HBD: Human Biodiversity

In Britain today, too many people are denied the chance to escape poverty and build a better life for themselves and their family. Sadly, this is especially true for people in Britain's black community. Black pupils are permanently excluded from school at more than twice the rate of white pupils. Some 9,500 black children leave primary school every year unable to read, write and add up properly. And of the 3,000 students who started at Oxford in 2008, only five are black Caribbean in origin. This inequality extends to the job market too, with recent research showing almost half of young black people are unemployed, well over twice the rate for young white people. 

What's going wrong? To a large extent, Labour's failure to address racial inequality echoes their failure to tackle inequality generally. Since 1997, income inequality, education inequality and health inequality have all widened, hitting the black community disproportionately hard.

A new Conservative government must do better. I want to take down the barriers that prevent so many black people realising their potential. In part, we'll do this through our core reform agenda. By tackling the causes of poverty, like poor schooling, family breakdown, addiction and welfare dependency, we can succeed where Labour has failed.

But we won't just rely on across-the-board measures to boost social mobility. We'll introduce concerted action to overcome the racial barriers that exist in Britain today. One of the most obvious is when it comes to starting a business: Conservatives have always believed that enterprise is a powerful catalyst for social mobility. However, too many black people in Britain today are being denied the opportunity to start their own business and get on in life.

This is not because of a lack of aspiration. Research has shown that almost a third of black people in England want to start their own business, compared with just 9% of the white population. However, only 4% of black people do manage to launch a startup – a level lower than any other ethnic group.

Accessing finance and advice are the key challenges for would-be black entrepreneurs. According to one study, black entrepreneurs are four times more likely to be denied a bank loan outright than white entrepreneurs, while the UK Survey of Small and Medium Enterprisesshows that as many as a quarter of black entrepreneurs report problems in accessing finance.A Conservative government will help tackle these barriers by turning Labour's failing welfare schemes into a radical plan to get Britain working. This will include funding for a national mentoring programme for black people who want to start a business. It will provide would-be black entrepreneurs with the targeted support, advice – and, crucially, role models – they need to access finance and work for themselves.

We know that the government will try to help blacks and fail. What we don't know is whether blacks in England will ever have as many privileges as those in America. Out of guilt, American whites put up with a lot from them, including school busing in order to make up for segregation.  The British won't have lovely videos of lynchings and cross burnings to scare the kids with.  

Look at the disparity at Oxford.  According to Cameron in 2008 there were only five blacks in a class of 3,000.  That's about what you'd expect without affirmative action.  Will the British government begin to increase that number?  

In the US affirmative action for Hispanics piggybacked on the programs set up for blacks.  The history of slavery and segregation was needed as a justification to get the thing rolling and before others could be added. Europeans don't have this kind of weapon to use against themselves.  They would be starting discrimination programs against themselves for people who had chosen to come.  

Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton's 2005 paper "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Abilities" is a beautiful work for both its rigor and scientific reasoning. The two scientists look at ten separate kinds of evidence that could possibly bring to light the causes of the black/white IQ gap. They are "the worldwide distribution of test scores, g factor of mental ability, heritability, brain size and cognitive ability, transracial adoption, racial admixture, regression, related life-history traits, human origins research, and hypothesized environmental variables." Rushton and Jensen find that every area points to an at least partly genetic explanation.

We could imagine a world where whites were smarter than blacks in only 60 or 70 percent of the countries studied instead of all. Or where the racial differences in IQ scores were the same everywhere except in cases of cross adoption studies. Or a world where there were IQ differences even when blacks and whites were adopted into similar environments but there were no correlations between skin color and IQ amongst blacks. That's not our world. The question on whether there are inherent racial differences in intelligence is like a math problem where the calculator, your own work by hand, your friend, and the back of the book are all independently giving you the same answer.

While Jensen and Rushton's "Thirty Years of Research" is an example of how to reason, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ Is Wrong by journalist David Shenk is the polar opposite. I've written many book reviews, which usually consist of me summarizing the work and giving my thoughts on a few ideas. It would be impossible to do so here. While Rushton and Jensen provide a falsifiable theory that makes predictions, and they examine it from several perspectives, Shenk presents a collage of pieces of data only tenuously linked to one another. He provides no clear ideas that could be directly challenged. If I was to sum up Genius, then I'd say it's about how everybody has the potential to be a, well, genius.¹ The view that genes directly make us who we are is said to be simplistic; how they interact with the world is so unpredictable that we really don't know how anybody will turn out. Instead of Genes + Environment, the new paradigm is GxE.

An op-ed in the LA Times all but admits that it’s impossible to educate some kids.

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.

Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum.

As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.

Our era is no different. We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.

Once again, I find myself sounding the alarm that the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed. But this time my warning carries a personal rebuke. For much of the last two decades, I was among those who jumped aboard the choice and accountability bandwagon. Choice and accountability, I believed, would offer a chance for poor children to escape failing schools. Testing and accountability, I thought, would cast sunshine on low-performing schools and lead to improvement. It all seemed to make sense, even if there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope.

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform -- codified in its signature Race to the Top program -- that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better...

Like the grand plans of previous eras, they sound sensible but will leave education no better off. Charter schools are no panacea. The nation now has about 5,000 of them, and they vary in quality. Some are excellent, some terrible; most are in between. Most studies have found that charters, on average, are no better than public schools.

Maybe, but at least they can probably get their mediocre results for less money.

Imagine how much better off students would be if we just gave each one the $19,000 a year we spend per pupil.  Instead of twelve years of compulsory education, you’d get a check for $228,000 on your eighteenth birthday.  Or you could give parents a $6,600 per year voucher for private school and still save enough to give the kid $148,000 when he graduates.

The fact of the matter is, that for all the inefficiencies in the public school system, we’ve spent so much money that it’s done all that it can do for those with below average IQs.  Like North Korea which maintains one of the largest armies in the world while it’s population lives in abject poverty, we’ve brought down the living standard of the population in order to feel good about ourselves.  There’s at least a practical reason for North Korea’s defense spending as it’s still threatened by the American regime.  We get nothing from the bulk of the money wasted on education.

Public education in America is partly a story of liberal creationism and partly one of the evils of unionism and government spending.

In a paper in Intelligence, Rushton and Jensen take issue with those who think that the black/white IQ gap is narrowing, and thus may eventually disappear.

(Rushton & Jensen, 2005) and (Rushton & Jensen, 2010) maintain that the IQ gap between Blacks and Whites has remained at least 15- to 20-points (1.1 standard deviations) since the time of World War I (1917) when mass testing first began ([Roth et al., 2001] and [Shuey, 1966]). On the other hand, (Flynn, 1987b) and (Flynn, 1999b) argued that the mean difference has decreased from the Army Alpha of World War I (1917), to the Army General Classification Test of World War II (1946), to the Armed Forces Qualification Test of the Vietnam era (1968). More recently, Dickens and Flynn (2006) claimed that Blacks had closed the IQ gap by 5.5 points (35%) between 1970 and 1992. Over the same time period, Nisbett (2009) claimed that Blacks had narrowed the gap in educational achievement by a commensurate 35% on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Nisbett also argued that educational interventions such as the Milwaukee project, the Abecedarian project, and the Infant Health and Development Program implied that the gap could be eliminated altogether.

To the contrary, we find there is little or no evidence of narrowing. The evidence presented in its favor rests mainly on insufficient sampling and selective reporting. For example, Rushton and Jensen (2006) calculated that the mean Black gain on the IQ tests discussed by Dickens and Flynn (2006) was only 2.1 points (14%) because these authors, for a variety of proffered methodological reasons, had excluded several tests showing small, nil, and negative gains, and also because they had used a projected trend line that exaggerated the gain. Nor was there any evidence of narrowing on other IQ tests over the 1970 to 1992 time period ([Murray, 2006] and [Murray, 2007]).

Nisbett's (2009) claim of a 35% Black improvement on the NAEP tests is also greatly exaggerated. Gottfredson (2005) estimated these gains were only about 20% and had ceased completely by 1990. In fact, her appraisal, as well as one by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) of a 20% Black gain may have been over-optimistic (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, actually reported the results were mixed, with other tests showing an increasing distance between Blacks and Whites).

As the authors point out, just because IQ scores have been increasing (the Flynn Effect) over the previous several decades doesn’t give us any reason for assuming that blacks will catch up to whites, any more than the population increase in height should convince us that the male/female gap in that area will close.

I’ve always thought the real black-white gap would actually be larger if the money spent educating children was distributed by the tax contribution of parents (or if only private schools existed).  The Cato Institute reports that nationwide the US spends $19,000 per student with largely black cities like Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City being some of the biggest spenders.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the US actually "invested" more per student on blacks than whites.  I’d like to see some numbers on tax burden by race vs. allocation per pupil.

And none of this considers the millions of blacks being born into better material circumstances than they would otherwise have thanks to affirmative action and government jobs.  Redistributionist policies should explain part of the reason why the average African American IQ is 15 points higher than that of their cousins in Africa.

As money becomes tighter and our increasing diversity makes whites more and more hostile to government spending, the next few decades should see an increase in racial disparities.

The problem with dealing honestly with race is that if you’re familiar with and talk about the science/common sense on group differences it’ll overshadow everything else you want to say. Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you he’s an environmentalist, creationist, neo-con and child molester. The last descriptive term is the only thing that you’re going to take away.  Everything else becomes irrelevant. So it is with the term “racist.” The term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

With that in mind, take a look at Frum Forum’s Tim Mak’s new article on Alternative Right.  See if you can find anything in there that would be out of place in a report put out by the SPLC.

After learning of the immense popularity of romance novels, I thought trying to read a few of them would tell me some things about the psychology of the fairer sex.

The books tend to be a quick read of 200 or so small pages.  The first one I picked up was Marrying the Lone Star Maverick. Holly Lombard works for Noah Brand at his family corporation.  Noah tries to get his twin brother Jeff to come back and work at the company for a year before their father retires.  Jeff agrees to only if he can do so from his ranch in Texas.  He needs an assistant, of course, so Noah sends Holly to the ranch.  She’s a city girl, he’s country, they clash but eventually fall for one another.  Finally Jeff tells Holly that his dad is only going to give him the family ranch if he marries this year.  He wants to enter into a marriage of convenience with her and will pay.  So they get married and continue to live together, knowing that it can’t last because she loves Dallas and he loves ranching.  A bunch of things happen and they decide they want to stay together after all and will find a way to make it work.

The Detroit school board chief is practically illiterate.

The president of the Detroit school board, Otis Mathis, is waging a legal battle to steer the academic future of 90,000 children, in the nation's lowest-achieving big city district.

He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence. Here's a sample from an e-mail he sent to friends and supporters on Sunday night, uncorrected for errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage. It begins:

If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

The rest of the e-mail, and others that Mathis has written, demonstrate what one of his school board colleagues describes, carefully, as "his communication issues." But if these deficits have limited Mathis, as he admits they have, they have not stopped him from graduating from high school and college. In January, his peers elected him president by a 10-1 vote over Tyrone Winfrey, a University of Michigan academic officer...

In another city, these revelations might be grounds for disqualification. But Mathis is liked and defended by many of his peers, who cite his collegiality, lack of defensiveness and leadership as more important than his writing skills. Even Winfrey, his defeated rival for the presidency, declined to criticize his qualifications.

I'll bet that it's not politically smart for blacks to go after one another over issues like this.  After all, how many members of the black middle class have themselves had some requirement waived somewhere or been insecure about their own test taking abilities?

So just how did Mr. Mathis graduate from college?

He graduated from Southwestern High School in 1973 with what he says was a 1.8 grade-point average but was previously reported as a .98 average. After serving in the Navy, Wayne State placed him in a special program to help academically unqualified students move forward, on the G.I. Bill.

He stayed at Wayne for 15 years, as a student and a counselor, becoming a virtual "prisoner of Wayne," as he jokes, unable to graduate.

Mathis and another student unsuccessfully challenged the use of an English proficiency test as a requirement for graduation. In 1992, when the case went to trial, the lawsuit gained national attention. Mathis said then his failure to pass the test "made me feel stupid." The requirement was eventually dropped in 2007, and Mathis applied to get his degree the next year, after his election.

So he waited around for fifteen years "as a student and a counselor" until the school finally dropped the required the English proficiency test.

Mathis doesn't seem ashamed of his "difficulties."

"I know he's a terrible writer. Oh wow, I've seen his e-mails," says Ida Byrd-Hill, a parent and activist who runs a nonprofit and is a member of Mensa, the high-IQ group.

"His job, though, is to represent the community. His lack of writing skills is prevalent in the community. If anybody does, he understands the struggles of what it's like to go through an institution and not be properly prepared."

Mathis and some of his supporters say his story is about someone who manages his limitations, just as others manage physical disabilities.

"Instead of telling them that they can't write and won't be anything, I show that cannot stop you," Mathis says. "If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that's something. ...It's not about what you don't have. It's what you can do."

Because of his struggles and perseverance, Mathis describes himself as a role model.

Notice that even the black woman who is supposedly in Mensa (I wonder if they race norm, or she isn't just lying) thinks that not being able to write makes the school board chief a great representative of his community.  Now I don't blame this man for being unable to tell the difference between making it in the private sector and making it as a government bureaucrat in an affirmative action system.  If he had the brainpower for that, he would've graduated from college within his first ten years or so.  But all whites with hopes of ever seriously engaging the black community in America need to know the intellectual and personal qualities that they're likely to come across among the African-American leadership.