourself just-so stories about books in the home, private tutors, school funding, and racism all day long, but if these actually had a substantial effect, we would see this in twin studies.
Note that IQ is young children is much less heritable, for reasons not fully understood. Home environment does substantially affect IQ measured in childhood, but this influence fades out by adulthood.
To be clear, I’m only speculating about the reasons heritability has increased, and even whether it has increased at all. However, I am not speculating about heritability of these traits in the US and other wealthy countries today; this is based on a robust body of research that consistently replicates, and which, unlike the vast majority of sociological research, uses methodologies that can actually support causal claims.
I should also clarify that heritability of these traits is likely lower in low-income countries, and lower in the global population, than in the populations of high-income countries, likely for more or less the same reasons that it is higher in the present than in the past. Some of the dumber HBD types will claim that the extremely low average IQs measured in sub-Saharan Africa are due to black Africans having less European admixture than African Americans, which may be a small factor, but I’m virtually certain that environmental differences like malnutrition and less/no formal schooling play a bigger role.
This is getting long, so I’ll continue in another comment.Report
Trauma can also be “inherited” in terms of chemicals that inhibit or alter genetic expression. There’s a whole and very fascinating study that shows that the sons of Union civil war POW who were conceived AFTER their father’s release suffered all sorts of health issues that were demonstrably trauma caused, even though the sons didn’t suffer the trauma. Ditto their sons (who would be your grandparents). Similar – albeit smaller – studies on Holocaust survivors documented the same thing.
So while environment may indeed be playing a role, dismissing past trauma – much less systems inflicting present trauma – is suspect in your assessment.Report
Epigenetic inheritance in plants is well established, but claims of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance—and especially transgenerational, i.e. grandparent to grandchild or further—in humans rest on very shaky evidence. Even in cases of extreme deprivation, the results of these studies are weak in terms of effect sizes, marginally statistically significant, often come from multiple comparisons without correction, and fail to rule out more boring means of transmission. Like, maybe fatter men were more likely to survive famine, and their children inherited a tendency towards obesity. Or maybe the memory of starvation made them more likely to overfeed their children.
Epigenetic alterations are reset twice in early mammalian development in order to make sure that the developing embryo has the epigenetic state necessary to develop correctly. I suppose it’s possible that there are some privileged sites on the genome; if the results of this study aren’t just a fluke it would suggest that they’re on the Y chromosome.
The hypothesized mechanism here is epigenetic alteration induced by severe food deprivation, which does not seem terribly relevant in a 21st or even mid to late 20th century context.
Also, I think you’re mixing up studies. The Union POW study only looked at children, not grandchildren, and overall mortality, not “all sorts of health issues.”
Pop journalism has transformed epigenetic inheritance from “Maybe in cases of extreme deprivation, like literal starvation, that might have a small effect on the health of children conceived a few years later” to “Your family is cursed to poor health and PTSD forever because some Karen called your grandmother a racial slur when she was 9.”
In any case, there’s no evidence that epigenetic inheritance is in, in 99+% of cases, a significant contributor to phenotypic variation. Acquired epigenetic modifications can have much stronger effects, of course, but those are largely driven by lifestyle, which is itself heavily influenced by genetics.Report
But after all this, the “Hereditarian” theory doesn’t seems particularly useful, as I mentioned to begin with.
It seems to say that ability and achievement is partly hereditary, partly environmental, and can vary widely from individual to individual and there’s no telling ahead of time what the outcome will be.
It can’t explain past events or predict future ones either in groups or in individuals.
About the only policy suggested by it is this: That if everyone is given access to good nutrition and a nurturing environment, they will reach their full potential, whatever it may be.Report
Part 3:
Yes, precisely. This was actually the topic of my first ever blog post, way back in 2005. When income was largely just a function of (legally) hereditary land ownership, the (genetic) heritability of income was quite low. But when the systems of hereditary privilege were broken up, and personal ability became a major determinant of earnings, the heritability of income increased dramatically. Again, the proof of the fact that genes now matter much more than hereditary privilege is found in twin studies. There’s a summary of a number of such studies in Table 1 of this PDF.
I’ll have to explain how to read this, because, again, I’m the one who’s actually invested the effort into learning this stuff: rMZ and rDZ are extent to which the outcomes are correlated in monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic twins, and are used to calculate h^2, c^2, and e^2, which refer to the percentage of variation in the outcome of interest (log hourly wage or log income) attributable to, respectively, genes, common (shared) environment (i.e. upbringing, including parental resources) and non-shared environment (a term of art referring to whatever factors cause identical twins to have different outcomes even when raised together, including luck, measurement error, random biological stuff, and free will, if you like).
Note that the average heritability found for the US is 41%, while the shared environment contribution is only 9%. Contribution from non-shared environment is 50%, but this is probably exaggerated a bit due to the fact that income measures for a single year are used. A more robust measure of income, such as average over several years, would show less influence from non-shared environment and more influence from genes and shared environment, though it would likely more or less maintain the ratio between contributions from genes and shared environment.
Note that “shared environment” should not be interpreted as “parents’ financial resources.” That’s a part of it, but it also includes things like culture and parenting style. As such, it should be taken as a loose upper bound on the true causal effect of parents’ financial resources on earnings in adulthood. Note that even if 100% of variation in earnings were attributable to parental resources, this could not explain the tendency of black men to regress towards lower mean earnings than white men. That is, white men who grew up in households at the 50th percentile of earnings tend to end up around the 50th percentile themselves on average, while black men who grew up in households around the 50th percentile of earnings tend to end up around the 40th percentile. This is exactly what a hereditarian model predicts.
On the topic of the centuries-long decline in white crime, it’s not entirely clear what happened there. One likely factor is that the rich had more surviving children, and over the course of many generations, descendants of the wealthy made up a larger and larger share of the population. That’s probably a factor, but other factors like stricter law enforcement, greater use of incarceration, improved nutrition, universal education, increased ease of earning an honest living, etc. probably played a more important role. Also, people drank a lot more alcohol back then.
Now, you’re going to want to say that black people just haven’t had the chance to benefit from those environmental improvements, but that’s insane. Black Americans today enjoy material conditions much closer to those of modern white Americans than to those of 19th-century white Americans. Some may squander the opportunity to earn an honest living, but they are not systematically denied that opportunity. And as I pointed out in the other thread, the relationship between parental income and criminal offending differs wildly between races. I do think it’s plausible that cultural factors explain some of the discrepancy here, but genetics definitely play a role.
In any case, the long decline in white (and Asian!) crime does not conflict with the high empirically measured heritability of criminality today. When the macroenvironment changes, heritability changes.
To summarize:
These are indeed spot-on criticisms of many sociological theories, especially the facile ones Philip is pushing. However, behavior genetics research is highly replicable. Estimates of heritability in modern economies do not apply to the past, because heritability was different then; however this does not invalidate them in the present, and furthermore a broader understanding of how heritability works and why it varies over time allows us to reconcile the past and present.
Hereditarianism also has predictive power for the future. Back in the 90s, Murray and Herrnstein predicted that black-white convergence had essentially run its course; tragically, this has held up remarkably well. I predict now that convergence will ultimately be achieved through biological, rather than sociological, interventions. Possibly through gene therapy, but also possibly through some other means of cognitive enhancement.
Your final point is, as you say, telling. You seem to judge a hypothesis not on its factual merits, but on the extent to which it provides some kind of justification for government intervention. That aside, you’re wrong about that, too. There are a couple of obvious directions to take this:
1. Stop doing stupid sh!t based on garbage-grade sociology and CRT ass-pulls. Cut out the anti-capitalist horsesh!t. Stop blaming STEM employers for the consequences of the huge racial gaps in math skills. Stop lying about standardized tests just being a measure of your parents’ income. Just stop being so stupid about everything.
2. Go big on biological research. Literally increase the budget by an order of magnitude, and stop suppressing research into the genetics of intelligence. Cognitive enhancement is the only way we’re ever going close racial achievement gaps. For the last 40 years, sociology has failed to move the needle a hair. It’s time to put competent scientists on the job.
3. Increase highly selected black immigration. Beef up the African-American gene pool by poaching the best and brightest that Africa and the Caribbean have to offer.
In short, literally none of these are even remotely valid criticisms. Good job weaponizing the bullsh!t asymmetry principle, though.Report
Hereditarianism HASN”T been tested except in abstract theory.
Nowhere has it been put into practice and been proven.
This is why you need to go into detailed scientific jargon, because you aren’t able to say “It’s suggested policy was implemented here, and its predicted outcomes were empirically observed.”
Tangentially, your argument here really just an appeal to authority, and a not-widely-accepted minority view at that.
While its great that you’ve done a lot of reading, you’re not educated enough to be able to read it and spot errors. You can’t compare their studies with others in the field and speak conversantly with the authors about why one is correct and the other not.
Maybe someday the scientific community will adopt the hereditarian view but today isn’t that day.Report
Oh boy.Report
I’m beginning to think that Brandon, Koz and George Turner may be the same person.Report
Nah, at least for Koz. He and I have bickered back and forth for years on a couple of narrow topics. He’s mostly wrong on those, but his arguments are well reasoned.Report
The three write very differently. George Turner is much more wild in his writing than Brandon or Koz.Report
There is no way.Report
George, nor Koz, to their credit, never whipped out the calipers.Report
All this talk about race diverges us from the talk we should be having about culture.Report
What about culture do you believe is Germaine to this discussion?Report
If racism is the source of modern inequality then we have one problem. The source of inequality is largely external to the people who live in poverty.
If culture is then we have a different problem.
The various problems my drug using/abusing/dealing branch of relatives have can be summed up as “has a different culture”. Alternatively, I’d sum it up as “makes bad choices”.Report
And you might be right that your relatives ONLY make bad choices, and that there’s no system keeping in a place where those bad choices are made.
You might also be very wrong – not for the least reason that addiction really messes up that ability to do much of anything that white hetero-normative society finds acceptable. Addiction also in many cases has a genetic component – which is why it often runs in families in one form or another.
None of that changes the fact that economic and educational systems – which are certainly components of culture – often create barriers to different choices and trajectories. Dismissing those systems out of hand makes both societal change and individual choice infinitely more difficult.Report
I’m not “dismissing systems”, I’m asking what about them is it that you want to change? At the moment, the only thing that’s even close to an actionable item is outlawing track and field hair cuts.Report
Yes you are. Everytime anyone brings up an example of systemic racism – meaning a system of rules or procedures or ways of acting that disadvantage black people – you dismiss it. Even here your reaction is not “Its an assault on those kids and their bodies enabled by a system that sees it as OK to force kids to cut their hair when someone doesn’t like it.” You default to outlawing something else, as if there aren’t enough laws that should protect these kids already.Report
So, still nothing specific other than track and field hair cuts?
I dismiss examples like that because they’re not serious.
Let me give you an example.
All the talk about trauma affecting IQ and education seems serious and explanatory. The unserious part would be linking that to Jim Crow, as opposed to a zip code where the murder rate is so high that everyone knows dozens of people who have been killed. Or for that matter, turning the worst white-cop interaction in the US into trauma porn.
As far as actionable items, we could try to put a lot more resources into policing those zips. Obviously this would involve trade offs.Report
Because there’s no link to current zip code sorting and Jim Crow . . .Report
Then our actionable item becomes opposing Jim Crow and red lining.
If Jim Crow was the source of our current problems then we’d see constant improvement because it’s gone. If we don’t see that, then either it’s not gone or our problem is something else.Report
Your proposal is acceptable.Report
Indeed true. My money is on Jim Crow not being gone a generation and a half after it was outlawed.Report
So is it gone now? If all we need to do is wait another generation, then that’s an answer.
If the claim is that it’s not gone (thus no improvement) so we need to act… then do what?Report
Redlining as formal government policy is gone, but redlining as an outcome and thus an economic and social determinant is very much alive and well – see this as one example (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redlining/). The challenge is even where redlined areas were once exclusively black, they are now generally mixed minority for a variety of reasons. And once the practice for home mortgages was outlawed in 1968 (though forms of it are still practiced as in the run up to the Great Recession) the federal government stopped keeping track of redlined neighborhoods the way it had before. In urban redlined areas there is also a lot of old dilapidated housing stock which requires additional resources to mitigate.
The best response would be for banks and HUD to target these areas with home loans that are actually affordable, to place Americorps and o t her government public works projects in these neighborhoods to support housing rennovation, to increase availability of day care, transit and job training as well as to intensify employment growth programs that bring economic opportunities back to the se neighborhoods. That requires multiple jurisdictions working together for a long time – so it won’t fit neatly into a Congressional or Presidential election cycle. But a response is doable.Report
A one word summation of your plan is “Gentrification”.
The neighborhood will increase in value a lot. The current residents may need to leave because they can’t afford it.Report
so what’s wrong with making sure they can? That’s the economic development piece . . . .Report
This is not my field, but my understanding is Gentrification is expected to have nasty side effects on (some of?) the existing people, especially ones who are poor and adapted for the area to be poor.
More importantly, I’m not sure “economic development” is something the gov does well, especially at scale.Report
Something to think about, this is a plan on how to uplift a group of people. This is not a plan to eliminate their oppression.
If there are no systems which keep them down other than lack of opportunity, then there’s at least a chance of working.
If those systems do exist and are not addressed, then our odds of success go way down. It’d be like trying to get my relative a job without first ending his cooking drugs for a motorcycle gang.
Edit: And I have multiple relatives over there so sometimes I’ve called them “he” and sometimes “she”.Report
If we’re going to make the definition of “system” vague enough and squishy enough that it’s going to apply to inequality, then most certainly those same systems work on my relatives.
Join a motorcycle gang and there are multiple feedbacks which make it hard to leave. Easier to cook for them and then you’ll get money from them and it will be even harder. The police will raid your home every now and then. You’ll probably end up doing time so that’s another strike or three against you.
All your friends will be in this culture, your support network will be too.
The gov will give you money for being pregnant and unwed, so there’s all sorts of negative incentives there too.
Cultures are great at maintaining themselves. But comparing those systems to legally mandated systems like Jim Crow isn’t useful.
Culture and cultural systems does the heavy lifting for creating our current problems.Report
Wilhoit’s law
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.Report
Pinky’s Proposition – Authoritarian leftists believe anything with a formal name, even if they made it up.Report
Italians used to be seen as non-White in the United States. In fact they were considered so non-White that an African-American man who married an immigrant from Sicily had his conviction under Alabama’s anti-mixed marriage laws over turned because of this.Report