American Jewish gentile differences

Stereotypes confirmed

Jews are an extraordinarily successful ethnic group in almost everything they choose to engage in, from physics to politics with the curious exception of US presidencies. Seb Jensen compiled a variety of overviews like this one:

Given this stark over-representation, there is of course the question of why they are so successful. The mainstream explanation is vague hand-waving about Talmudic traditions or cultures of learning. The HBD blogger position is that it is mainly due to higher than average intelligence. There are some small meta-analyses of Jewish IQ, which look like this:

You can find more studies. The ones with very high means are usually small select samples from NYC. The general problem with the estimates from the studies above is that the identification of Jews is usually by self-report of religious stance. Since the secular Jews are the smartest, the use of the religion=Judaism proxy for identification leads to an underestimate. Similarly, modern self-described Jews are admixed with mainly Europeans (and increasingly East Asians), which results in half and quarter Jews with somewhat lower mean IQs on average (racial assortative mating for intelligence does not completely eliminate this outbreeding effect). Using the large Project Talent data and Jensen’s method, one can estimate that a perfectly g-loaded test would get about 110 IQ.

But maybe this amount of intelligence isn’t enough, so we need something more to explain. You are no doubt familiar with the various anti-Jewish takes which center on ethnocentrism, parasitism and so on. These kinds of accounts also usually claim the IQ advantage is not real (normal academics also sometimes deny the intelligence advantage). Their main mistake is not understanding Israel’s demographic composition and thinking that Israel’s national intelligence average of 92-94 IQ is inconsistent with high Ashkenazi intelligence. These points are all dealt with in Seb’s post. Nevertheless, even a 10 IQ advantage may not be enough to explain the over-representation. Seb tried estimating some models, and I’ve previously suggested that mental instability explains some other part of their creative output. It’s not clear we need something more to explain Jewish achievement with, but I decided to look in the OKCupid data to see what differences exist between non-Jewish Whites and Jews. In my dog and cat people study, I had made a variety of scales out of the questions on OKCupid, so we can reuse them here for quick results: