ThTh3: I'm not sure that's too good to be true, so much as a fairly predictable consequence of substantial reduction in energy intake and extensive weight loss. Remember that GLP-1 agonists were originally designed to be diabetes drugs, so it would be kind of weird if they didn't reduce cardiovascular deaths.
The problem is that none of this was consented to by Lacks or her family and they never received a dime from it.
I realize that by pointing this out I am once again inviting knee-jerk smears from some of this site's more toxic commenters, but while Lacks was not compensated for the tissue sample specifically, she was treated on a charity basis. I have to imagine that that was worth quite a few dimes. It was not standard practice at the time to request permission to study medical waste, so she was not explicitly asked to give permission to study it in exchange for free treatment, but I don't think there's any reasonable basis for doubt that she would have turned down such a trade. A priori, it was a pretty great deal for her.
For all the grandstanding, I have yet to see anything resembling a coherent argument for her or her family having been wronged or cheated, or entitled to compensation in any way. She does not appear to have been harmed, she was treated for free, and all the time, expertise, and money invested to make her medical waste useful and valuable was done by other people. I can see throwing her family a modest sum of money as a simple gesture of goodwill, but the idea that they're actually entitled to anything is pretty nuts, IMO.
People really seem to want to shoehorn this into a pattern of white exploitation of black people, and while there was certainly a lot of that going on at various times in the past, the facts of this case as I understand them just don't fit into that narrative in any way I can see.
This is actually an issue of personal relevance to me, because my mother died at a relatively young age of an interesting disease, and before she died samples were taken for future study. Because this had become standard practice by then, she had to sign a consent form to give them permission to take samples, which of course she did because why wouldn't she? Over a decade later, some progress is being made in treatment of this disease, and while I have no way of knowing, it's certainly possible that her samples or iPSCs derived therefrom were used in some key studies. If I found out that they had, I would be happy about that, and the idea of demanding compensation for work other people did using my mother's medical waste would never occur to me.
You're one of the only people I actually respect who I've seen signing on to this narrative. Can you explain to me why you think that this was a legitimate scandal and that her family is entitled to compensation?
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?
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.
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.
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:
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....Further, it doesn’t offer any suggestions for policy which can produce predictably reliable results.
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.
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.
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.
The IQ/Heredity theory can’t explain this.
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.
I mean, I do get why you think that it was inappropriate to enforce antitrust laws against unions: You're thinking of law in terms of who/whom instead of what. But that's how you get a government of men instead of a government of laws.
What you find, if you look past union hagiography and dig into the actual history of these supposed massacres, is that the unions were almost always the aggressors.
The reason for this is not the moral superiority of management, but a simple matter of incentives. Workers were not paid much in those days, but they were generally paid fair market wages, and as a result, striking workers often found that there was a ready supply of workers lining up to replace them. As a result, they were unable to put any real pressure on their employers to pay above-market wages without resorting to sabotage and violence against (often black) replacement workers.
Management, on the other hand, had no real incentive to initiate violence. They weren't going to get strikers to go back to work by shooting or beating them. But they did have an incentive to use violence to protect their equipment and replacement workers from attacks by strikers.
Also, the whole point of a union is to cartelize the labor market. It's not really clear why you think use of antitrust law to resist this is inappropriate. If you take a look at the text of the major provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act quoted in its Wikipedia article, it looks pretty clear to me that it accurately describes unions. It's anti-trust, not anti-business.
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.
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.
Jim Crow ended 2-3 generations ago. Ctrl-F "hysteresis" for some discussion of why your assumption that that's still a major factor in Millennials and Gen Z is not tenable.
Claims about over-policing of black men and over-disciplining of black children are based primarily on ass-pulled assumptions that there are no racial differences in criminal offending and disruptive behavior.
Incidentally, on the topic of overpolicing, I myself have been stopped and frisked over ten times in my life. While I'm opposed to this in principle, in practice it's been nothing more than a minor annoyance. It has had no long-term detrimental effect on any aspect of my life. Do you know why? Because I'm not an idiot. I don't carry contraband, and because I behave in a manner consistent with the fact that I don't want to give the cops an excuse to give me crap.
Do we actually have any good stats on this, or are you just making assumptions based on stereotypes? I found some sources suggesting that Italian immigrants actually committed less crime than native-born Americans, while Irish immigrants committed crime at moderately elevated rates (55% of arrests in NYC, while making up a third of the population), but I don't know how reliable those claims are. Furthermore, how confident are we that people with Irish ancestry don't still commit more crime than WASPs today? How much of a reduction has there actually been, in relative terms? We've almost entirely much stopped paying attention to achievement gaps between different European ethnicities because they're dwarfed by racial gaps.
So I'm not at all sure that your premise here is correct. But let's assume for the sake of argument that it is. This actually supports a genetic explanation. The basic model you're proposing here is that people who are shut out of legitimate occupations by harsh discrimination turn to crime, and when discrimination relaxes, crime plummets.
The thing is, discrimination against black Americans has declined tremendously, and crime hasn't really followed. Sure, the black homicide rate is down a bit from the highs of the 80s and early 90s (possibly driven by lead and/or the crack wars), but it plateaued around 2000 and then skyrocketed after the Racial Reckoning™.
There was a recent resume field study finding that resumes with distinctively black names got a 10% (e.g. 18% vs. 20%, not 10% vs. 20%) lower callback rate when submitted for jobs with low educational requirements. Yeah, sure, that's crappy, but on an individual level, that isn't even noticeable. Having to submit 10% more resumes to get a job is statistical noise, not something that shuts you out of legitimate occupations.
And that's for jobs with low educational requirements. For jobs with high educational requirements, I strongly suspect that discrimination goes the other way because of the pressure on those industries to diversify and the shortage of qualified black candidates. But for obvious reasons, nobody seems to want to do those studies. And in terms of actually getting those credentials, there's strong and well-documented discrimination in favor of black students. Did you know that black students get college degrees at about the same rate as white students with test scores half a standard deviation higher? No, that doesn't mean tests are biased, because they don't get better college grades than score-matched white students, it's just that they're as likely to attend and power through.
The fact that black Americans continue to have high rates of criminal offending and low average academic achievement long after a dramatic reduction in discrimination suggests that discrimination is not the issue here. And for reasons I outlined in my reply to Philip's comment just above yours, a hysteresis-based model is not plausible, either.
Proving once again that science denialism and anti-intellectualism are bipartisan phenomena. There is an entire field of science dedicated to the study of the genetics of behavioral traits, and like most of the issues on which you've formed strong opinions, you know virtually nothing about it.
The regularity with which virtually every behavioral trait examined turns out to be governed more by genetics than by upbringing is such that in 2000 Erik Turkheimer---a left-wing behavior genetics researcher---proposed it as one of the three laws of behavior genetics:
1. All human behavioral traits are [genetically] heritable.
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Note also, from the linked paper:
These observations surprised many outsiders to the field of behavior genetics at the time, yet they remain an accurate broad-brush summary of the empirical evidence fourteen years later. Indeed, they have attained the status of “null hypotheses”—the most reasonable a priori expectations to hold in the absence of contrary evidence (Turkheimer, Pettersson, & Horn, 2014).
So your default assumption here should be that it's very likely that genetic factors predispose people to criminality to greater or lesser degrees, because that's almost always the case. And in fact there are numerous studies on the heritability of criminal offending and related behaviors and traits, almost all of which find substantial genetic influences.
In accordance with the fourth law of behavior genetics ("A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability"), the actual genetic architecture of behavioral traits extremely complex, and beyond our ability to decipher at this time, so we cannot accurately predict criminality via genome sequencing, but the convergent evidence from different study methodologies (twin, adoption, family, GWAS) allows us to be quite confident that genetic factors do play an important role, even if we don't yet know exactly which genetic factors.
To head off your bad-faith dismissal of solid science on the grounds that we can't precisely predict crime from genome sequences, I would like to point out that the left's unwarranted confidence in the idea that parental SES is the primary driver of crime is entirely undiminished by the fact that crime cannot be precisely predicted based on parental SES.
Correct. The fact that low SES is correlated with crime does not mean that low SES is the main cause of crime. The fact that people with low earnings tend to have children with low earnings does not mean that parental earnings are the main causal driver of one's earnings in adulthood.
You're quite happy to assume that correlation is proof of causation when it would support a causal model to which you've made ideological precommitments, so it's pretty rich for you to presume to lecture me on this point. I don't even know what correlation you think I'm taking as proof of causation. My causal claims are based on studies using methodologies that actually allow for causal inference, not just naïve assumptions about correlational data.
We've been over this before. History matters in some sense, but not in the manner, or to the extent, that is necessary to justify the claims you're making. You're starting from your desired conclusion and just assuming whatever facts are necessary to justify those conclusions, which is profoundly unscientific.
Low SES is not, in general, strongly intergenerationally sticky. Studies of the US find about 0.4 rank-rank father-son elasticity for earnings, and only a part of that is a true causal effect of parental SES, the rest being due to heritable factors. Raj Chetty's work shows that, intergenerationally, black men regress towards a lower mean SES than white men, which is exactly what we would expect to see if the cause were genetic, and not at all what we would expect to see if the cause were historical disadvantage (in which case black and white men would regress towards the same mean SES).
Twin studies show that academic achievement is highly heritable, with shared environment accounting only for a small percentage of the variation, not nearly enough to explain the black-white gap. In fact, the black-white educational achievement gap is larger, in standardized terms, than the black-white SES gap. This is consistent with educational achievement driving the SES gap, rather than with SES driving the educational achievement gap.
The hysteresis-driven model you're proposing here simply doesn't work. The contradictions can only be avoided with an extremely shallow analysis that begins with the observation that there was oppression in the past and is low achievement in the present and ends with a glib post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
I'm quite certain I've laid out at least some of this for you in the past, but you keep repeating the same basic talking points without demonstrating any awareness or understanding of the serious problems I've pointed out with this ultra-simplistic "analysis."
We keep trying to place that set of statistics in historical context and tease out why and how that history is influencing today’s outcomes.
No, you don't. You just say "history matters" and drop the mic. Apologies if I've missed it, but I have no recollection of you ever providing any credible arguments for why we should believe that history has the specific effects you're claiming it does, especially in light of the objections I've raised above and elsewhere.
Real Conservativism...
When I said real liberalism, I meant actual liberalism in the sense of equal rights and civil liberties and such, not "liberalism" as a euphemism for leftism. I was describing my own ideology, not concern-trolling about yours.
My point here is that I see no conflict between the idea that racial achievement gaps are driven largely by genetic factors and the idea that people should be judged as individuals and treated as equals before the law. When liberalism is not contingent on particular answers to purely empirical questions about the causes of racial achievement gaps, there is no need to moralize those questions.
I've had the same thought myself many times. If your commitment to liberalism and opposition to racism is so weak that you have to deny the huge, extremely well-documented racial gaps in criminal offending---or even the possibility that these gaps might have a genetic basis---in order to convince yourself that you're a good person, you are a motherfishing child. You're starting from feelings and assuming the truth of whatever facts are necessary to justify those feelings. You don't have a problem with racism---you have a problem with reality.
Real liberalism is strong enough to withstand inconvenient facts.
What, then, do we do with this knowledge? No one above has addressed this, at least from what I recall?
The answer to this question is so obvious that I have to suspect bad faith here, but once again:
We calmly and maturely acknowledge the fact that the overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system is attributable to differences in rates of criminal offending, not to a white supremacist conspiracy. We do not riot. We do not set things on fire. We do not go on unhinged rants about racial differences in incarceration rates proving that America is a white supremacist nation. We do not decide to stop enforcing laws because arresting black people is racist.
How are you not seeing how much absolute batsh!ttery arises from the assumption that there are no racial gaps in criminal offending? I get that Chip and Philip, and maybe you, want so, so badly for the answer to be "We round up all the [black people] and throw them in jail preemptively." But outside of a few literal Klansmen, nobody actually wants to do that. Those of us in the reality-based community just want the rest of you to stop responding to disparate impact of fairly enforcing laws in the stupidest way imaginable.
There is a (statistical) material reality that black families have been suffering economic and educational disadvantages that have compounded through generations compared to white families.
No, this is false. For one, it is not true in general that economic and educational disadvantages compound through generations. When the causes are purely exogenous, they attenuate rather than compounding. This is why many formerly disadvantaged ethnic groups (Jews, Asians, Irish, Italians) were able to catch up with no special help. In order to keep a group below its natural level of achievement, it's necessary to reapply the oppressive forces every generation.
Basic causal confusion aside, in the specific case of black Americans, we do not observe any kind of compounding of disadvantage. The black-white SES gap has been fairly stable for decades, and has shrunk over the past 3-4 generations; if disadvantages were compounding across generations, it would be growing.
On what basis do you make the claim that Hanania would gladly ignore the fact that "statistics that are true in the aggregate cannot predict the behavior of a single individual?"
While I don't doubt that many Middle Eastern countries are very sexist, this particular thing sounds more like a foreigner-targeted grift than sex discrimination.
Contrary to media gaslighting, the Florida government's criticisms of the AP African American Studies curriculum were reasonable. It absolutely was pushing a political agenda that was totally inappropriate for public schools, and that was a big part of the curriculum.
However, I took a look at the curriculum for AP Psychology, and it had only a single, fairly anodyne bullet point about sexual orientation and gender identity---one of seven in the developmental psychology unit, which overall accounts for 7-9% of the test weight, which means that it probably accounts for 1-2% of the material in the class, if taught according to the curriculum.
Partisan hacks are going to try to equate these two things, but they're really very different. The Florida BoE was right about AP AAS, but unless I'm missing something big, they're way off base here.
This isn't a question of terminology. Essentialism and hereditarianism are totally different things. Importantly, essentialism is racist and unscientific, while hereditarianism is not racist, and has a lot of scientific support.
Talking about whether "blacks are genetically predisposed to crime" betrays a facile understanding of the issue. Some black people are, and some black people aren't. So are some white people. Genetic factors that predispose people to criminality in the context of modern society are very likely weakly to moderately positively correlated with proportion of recent African ancestry, and weakly to moderately negatively correlated with proportion of recent East Asian ancestry, but there is a great deal of overlap between races.
That's the difference between essentialism and hereditarianism. Hereditarianism for highly polygenic traits deals with continuous and overlapping distributions, not with categorical claims about entire races.
One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain “a creepy obsession with so-called race science” and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter. We simply need to come down hard on crime, which involves reforms like investing in policing and making use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology.
Whether he believes that there's a genetic component to racial gaps in criminal offending, I don't know. I think he probably does. It would be hard for an intelligent person to take a serious, honest look at the evidence and not come to that conclusion. But he seems to be less interested in the cause than the solution.
Unfortunately, there's really no good way to do this. One option for napkin math is to use FBI ratios and apply them to CDC totals, but a problem with this is that clearance rates are substantially higher for white homicide victims (and likely offenders) than black homicide victims, due to a variety of factors (more homicides to solve in heavily black precincts, gang warfare vs. robbery vs. domestic/personal issues, disincentives for witnesses to talk to the police, etc.). This means that black homicides get underrepresented in the FBI's offender/victim crosstabs, so we can't even trust the ratios. For example, note that according to FBI's expanded homicide table 6, there were more white + Hispanic than black homicide victims in 2018, but the CDC data I linked above shows the opposite.
Even Hanania’s substack writing, of which I have read a decent bit, all tends to come to a conclusion in support of racial profiling as public policy.
Can you point to specific posts that you think back this claim?
A lot of people are making dumb assumptions based on a single sentence: "We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people." In context, this was clearly about disparate impact of cracking down on crime in general, not racial profiling:
While I support policies that can make incremental improvements, actually solving our crime problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government. Whether you want to focus on guns or the criminals themselves, it would involve heavily policing, surveilling, and incarcerating more black people. If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take.
This is undeniably true. There are huge racial gaps in criminal offending, especially for homicide. Cracking down on crime will necessarily result in arresting and incarcerating more black people, to a much greater extent than white people (and to a much, much greater extent than Asian people, but we don't talk about that, because the idea of racial disparities in incarceration being a product of white supremacy really turns us on). And policing high-crime neighborhoods more intensely will necessarily result in more surveillance of black people.
In isolation, you can read that one sentence as an endorsement of racial profiling for the sake of racial profiling, but when it's immediately followed (and preceded) by a mention of disparate impact, and how our culture is totally incapable of dealing with it in a rational and mature manner, it's pretty clear that this is talking about the unavoidable effects of a race-neutral anti-crime policies in the context of a society with vast racial gulfs in rates of criminal offending.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Thursday Throughput: HELA Edition”
ThTh3: I'm not sure that's too good to be true, so much as a fairly predictable consequence of substantial reduction in energy intake and extensive weight loss. Remember that GLP-1 agonists were originally designed to be diabetes drugs, so it would be kind of weird if they didn't reduce cardiovascular deaths.
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The problem is that none of this was consented to by Lacks or her family and they never received a dime from it.
I realize that by pointing this out I am once again inviting knee-jerk smears from some of this site's more toxic commenters, but while Lacks was not compensated for the tissue sample specifically, she was treated on a charity basis. I have to imagine that that was worth quite a few dimes. It was not standard practice at the time to request permission to study medical waste, so she was not explicitly asked to give permission to study it in exchange for free treatment, but I don't think there's any reasonable basis for doubt that she would have turned down such a trade. A priori, it was a pretty great deal for her.
For all the grandstanding, I have yet to see anything resembling a coherent argument for her or her family having been wronged or cheated, or entitled to compensation in any way. She does not appear to have been harmed, she was treated for free, and all the time, expertise, and money invested to make her medical waste useful and valuable was done by other people. I can see throwing her family a modest sum of money as a simple gesture of goodwill, but the idea that they're actually entitled to anything is pretty nuts, IMO.
People really seem to want to shoehorn this into a pattern of white exploitation of black people, and while there was certainly a lot of that going on at various times in the past, the facts of this case as I understand them just don't fit into that narrative in any way I can see.
This is actually an issue of personal relevance to me, because my mother died at a relatively young age of an interesting disease, and before she died samples were taken for future study. Because this had become standard practice by then, she had to sign a consent form to give them permission to take samples, which of course she did because why wouldn't she? Over a decade later, some progress is being made in treatment of this disease, and while I have no way of knowing, it's certainly possible that her samples or iPSCs derived therefrom were used in some key studies. If I found out that they had, I would be happy about that, and the idea of demanding compensation for work other people did using my mother's medical waste would never occur to me.
You're one of the only people I actually respect who I've seen signing on to this narrative. Can you explain to me why you think that this was a legitimate scandal and that her family is entitled to compensation?
On “The Bigger Question To The Richard Hanania Kerfuffle”
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
On “Cheer Up. Things Aren’t Uniquely Bad”
I mean, I do get why you think that it was inappropriate to enforce antitrust laws against unions: You're thinking of law in terms of who/whom instead of what. But that's how you get a government of men instead of a government of laws.
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What you find, if you look past union hagiography and dig into the actual history of these supposed massacres, is that the unions were almost always the aggressors.
The reason for this is not the moral superiority of management, but a simple matter of incentives. Workers were not paid much in those days, but they were generally paid fair market wages, and as a result, striking workers often found that there was a ready supply of workers lining up to replace them. As a result, they were unable to put any real pressure on their employers to pay above-market wages without resorting to sabotage and violence against (often black) replacement workers.
Management, on the other hand, had no real incentive to initiate violence. They weren't going to get strikers to go back to work by shooting or beating them. But they did have an incentive to use violence to protect their equipment and replacement workers from attacks by strikers.
Also, the whole point of a union is to cartelize the labor market. It's not really clear why you think use of antitrust law to resist this is inappropriate. If you take a look at the text of the major provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act quoted in its Wikipedia article, it looks pretty clear to me that it accurately describes unions. It's anti-trust, not anti-business.
On “The Bigger Question To The Richard Hanania Kerfuffle”
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.
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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.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/7/2023”
Jim Crow ended 2-3 generations ago. Ctrl-F "hysteresis" for some discussion of why your assumption that that's still a major factor in Millennials and Gen Z is not tenable.
Claims about over-policing of black men and over-disciplining of black children are based primarily on ass-pulled assumptions that there are no racial differences in criminal offending and disruptive behavior.
Incidentally, on the topic of overpolicing, I myself have been stopped and frisked over ten times in my life. While I'm opposed to this in principle, in practice it's been nothing more than a minor annoyance. It has had no long-term detrimental effect on any aspect of my life. Do you know why? Because I'm not an idiot. I don't carry contraband, and because I behave in a manner consistent with the fact that I don't want to give the cops an excuse to give me crap.
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Do we actually have any good stats on this, or are you just making assumptions based on stereotypes? I found some sources suggesting that Italian immigrants actually committed less crime than native-born Americans, while Irish immigrants committed crime at moderately elevated rates (55% of arrests in NYC, while making up a third of the population), but I don't know how reliable those claims are. Furthermore, how confident are we that people with Irish ancestry don't still commit more crime than WASPs today? How much of a reduction has there actually been, in relative terms? We've almost entirely much stopped paying attention to achievement gaps between different European ethnicities because they're dwarfed by racial gaps.
So I'm not at all sure that your premise here is correct. But let's assume for the sake of argument that it is. This actually supports a genetic explanation. The basic model you're proposing here is that people who are shut out of legitimate occupations by harsh discrimination turn to crime, and when discrimination relaxes, crime plummets.
The thing is, discrimination against black Americans has declined tremendously, and crime hasn't really followed. Sure, the black homicide rate is down a bit from the highs of the 80s and early 90s (possibly driven by lead and/or the crack wars), but it plateaued around 2000 and then skyrocketed after the Racial Reckoning™.
There was a recent resume field study finding that resumes with distinctively black names got a 10% (e.g. 18% vs. 20%, not 10% vs. 20%) lower callback rate when submitted for jobs with low educational requirements. Yeah, sure, that's crappy, but on an individual level, that isn't even noticeable. Having to submit 10% more resumes to get a job is statistical noise, not something that shuts you out of legitimate occupations.
And that's for jobs with low educational requirements. For jobs with high educational requirements, I strongly suspect that discrimination goes the other way because of the pressure on those industries to diversify and the shortage of qualified black candidates. But for obvious reasons, nobody seems to want to do those studies. And in terms of actually getting those credentials, there's strong and well-documented discrimination in favor of black students. Did you know that black students get college degrees at about the same rate as white students with test scores half a standard deviation higher? No, that doesn't mean tests are biased, because they don't get better college grades than score-matched white students, it's just that they're as likely to attend and power through.
The fact that black Americans continue to have high rates of criminal offending and low average academic achievement long after a dramatic reduction in discrimination suggests that discrimination is not the issue here. And for reasons I outlined in my reply to Philip's comment just above yours, a hysteresis-based model is not plausible, either.
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Proving once again that science denialism and anti-intellectualism are bipartisan phenomena. There is an entire field of science dedicated to the study of the genetics of behavioral traits, and like most of the issues on which you've formed strong opinions, you know virtually nothing about it.
The regularity with which virtually every behavioral trait examined turns out to be governed more by genetics than by upbringing is such that in 2000 Erik Turkheimer---a left-wing behavior genetics researcher---proposed it as one of the three laws of behavior genetics:
1. All human behavioral traits are [genetically] heritable.
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Note also, from the linked paper:
So your default assumption here should be that it's very likely that genetic factors predispose people to criminality to greater or lesser degrees, because that's almost always the case. And in fact there are numerous studies on the heritability of criminal offending and related behaviors and traits, almost all of which find substantial genetic influences.
In accordance with the fourth law of behavior genetics ("A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability"), the actual genetic architecture of behavioral traits extremely complex, and beyond our ability to decipher at this time, so we cannot accurately predict criminality via genome sequencing, but the convergent evidence from different study methodologies (twin, adoption, family, GWAS) allows us to be quite confident that genetic factors do play an important role, even if we don't yet know exactly which genetic factors.
To head off your bad-faith dismissal of solid science on the grounds that we can't precisely predict crime from genome sequences, I would like to point out that the left's unwarranted confidence in the idea that parental SES is the primary driver of crime is entirely undiminished by the fact that crime cannot be precisely predicted based on parental SES.
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Correct. The fact that low SES is correlated with crime does not mean that low SES is the main cause of crime. The fact that people with low earnings tend to have children with low earnings does not mean that parental earnings are the main causal driver of one's earnings in adulthood.
You're quite happy to assume that correlation is proof of causation when it would support a causal model to which you've made ideological precommitments, so it's pretty rich for you to presume to lecture me on this point. I don't even know what correlation you think I'm taking as proof of causation. My causal claims are based on studies using methodologies that actually allow for causal inference, not just naïve assumptions about correlational data.
We've been over this before. History matters in some sense, but not in the manner, or to the extent, that is necessary to justify the claims you're making. You're starting from your desired conclusion and just assuming whatever facts are necessary to justify those conclusions, which is profoundly unscientific.
Low SES is not, in general, strongly intergenerationally sticky. Studies of the US find about 0.4 rank-rank father-son elasticity for earnings, and only a part of that is a true causal effect of parental SES, the rest being due to heritable factors. Raj Chetty's work shows that, intergenerationally, black men regress towards a lower mean SES than white men, which is exactly what we would expect to see if the cause were genetic, and not at all what we would expect to see if the cause were historical disadvantage (in which case black and white men would regress towards the same mean SES).
Twin studies show that academic achievement is highly heritable, with shared environment accounting only for a small percentage of the variation, not nearly enough to explain the black-white gap. In fact, the black-white educational achievement gap is larger, in standardized terms, than the black-white SES gap. This is consistent with educational achievement driving the SES gap, rather than with SES driving the educational achievement gap.
The hysteresis-driven model you're proposing here simply doesn't work. The contradictions can only be avoided with an extremely shallow analysis that begins with the observation that there was oppression in the past and is low achievement in the present and ends with a glib post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
I'm quite certain I've laid out at least some of this for you in the past, but you keep repeating the same basic talking points without demonstrating any awareness or understanding of the serious problems I've pointed out with this ultra-simplistic "analysis."
No, you don't. You just say "history matters" and drop the mic. Apologies if I've missed it, but I have no recollection of you ever providing any credible arguments for why we should believe that history has the specific effects you're claiming it does, especially in light of the objections I've raised above and elsewhere.
When I said real liberalism, I meant actual liberalism in the sense of equal rights and civil liberties and such, not "liberalism" as a euphemism for leftism. I was describing my own ideology, not concern-trolling about yours.
My point here is that I see no conflict between the idea that racial achievement gaps are driven largely by genetic factors and the idea that people should be judged as individuals and treated as equals before the law. When liberalism is not contingent on particular answers to purely empirical questions about the causes of racial achievement gaps, there is no need to moralize those questions.
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Bookmarking this comment as a receipt for the next time someone asserts that nobody can ever answer the question of why we should care about this.
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I've had the same thought myself many times. If your commitment to liberalism and opposition to racism is so weak that you have to deny the huge, extremely well-documented racial gaps in criminal offending---or even the possibility that these gaps might have a genetic basis---in order to convince yourself that you're a good person, you are a motherfishing child. You're starting from feelings and assuming the truth of whatever facts are necessary to justify those feelings. You don't have a problem with racism---you have a problem with reality.
Real liberalism is strong enough to withstand inconvenient facts.
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The answer to this question is so obvious that I have to suspect bad faith here, but once again:
We calmly and maturely acknowledge the fact that the overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system is attributable to differences in rates of criminal offending, not to a white supremacist conspiracy. We do not riot. We do not set things on fire. We do not go on unhinged rants about racial differences in incarceration rates proving that America is a white supremacist nation. We do not decide to stop enforcing laws because arresting black people is racist.
How are you not seeing how much absolute batsh!ttery arises from the assumption that there are no racial gaps in criminal offending? I get that Chip and Philip, and maybe you, want so, so badly for the answer to be "We round up all the [black people] and throw them in jail preemptively." But outside of a few literal Klansmen, nobody actually wants to do that. Those of us in the reality-based community just want the rest of you to stop responding to disparate impact of fairly enforcing laws in the stupidest way imaginable.
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No, this is false. For one, it is not true in general that economic and educational disadvantages compound through generations. When the causes are purely exogenous, they attenuate rather than compounding. This is why many formerly disadvantaged ethnic groups (Jews, Asians, Irish, Italians) were able to catch up with no special help. In order to keep a group below its natural level of achievement, it's necessary to reapply the oppressive forces every generation.
Basic causal confusion aside, in the specific case of black Americans, we do not observe any kind of compounding of disadvantage. The black-white SES gap has been fairly stable for decades, and has shrunk over the past 3-4 generations; if disadvantages were compounding across generations, it would be growing.
On what basis do you make the claim that Hanania would gladly ignore the fact that "statistics that are true in the aggregate cannot predict the behavior of a single individual?"
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Oh. Good catch. So the College Board was just straight-up lying?
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While I don't doubt that many Middle Eastern countries are very sexist, this particular thing sounds more like a foreigner-targeted grift than sex discrimination.
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Contrary to media gaslighting, the Florida government's criticisms of the AP African American Studies curriculum were reasonable. It absolutely was pushing a political agenda that was totally inappropriate for public schools, and that was a big part of the curriculum.
However, I took a look at the curriculum for AP Psychology, and it had only a single, fairly anodyne bullet point about sexual orientation and gender identity---one of seven in the developmental psychology unit, which overall accounts for 7-9% of the test weight, which means that it probably accounts for 1-2% of the material in the class, if taught according to the curriculum.
Partisan hacks are going to try to equate these two things, but they're really very different. The Florida BoE was right about AP AAS, but unless I'm missing something big, they're way off base here.
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This isn't a question of terminology. Essentialism and hereditarianism are totally different things. Importantly, essentialism is racist and unscientific, while hereditarianism is not racist, and has a lot of scientific support.
Talking about whether "blacks are genetically predisposed to crime" betrays a facile understanding of the issue. Some black people are, and some black people aren't. So are some white people. Genetic factors that predispose people to criminality in the context of modern society are very likely weakly to moderately positively correlated with proportion of recent African ancestry, and weakly to moderately negatively correlated with proportion of recent East Asian ancestry, but there is a great deal of overlap between races.
That's the difference between essentialism and hereditarianism. Hereditarianism for highly polygenic traits deals with continuous and overlapping distributions, not with categorical claims about entire races.
That's me talking, not Hanania. Here's Hanania:
Whether he believes that there's a genetic component to racial gaps in criminal offending, I don't know. I think he probably does. It would be hard for an intelligent person to take a serious, honest look at the evidence and not come to that conclusion. But he seems to be less interested in the cause than the solution.
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Unfortunately, there's really no good way to do this. One option for napkin math is to use FBI ratios and apply them to CDC totals, but a problem with this is that clearance rates are substantially higher for white homicide victims (and likely offenders) than black homicide victims, due to a variety of factors (more homicides to solve in heavily black precincts, gang warfare vs. robbery vs. domestic/personal issues, disincentives for witnesses to talk to the police, etc.). This means that black homicides get underrepresented in the FBI's offender/victim crosstabs, so we can't even trust the ratios. For example, note that according to FBI's expanded homicide table 6, there were more white + Hispanic than black homicide victims in 2018, but the CDC data I linked above shows the opposite.
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Even Hanania’s substack writing, of which I have read a decent bit, all tends to come to a conclusion in support of racial profiling as public policy.
Can you point to specific posts that you think back this claim?
A lot of people are making dumb assumptions based on a single sentence: "We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people." In context, this was clearly about disparate impact of cracking down on crime in general, not racial profiling:
This is undeniably true. There are huge racial gaps in criminal offending, especially for homicide. Cracking down on crime will necessarily result in arresting and incarcerating more black people, to a much greater extent than white people (and to a much, much greater extent than Asian people, but we don't talk about that, because the idea of racial disparities in incarceration being a product of white supremacy really turns us on). And policing high-crime neighborhoods more intensely will necessarily result in more surveillance of black people.
In isolation, you can read that one sentence as an endorsement of racial profiling for the sake of racial profiling, but when it's immediately followed (and preceded) by a mention of disparate impact, and how our culture is totally incapable of dealing with it in a rational and mature manner, it's pretty clear that this is talking about the unavoidable effects of a race-neutral anti-crime policies in the context of a society with vast racial gulfs in rates of criminal offending.
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