J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 356

The wise and thoughtful Dan Nexon gets this, I think, exa...

The wise and thoughtful Dan Nexon gets this, I think, exactly right. The question is: Why is conservatism intellectually irrelevant in many academic departments and disciplines? The propensity of prominent conservatives to try to ratf--- 20 year olds is certainly part of the problem: Dan Nexon: "This reads like an excuse for publishing an intemperate opinion-editorial in the student newspaper, not an attempt by a world-famous academic to rationalize conspiring to ratf--- an undergrad at an institution with which he is affiliated:"

Niall Ferguson: "I need to grow up and keep out of student politics, no question. But the context is important. Conservatism is on the brink of extinction in much of academia, especially in history. This isn't healthy."

Yes. Twitter Has Crap Aggregation Tools

KneelBeforeHat: "Via @SorryWhat_Now_: Senior Hoover fellow enlists college Republicans in bumbling conspiracy to oppo research and 'grind' and 'intimidate' liberals. No doubt this was for campus diversity of thought..."

Angus Johnston: "Historian Niall Ferguson urged conservative students to 'unite against the SJWs' on a Stanford speakers' committee, encouraged "opposition research" on one student member..."

Rules are different for Republicans: Lawrence H. Summers: "If during the Clinton or Obama Administrations there had been a statement from @POTUS or anyone senior official in the morning before the Employment Report it would have been a major scandal���with all sorts of investigations following on..."

[Matthew Yglesias: _ "It was nice of Trump_ to preview the unexpectedly strong jobs numbers this morning and he definitely didn���t do the same thing privately last night to help any rich friends or sons do insider trading..."

Matthew Yglesias: "The key thing, as always, is that every single House Republican and every single Senate Republican wake up every single day and decide to do nothing at all to check Trump���s corruption..."

Dan Davies: "Mattarella looks like he's done his long-term reputation good. He's respected the majority; they can have who they want in the government. And he's preserved the anti majoritarian parts of the constitution; you can't risk major EU treaties unless you explicitly run on that policy..."

Equitable Growth: "Just posted: Stories of #inequality & growth you should be reading. Ft. @KClausing, @SamEyler, @gabriel_zucman, @EmilyRPeck, @AlexiaCampbell & @portereduardo..."

Equitable Growth: "'Greater education and the need for more workers to receive it are not adequate explanations of inequality. The decline in union density is.' @LipstickEcon on new research that links declining unionization to rising #inequality, via @Slate https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/study-unions-increasingly-represent-educated-workers.html����� #EGgrantee..."

Jeet Heer: "Winning: "New SCOOP from Singapore: The U.S. is trying to find a discreet way to pay for Kim Jong Un���s luxury five-start hotel: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-us-is-trying-to-find-a-discreet-way-to-pay-for-kim-jong-uns-hotel-in-singapore/2018/06/01/776055ce-9745-439e-9ee4-c0cef8e81523_story.html"

Nouriel Roubini: "So please scam me as u wish as I fork u $4bn!: 'The EOS tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform...'"

Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads: Economic History

Kevin Drum: What Made Marxism So Deadly?: "[Noah] Smith has the causation backward here...

Paul Rincon: Hun migrations 'linked to deadly Justinian Plague': "Eske Willerslev, Peter de Barros Damgaard and others... sequenced genomes... recovered DNA from a strain of plague related to the one responsible for the Justinian Plague...

Noah Smith: Remember Karl Marx for the many things he got wrong: "Marx didn���t make it to 200, but the ideas he injected into the global conversation and the ideologies that bear his name far outlasted the German economist and philosopher...

History, biography, and fiction are the queens of the humanities because we think via narrative: David Robson: Culture-Our fiction addiction: Why humans need stories: "The perfect summer blockbuster. A handsome king... superhuman strength... insufferable arroganc... wreak[s] havoc...

The well-worth reading Ryan Cooper trolls me: Ryan Cooper: It's time to normalize Karl Marx: "For elite American economists, Marx has long been viewed as absolutely anathema, if not some kind of demon...

Craig Palsson: Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Incomplete Property Rights and Structural Change in Haiti

Peter Baehr (2001): The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel": Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Geha��use Metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: "In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Geha��use that modern capitalism has created...

J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, Tim L. Squires, and David N. Weil: The Global Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade: "We study the distribution of economic activity, as proxied by lights at night, across 250,000 grid cells of average area 560 square kilometers...

Jane Humphries (2013): The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective: a critique of the high wage economy interpretation of the British industrial revolution: "The lure of aggregates and the pitfalls of the patriarchal perspective...

Susan Pfeiffer et al.: Discernment of mortality risk associated with childbirth in archaeologically derived forager skeletons: "An obstetric dilemma may have been a persistent characteristic of human evolution...

Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth...

John Stuart Mill (1848, 1871): Principles of Political Economy: "Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being...

Prateek Raj: How merchant guilds became obsolete: "For much of human history, markets were embedded in relationships.... Merchant guilds... associations of wholesale traders were networked, and were considered reliable...

��scar Jord��, Katharina Knoll, Dmitry Kuvshinov, Moritz Schularick, Alan Taylor: The rate of return on everything: "Returns of major asset classes in the advanced economies over the last 150 years...

Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and wh...

Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "Geneticists of the 1920s knew that it was in their short term interests to have the public believe that any and all shit was innate...

...But the field evolved, and can���t afford to devolve. It would be nice if we could get beyond genetics-vs-culture, so we could talk more comprehensively about ���embodiment���.�� But the hereditarians and racists won���t allow it. We should not be debating the innate intelligence of black people, or of the poor, on college campuses or anywhere.�� It is a morally corrupt pseudoscientific proposition.��

It's like inviting a creationist or an inventor of a perpetual motion machine. The university should not be a censor, but it sure as hell is a gatekeeper. ��At this point, sometimes they go all radical epistemological relativist and and say that all ideas deserve a hearing. ��But all ideas don't deserve a hearing. ��The universe of things that do get discussed and debated on college campuses is rather small in proportion to the ideas that people have debated over the years. ��Should we stone witches? No. Might the speed of light be 140,000 miles per second, rather than 186,000? No. ��Might the universe just be made up of earth, air, water, and fire? No. ��Might Africans just be genetically stupid? Might people who want to debate this point have their fundamental civic morality called into question instead?

This also raises bigger problems.�� Geneticists that mislead the public about what human genetics explains. ��College faculty that can���t identify pseudoscience.�� There were, after all, any number of serious refutations of every aspect of The Bell Curve...

#shouldread

A Few Notes on Higher Education in the Age of Trump: Hoisted from June 10, 2017

Hoisted: A Few Notes on Higher Education in the Age of Trump... (June 10, 2017):

I wrote http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/06/must-read-two-points-diversity-and-finding-truth-in-the-sense-of-rough-consensus-and-running-code-where-i-think-larry.html: Two points (diversity and finding truth in the sense of rough consensus and running code) where I think Larry Summers is 100% correct. One point (Charles Murray) where I think Larry is broadly right but that things are more complicated. And one point (sensitivity training) where I think Larry Summers is more wrong than right. But more on that anon. Definitely worth reading.

This is the "anon":

(1 & 2) The two points where I think Larry is 100% correct are:

(a) The strong need for universities to not just check demographic boxes but to actually devote resources to enhancing economic diversity.

(b) The point of a university is not just to express but to evaluate and assess ideas. We need a diversified portfolio of ideas to discuss. But we also need to assess what is and is not the case, and what ideas have failed the tests of coherence, utility, and good faith.

(3) With respect to Charles Murray, where I think Larry is "right, but...", some thoughts:

Murray is (a) racist enough to imitate the KKK in lighting crosses on fire, (b) mendacious enough to have called forth Jim Heckman's angry review of The Bell Curve as simply not competent social science http://reason.com/archives/1995/03/01/cracked-bell, and (c) corrupt enough to lie about the circumstances under which AEI fired David Frum for saying true things AEI's donors and political masters did not want to hear http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/196981/david-frums-departure-aei-charles-murray.

Yes, once Murray had been invited to Middlebury, he should have come and spoken. But also: people who do not think that he ought to have been invited to Middlebury should also have been allowed, nay encouraged, to speak���and should not have been told by anybody to shut up and not speak.

And the people who invited Charles Murray to speak at Middlebury have, in my view, a great deal of explaining to do.

As I wrote http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/02/statement-for-the-bbc-on-the-disruption-of-berkeley-speaker-event-on-february-1-2017.html: "A university is both a safe space in which ideas are to be expressed and a space in which those ideas are to be evaluated. When one sets forth ideas or causes ideas to be set forth in a university, one is doing so because one believes that these ideas are���potentially, at least���great ones. In so doing, members of the university are accountable only to, as Berkeley Professor Ernst Kantorowicz said in the 1940s, 'their conscience and their God'".

What are the ideas that Charles Murray has to express that are potentially great? Those who invited Charles Murray to Middlebury have a duty to the college to say why they think he has anything potentially great to say. They have not met that duty. Perhaps they do think he has something great to say: if so, they need to tell us what it is. Perhaps, though, they invited their speaker because they hoped bringing a cross-burner to campus would make African-American, Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, and other minority members of the university feel small and unsafe. If so they need to examine their consciences and pray to their gods, and think hard about whether they understand the purposes of a university.

(4) The point where I think Larry is more wrong than write is where he writes:

Something has gone badly wrong when the chancellor of the largest state university system is pushing faculty attendance at seminars where faculty are trained that it is wrong and even racist to say that ���America is a land of opportunity��� or that ���meritocracy is a good thing��� or that ���with hard work you can achieve your dreams���...

You can say: "America is a land of opportunity. FULL STOP!" You can say "Is America a land of 'opportunity'?" or "America is a land of opportunity. Yes or no?" or "America is a land of opportunity. It what ways is this true? In what ways is this false?"

I can think of many times and places in which a professor saying the first to a student is, to put it bluntly, simply being a dick.

Similarly, to say "Meritocracy is a good thing. FULL STOP!" is to ignore that the very first use of the word "meritocracy" comes in 1958 in a classic work of sociology by Michael Young, his The Rise of the Meritocracy http://amzn.to/2soHDLi, in which Young argued as strongly as he could that, indeed, the rise of the meritocracy was a bad thing. And "With hard work you can achieve your dreams. FULL STOP!" is, I think, simply wrong: with hard work you can achieve some of your dreams���to achieve them all requires hard work, luck, a willingness to lean in, a strong willingness not just to work hard but to purchase lottery tickets outside of your comfort zone, and forethought and planning to maximize the chances that you will find yourself in the right place at the right time.

Thus, IMHO at least, to say "Meritocracy is a good thing. FULL STOP!" or "With hard work you can achieve your dreams. FULL STOP!" is simply being a dick. And I do think universities should encourage faculty to attend seminars at which they reflect on how not to be dicks.

Of course, much of "sensitivity training" could, in my view, be replaced by one of Harold Pollack's index cards http://amzn.to/2sOcqyM. This one would read:

Don't be a dick.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person you are talking to: are you (unintentionally) being a dick even though you are not trying to be one?

And, we humans being as perverse as we are, sensitivity training seminars do themselves present substantial opportunities for dickishness.

Larry Summers: How elite universities meet the challenges of the Trump era: "Rebecca Blumenstein... our conversation focused on how elite universities are meeting the challenges of the Trump era... https://www.ft.com/content/99cc63cd-7e59-3390-a052-6fcb654eb161

...I���m afraid I am quite negative on several counts. First, by placing much less emphasis on economic diversity relative to other dimensions of diversity, we are perpetuating the divisions that brought Donald Trump to power. I���m proud of what we did at Harvard during my presidency to make college free for students with a family income under $60,000 and to step up recruitment of thoses from disadvantaged backgrounds and the way these policies have been emulated. But it remains the case that we make far less effort to recruit, admit and educate economically disadvantaged students than we do to economically advantaged minority students. I think that is wrong....

Second, it is terrifying that the US now has its first post-rational president who denies science, proposes arithmetically unsound budgets and embraces alternative facts. I would hope at such a time universities would be bulwarks for honest, open debate as a route towards greater truth. All too often, though, the objective of discussion at our elite schools is framed not as finding truth, or distinguishing better from worse ideas. Rather, it is framed as achieving greater respect for other views or appreciation of the feelings of others.

All too often as with the shameful treatment of Charles Murray at Middlebury, this means giving a heckler���s veto to those who want to carry the day with the strength of their feeling rather than the force of their argument....

Third, at a time when the US faces momentous challenges, I am discouraged to see universities turn inwards and embrace an Orwellian paternalism in an effort to reduce what is seen as victimisation. Something has gone badly wrong when the chancellor of the largest state university system is pushing faculty attendance at seminars where faculty are trained that it is wrong and even racist to say that ���America is a land of opportunity��� or that ���meritocracy is a good thing��� or that ���with hard work you can achieve your dreams���. The only intellectually safe space for a college student should be in his or her parents��� home. A liberal education that does not cause moments of acute discomfort is a failure...

Three Conservatives on Why Charles Murray's Ideas Are Bankupt in the Academic Intellectual Marketplace

I have never understood why "conservatives" like Niall Ferguson think that cross-burner Charles Murray is a good standard bearer for their ideas in a university setting. Is it their explicit and deliberate aim to generate counterdemonstrations and further reinforce the link between conservative ideas and white ethnicism in America today? Do they really think that yoking appeals to racial animosity, immutable "racial" differences in intelligence, and white ethnicism to their cause is a winner?

Niall Ferguson won't claim that the immutable-racial-differences arguments in Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve get it right. He will only claim that: "the sheer scale of the discussion that Murray���s work has generated would seem to argue for its importance, regardless of whether one ends up agreeing with him..." In academic speech ideas are not merely presented but evaluated. Cross-burner Murray's ideas have been evaluated by, among others, the impeccably conservative Thomas Sowell, James Heckman, and Glenn Loury. Wouldn't a proper Cardinal Conversation aimed at elevating the debate have featured one of these non-cross-burning conservatives? They would have said something like:

Glenn Loury: "Implicit in their argument is the judgment that we shall have to get used to there being a substantial minority of our fellows who, because of their low intelligence, may fail to perform adequately in their roles as workers, parents, and citizens.... What I find problematic is their suggestion that we accommodate ourselves to the inevitability of the difference in mental performance among the races in America.... The record of black American economic and educational achievement in the post-civil-rights era has been ambiguous���great success mixed with shocking failure.... The account that attributes it to the limited mental abilities of blacks is singular in its suggestion that we must learn to live with current racial disparities.... The question now on the floor... is whether blacks are capable of gaining equal status, given equality of opportunity.... Some conservatives are not above signaling, in more or less overt ways, their belief that blacks can never pass this test..."

James Heckman: "IQ may actually be a better measure of the environment facing children than the measure of environment used by Murray and Herrnstein. They use IQ to predict schooling, but schooling produces IQ. Hence, they are especially likely to find a strong measured effect of 'IQ' on schooling. The same remarks apply to their study of racial and ethnic differentials in socioeconomic outcomes.... There are methods for addressing these problems, but Murray and Herrnstein do not use them.... Finally... the argument does not cumulate.... Its case against affirmative action... does not require acceptance of a single ("g-loaded") scale of ability, or acceptance of the importance of heredity in producing socioeconomic inequality. The authors' evidence of growing stratification by cognitive ability in schools and workplaces does not require that they take a position on how the ability is produced. Yet the authors argue strenuously for their narrow view of ability and its heritability and thereby distract the reader's attention.... The authors have no good way to separate genetic from social influences on social behavior. Their environmental data are too crude and the AFQT score they use is obtained too late in life to make a genetic-environmental distinction meaningful. The authors would require much finer measures of environmental variables than they have at their disposal to rule out the importance of family and society in determining individual outcomes..."

Thomas Sowell: "Perhaps the strongest evidence against a genetic basis for intergroup differences in IQ is that the average level of mental test performance has changed very significantly for whole populations over time and, moreover, particular ethnic groups within the populatio'Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence'. It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve.... The implications of such rising patterns of mental test performance is devastating to the central hypothesis.... The failure to draw the logical inference seems puzzling. Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial? Herrnstein and Murray do not address this question.... Perhaps the most intellectually troubling aspect of The Bell Curve is the authors' uncritical approach to statistical correlations. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten, and one of the most widely ignored facts in public policy research. The statistical term "multicollinearity," dealing with spurious correlations, appears only once in this massive book..."

What is the point of inviting the cross-burning Murray, other than to ghettoize Stanford's conservatives?

Glenn Loury: The Bell Curve-Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life: "The authors of _The Bell Curve _undertake to pronounce upon what is possible for human beings to do while failing to consider that which most makes us human...

...They begin by seeking the causes of behavior and end by reducing the human subject to a mechanism whose horizon is fixed by some combination of genetic endowment and social law. Yet we, even the "dullest" of us, are so much more than that.... Can we sensibly aspire to a more complete social integration than has yet been achieved of those who now languish at the bottom of American society? A political movement that answers "no" to this question must fail, and richly deserves to.

Herrnstein and Murray are not entirely direct on this point. They stress, plausibly enough, that we must be realistic in formulating policy, taking due account of the unequal distribution of intellectual aptitudes.... Implicit in their argument is the judgment that we shall have to get used to there being a substantial minority of our fellows who, because of their low intelligence, may fail to perform adequately in their roles as workers, parents, and citizens. I think this is quite wrong. Social science ultimately leads the authors astray on the political and moral fundamentals....

Some citizens simply lack the wits to manage their affairs so as to avoid criminal violence, be responsive to their children, and exercise the franchise, Herrnstein and Murray argue. If we want our "duller" citizens to obey our laws, we must change the laws (by, e.g., restoring simple rules and certain, severe punishments). Thus: "People of limited intelligence can lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of 'Thou shalt not steal.' They find it much harder to lead moral lives in a society that is run on the basis of 'Thou shalt not steal unless there is a really good reason to.'"...

Observing a correlation between a noisy measure of parenting skills, say, and some score on an ability test is a far cry from discovering an immutable law of nature.... I urge Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals to think long and hard before chanting this IQ mantra in public discourses....

The authors will surely get more grief than they deserve for having stated the facts of this matter���that on the average blacks lag significantly behind whites in cognitive functioning. That is not my objection. What I find problematic is their suggestion that we accommodate ourselves to the inevitability of the difference in mental performance among the races in America. This posture of resignation is an unacceptable response to today's tragic reality. We can be prudent and hard-headed about what government can and cannot accomplish through its various instruments of policy without abandoning hope of achieving racial reconciliation within our national community.

In reality, the record of black American economic and educational achievement in the post-civil-rights era has been ambiguous���great success mixed with shocking failure. Myriad explanations for the failure have been advanced, but the account that attributes it to the limited mental abilities of blacks is singular in its suggestion that we must learn to live with current racial disparities....

The question now on the floor, in the minds of blacks as well as whites, is whether blacks are capable of gaining equal status, given equality of opportunity. It is a peculiar mind that fails to fathom how poisonous a question this is for our democracy. Let me state my unequivocal belief that blacks are, indeed, so capable. Still, any assertion of equal black capacity is a hypothesis or an axiom, not a fact. The fact is that blacks have something to prove, to ourselves and to what W. E. B. Du Bois once characterized as "a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." This is not fair; it is not right; but it is the way things are.

Some conservatives are not above signaling, in more or less overt ways, their belief that blacks can never pass this test. Some radical black nationalists agree.... At bottom these parties share the belief that the magnitude of the challenge facing blacks is beyond what we can manage.

I insist, to the contrary, that we can and must meet this challenge. I find it spectacularly unhelpful to be told, "Success is unlikely given your average mental equipment, but never mind, because cognitive ability is not the only currency for measuring human worth." This is, in fact, precisely what Herrnstein and Murray say. I shudder at the prospect that this could be the animating vision of a governing conservative coalition in this country. But I take comfort in the certainty that, should conservatives be unwise enough to embrace it, the American people will be decent enough to reject it.

James Heckman: Cracked Bell: "IQ rises with age and with years of schooling completed...

...IQ may actually be a better measure of the environment facing children than the measure of environment used by Murray and Herrnstein. They use IQ to predict schooling, but schooling produces IQ. Hence, they are especially likely to find a strong measured effect of "IQ" on schooling.

The same remarks apply to their study of racial and ethnic differentials in socioeconomic outcomes. If racial differentials in environments affect ability and influence measured test scores, evidence that racial differentials weaken when ability is controlled for using regression methods does not rule out an important role for the environment in explaining performance in society. In the presence of measurement error in the environment, the authors' analysis will overstate the "true" effect of ability on those outcomes.

There are methods for addressing these problems, but Murray and Herrnstein do not use them. They should have tried a variety of measures of family background to explore the sensitivity of their reported results to the particular measures of family background they do use. A strict environmentalist could justifiably argue that the evidence reported by Murray and Herrnstein simply reveals the crudity of their measure of the environment and the strength of the correlation between the test score and their measure of environment.

One important technical point worth making here concerns the method used by the authors to measure standardized changes in IQ and family background.... By restricting the range of the environmental variable they understate the role of the environment in affecting outcomes relative to the role allocated to IQ.

Finally, the book fails due to a lack of coherence. The argument does not cumulate in a convincing way. Too many seams are visible. Its case against affirmative action and egalitarianism in education, and in favor of the use of testing in the workplace, does not require acceptance of a single ("g-loaded") scale of ability, or acceptance of the importance of heredity in producing socioeconomic inequality. The authors' evidence of growing stratification by cognitive ability in schools and workplaces does not require that they take a position on how the ability is produced. Yet the authors argue strenuously for their narrow view of ability and its heritability and thereby distract the reader's attention.

Nor do the two competing visions of the future of American society offered up in Part IV naturally flow from the arguments and evidence presented in the earlier parts of the book. The first dystopic vision relies on stronger sorting and heritability mechanisms than the authors have demonstrated actually operate in American society. Even if IQ is largely inherited, there is considerable scope for intergenerational economic mobility. The extreme pessimism of this scenario ignores the warnings issued by the authors that even among persons in the lowest ability grouping, there is still a lot of socially productive behavior. Their pessimistic vision relies on unsupported assumptions about the skill bias of future technological change and the inability of entrepreneurs���and social institutions���to efficiently utilize unskilled labor. This vision might be realized, but it reads more like a story borrowed from science fiction novels than a plausible extrapolation of existing social trends....

Had the authors been more cautious, they would have told the following defensible story: They have produced very convincing evidence that by the late teenage years, essential features of the skills and motivation of persons are determined. These features strongly influence individuals' performance in schools, in the market, and in other aspects of social life. The Armed Forces Qualifying Test seems to be a good measure of the skills affecting social performance. Using the components on which the test is based, rather than one composite score, would probably capture the diversity of abilities in the population even better.

The authors have no good way to separate genetic from social influences on social behavior. Their environmental data are too crude and the AFQT score they use is obtained too late in life to make a genetic-environmental distinction meaningful. The authors would require much finer measures of environmental variables than they have at their disposal to rule out the importance of family and society in determining individual outcomes.

Nonetheless, their evidence and the evidence assembled from many government skill-remediation programs for adults suggests that persons are not very malleable after their late teens or perhaps their early 20s. Successful interventions for such people are likely to be very costly. The literature suggests a particularly poor performance of educational remediation programs for adults of low cognitive ability as measured by AFQT and other cognitive tests....

As for social policy, we should recognize that heterogeneity in experiences and endowments produces a wide range of cognitive skills and motivations. For a variety of reasons, treating persons fairly as individuals may lead to heterogeneity in outcomes among demographic groups. Denying individual heterogeneity by treating persons as members of demographic categories will produce disparities in productivity among demographic groups, reduce economic efficiency, and foster a sense of injustice among all participants in society.

Thomas Sowell: Bell Curve: "The name-calling and mud-slinging with which so many critics of The Bell Curve have responded...

...especially among black intellectuals and "leaders," are only likely to provoke others to conclude that they protesteth too much, lending more credence to the conclusion that genetics determines intelligence. Such a conclusion goes beyond what Herrnstein and Murray say, and much beyond what the facts will support.... Critics have largely overlooked... disputable points....

The greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability.... When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s. So did canal boat children in Britain, and so did rural British children compared to their urban counterparts, at a time before Britain had any significant non-white population. So did Gaelic-speaking children as compared to English-speaking children in the Hebrides Islands. This is neither a racial nor an ethnic peculiarity. It is a characteristic found among low-scoring groups of European as well as African ancestry. In short, groups outside the cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race might be....

Perhaps the strongest evidence against a genetic basis for intergroup differences in IQ is that the average level of mental test performance has changed very significantly for whole populations over time and, moreover, particular ethnic groups within the population have changed their relative positions during a period when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of these groups....

The work of James R. Flynn... the authors seem not to acknowledge the devastating implications of that finding for the genetic theory of intergroup differences, or for their own reiteration of long-standing claims that the higher fertility of low-IQ groups implies a declining national IQ level.... Even before Professor Flynn's studies, mental test results from American soldiers tested in World War II showed that their performances on these tests were higher than the performances of American soldiers in World War I by the equivalent of about 12 IQ points. Perhaps the most dramatic changes were those in the mental test performances of Jews in the United States. The results of World War I mental tests conducted among American soldiers born in Russia���the great majority of whom were Jews���showed such low scores as to cause Carl Brigham, creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, to declare that these results "disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent." Within a decade, however, Jews in the United States were scoring above the national average on mental tests, and the data in The Bell Curve indicate that they are now far above the national average in IQ.

Strangely, Herrnstein and Murray refer to "folklore" that "Jews and other immigrant groups were thought to be below average in intelligence. " It was neither folklore nor anything as subjective as thoughts. It was based on hard data, as hard as any data in The Bell Curve. These groups repeatedly tested below average on the mental tests of the World War I era, both in the army and in civilian life. For Jews, it is clear that later tests showed radically different results--during an era when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of American Jews. My own research of twenty years ago showed that the IQs of both Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans also rose substantially over a period of decades....

The implications of such rising patterns of mental test performance is devastating to the central hypothesis... that the greater fertility of low-IQ groups would lower the national (and international) IQ over time. The logic of their argument seems so clear and compelling that the opposite empirical result should be considered a refutation of the assumptions behind that logic.... Herrnstein and Murray... seem not to see how crucially it undermines the case for a genetic explanation of interracial IQ differences. They say:

The national averages have in fact changed by amounts that are comparable to the fifteen or so IQ points separating blacks and whites in America. To put it another way, on the average, whites today differ from whites, say, two generations ago as much as whites today differ from blacks today. Given their size and speed, the shifts in time necessarily have been due more to changes in the environment than to changes in the genes....

The failure to draw the logical inference seems puzzling. Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial? Herrnstein and Murray do not address this question, but instead shift to a discussion of public policy:

Couldn't the mean of blacks move 15 points as well through environmental changes? There seems no reason why not���but also no reason to believe that white and Asian means can be made to stand still while the Flynn effect works its magic.

But the issue is not solely one of either predicting or controlling the future. It is a question of the validity of the conclusion that differences between genetically different groups are due to those genetic differences, whether in whole or in part. When any factor differs as much from Al to A2 as it does from A2 to B2, why should one conclude that this factor is due to the difference between A in general and B in general? That possibility is not precluded by the evidence, but neither does the evidence point in that direction.

A remarkable phenomenon commented on in the Moynihan report of thirty years ago goes unnoticed in The Bell Curv���the prevalence of females among blacks who score high on mental tests. Others who have done studies of high-IQ blacks have found several times as many females as males above the 120 IQ level. Since black males and black females have the same genetic inheritance, this substantial disparity must have some other roots, especially since it is not found in studies of high-IQ individuals in the general society, such as the famous Terman studies, which followed high-IQ children into adulthood and later life. If IQ differences of this magnitude can occur with no genetic difference at all, then it is more than mere speculation to say that some unusual environmental effects must be at work among blacks. However, these environmental effects need not be limited to blacks, for other low-IQ groups of European or other ancestries have likewise tended to have females over-represented among their higher scorers, even though the Terman studies of the general population found no such patterns.

One possibility is that females are more resistant to bad environmental conditions, as some other studies suggest. In any event, large sexual disparities in high-IQ individuals where there are no genetic or socioeconomic differences present a challenge....

Black males and black females are not the only groups to have significant IQ differences without any genetic differences. Identical twins with significantly different birthweights also have IQ differences, with the heavier twin averaging nearly 9 points higher IQ than the lighter one. This effect is not found where the lighter twin weighs at least six and a half pounds, suggesting that deprivation of nutrition must reach some threshold level before it has a permanent effect on the brain during its crucial early development.

Perhaps the most intellectually troubling aspect of The Bell Curve is the authors' uncritical approach to statistical correlations. One of the first things taught in introductory statistics is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten, and one of the most widely ignored facts in public policy research. The statistical term "multicollinearity," dealing with spurious correlations, appears only once in this massive book...

#orangehairedbaboons
#berkeley
#academicfreedom
#whiteethnicism
#neofascism

Niall Ferguson and the Avoidance of Personal Responsibility: Every Accusation a Confession Department: (Early) Monday Smackdown

As Mitt Romney said of Niall Ferguson and company, they are: "people who... are dependent... who believe that they are victims, who believe that... they are entitled.... I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives...":

Niall Ferguson descends far into self-parody with this self-smackdown. Jonathan Healey comments:

Jonathan Healey: "Worth pointing out that it also 'might have been avoided' if you'd thought to yourself 'Hang on, a professor with a massive profile trying to find kompromat on a student is a bit off, isn't it?':

Niall Ferguson: From all of this I draw two conclusions. First, it might have been avoided if conservatives at universities did not feel so beleaguered. There is a debate about whether free speech has been restricted on American campuses in recent years. I have no doubt it has. Middle-of-the-road students live in fear that a casual remark will be deemed "offensive" or "triggering" and that social media will be unleashed to shame them. Conservative students have to keep quiet or fight a culture war in which they are hopelessly outnumbered.

The other lesson I have learn[ is that Uncle Jan was right: I do need to grow up. Student politics is best left to students. So I am putting my tweed jacket back on and retreating to my beloved study. It is time to write another book.

#mondaysmackdown
#publicsphere
#orangehairedbaboons

Niall Ferguson: "Whatever you do don't agree to anything Mr. O. proposes and make sure you arrive with your own proposal...

...Be procedural. Don't even let the meeting begin without an agreement on procedure. And remember: the people who started this initiative should be the ones who lead the meetings. Below are the original committee members:

Statler-Throckmorton Ada

Chen Stefanie

Kinnie Kyle

Makridis Christos Andreas

Mitchell Anna

Tention-Palmer Justice

Veriah Jacques Ravi

Xenopoulos Antigone

They should all be allies against O. Whatever your past differences, bury them. Unite against the SJWs.

Makridis is especially good and will intimidate them as he is an Econ Ph.D.

N.

Niall Ferguson: "Agree 100%...

...A famous victory.

Now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Some opposition research on Mr. O. might also be worthwhile.

N.

Niall Ferguson: Ouch! A hard lesson on student politics learnt: "In those distant days of the 1980s academic historians came in different flavours...

...On the whole I found the Tory dons more fun.... Fast-forward more than 30 years and I find myself at Stanford. My don���s life has not been exactly as I imagined it, but near enough. Books? Fifteen at the last count. Scruffy jackets? A wardrobe-ful. A level of freedom unknown in any other profession? No question. But there is one huge difference that has crept up on me almost imperceptibly. Today scarcely any conservatives are to be found among academic historians. In American history departments, according to a 2016 study of 40 leading institutions, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 33.5 to one....

This helps explain why, shortly after taking up a post at Stanford���s Hoover Institution, I was approached by a succession of students. Some were self-professed conservatives, others registered Republicans, but most were libertarians, classical liberals or undecideds. Their common complaint was that the campus was dominated by progressives, and that it was hard even to get a conservative as an outside speaker. Their common goal was intellectual diversity.... I suggested setting up a visiting speaker series dedicated to free speech....

As the president and provost also wished to promote free speech at Stanford, we joined forces. Seeking a bipartisan basis for the initiative, we brought in a Democrat colleague, Mike McFaul, and involved all the student publications, left and right-leaning alike. We organised five such ���Cardinal Conversations���, ranging from technology and politics to populism and inequality. There was (as I had expected) opposition from the outset. In particular, our invitation of Charles Murray provoked outrage from the campus left.... The sheer scale of the discussion that Murray���s work has generated would seem to argue for its importance, regardless of whether one ends up agreeing with him.

The campus left took a different view. Eight student groups joined forces to write to the president, calling for Murray���s invitation to be rescinded. ���Murray���s work is not an academic undertaking,��� they wrote. ���It is a foundation for white supremacy.��� When the event nevertheless went ahead, they organised a noisy protest....

What I had not foreseen was that the protest leaders might attempt to take over the student steering committee we had established.... I had heard their charge that I was ���weaponising free speech���. I had satisfied myself that their antipathy to Murray was not based on any reading of his work. I had no objection to these groups��� views being heard, but began to fear they were seeking an effective veto over future events.... The groups represented by the ���coalition of concerned students��� seemed to constitute a rather small proportion of the overall student body. When I heard an emergency meeting had been called by their leader to change the structure of the committee, I decided to mobilise the college Republicans.

Now the emails we exchanged have been published, I stand condemned for my intemperate language. Fair enough. As soon as it became clear that these emails had been inadvertently forwarded to unintended recipients, I resigned from Cardinal Conversations. Re-reading my emails now, I am struck by their juvenile, jocular tone....

From all of this I draw two conclusions. First, it might have been avoided if conservatives at universities did not feel so beleaguered. There is a debate about whether free speech has been restricted on American campuses in recent years. I have no doubt it has. Middle-of-the-road students live in fear that a casual remark will be deemed ���offensive��� or ���triggering��� and that social media will be unleashed to shame them. Conservative students have to keep quiet or fight a culture war in which they are hopelessly outnumbered...

June 3, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Him Now: Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias: "Though unusually juvenile in its phrasing, the underlying sentiment is typical of what I've called the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics���the conservative conceit that willpower is the crucial variable in making our national security policy work..."

Felix Salmon Says Bear Stearns���Except for Its CEO���Was Smarter than Lehman Brothers: Felix Salmon: "During a credit crunch, when you're stuck with illiquid assets, you can't hedge them.... Just as short positions in CDO equity tranches turned out to be a really bad hedge for long positions in super-senior tranches, short positions in broad credit indices are not a great hedge for specific loans which have turned sour. Ironically, it was Bear Stearns who had at least some people, led by mortgage head Tom Marano, who understood this. They knew that the big risk to the firm was chaos in the financial markets, so they put on a 'chaos trade' which would make lots of money in such an event, and very broadly hedge the risks the bank faced. But CEO Alan Schwartz, in a fateful decision, reversed that trade..."

Hoisted from Archives: David Stockman and William Greider: Brett Ellingson asks for background on William Greider and David Stockman.... William Greider.... "Stockman's... greatest sin, however, was telling the truth, albeit belatedly...." But there was no truth-telling exercise.... Republican Vice President George H.W. Bush knew that Reagan's fiscal policies didn't add up: he and his people coined the phrase "voodoo economics." Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker knew that Reagan's plan made no sense: he called it a "riverboat gamble," meaning an imprudent and unwise throw of the dice...

Barack Obama: Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Final Primary Night: Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008: St. Paul, Minnesota: As Prepared for Delivery

New York Times Death Spiral Watch: David Brooks Edition: DAVID BROOKS: "Obama���s problem is he doesn���t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee���s salad bar... "C&Ler Mitzi.... "I called my Applebee���s today to make sure I was correct and they do not have a salad bar.... None of their restaurants have a salad bar. David, sometimes the jokes write themselves. What an idiot..."

Holly Brewer: Slavery, Sovereignty, and ���Inheritable Bl...

Holly Brewer: Slavery, Sovereignty, and ���Inheritable Blood���: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery: "I contextualize Locke���s ideas and actions with regard to slavery in the empire...

...to argue that we need to begin with different assumptions and questions. Those policies did not emerge from Locke, but instead from those he argued against: the Stuart kings. To understand the origins of slavery, we need to pay more attention to how various laws and policies enabled it across the empire, to who was behind those policies, to who profited the most from those policies via customs on imported staple crops, and to how those policies were initially rationalized. Slavery was created in legal pieces���pieces written, approved, and rationalized in hierarchical political contexts by Charles II and his brother James II. They had origins in older feudal law, with new innovations to make them more capitalist���but the larger rationale was in principles of absolutism and the divine rights of kings. There are powerful connections between monarchy, oligarchy, lordship, and slavery; all emphasize hereditary status. It took force to implement and get access and control enslaved labor and collect taxes; the power of empire was critical to each part of slavery���s development. When Locke had real power in the 1690s on the Board of Trade, he helped to reform Virginia laws and government, objecting especially to royal land grants that had rewarded those who bought ���negro servants���...

#shouldread

Twitter Is Crap at Aggregation Tools...

Jeet Heer: "You (smart person): Jeet, it's an unfair caricature that people who loudly complain about political correctness are hypocritical reactionaries who don't care for free speech but want to defend privilege. Me: Um: Niall Ferguson wanted opposition research on a student.Campus arguments over diversity and free speech are causing some distinguished academics to do extremely strange things...

Garance Franke-Ruta: "One of America's most famous male journalists of the 1970s did not report on domestic violence in the White House because, he says, he did not understand that the president hitting his wife was a criminal act..."

Nick Beaudrot: ";Well we have to have a quote from the opposition' is one of those rules that will suddenly reappear when Democrats have one party control..."

Molly Jong-Fast: "Truly spectacular that an administration so stocked with oil company shills could alienate oil companies! Another day of winning in Trumpworld..."

Nicholas Weaver: "Or who are people who do understand what is going on, and see that it is basically all fraud, scam, lies, and tulip-mania hype intent on speedrunning 500 years of economic failure with one or two additional disasters grafted on for good measure..."

Matthew Yglesias: "Some of the press has partially internalized the White House propaganda which holds that reporting on Trump is opposition politics so there���s little need to incorporate actual opposition party viewpoints���a challenging environment for Dems..."

Matthew Yglesias: "McCain���s final political act will be to maximize the GOP���s chances of ensuring a president he sometimes claims to deplore will face no accountability for his rampant corruption..."

Matthew Yglesias: "A reminder that Comey used to know what the rules were for commenting on a closed investigation with no charges..."