#5 elites are high IQ, but live in a bubble. If elites have IQ, they would know that the welfare system contributes to poverty. So either elites do not possess the IQ’s to see the impact of welfare on the poor, or understand they live in a bubble. Alternatively, perhaps elites really don’t care about the poor at all, but they are committed to virtue signaling.
Although I agree there is likely a great deal of virtue signaling and a dearth of actual concern with the poor amongst the elite, I do want to push back on your IQ point. High IQ doesn't mean you can access truth directly; you still have to get the evidence and interpret it. Caplan's point is that the high IQ live in a bubble that does not involve very many low IQ poor people, if any. They simply do not have direct access to the experience of spending time engaging with those sorts of people. The differences in modes of thought are quite surprising, in a "Why did you think that was possibly going to work out?" kind of way. People want to believe everyone is pretty much like themselves, because our understanding of others comes mainly from introspection. It takes a lot of direct experience to convince oneself otherwise, which is why travel tends to both broaden the mind and make you miss home so much.
Likewise, that's why bubbles are so persistent and IQ doesn't help much in understanding it. The world you experience is your world, and your world doesn't include all the stuff you don't experience. Without frequent forays and experience in parts of reality you did not realize existed it is difficult to recognize you are in a bubble, much less start to grasp what manner of things are outside it. Even more so if your bubble is the dominant cultural bubble of your society. At least us weirdos are reminded on a daily basis that there is are a lot of people very different from us :D
Agree. My point is that elites get information as well, they could easily read Murray or the myriad of works that have pointed out the bubble effect. Perhaps it is not IQ per se, but self awareness. I would think high IQ people would at least understand that there are blind spots for all of us, but perhaps personal ego blinds them. Thank you so much for an enlightening comment. I do appreciate it.
It is a strange lacuna in reasoning, I agree. I think part of it is the strength of the bubble, as well as the social stigma against admitting that IQ has anything to do with it. It seems to that everyone sort of agrees that the claim that IQ is the matter is just a lie, and there is no desire to check and see if that is true because it would mean being out of the group. With an absence of interaction of the very lower classes, there just isn't anything to puncture the bubble, and some incentive to ensure it doesn't get punctured.
I think you are right about the ego aspect as well. No one loves finding out their world view is very wrong, much less finding out that your preferred ways of ethically helping the poor (voting for welfare programs) is actually causing harm instead. I imagine most who encounter that information have a hard time really taking it to heart due to the horror of the realization. Horror at least if they actually care about the poor, which... well I question how many are really so caring when you get down to it, if they don't have equally amount of care in finding out if it actually works.
Sometimes it seems like a feminine vs masculine perspective. Social democrats seem to have (on average) a more feminine, empathic, approach to the poor that tends towards wishful thinking (although there is a bubble effect, too). An analogy would be the way fathers are stereotypically sterner with their kids (especially boys) but mothers are more indulgent, which incentivizes bad behavior.
I am not so sure about this. For a long time trade unions pushed this line, and the men who believed in unions trusted their seniors. This is the world I grew up in, and to deny basic decency to the impoverished seemed cruel. My parents did not attend university. We never saw poor people as the other, only people who had it worse. Race also rears its ugly head in American when it comes to welfare. No one, and this is so deeply held, NO ONE wants anyone to think that they are racist.
I am convinced that if the poor urban people had been white, we would have changed the system long ago. Tough love is too much for people when the charge of racism can be thrown about.
I'm a statistician by trade. If you know anything about statistics you know that:
1) Only a small % of the population is statistically capable of understanding statistics.
2) Only a small % of those people are capable of letting reason rather then emotion rationalize their understanding.
3) Only a small % of those people have the moral courage to accept #2.
4) Only a small % of #3 people will be convinced that its even a matter of morality, because what is the point of being moral when it can have no pragmatic effect but obvious negative personal effects.
Look, we can't alb Lee Kuan Yew. Even Charles Murray couldn't be Lee Kuan Yew (LKY was far more "mean" than Murray).
Let me give you an illustrative example. Charles supported the Iraq War (at first). He had some high fluting reasons that ultimately lie in his idea that all people have moral equivalence before God.
Steve Sailer published an article on the eve of war that basically says "they are low IQ cousin fuckers, there is no damn way this war will ever work out well."
Steve was right, and Charles knew enough about HBD to know he would be right. But he didn't have the personality to admit he was right. The facts weren't enough.
America needs Lee Kuan Yew. I always say the US should outsource our federal government to Singapore. They would fix us in a decade or less, and do it cheaper.
See Chapter 2 in Murray's "Real Education" (it's available in PDF online somewhere). Murray lays out in detail just what low IQ folks cannot do in terms of everyday tasks which higher IQ people cannot help but understand (their "reverse" Dunning-Kruger notwithstanding).
I recall Jordan Peterson talking once about that as well. Things like "folding a letter" are somewhat challenging. He similarly made the point that a dim college student is probably still IQ 100+. Someone in the high 80's to mid 90's is a whole other matter.
I have had employees in the past with IQs under 100. Some, with care and training, were taught to be very good employees at their specific jobs, although you didn't want to push them out of that.
Others were all but incapable of learning the simplest asks required of simple jobs. That is just heart-wrenching, simce most of them were kind and gentle people. They would just never be competent at any job. I had one, briefly, who simply seemed unable to master using a broom and/or a mop.
Linda Gottfredson, an educational psychology professor at University of Delaware, has done quite a bit of work analyzing the IQ requirements of various tasks, jobs, and professions. Definitely worth taking a look at her observations and keeping them in mind next time readers here (highly intelligent, highly educated, and of high social status) must interact with those less gifted and esteemed.
To your first paragraph, I recall visiting a coffee shop once that was run (intentionally) by handicapped folk. Mostly Down syndrome as I recall, but then I was just there once. Anyway, I was really struck with both how nice the shop was, much cleaner and tidier than the average Starbucks, and how proud and pleasant the workers were. They clearly were very good at their jobs, took them very seriously, and were wonderfully proud of both facts. It was quite uplifting, and made me wish that such focused vocational roles could be found for most lower IQ people. That sense of being useful both to yourself and others is so good for people.
My general eperience, although quite a few years old, is that there are many very reasonable lower IQ people who are willing to work hard at jobs they can handle when given the chance AND, most importantly, support.
If you're much above average IQ it is very easy to get frustrated at "slow learners" and not treat them as you would want to be treated. Take it slow. Treat them with love, reward their good efforts and gently try to fix their wrong efforts and you might be surprised at how they respond.
They want to be liked and accepted just as much as anyone, and we owe it to them to treat them as well as we would anyone else.
I think Murray believes that we have reached a stage at which the low IQ may not have any "comparative advantage". That is like horses their free market value may only be the glue factory even if they had the best intentions.
Murray proposes a system of subsidy (UBI, health insurance) in which we can pretend they contribute to society, though he understands this can only work if the contributor to recipient ratio remains balanced (immigration).
I don't believe Murray's outlook is anywhere near that dark. His UBI proposal, for example, is intended to replace what he sees as a disincentive-laden welfare system that serves to lessen social cohesion and sap individual agency, thus serving poorly those most in need of support.
Murray's UBI, in the best case scenario he lays out in 2006's "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State," would result in everyone receiving the same benefit (equality rather than "equity") which they could then use to pool resources with others to gain a foothold in the working world. Pipe dream? Perhaps, but it is certainly no "glue factory" scenario to address the issue.
Not enough of our elites now have had to spend any real leagth of time living with/near the lower economic classes. I grew up in rural poverty, where even the well-off didn't have a whole lot more than my family. I believe I understand the less intelligent, more impulsive, and less morally/future concerned than our elites.
But I taught in a Poli Sci department. of 30+ teaching colleagues over the years, perhaps 6 or so seemed to understand non-elites on any real level. They had plenty of stereotyped views about them though.
So, basically, I believe that too many policy-makers rely on their personal stereotypes rather than any fundamental knowledge of the people on whom they enforce their preferred policies. That goes a long way to explain the failures of homeless policy and crime policies for sure.
Robert D. Putnam (of "Bowling Alone" fame) explores this theme—the decline over time of class mixing in American social institutions—in his excellent 2015 "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis." The book relies on the same basic social science data and covers much the same ground found in Charles Murray's incisive 2012 "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960—2010." (Murray confined his datasets and discussion to whites to avoid the charges of racism he encountered with many of his previous and subsequent books.)
My time in Baltimore radically turned me against negroes. Before I had any significant interaction with them I was sympathetic. After I was very antagonistic.
The underclass is just very very very unsympathetic. When people think about sympathy for their lessors I think they mostly think of what C.S. Lewis called "the intellectuals of the proletariate (his term for RAF mechanics)". The kind of average to above average IQ white people that weren't effeminate white collar drones.
My experience in business, then in Academia in a college with a large portion of "underclass" students has been much different. I have watched (and helped, I hope) members of the underclass (white, Black, Hispanic) grow and blossom when given a real opportunity.
Many want to esacpe the culture they were raised in. And of course one of the complaints from those they left behind, who apparently are okay with a dysfunctional culture" is those who left have somehow damaged those who didn't leave. In practice many of my former students have striven diligently to help anyone from their previous culture to succed, either in the culture or out of it.
Unless yu have lived in very close proximity to an underclass culture you'll probably never understand it. I'm pretty sure I've lost some of my understanding, although I still have family and roots there and visit it from time to time.
I don't know how to change that cukture, but I do know there are individuals there who could be and should be ''rescued.'
Having found all three of these books helpful and worth reading, if a bit unsatisfying taken as a whole, this is a useful way of integrating Murray’s research and work.
What the right misses is any cognition of the importance of breaking the link between the IQ and education of low income parents and those of their children. That’s why they *always* vote down Head Start and universal pre-K which nearly every other rich country has. Caplan and Murray instead seem to prefer the solution of taking away the safety net, to use as a cattle prod, which they call “short term feedback”
Perhaps "the right" has taken the time and trouble, unlike you, to read the studies showing no positive long-term effects of Head Start. And the "gold standard" showing the wonders of "universal pre-K" (in a universe of a few states) failed, alas, to provide a control group in their study. When they were forced to do so, all the miraculous pre-K "benefits" went up in smoke. Luckily, for whom?, both Head Start and pre-K programs are going strong, the demand for actual, provable, scientifically valid evidence for their efficacy by "the right" notwithstanding.
The 2019 meta analysis of pre K math enrichment by Wang et al found moderate to large positive effects, concluding that the programs were “clearly effective”. Meta analyses are important because they show which direction the body of studies point, avoiding the problem of cherry picking a single study. Camilli (2010) and Shrager (2013) both found strong positive meta-analytic effects including randomized studies with control groups.
I could go on, but suffice to say your comment is beyond false and is starting to dip a toe into intellectually dishonest.
Meta-analyses of umpteen flawed studies produce only meta-garbage. Pre-K effects, both positive and negative, have repeatedly been shown to be short-lived, primarily related to socialization, and of value primarily in generating political support for taxpayer-funded daycare so that mothers can be integrated into the working (and taxpaying) world. https://www.mdrc.org/work/publications/building-better-evidence-pre-k-strengthening-assessments-childrens-skills
I note you elided entirely the data and conclusions of national studies of Head Start—they even repeated the exercise again and again before deep-sixing the results and trumpeting the wonderful improvements kids showed in, um, er, uh...
"The advantages children gained during their time in Head Start and up to age 4 yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.
Cognitive Outcomes. By the end of 1st grade, only a single cognitive impact was found for each cohort.
Social-Emotional Outcomes. By the end of 1st grade, there was some evidence that the Head Start group in the 3-year-old cohort had closer and more positive relationships with their parents than the control group. These impacts were preceded by other social-emotional impacts in the earlier years.
Health Outcomes. For the 4-year-old cohort, there was an impact on child health insurance coverage at the end of 1st grade.
Parenting Outcomes. For the 3-year-old cohort, there were favorable impacts on use of time-out and authoritarian parenting at the end of 1st grade. Specifically, those favorable impacts consisted of less use of time out and spanking. For the 4-year-old cohort, there were no significant parenting practices impacts in 1st grade."
It’s actually comical. You provided two links which are positive to overwhelmingly positive re: Head Start. You thought no one would read them! In particular, the first link said that Head Start gave kids a permanent boost in critical thinking and problem solving. I defy anyone to read the entirety of the two articles and conclude that they are negative with respect to Head Start.
Given the chance to rebut, you clearly failed, even with your cherry-picked links. But that’s how it always is with wingers: they live in a real bubble, not the one that they imagine the left lives in, and they think they can snowball everyone with their ideas founded on confirmation bias.
You give no evidence that these programs “break the link” between IQ and long-term outcomes. There is a big difference between narrowing the gap slightly and “breaking the link” (which you claimed was the goal in your first comment).
I think the studies do not say what you think they say.
Keep in mind that ANY "study" of educational program results undertaken on behalf of the educrats and funders behind the program is apt to put the most positive spin possible on what are, without fail, the depressingly dismal results attending liberal illusions about life.
Head Start is a glorified baby-sitting service. However, a study of one in Ann Arbor, MI pretty clearly showed an increase over time in dental health when the children brushed their teeth twice a day at Head Start. And apparently got many of their parents to start brushing with them at home.
“Breaking the link between the IQ and education of low income parents and those children” is impossible. You can lower the difference somewhat by giving low-income children better education than everyone else, but universal pre-K by definition undoes that. If you give the same education to everyone, those with higher IQ will come out ahead. The only way you can undo the difference is to punish the high IQ severely, which hurts all of society.
We need to be concerned about Upward Mobility, not Equality:
"Harrison Bergeron," a delightful short-story by Kurt Vonnegut and freely available online, is instructive in the practicalities attending equalizing human achievement if not (never) human potential.
You should read Human Diversity. He does not come off as "right wing", and has extensive sections on the literature and empirical results of attempts to intervene to help low income/IQ people do better. Bottom line is that these programs have short run benefits that taper out and have negligible benefits by adulthood. He is very non-ideological on these points. Murray himself advocates for UBI also, FWIW.
For my part, I think part of the problem is the tendency for people in charge (high IQ "elites") to keep credentializing everything, assuming everyone is on a college bound track, and generally making it harder for lower IQ people to get a foothold in jobs that they are perfectly capable of doing. Does everyone need to take pre-calc in high school for example? Maybe that time could be better spent doing something else. It's true that high IQ people can be better at most anything, but that's not a reason to prevent people from doing jobs they are capable of.
I think you have confused my argument - that we should do everything we can to break the vicious cycle of uneducated parents yielding uneducated children, as does every other advanced nation, with a different argument - that we should aim for equality of results. It may be easier for you to refute that straw man, but that’s not addressing my point. The educated and intelligent will always excel, but that does not mean that kids with uneducated parents are the lost cause that some think they are.
You also said in another post that I presented no evidence that these programs break the link between IQ and long-term outcomes. I did not claim to offer such proof. I instead claimed that these programs significantly reduce negative effects of growing up in a poor, uneducated household- most notably seem in long-term effects, and presented more than one meta analysis summarizing the results of dozens of studies including those with control groups. If you are claiming that you now understand my argument, have read not only the meta-analyses but also all the studies they examined, and came to the opposite conclusion as the expert authors, then you are an impressively-fast reader. But your opinion of the research you read so quickly is not a refutation of the authors’ conclusions unless and until you state specifically the points you on which you differ and why.
You were advocating for head start and universal pre-k, no? The data indicates that these programs have little to no lasting effects. IQ is the driver. Uneducated parents are generally low IQ and have low IQ kids who seem destined for low outcomes until someone comes up with some sort of new breakthrough intervention. It's a depressing outcome, but everything seems to indicate that, in general and at the population level, better or worse environments don't make much difference to outcomes.
Head Start is the most studied social program in history and it has been shown to have NO long term effect on educational achievement. In fact, no early education program has been shown to be effective. Supporting these is the definition of virtue signaling.
When confronted with detailed meta analysis that show something is clearly effective, it’s always good to simply say it “has been shown” to be ineffective and use all caps.
There is no surer sign of a midwit than someone who thinks a meta-analysis is the pinnacle of scientific research. A meta analysis, especially on a politically contentious topic, takes a bunch of studies, throws out the ones that hurt their desired conclusion, and run a statistical model that is set up to support their preferred conclusion.
Something similar happened in India soon after they accepted their Constitution. That Constitution basically set aside a certain amount of things (like spaces in universities) to classes/castes of those who had been poor for various reasons. Within a few years more and more groups were lobbying to have the bar raised just enough so that they could 'qualify' to recieve the goodies. As a class, the low income are not so stupid as to not understand many carrots and sticks.
UMC and above people really want to have pre-marital sex and do recreational drugs in something resembling moderation.
This doesn't destroy* their lives, but it does destroy the lives of the left half of the bell curve.
This is a fundamental problem for liberalism. Liberalism works for some but not for others, and those that it works for aren't willing to temper their urges for the sake of others.
*Such indulgences cause the privileged to perform below potential and especially to have very low TFR. The UMC solution to divorce was to get married in their 30s and have few children.
This is a very interesting integration of Charles Murray's theories on poverty. Unfortunately, I don't think Murray's counter-proposals are very compelling.
In my Substack column, I propose alternative policies to overcome the negative incentives built into our social programs for the poor and near-poor:
I encourage those interested in these matters to subscribe to Mr. Magoon's Substack. The material there is excellent: substantive, supported by evidence, and well-written. I'll also be buying his book when it comes out.
Having read all three books, I also noticed that Charles Murray gave three different, and apparently contradictory, explanations on the causes of poverty. This is a plausible integration of those theories. I would love to hear what Murray says about this.
Re: “higher social mobility”, I wonder if it is even possible to have a society with high social mobility for generation after generation. Maybe having high social mobility can only be temporary, while a society is transitioning from a stratified aristocratic setup to a more meritocratic setup based on IQ and conscientiousness. The “problem” is, IQ and conscientiousness are fairly heritable. So once a society has done an effective job sorting people in one generation, you would expect less mobility afterwards. Maybe the US, being the land of opportunity, went through this temporary stage earlier than the other countries you reference.
(Edit: This was supposed to be in response to Tareq’s comment.)
Well I think these traits are heritable but we are only talking 50-80% heritable vs other factors, suggesting the variability between “elites” may be as high as non-elites and society is leaving a lot on the table by not betting on social mobility. The problem then is elites looking to avoid downward mobility for their offspring. But this is pure thesis, no data 🤫.
You might find Richard Herrnstein's 1971 prediction relevant (from the article "I.Q." in The Atlantic Monthly):
"Greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness, and educational opportunity are NOT going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage. It will instead give us a society sharply graduated, with ever greater innate separation between the top and the bottom, and ever more uniformity within families as far as inherited abilities are concerned. Naturally, we find this vista appalling, for we have been raised to think of social equality as our goal. The vista reminds us of the world we had hoped to leave behind - aristocracies, privileged classes, unfair advantages and disadvantages of birth. ... By removing arbitrary barriers between classes, society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers. When people can freely take their natural level in society, the upper classes will, virtually by definition, have greater capacity than the lower." (emphasis in the original)
Thanks for sharing the analysis and including Charles Murray's perspectives. While his views are influential, I find it important to question some of his claims, especially regarding the U.S. welfare state.
The idea of the U.S. having a "generous" welfare state seems quite exaggerated to me. Compared to Europe, U.S. welfare programs are often means-tested with strict eligibility and low benefit levels. Programs like TANF have significant work requirements and time limits, unlike the more comprehensive systems in countries like Sweden or Germany.
Murray's critique focuses on the U.S., but I find it interesting that places with more generous welfare states often have higher social mobility. This suggests there are forces at work beyond what his analysis considers. It seems to me that economic inequality, education, labor markets, and structural factors play a significant role in shaping socioeconomic outcomes.
In the UK, the notion of an "idle class" cheating benefits is often overstated by the press. Research shows that benefit fraud rates are low, and most recipients genuinely need the support.
Personally, I find libertarianism an attractive philosophy, but in practice, it often permits the continuation of the status quo rather than enacting real change. While Murray's work provides one viewpoint, it's important to consider the context in which older texts were written. They reflect the ideas of elites at that time, and those populations have certainly changed since.
Political life can sometimes be a pendulum, swinging back and forth. It seems to me that Murray's writings were part of a reaction to a particular time. I wonder if his findings are actually timeless or more reflective of the specific context in which they were produced.
Charles Murray is a public intellectual, not just a sheltered author of social scientific studies over the last 40 years. As such, he frequently gives talks, interviews, and participates in panel discussions on a range of topics including retrospectives on his earlier published works. I encourage you to seek out some of these events (most are video recorded and available on YouTube or through AEI). Listen especially to Murray being interviewed by Sam Harris (setting off an amusing spat with Ezra Klein of Vox) and watch the multiple one-on-one sessions with Glenn Loury.
Murray also publishes short articles, mostly through AEI, updating his prior work in the face of new and relevant information, studies, and social trends. To my knowledge, Murray has not had to retract a single word of his voluminous and meticulously researched body of work over what has certainly been a period of massive social change in the USA.
"If elites understood the world outside their Bubble a little better, they would have foreseen – and largely avoided – the welfare state’s negative effects on work and family."
They understand the world outside their bubble quite well; & they know that the system works mostly to their advantage with extreme wealth inequality, so it's cheaper for them to buy social peace with a modest welfare state than risk a revolution.
#5 elites are high IQ, but live in a bubble. If elites have IQ, they would know that the welfare system contributes to poverty. So either elites do not possess the IQ’s to see the impact of welfare on the poor, or understand they live in a bubble. Alternatively, perhaps elites really don’t care about the poor at all, but they are committed to virtue signaling.
Although I agree there is likely a great deal of virtue signaling and a dearth of actual concern with the poor amongst the elite, I do want to push back on your IQ point. High IQ doesn't mean you can access truth directly; you still have to get the evidence and interpret it. Caplan's point is that the high IQ live in a bubble that does not involve very many low IQ poor people, if any. They simply do not have direct access to the experience of spending time engaging with those sorts of people. The differences in modes of thought are quite surprising, in a "Why did you think that was possibly going to work out?" kind of way. People want to believe everyone is pretty much like themselves, because our understanding of others comes mainly from introspection. It takes a lot of direct experience to convince oneself otherwise, which is why travel tends to both broaden the mind and make you miss home so much.
Likewise, that's why bubbles are so persistent and IQ doesn't help much in understanding it. The world you experience is your world, and your world doesn't include all the stuff you don't experience. Without frequent forays and experience in parts of reality you did not realize existed it is difficult to recognize you are in a bubble, much less start to grasp what manner of things are outside it. Even more so if your bubble is the dominant cultural bubble of your society. At least us weirdos are reminded on a daily basis that there is are a lot of people very different from us :D
Agree. My point is that elites get information as well, they could easily read Murray or the myriad of works that have pointed out the bubble effect. Perhaps it is not IQ per se, but self awareness. I would think high IQ people would at least understand that there are blind spots for all of us, but perhaps personal ego blinds them. Thank you so much for an enlightening comment. I do appreciate it.
It is a strange lacuna in reasoning, I agree. I think part of it is the strength of the bubble, as well as the social stigma against admitting that IQ has anything to do with it. It seems to that everyone sort of agrees that the claim that IQ is the matter is just a lie, and there is no desire to check and see if that is true because it would mean being out of the group. With an absence of interaction of the very lower classes, there just isn't anything to puncture the bubble, and some incentive to ensure it doesn't get punctured.
I think you are right about the ego aspect as well. No one loves finding out their world view is very wrong, much less finding out that your preferred ways of ethically helping the poor (voting for welfare programs) is actually causing harm instead. I imagine most who encounter that information have a hard time really taking it to heart due to the horror of the realization. Horror at least if they actually care about the poor, which... well I question how many are really so caring when you get down to it, if they don't have equally amount of care in finding out if it actually works.
Sometimes it seems like a feminine vs masculine perspective. Social democrats seem to have (on average) a more feminine, empathic, approach to the poor that tends towards wishful thinking (although there is a bubble effect, too). An analogy would be the way fathers are stereotypically sterner with their kids (especially boys) but mothers are more indulgent, which incentivizes bad behavior.
I am not so sure about this. For a long time trade unions pushed this line, and the men who believed in unions trusted their seniors. This is the world I grew up in, and to deny basic decency to the impoverished seemed cruel. My parents did not attend university. We never saw poor people as the other, only people who had it worse. Race also rears its ugly head in American when it comes to welfare. No one, and this is so deeply held, NO ONE wants anyone to think that they are racist.
I am convinced that if the poor urban people had been white, we would have changed the system long ago. Tough love is too much for people when the charge of racism can be thrown about.
Great point. I agree. Thank you.
I'm a statistician by trade. If you know anything about statistics you know that:
1) Only a small % of the population is statistically capable of understanding statistics.
2) Only a small % of those people are capable of letting reason rather then emotion rationalize their understanding.
3) Only a small % of those people have the moral courage to accept #2.
4) Only a small % of #3 people will be convinced that its even a matter of morality, because what is the point of being moral when it can have no pragmatic effect but obvious negative personal effects.
Look, we can't alb Lee Kuan Yew. Even Charles Murray couldn't be Lee Kuan Yew (LKY was far more "mean" than Murray).
Let me give you an illustrative example. Charles supported the Iraq War (at first). He had some high fluting reasons that ultimately lie in his idea that all people have moral equivalence before God.
Steve Sailer published an article on the eve of war that basically says "they are low IQ cousin fuckers, there is no damn way this war will ever work out well."
Steve was right, and Charles knew enough about HBD to know he would be right. But he didn't have the personality to admit he was right. The facts weren't enough.
America needs Lee Kuan Yew. I always say the US should outsource our federal government to Singapore. They would fix us in a decade or less, and do it cheaper.
See Chapter 2 in Murray's "Real Education" (it's available in PDF online somewhere). Murray lays out in detail just what low IQ folks cannot do in terms of everyday tasks which higher IQ people cannot help but understand (their "reverse" Dunning-Kruger notwithstanding).
I recall Jordan Peterson talking once about that as well. Things like "folding a letter" are somewhat challenging. He similarly made the point that a dim college student is probably still IQ 100+. Someone in the high 80's to mid 90's is a whole other matter.
I have had employees in the past with IQs under 100. Some, with care and training, were taught to be very good employees at their specific jobs, although you didn't want to push them out of that.
Others were all but incapable of learning the simplest asks required of simple jobs. That is just heart-wrenching, simce most of them were kind and gentle people. They would just never be competent at any job. I had one, briefly, who simply seemed unable to master using a broom and/or a mop.
Linda Gottfredson, an educational psychology professor at University of Delaware, has done quite a bit of work analyzing the IQ requirements of various tasks, jobs, and professions. Definitely worth taking a look at her observations and keeping them in mind next time readers here (highly intelligent, highly educated, and of high social status) must interact with those less gifted and esteemed.
To your first paragraph, I recall visiting a coffee shop once that was run (intentionally) by handicapped folk. Mostly Down syndrome as I recall, but then I was just there once. Anyway, I was really struck with both how nice the shop was, much cleaner and tidier than the average Starbucks, and how proud and pleasant the workers were. They clearly were very good at their jobs, took them very seriously, and were wonderfully proud of both facts. It was quite uplifting, and made me wish that such focused vocational roles could be found for most lower IQ people. That sense of being useful both to yourself and others is so good for people.
My general eperience, although quite a few years old, is that there are many very reasonable lower IQ people who are willing to work hard at jobs they can handle when given the chance AND, most importantly, support.
If you're much above average IQ it is very easy to get frustrated at "slow learners" and not treat them as you would want to be treated. Take it slow. Treat them with love, reward their good efforts and gently try to fix their wrong efforts and you might be surprised at how they respond.
They want to be liked and accepted just as much as anyone, and we owe it to them to treat them as well as we would anyone else.
115, 107, 100, 90, 85, 75. Numbers are a bitch...
I think Murray believes that we have reached a stage at which the low IQ may not have any "comparative advantage". That is like horses their free market value may only be the glue factory even if they had the best intentions.
Murray proposes a system of subsidy (UBI, health insurance) in which we can pretend they contribute to society, though he understands this can only work if the contributor to recipient ratio remains balanced (immigration).
I don't believe Murray's outlook is anywhere near that dark. His UBI proposal, for example, is intended to replace what he sees as a disincentive-laden welfare system that serves to lessen social cohesion and sap individual agency, thus serving poorly those most in need of support.
Murray's UBI, in the best case scenario he lays out in 2006's "In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State," would result in everyone receiving the same benefit (equality rather than "equity") which they could then use to pool resources with others to gain a foothold in the working world. Pipe dream? Perhaps, but it is certainly no "glue factory" scenario to address the issue.
Not enough of our elites now have had to spend any real leagth of time living with/near the lower economic classes. I grew up in rural poverty, where even the well-off didn't have a whole lot more than my family. I believe I understand the less intelligent, more impulsive, and less morally/future concerned than our elites.
But I taught in a Poli Sci department. of 30+ teaching colleagues over the years, perhaps 6 or so seemed to understand non-elites on any real level. They had plenty of stereotyped views about them though.
So, basically, I believe that too many policy-makers rely on their personal stereotypes rather than any fundamental knowledge of the people on whom they enforce their preferred policies. That goes a long way to explain the failures of homeless policy and crime policies for sure.
Robert D. Putnam (of "Bowling Alone" fame) explores this theme—the decline over time of class mixing in American social institutions—in his excellent 2015 "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis." The book relies on the same basic social science data and covers much the same ground found in Charles Murray's incisive 2012 "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960—2010." (Murray confined his datasets and discussion to whites to avoid the charges of racism he encountered with many of his previous and subsequent books.)
My time in Baltimore radically turned me against negroes. Before I had any significant interaction with them I was sympathetic. After I was very antagonistic.
The underclass is just very very very unsympathetic. When people think about sympathy for their lessors I think they mostly think of what C.S. Lewis called "the intellectuals of the proletariate (his term for RAF mechanics)". The kind of average to above average IQ white people that weren't effeminate white collar drones.
My experience in business, then in Academia in a college with a large portion of "underclass" students has been much different. I have watched (and helped, I hope) members of the underclass (white, Black, Hispanic) grow and blossom when given a real opportunity.
Many want to esacpe the culture they were raised in. And of course one of the complaints from those they left behind, who apparently are okay with a dysfunctional culture" is those who left have somehow damaged those who didn't leave. In practice many of my former students have striven diligently to help anyone from their previous culture to succed, either in the culture or out of it.
Unless yu have lived in very close proximity to an underclass culture you'll probably never understand it. I'm pretty sure I've lost some of my understanding, although I still have family and roots there and visit it from time to time.
I don't know how to change that cukture, but I do know there are individuals there who could be and should be ''rescued.'
Having found all three of these books helpful and worth reading, if a bit unsatisfying taken as a whole, this is a useful way of integrating Murray’s research and work.
What do you suppose would've given you the satisfaction Murray failed to provide?
What the right misses is any cognition of the importance of breaking the link between the IQ and education of low income parents and those of their children. That’s why they *always* vote down Head Start and universal pre-K which nearly every other rich country has. Caplan and Murray instead seem to prefer the solution of taking away the safety net, to use as a cattle prod, which they call “short term feedback”
Perhaps "the right" has taken the time and trouble, unlike you, to read the studies showing no positive long-term effects of Head Start. And the "gold standard" showing the wonders of "universal pre-K" (in a universe of a few states) failed, alas, to provide a control group in their study. When they were forced to do so, all the miraculous pre-K "benefits" went up in smoke. Luckily, for whom?, both Head Start and pre-K programs are going strong, the demand for actual, provable, scientifically valid evidence for their efficacy by "the right" notwithstanding.
The 2019 meta analysis of pre K math enrichment by Wang et al found moderate to large positive effects, concluding that the programs were “clearly effective”. Meta analyses are important because they show which direction the body of studies point, avoiding the problem of cherry picking a single study. Camilli (2010) and Shrager (2013) both found strong positive meta-analytic effects including randomized studies with control groups.
I could go on, but suffice to say your comment is beyond false and is starting to dip a toe into intellectually dishonest.
Meta-analyses of umpteen flawed studies produce only meta-garbage. Pre-K effects, both positive and negative, have repeatedly been shown to be short-lived, primarily related to socialization, and of value primarily in generating political support for taxpayer-funded daycare so that mothers can be integrated into the working (and taxpaying) world. https://www.mdrc.org/work/publications/building-better-evidence-pre-k-strengthening-assessments-childrens-skills
I note you elided entirely the data and conclusions of national studies of Head Start—they even repeated the exercise again and again before deep-sixing the results and trumpeting the wonderful improvements kids showed in, um, er, uh...
Key Findings from Head Start Report (started 2010, published 2018...government work): https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/report/head-start-impact-study-final-report-executive-summary
"The advantages children gained during their time in Head Start and up to age 4 yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.
Cognitive Outcomes. By the end of 1st grade, only a single cognitive impact was found for each cohort.
Social-Emotional Outcomes. By the end of 1st grade, there was some evidence that the Head Start group in the 3-year-old cohort had closer and more positive relationships with their parents than the control group. These impacts were preceded by other social-emotional impacts in the earlier years.
Health Outcomes. For the 4-year-old cohort, there was an impact on child health insurance coverage at the end of 1st grade.
Parenting Outcomes. For the 3-year-old cohort, there were favorable impacts on use of time-out and authoritarian parenting at the end of 1st grade. Specifically, those favorable impacts consisted of less use of time out and spanking. For the 4-year-old cohort, there were no significant parenting practices impacts in 1st grade."
It’s actually comical. You provided two links which are positive to overwhelmingly positive re: Head Start. You thought no one would read them! In particular, the first link said that Head Start gave kids a permanent boost in critical thinking and problem solving. I defy anyone to read the entirety of the two articles and conclude that they are negative with respect to Head Start.
Given the chance to rebut, you clearly failed, even with your cherry-picked links. But that’s how it always is with wingers: they live in a real bubble, not the one that they imagine the left lives in, and they think they can snowball everyone with their ideas founded on confirmation bias.
You give no evidence that these programs “break the link” between IQ and long-term outcomes. There is a big difference between narrowing the gap slightly and “breaking the link” (which you claimed was the goal in your first comment).
I think the studies do not say what you think they say.
Keep in mind that ANY "study" of educational program results undertaken on behalf of the educrats and funders behind the program is apt to put the most positive spin possible on what are, without fail, the depressingly dismal results attending liberal illusions about life.
Head Start is a glorified baby-sitting service. However, a study of one in Ann Arbor, MI pretty clearly showed an increase over time in dental health when the children brushed their teeth twice a day at Head Start. And apparently got many of their parents to start brushing with them at home.
“Breaking the link between the IQ and education of low income parents and those children” is impossible. You can lower the difference somewhat by giving low-income children better education than everyone else, but universal pre-K by definition undoes that. If you give the same education to everyone, those with higher IQ will come out ahead. The only way you can undo the difference is to punish the high IQ severely, which hurts all of society.
We need to be concerned about Upward Mobility, not Equality:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-progress-and-upward-mobility
"Harrison Bergeron," a delightful short-story by Kurt Vonnegut and freely available online, is instructive in the practicalities attending equalizing human achievement if not (never) human potential.
You should read Human Diversity. He does not come off as "right wing", and has extensive sections on the literature and empirical results of attempts to intervene to help low income/IQ people do better. Bottom line is that these programs have short run benefits that taper out and have negligible benefits by adulthood. He is very non-ideological on these points. Murray himself advocates for UBI also, FWIW.
For my part, I think part of the problem is the tendency for people in charge (high IQ "elites") to keep credentializing everything, assuming everyone is on a college bound track, and generally making it harder for lower IQ people to get a foothold in jobs that they are perfectly capable of doing. Does everyone need to take pre-calc in high school for example? Maybe that time could be better spent doing something else. It's true that high IQ people can be better at most anything, but that's not a reason to prevent people from doing jobs they are capable of.
I think you have confused my argument - that we should do everything we can to break the vicious cycle of uneducated parents yielding uneducated children, as does every other advanced nation, with a different argument - that we should aim for equality of results. It may be easier for you to refute that straw man, but that’s not addressing my point. The educated and intelligent will always excel, but that does not mean that kids with uneducated parents are the lost cause that some think they are.
You also said in another post that I presented no evidence that these programs break the link between IQ and long-term outcomes. I did not claim to offer such proof. I instead claimed that these programs significantly reduce negative effects of growing up in a poor, uneducated household- most notably seem in long-term effects, and presented more than one meta analysis summarizing the results of dozens of studies including those with control groups. If you are claiming that you now understand my argument, have read not only the meta-analyses but also all the studies they examined, and came to the opposite conclusion as the expert authors, then you are an impressively-fast reader. But your opinion of the research you read so quickly is not a refutation of the authors’ conclusions unless and until you state specifically the points you on which you differ and why.
You were advocating for head start and universal pre-k, no? The data indicates that these programs have little to no lasting effects. IQ is the driver. Uneducated parents are generally low IQ and have low IQ kids who seem destined for low outcomes until someone comes up with some sort of new breakthrough intervention. It's a depressing outcome, but everything seems to indicate that, in general and at the population level, better or worse environments don't make much difference to outcomes.
Head Start is the most studied social program in history and it has been shown to have NO long term effect on educational achievement. In fact, no early education program has been shown to be effective. Supporting these is the definition of virtue signaling.
When confronted with detailed meta analysis that show something is clearly effective, it’s always good to simply say it “has been shown” to be ineffective and use all caps.
There is no surer sign of a midwit than someone who thinks a meta-analysis is the pinnacle of scientific research. A meta analysis, especially on a politically contentious topic, takes a bunch of studies, throws out the ones that hurt their desired conclusion, and run a statistical model that is set up to support their preferred conclusion.
Show me the data…
I don't quite get something: "We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead."
But, every measure I ever see says that we have fewer poor as a percentage of population now than ever before. How does that follow?
Because 2020-21 proved that what reduces poverty is not complex government programs, but "straight cash, homie." - Randy's Moss
The poverty rate in the US has been relatively flat since the great society.
Something similar happened in India soon after they accepted their Constitution. That Constitution basically set aside a certain amount of things (like spaces in universities) to classes/castes of those who had been poor for various reasons. Within a few years more and more groups were lobbying to have the bar raised just enough so that they could 'qualify' to recieve the goodies. As a class, the low income are not so stupid as to not understand many carrots and sticks.
Spot on.
UMC and above people really want to have pre-marital sex and do recreational drugs in something resembling moderation.
This doesn't destroy* their lives, but it does destroy the lives of the left half of the bell curve.
This is a fundamental problem for liberalism. Liberalism works for some but not for others, and those that it works for aren't willing to temper their urges for the sake of others.
*Such indulgences cause the privileged to perform below potential and especially to have very low TFR. The UMC solution to divorce was to get married in their 30s and have few children.
This is a very interesting integration of Charles Murray's theories on poverty. Unfortunately, I don't think Murray's counter-proposals are very compelling.
In my Substack column, I propose alternative policies to overcome the negative incentives built into our social programs for the poor and near-poor:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-working-family-tax
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-case-for-upward-bound-accounts
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/we-should-phase-out-most-means-tested
I encourage those interested in these matters to subscribe to Mr. Magoon's Substack. The material there is excellent: substantive, supported by evidence, and well-written. I'll also be buying his book when it comes out.
Having read all three books, I also noticed that Charles Murray gave three different, and apparently contradictory, explanations on the causes of poverty. This is a plausible integration of those theories. I would love to hear what Murray says about this.
Re: “higher social mobility”, I wonder if it is even possible to have a society with high social mobility for generation after generation. Maybe having high social mobility can only be temporary, while a society is transitioning from a stratified aristocratic setup to a more meritocratic setup based on IQ and conscientiousness. The “problem” is, IQ and conscientiousness are fairly heritable. So once a society has done an effective job sorting people in one generation, you would expect less mobility afterwards. Maybe the US, being the land of opportunity, went through this temporary stage earlier than the other countries you reference.
(Edit: This was supposed to be in response to Tareq’s comment.)
Well I think these traits are heritable but we are only talking 50-80% heritable vs other factors, suggesting the variability between “elites” may be as high as non-elites and society is leaving a lot on the table by not betting on social mobility. The problem then is elites looking to avoid downward mobility for their offspring. But this is pure thesis, no data 🤫.
You might be interested in my article on this subject:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/social-mobility-vs-upward-mobility
You might find Richard Herrnstein's 1971 prediction relevant (from the article "I.Q." in The Atlantic Monthly):
"Greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness, and educational opportunity are NOT going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage. It will instead give us a society sharply graduated, with ever greater innate separation between the top and the bottom, and ever more uniformity within families as far as inherited abilities are concerned. Naturally, we find this vista appalling, for we have been raised to think of social equality as our goal. The vista reminds us of the world we had hoped to leave behind - aristocracies, privileged classes, unfair advantages and disadvantages of birth. ... By removing arbitrary barriers between classes, society has encouraged the creation of biological barriers. When people can freely take their natural level in society, the upper classes will, virtually by definition, have greater capacity than the lower." (emphasis in the original)
Thanks for sharing the analysis and including Charles Murray's perspectives. While his views are influential, I find it important to question some of his claims, especially regarding the U.S. welfare state.
The idea of the U.S. having a "generous" welfare state seems quite exaggerated to me. Compared to Europe, U.S. welfare programs are often means-tested with strict eligibility and low benefit levels. Programs like TANF have significant work requirements and time limits, unlike the more comprehensive systems in countries like Sweden or Germany.
Murray's critique focuses on the U.S., but I find it interesting that places with more generous welfare states often have higher social mobility. This suggests there are forces at work beyond what his analysis considers. It seems to me that economic inequality, education, labor markets, and structural factors play a significant role in shaping socioeconomic outcomes.
In the UK, the notion of an "idle class" cheating benefits is often overstated by the press. Research shows that benefit fraud rates are low, and most recipients genuinely need the support.
Personally, I find libertarianism an attractive philosophy, but in practice, it often permits the continuation of the status quo rather than enacting real change. While Murray's work provides one viewpoint, it's important to consider the context in which older texts were written. They reflect the ideas of elites at that time, and those populations have certainly changed since.
Political life can sometimes be a pendulum, swinging back and forth. It seems to me that Murray's writings were part of a reaction to a particular time. I wonder if his findings are actually timeless or more reflective of the specific context in which they were produced.
Thanks again for the stimulating discussion.
Charles Murray is a public intellectual, not just a sheltered author of social scientific studies over the last 40 years. As such, he frequently gives talks, interviews, and participates in panel discussions on a range of topics including retrospectives on his earlier published works. I encourage you to seek out some of these events (most are video recorded and available on YouTube or through AEI). Listen especially to Murray being interviewed by Sam Harris (setting off an amusing spat with Ezra Klein of Vox) and watch the multiple one-on-one sessions with Glenn Loury.
Murray also publishes short articles, mostly through AEI, updating his prior work in the face of new and relevant information, studies, and social trends. To my knowledge, Murray has not had to retract a single word of his voluminous and meticulously researched body of work over what has certainly been a period of massive social change in the USA.
"If elites understood the world outside their Bubble a little better, they would have foreseen – and largely avoided – the welfare state’s negative effects on work and family."
They understand the world outside their bubble quite well; & they know that the system works mostly to their advantage with extreme wealth inequality, so it's cheaper for them to buy social peace with a modest welfare state than risk a revolution.
Speaking of the welfare state... Who else is being unproductively subsidized by it? University profs like you, Bryan.
As you explain in the Case Against Education, universities teach pupils nothing useful and partake in the corruption of the tax payer money.
So resign now, Bryan. You are a phony hypocrite for not doing so.
Jeez, a lot of sanctimonious douchebag commentary here
Two Tweets on point:
https://x.com/tr00perr/status/1791807218263699630?s=46&t=U7laPY1hHEa798qtlcpDpA
Not a fan of Alex Jones but:
https://x.com/alexjonesmw3/status/1790938565402071381?s=46&t=U7laPY1hHEa798qtlcpDpA
Lol. Citing Alex Jones is certainly an interesting strategy
I cite strong empirical evidence. You cite yourself.