Major sources of US immigration, such as India and China, are missing from the US census table and the resulting regression. Nearly all of Asia is missing, actually. Seems like enough to possibly effect the results.
I would think that a large share of Latvian Americans may be Jewish. There were about 200,000 Jews in Latvia in 1914, and almost all of them either emigrated or died in the Holocaust. There are 80,000 or so Latvian Americans today.
While I do not have enough expertise on the last 3 points to adequately respond to them, I know enough to critique the first one. I read Sowell’s study that researched West Indians in comparison to African Americans. The data was from 1969 of the public census, he wrote this in the 70s (he is very old). He found that nationally (I rounded) the median household income for African Americans was 5900, West Indians were 9000 and the national average was 9500.
He then isolated them to the same geographic area (nyc metro area) and found African Americans had 6900 and West Indians had 8800, he held about everything constant such as education, age, children etc, all of which were quite comparable. Most West Indians at the time were concentrated (over 50%) in nyc alone and therefore it would be a good geographic place to compare. 8800 median income was comparable to other groups that are located in the nyc metro area such as Italian Americans who also had an income of 8800 nationally.
Sowell wanted to test whether West Indians made more than African Americans because they were favored more as hard working and as immigrants with better education, so he isolated the census to second generation West Indians who would seem imperceptible as anything other than a black, assimilated New Yorker most of whom with the exception of the newly arrived black southerners spoke in a New York dialect. The second generation West Indies with only 1 year more of schooling had a median income of 10900, surpassing African Americans, their parents, the national average and the average of the northeast (10700), which is why Friedman said in one generation they caught up to the rest of the nation, in truth they surpassed even the average of the richest region of the USA. They surpassed whites and other ethnic groups with which they were similar and sowell maintains neither genetics nor discrimination could explain that since they are darker skinned and have more African genes.
But the author does bring up a good point, why doesn’t it seem like this pattern holds today? Things changed dramatically since then. 1. West Indians after 1970 started relocating more to the south which was perceived as more family friendly and like them religiously devout, this would depress the groups median wages overall. 2. Prior to 1970 as sowell writes about, close to 90 percent of a West Indian’s friend groups and about 90 percent of the time their marriage partner was also a West Indian. In other words they usually hung around and associated with their own ethnic group and not American blacks. After social desegregation took place throughout America and all ethnic groups started interacting more, the movements of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged certain social pathologies (illegitimacy, anti intellectualism, “acting white”, hooliganism and violence) once confined to southern whites and blacks to seep into the American black and then West Indian youth and because West Indian youth became imperceptible both by look and culture, they were pressured to conform to these social pathologies, all of which would lead to lower median incomes and stunt upward mobility. Sowell writes about this in Black Rednecks and White Liberals. There is this great study from Harvard in 1994 highlighting West Indians and their transition from an immigrant group into part of the American black mainstream. In it the West Indian parents are worried about their children becoming more like and adopting customs of American blacks including aspects of what they called “ghetto culture”.
That is my two cents on this. I encourage the author to read this, read his original study American ethnic groups (1978) edited by Thomas sowell or Sowell’s Ethnic America (1981) and then see whether Friedman’s point refutes hereditarianism or not. Thank You.
It's pretty depressing to see quality work like this put into a mode of discourse that can and will almost certainly be ignored by intellectual cowards like Friedman -- however courageous he is by comparison to the larger academic discourse that is upstream from the suicidal moral zeitgeist. This not to say all is vanity but the lessons of history, including most conspicuously "The Bell Curve" from decades ago, tell us this mode of discourse is not moving the needle nearly as fast as are the gene shredding institutions.
If each new contribution to the discourse were brought into a comprehensive macrosocial model with prior contributions, and all subject to an information criterion for model selection, it would not only force the cowards to stick their heads above the their parapets like "correlation doesn't imply causation", "ecological correlations are invalid", "you didn't discount for <fill in the blank> confouders", blah blah blah, but it would provide a model that might actually prove _practically_ useful for those of us deprived of power. The problem, of course, is not only the additional burden of applying an information criterion for casual model selection, but the large residual "argument surface" over which information criterion is applicable.
IMNSHO, that's why approximating algorithmic information is the right way to go, even though lossless compression of an increasing diversity of datasets -- required so as to include the data relied upon by the cowards -- into a unified executable archive would increase the efforts by perhaps an order of magnitude.
I may at some point go over your argument carefully enough to rebut or agree, but the person you should be arguing the African stuff with is not me but Chisala. Have you corresponded with him? Interacted with him online?
As I am sure you know, it's pretty easy to make a convincing argument for a proposition, true or false, if you are reasonably intelligent and the people you are arguing with are not exposed to the other side. I generally prefer to form opinions on controversial issues, a subject I have discussed in two recent Substack posts, by looking at competent arguments from both sides.
As regards Nigeria I suspect there is substructure i.e. elite subgroups within the population. There are more highly talented Nigerian mathematicians than I would expect if the population were homogenous. Might be similar effects when it comes to Scrabble.
Am I missing something in your criticism of the second point? The tables addressing the performance of Nigerians in the UK only show a black-white IQ gap. Doesn't the inclusion of non-Nigerian black Africans (like Somalis, Ugandans, Kenyans etc..) in those tables somewhat miss the point that Friedman was making? That inclusion can possibly bring down what would otherwise be a higher Nigerian IQ.
I just read your unpublished(on substack) blog post. I want to say this under relevant post. When it comes to the difference in intelligence between the races, you are very successful in defending hereditarianism. You're destroying the colorism and Scarr Rowe hypothesis. But when it comes to traditional values (family, religion, etc.), you are not enthusiastic about defending hereditarianism. This is interesting.
I really don't understand why people read Chisala's article and come away with some conclusions. He basically just points to some data that are outliers and try to make an argument as if they're a representative population data.
There are population wide test scores like the SAT in the US involving millions of students. And states like Michigan where all students are required to take the exam (for free). Chisala has nothing to say about those studies. Instead he likes to write about Scrabble players and African immigrants in the UK? Really? Even the Nigerian immigrants themselves will tell you that they're not representative of their population. The Indian immigrants working in tech in California will all tell you that they're not like the average Indian person in India.
Lynn's measurement of Albanian IQ must clearly be wrong, since there is a huge discrepancy between the supposed IQ and their actual earnings in the US (which are in line with neighboring countries like Greece and Serbia).
EK, what's your take on borderer/scots-irish/Appalachian stagnation in the US? Do you think that they are genetically different than other Britons? Or do you need to invoke some long-lagging state history?
Major sources of US immigration, such as India and China, are missing from the US census table and the resulting regression. Nearly all of Asia is missing, actually. Seems like enough to possibly effect the results.
"Why is Latvia so high?"
I would think that a large share of Latvian Americans may be Jewish. There were about 200,000 Jews in Latvia in 1914, and almost all of them either emigrated or died in the Holocaust. There are 80,000 or so Latvian Americans today.
While I do not have enough expertise on the last 3 points to adequately respond to them, I know enough to critique the first one. I read Sowell’s study that researched West Indians in comparison to African Americans. The data was from 1969 of the public census, he wrote this in the 70s (he is very old). He found that nationally (I rounded) the median household income for African Americans was 5900, West Indians were 9000 and the national average was 9500.
He then isolated them to the same geographic area (nyc metro area) and found African Americans had 6900 and West Indians had 8800, he held about everything constant such as education, age, children etc, all of which were quite comparable. Most West Indians at the time were concentrated (over 50%) in nyc alone and therefore it would be a good geographic place to compare. 8800 median income was comparable to other groups that are located in the nyc metro area such as Italian Americans who also had an income of 8800 nationally.
Sowell wanted to test whether West Indians made more than African Americans because they were favored more as hard working and as immigrants with better education, so he isolated the census to second generation West Indians who would seem imperceptible as anything other than a black, assimilated New Yorker most of whom with the exception of the newly arrived black southerners spoke in a New York dialect. The second generation West Indies with only 1 year more of schooling had a median income of 10900, surpassing African Americans, their parents, the national average and the average of the northeast (10700), which is why Friedman said in one generation they caught up to the rest of the nation, in truth they surpassed even the average of the richest region of the USA. They surpassed whites and other ethnic groups with which they were similar and sowell maintains neither genetics nor discrimination could explain that since they are darker skinned and have more African genes.
But the author does bring up a good point, why doesn’t it seem like this pattern holds today? Things changed dramatically since then. 1. West Indians after 1970 started relocating more to the south which was perceived as more family friendly and like them religiously devout, this would depress the groups median wages overall. 2. Prior to 1970 as sowell writes about, close to 90 percent of a West Indian’s friend groups and about 90 percent of the time their marriage partner was also a West Indian. In other words they usually hung around and associated with their own ethnic group and not American blacks. After social desegregation took place throughout America and all ethnic groups started interacting more, the movements of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged certain social pathologies (illegitimacy, anti intellectualism, “acting white”, hooliganism and violence) once confined to southern whites and blacks to seep into the American black and then West Indian youth and because West Indian youth became imperceptible both by look and culture, they were pressured to conform to these social pathologies, all of which would lead to lower median incomes and stunt upward mobility. Sowell writes about this in Black Rednecks and White Liberals. There is this great study from Harvard in 1994 highlighting West Indians and their transition from an immigrant group into part of the American black mainstream. In it the West Indian parents are worried about their children becoming more like and adopting customs of American blacks including aspects of what they called “ghetto culture”.
That is my two cents on this. I encourage the author to read this, read his original study American ethnic groups (1978) edited by Thomas sowell or Sowell’s Ethnic America (1981) and then see whether Friedman’s point refutes hereditarianism or not. Thank You.
It's pretty depressing to see quality work like this put into a mode of discourse that can and will almost certainly be ignored by intellectual cowards like Friedman -- however courageous he is by comparison to the larger academic discourse that is upstream from the suicidal moral zeitgeist. This not to say all is vanity but the lessons of history, including most conspicuously "The Bell Curve" from decades ago, tell us this mode of discourse is not moving the needle nearly as fast as are the gene shredding institutions.
If each new contribution to the discourse were brought into a comprehensive macrosocial model with prior contributions, and all subject to an information criterion for model selection, it would not only force the cowards to stick their heads above the their parapets like "correlation doesn't imply causation", "ecological correlations are invalid", "you didn't discount for <fill in the blank> confouders", blah blah blah, but it would provide a model that might actually prove _practically_ useful for those of us deprived of power. The problem, of course, is not only the additional burden of applying an information criterion for casual model selection, but the large residual "argument surface" over which information criterion is applicable.
IMNSHO, that's why approximating algorithmic information is the right way to go, even though lossless compression of an increasing diversity of datasets -- required so as to include the data relied upon by the cowards -- into a unified executable archive would increase the efforts by perhaps an order of magnitude.
I may at some point go over your argument carefully enough to rebut or agree, but the person you should be arguing the African stuff with is not me but Chisala. Have you corresponded with him? Interacted with him online?
As I am sure you know, it's pretty easy to make a convincing argument for a proposition, true or false, if you are reasonably intelligent and the people you are arguing with are not exposed to the other side. I generally prefer to form opinions on controversial issues, a subject I have discussed in two recent Substack posts, by looking at competent arguments from both sides.
As regards Nigeria I suspect there is substructure i.e. elite subgroups within the population. There are more highly talented Nigerian mathematicians than I would expect if the population were homogenous. Might be similar effects when it comes to Scrabble.
Am I missing something in your criticism of the second point? The tables addressing the performance of Nigerians in the UK only show a black-white IQ gap. Doesn't the inclusion of non-Nigerian black Africans (like Somalis, Ugandans, Kenyans etc..) in those tables somewhat miss the point that Friedman was making? That inclusion can possibly bring down what would otherwise be a higher Nigerian IQ.
"Iranians - what gives?" - a LOT of those Iranians are physicians.
Video games which require up-to-date PC (unlike chess or scrabble) are actually bad argument because of poor availability in poorer countries.
1) Where are the East Indians?
2) Is there research which takes into consideration the self-regulating competencies of the various nationalities/ethnicities in interaction with IQ?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28586087/
I just read your unpublished(on substack) blog post. I want to say this under relevant post. When it comes to the difference in intelligence between the races, you are very successful in defending hereditarianism. You're destroying the colorism and Scarr Rowe hypothesis. But when it comes to traditional values (family, religion, etc.), you are not enthusiastic about defending hereditarianism. This is interesting.
I really don't understand why people read Chisala's article and come away with some conclusions. He basically just points to some data that are outliers and try to make an argument as if they're a representative population data.
There are population wide test scores like the SAT in the US involving millions of students. And states like Michigan where all students are required to take the exam (for free). Chisala has nothing to say about those studies. Instead he likes to write about Scrabble players and African immigrants in the UK? Really? Even the Nigerian immigrants themselves will tell you that they're not representative of their population. The Indian immigrants working in tech in California will all tell you that they're not like the average Indian person in India.
Lynn's measurement of Albanian IQ must clearly be wrong, since there is a huge discrepancy between the supposed IQ and their actual earnings in the US (which are in line with neighboring countries like Greece and Serbia).
EK, what's your take on borderer/scots-irish/Appalachian stagnation in the US? Do you think that they are genetically different than other Britons? Or do you need to invoke some long-lagging state history?