Hypothetically speaking, if average human population group differences in aptitude, temperament, personality and decision-making exist and are immutable over generational timespans, and those group average differences are greater when the population groups being compared are larger (i.e. ethnicity versus race), would anything change about principal economic theories and concepts (e.g. free trade, externalities, free movement of labor, comparative advantage, public choice theory, opportunity cost, rationality of players, labor force growth)? If so, how would they change?
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Don’t know about the rest, but free trade should still be fine. The fact that people are irrational doesn’t affect comparative advantage.
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It shouldn’t matter at all.
In terms of a domestic economy, they’ll still be a full spectrum of unskilled to skilled people and a free labor market will allocate resources and either attract or repel different types of immigrants to make up the difference.
In free trade, it should matter somewhat, in that a homogeneous country might be more or less rational, but a rational actor would take that irrationality into account and adjust his actions accordingly. This is similar to how a woman’s irrationality can be understood and accounted for in male interactions – something you are an expert on.
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I’m confused.
Your first premise(s) postulate group differences which a) exist and b) are immutable.
Your second premise is that “those differences are greater the bigger the population groups being compared.” Bigger between various random individuals in the respective groups? Bigger differences between the group averages?
If the first, always possible, but irrelevant to statistical/group analysis. If the second, no, because of the first postulate (immutable).
Please illustrate via example.
Signed:
A veteran of seven college courses in economics/statistics.
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Doesn’t comparative advantage depend on a country understanding what it’s optimal production industry is (i.e., being rational)? If I’m Chile, and I can make cars better than handbags but I choose to devote more energy to handbags, it wouldn’t be rational.
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Yeah, I don’t quite get this one today. Perhaps the comments will flesh out the point for me. I want to agree with a_c, but I really just don’t know.
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yo man, that’s some deep shit right there…
my answer, fuck em… fuck em in their goat asses
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Also, given statistical variance, every country will have an elite smart enough to make rational economic decisions. Those people may not necessarily be in charge in the case of authoritarian countries, but relative average differences shouldn’t matter as much given that actual economic decisions are usually made by the elite.
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my immediate response is no, but i think you’re question requires a bit more clarification.
economics is based on individuals, households, firms, nations, etc. acting to rationally maximize their utility within certain limits (i.e. a budget contraint). without more clarification, i can’t see how such concepts would interract with the “average human population group differences” to which you refer.
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i edited the question to make it clearer.
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Mostly it shouldn’t matter.
Exceptions:
1. Assumption of rationality
This assumption is going in the toilet anyway, but some groups are more irrational on average than others.
2. Assumption of individuality
People often act more like members of a family or members of an ethnic group than like pure individuals. This will vary from population to population.
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I’m not sure if it really matters to the point you are trying to investigate, Roissy, but those average differences are most certainly not immutable over time. One of the things to keep in mind with evolution is that there is absoultely nothing about a species that can be considered constant, baseline, or “inherent,” given a long enough timespan. This includes variation among various varying rates. Traits might easily remain species-endemic but show a larger rate of variance.
Presumably you’re talking about shorter time scales, evolutions of societies and not of the species. Even then, though, for devil’s advocacy, I’d point out that certain (especially brain-related) traits, and their relative distribution both within and across societies, may evolve astonishingly fast. In as little as 600 years.
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Roissy,
Why don’t you just email your buddy Tyler Cowen about this?
I know that he personally responds to almost all economic questions put to him.
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The variable that influences (then changes) those economic theories most is government and its use of power.
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Not to change the subect:
But Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas is the best Gentleman’s Club in America.
Hands down. (so to speak).
– MPM
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If I am reading this right, then the existence of these differences (if they could be quantified) could be used to test current theories. If Group A has a lot of people who are good Task A and bad at Task B (at least when it comes to natural talent) and Group B had a bunch of people who were good at Task B and bad at Task A, then there would be trade so that people in Group B did Task B and Group A did Task A and everyone is richer.
If one of these Tasks were somehow difficult to trade (like say Task B was giving back rubs, something that even modern IT and transportation doesn’t let you shove across a wire or put in a container) then people from Group B would start actually moving to where Group A lives, since there is too many people giving out those backrubs back in Group B’s homeland and not enough in Group A’s. So that covers rationality, comparative advantage, etc, etc.
Economics is kind of based on different people being good at different things (specialization) and moving the idea from single people to groups is more of a facet of macroeconomics than some kind of world changer.
I imagine you would end up with some real issues ‘proving’ one group has an inherent advantage at something over another, especially when you get anything looking like race involved.
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I understand where you’re going with this. Generational differences (read: pussification) are not enough to alter economic theories, which are freestanding anyway. Most of the theories you listed are only measurable within open systems in practice, so there will always be a sea of variables contributing to any quantifiable outcome.
If you believe in those economic theories as facts or even as consistent, underlying tendencies, then you should focus on how to exploit the current generation’s peculiarities (and predictable future tendencies). Say our present culture is risk-adverse in the area of investing; with so many hedge funds collapsing, people will overpay for insurance on their returns. The resulting abundance of very low yield, government insured bonds skews the demand downward for anything more risky. You can find a relatively stable, diverse set of uninsured bonds that now must pay artificially high premiums because the temper of the times makes such pools unattractive. People would rather make 3% every time than flip a coin between 0% and 8%, to pick simple numbers. Ranieri would still have a fat stack of penny stocks in his port because he knows that those are even more valuable as a whole, if you can manage your exposure to contain high failure rates. These days, risk is unattractive so risk is cheap, and that’s tangibly exploitable. Generational differences, of a sort, are making that possible.
The disparagement of free market ideals in the popular media can be likened to the rise of feminism in the western culture in the same parallel that libertarian opportunists might resemble pickup artists. In times of free love, principles of game are still useful but less important. In times of free trade, markets are easier to identify and exploit, but a strong business acumen contributes a competitive edge nonetheless. As much as I’d enjoy seeing a Randian collapse of our socialist-trending government, the reality is that it should eventually swing back toward normalcy, as pushed by an invisible hand.
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I don’t think it changes much, unless a particular group was found to be much less rational than the human norm (which isn’t all that high it seems).
Comparative Advantage in particular would explain why free trade in such a world would still be mutually advantageous even if one population group were strictly inferior on all dimensions to another. Comparative Advantage is one of the key concepts that is rarely understood by those who oppose free trade.
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when the population groups being compared are larger
Women with GNP’s vs. those with hideous pedophilic Bald Eagles?
Peter
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Forget the skanky, stupid, shallow, and emotionally damaged bar chicks for a while guys…we American males have a country we need to take back from the financial Zio-bloodsuckers – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m36yibpLUek&feature=channel_page
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I understand where you’re going with this. Generational differences (read: pussification)
that’s where he’s going with it? i thought he was trying to get a race realism debate started without having to explicitly endorse one side or the other of the debate. did i misread?
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I dunno.
But America will be pretty much Mexicanized due to its propensity to compensate anyone with a vagina, who can pop out kids, with free rent, free healthcare, and free money.
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Economics assume “representative agents”. There is no room for race-realism in it. Political Economy could take this issue if it wasn´t the most politically correct branch of economics
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42?
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More importantly, How about another 800 billion of funny “money” pumped into our currency supply.
Ron Paul said these words almost a year ago…
“Unless we embrace fundamental reforms, we will be caught in a financial storm that will humble this great country as no foreign enemy ever could”
– Ron Paul, March 4, 2008
This country needs to get back on the gold standard and we need to abolish the Federal Reserve “Bank”
Inflation was a non-issue until the FED was created in 1913.
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This is as realist as proposing:
-sending black people back to Africa
– overturning the feminist revolution and reinstalling the laws concerning divorce as they were in the 50s
– sending all mexicans back to Mexico
– dismantling the welfare state
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you’re boring me
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Nothing should really change about the models themselves as they are developed *a priori*. Whether they empirically show the same results over time would be another matter.
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And after our entire financial system collapses it might be pretty easy. We’ll be starting from “scratch”
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What the hell does any of this have to do with pickup? And why does every post devolve into something resembling the discussions of 19th century eugenicists.
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Imagine that you had a race of human beings with an average IQ of 50 that commits, on average, 100 times the crime of the average American. There is no group that even approaches that today, of course. As I said, a hypothetical.
If your economic model doesn’t budge when confronted by a hypothetical like that, then your economic model is fucked.
Your economics is probably based on ‘magical equality fairy’ theory — the left’s version of creationism, evolution having stopped 100,000 years ago when the magical equality fairy decided that everybody should be the same. Don’t be surprised if your economics don’t come close to describing the real world.
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“This is as realist as proposing:
-sending black people back to Africa
– overturning the feminist revolution and reinstalling the laws concerning divorce as they were in the 50s
– sending all mexicans back to Mexico
– dismantling the welfare state”
What’s more realistic is the long decline and collapse of America.
America is the ONLY industrialized country whose population is exploding. Not only that, the exploding population is non-productive and a drain on American infrastructure.
As long as America puts every functional uterus on a golden pedestal, every poor brown woman will pump out more kids to reap the golden ticket of welfare and Medicaid.
We are turning into a nation dedicated to supporting women through public welfare and private welfare (child support). All of this welfare comes from the pockets of the most productive groups in the world: middle class men.
No wonder modern American women don’t need to respect men.
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A book called “A Farewell to Alms” argues something like what I think you’re getting at, namely that the economic plight of man slowly improved as more economically productive people had more offspring.
http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton/dp/0691141282/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233945006&sr=8-1
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Good question. Neo-classic economics is based on the idea that people tend to act in a way that maximizes their utility (that is, people tend to make the choices that best satisfies them). That is a nice convenience so that human behavior fits the optimal outcome and so can be easily modeled; but experiments also hold this assumption to be generally true, especially as people repeat objectives.
This is generally called of “rationality”, even though it doesn’t necessarily mean people use conscious reason — people tend to also correctly calculate the motion of a projectile, that doesn’t mean they are consciously calculating it, or that they know any physics at all. Somehow it’s assumed people can make the choices they prefer. A good, popular book on this is Tim Harford’s recent “The Logic of Life” in which he covers romance, crime and addictions.
If human behavior becomes erratic, neo-classic economics may still hold because irrational behavior will tend to cancel out, as long as it doesn’t happen in absurd numbers.
If it isn’t erratic, then there is logic behind such apparent “irrational” behavior, and you can include some variable to compensate for it in the models. I suppose in such a case, technology could also be invented to aid people making good choices in their life, if they really suck at that, hence fixing the problem.
I tend to think that when lose evolutionary pressures become a problem, we’ll be advanced enough that we will be able to correct any of such defects.
A lot of economics like firm theory, and I suppose public choice theory, should stay solid because you just need a handful of entrepreneurs/politicians acting rationally in their pursuit of profits/votes. The process of cumulative selection will weed out the irrational individuals.
It comes across my mind that the reason why you make that question is in face of the current economic woes. I’m not going to contribute my 2 cents on this, but notice that apparent irrational behavior isn’t necessarily so. It might have seemed irrational for someone to “bet” on the housing bubble, but even if you know it’s going to pop, you may still not want to miss it, especially when the stakes are so high since the Fed made leveraging so cheap.
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first of all, let me say that I don’t want to hurt the feelings of any person of any race by pointing out that the races differ genetically. I don’t think it is polite to speak in specifics.
However, let’s accept the fact that certain races, which we shall not name, carry DNA that keeps their average IQ under 89.
Other races have DNA that keeps their average IQ over 103
In a society that accepted inequality, there would be no problem with these two races living together in harmony.
The high IQ race would occupy most of the heights of the society, including the high paid jobs and ownership of most of the lucrative businesses. The low IQ race would accept more humble jobs
however, In today’s world, this is not how it plays out. The low IQ race typically is resentful and angry about their relatively lower income and wealth, and the usual result is crime, pogroms, and genocide against the higher IQ race.
I don’t know if this addresses your question
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Roissy,
Flesh this question out a little bit more. None of these group differences or their economic consequences matter without freedom of association. If one is forced to live and participate in a ‘melting pot’, any group’s advantages are pretty much negated. Lowest common denominator, etc., etc.
People can only vote with their feet and/or pocketbook so much nowadays.
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The answer to the question you pose is contained in a book called “World on Fire” by Amy Chua
In this book she describes how her racial group had a dramatically higher IQ than the other racial group in her country (Indonesia) and as a result her race wound up with high incomes and the other race in her country wound up with low incomes.
After a while the other race got fed up and raped / tortured / and murdered her race. This wasn’t something from the 1930’s – it happend in 1998
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“however, In today’s world, this is not how it plays out. The low IQ race typically is resentful and angry about their relatively lower income and wealth, and the usual result is crime, pogroms, and genocide against the higher IQ race.”
The lower IQ guy has 5 kids with 5 different women, who themselves have other kids with different fathers. They are free to reproduce as much as they’d like because their kids are raised on YOUR tax dollars.
However, the middle class guy has 2.5 kids with one woman. God forbid he doesn’t have any game to keep his bitch in check or if he knocks up other women willy-nilly. There WILL be consequences in the form of divorce rape and/or child support.
Simple math: How long do you think it will take before the lower IQ classes take over the population?
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“she describes how her racial group had a dramatically higher IQ than the other racial group in her country (Indonesia) and as a result her race wound up with high incomes and the other race in her country wound up with low incomes.
After a while the other race got fed up and raped / tortured / and murdered her race. This wasn’t something from the 1930’s – it happend in 1998”
It happened during the Rodney King riots in LA. Just ask the truck driver or the Korean store owners.
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Let me raise a different question – where will you be happiest?
Let’s say that you have an IQ of 130 and as a result of that IQ you save up $5 million dollars by the time you are 40. You want to stop working at 40 and write blogs and live off your income. You invest the $5 million in inflation protected T bills so you get 2% a year over and above inflation and you choose to spend that 2% a year. That gives you an income of $100,000 a year for the rest of your life to live on.
OK – where are you going to go live ?
This is very interesting to me – some people would go live in Guatemala. In guatemala you can hire a maid, butler, gardener, housekeeper, and cook for about $3,000 per person per year – So you can live in guatemala with five or six full time servants – for many people this is the life they want – a life surrounded by servants –
On the other hand, you could take the same $100,000 a year and move to La Jolla. Things are expensive in La Jolla, you can probably afford to live in a modest apartment with only one single part time servant on the same $100,000 a year
some people will choose Guatemala and some will choose La Jolla. I think the difference is that Guatemala is a country with a low average IQ and despite the low cost of living and ability to have plenty of servants, many high IQ people just don’t want to live among the low IQ people
on the other hand, La Jolla is a place with on average high IQs so even with a lower standard of living, many people prefer to be among others with a high IQ.
My point is, by having a huge group with a low IQ living near you, the economists say that you get huge benefits (cheap servants, cheap labor etc) but really in practical terms the economists are wrong – the drawbacks are too great.
Do some research – people are happiest in Denmark where there is little diversity, and very small number of people with low IQ. It is impossible to get a servant in Denmark for less than 30 thousand bucks a year, yet the high IQ successful people are happier in Denmark (with 30 thousand dollar servants) than they are in Guatemala with 3 thousand dollar servants. The economists would say this is not possible but it is true
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I come from a race that has much lower than average athletic ability. Also much smaller than average penis length and smaller than average penis diameter.
It doesn’t bother me to have it pointed out that me and my race have lower than average muscle mass and testosterone.
I take pride in the higher average IQ of my race.
Other races have superior athletic ability and larger penises, but much much lower IQ’s
I am concerned that members of the lower IQ races will be offended by this thread and will leave the Roissy blog forever. So i would urge my fellow posters to not specify which race it is specifically that has the big penis/small IQ combo and which race has the small penis/ large iq combo
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Concerning economics and libertarian ideas – have you seen this article today?
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Limiting-CEO-pay-fine-now/story.aspx?guid=%7B21B6A910%2DCB1C%2D410D%2DB6BD%2D798FFB1CDF30%7D
Lawrence Chimerine, a prominent economist, has proposed that the White House call for a “national initiative” in which Corporate America would agree to “temporarily” put a freeze on further job cuts.
I interviewed Lawrence Chimerine about this subject today on my video blog.
Who is John Galt?
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roissy, your question is so full of bullshit it hardly warrants the neurons required to attempt an equally bull shitty answer. Get a life. ><;
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sara, is that your idea of foreplay? you tease!
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Labor saving devices are a cheap proxy for servants. Once a week housecleaning would do it for me, even if I had Bill Gates’ money.
I’d go to Japan, because the language is negotiable for me and there’s a lot more I’d like to see. For most people that wouldn’t be a viable choice. It’s expensive, and the language tends to make it less accessible to foreigners than many other places.
I knew a girl whose father was an executive of a Japanese company. They had a nice, but smallish house with a detached garage. My 1800 sf Colonial on 1/3 acre is at least twice the house and four times the land and I am not close to rich. Upstate NY has cheap housing because taxes are high and jobs are scarce. Where you want to be correlates highly with what else you want from life.
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How is gonna get me laid??
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I think the principles of economics would stay the same. The one major caveat would be that the basic structure of a state would need to be stronger in populations less suited to time preference deferral and peaceful cooperation. In other words, libertarianism (and not just partisan libertarianism, but also the minimal constitutional government described by de Tocqueville among others) might work in largely peaceful, cooperative groups, but other groups might need more of a British model of government-enforced peace.
Consider, though, that modern levels of economic freedom are themselves historically novel. Before they arose, groups could not have been fully adapted to them, therefore pre-adaptation can’t be an absolute requirement. (A Farewell to Alms does suggest an inadvertent selection for time preference in Britain prior to the industrial revolution; this may weaken my point.)
Have you been reading The 10,000 Year Explosion? If not, I recommend it. The authors propose that agriculture, by increasing population and changing humans’ social and economic environment has increased the pace of human evolution. The obvious implication is that the earlier your ancestors domesticated themselves, the better you may do in a modern technological, agricultural society. An interesting, less obvious implication is that if genetic differences in behavior are pinpointed, they are very likely to exist at the level of individual cultures and not be uniform across races.
Also, define “immutable across generational timespans.” Across two or three generations differences likely are immutable to the naked eye, but if 10,000 Year Explosion is correct they are in fact mutable across relatively short historic timespans. Especially when pre-existing behavioral differences are selected among for frequency and you’re not looking for truly novel mutations.
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At first I thought you were joking with this post but judging by the coherent answers I guess… not.
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Most economic theories account for the diversity of human ability and decision-making prowess. There are numerous different risk/reward appetites; thus we have financial models that price riskier securities and safer securities (corporate bonds), with the riskier paying higher dividends and the less risky a lower dividend. This is because there is a broad spectrum of appetite for risk in the market. With respect to the allocation of labor and capital, there will always be owners of capital who seek to deploy it, and bear the greater risk of loss, and who of course stand to gain more (let’s think of them as the business alphas or high betas at least) and then you have the workers (labor) who are paid less, and who bear less risk in the overall enterprise (you guessed it: betas, omegas). So I think the answer is no, if I understand the gist of the question. The greater diversity of different intellects, attitudes and decision-making may result in a greater variety of the ways in which capital, labor and technology are deployed, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental notion that economic growth is primarily a function of the efficient combination and deployment of these major factors. However, most economic theories predict that people will behave rationally and that has been shown to be false, time and time again. People are greedy, irrational and they make mistakes, even seasoned veterans.
I will quibble with the premise slightly, however: if you read the latest National G article about Darwin and his modern intellectual progeny, you find support for the notion that the idea that human tendencies are “immutable over generational timespans” – is incorrect – that is, evolution can take place over as few as one or two generations. (As a side note, Roissy should dedicate an entire post to the biologist’s debate found in the Second column of page 65 of this issue of National G, February 2009 – directly addresses the issue of “peacocking” in an actual discussion of peacock/peahen mating habits. So relevant to the game theory of Mystery).
There is, however, one pesky little concept that is starting to gain ALOT of traction in today’s economic climate: the Black Swan. An event so rare, so unpredictable and so outside the norm that it disrupts the entire status quo. By its very definition it should not be possible, and thus, economic theory does not even account for it. Models are constructed excluding it. Lives and careers are built around its non-existence.
And then, of course, it happens. It is a concept that implies that there are greater variations than those that we deem to be fixed, and that the spectrum of what is possible is broade than we imagine. That is, in fact, a theory that has developed to explain factual situations that we have not been able to fathom.
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No. In fact, the main point of the theory of comparative advantage is that country A can be more productive than country B in producing *all* goods, and still can obtain benefits from trade. Differences in productivity may be due to any number of factors, aptitude, skill, experience, education etc.
The fact is that economists are very used to the idea that some people or countries, for whatever reason, are more productive than others. Economics would be among the endeavors least changed by the hypothesis you raise.
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I must agree with G. The Rhino is a fine, fine place.
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In a true libertarian peaceful society high IQ and low IQ people benefit from living next to each other and interacting economically
If the high IQ people and the low IQ people are of the same race and culture, things tend to work ok, as the economists and libertarians predict.
When they are of different races the low IQ race tends to torture and murder the high IQ race.
Example : low IQ Turks made a decision to torture and murder a million high IQ armenians about 80 years ago.
Low IQ race in Indonesia made the decision to torture and murder the high IQ race in Indonesia in 1998.
Pattern is repeated over and over again
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Economics already accounts for differences in aptitude, temperament and personality. Rational choice theory would take a hit if people turned out not to be perfectly rational, which we already know is the case. Behavioral economics is starting to explain (or at least quantify) some of this irrational behavior. Undoubtedly, researchers will find that different groups vary in their level of rationality.
Do some research – people are happiest in Denmark where there is little diversity, and very small number of people with low IQ. … high IQ successful people are happier in Denmark than Guatemala … The economists would say this is not possible but it is true
There are a lot of problems with measuring happiness. Happiness has more to do with your current standard of living measured against your standard of luxury than it does with your absolute standard of living.
This country needs to get back on the gold standard and we need to abolish the Federal Reserve “Bank”
The value of all the gold in the world isn’t enough to support the daily transactions of the global populace. If government just redefines the value of gold, how is that not just like fiat money?
Inflation was a non-issue until the FED was created in 1913.
Yes it was. Severe inflation could almost always be traced back to government interference, but it was there nonetheless. The Fed just consolidated the governments stranglehold on the currency.
I take pride in the higher average IQ of my race.
You are a loser. It’s always the lowest quality members of a group that take the most pride in the achievements of other members of that group. I remember an exchange with a deadbeat German roommate I had in undergrad.
paraphrasing
Deutschebag: My people have made tremendous contributions to math and science. What have yours ever done?
Me: Dave, I published my research in ______ when I was 19. What the fuck have you ever done? You know all those great German scientists you’re talking about? None of them are you.
I knew this post would bring out the morons.
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all these people giving examples of low iq people attacking, killing and raping high iq people….so what? history has just as many examples of high iq people attacking, killing and exploiting low iq people too. the european colonizers and the native populations of the new world, the treatment of peasants under feudalism, the system of indentured servitude, the way the poor were treated during the industrial revolution in victorian england, slavery around the world, and brutalities enacted by the the most intelligent of ancient roman on their inferiors…there are plenty of examples of this…stop being intellectually lazy and cherrypicking history. yes low iq people have attacked high iq people but history has plenty of examples of the reverse too.
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anon: “All of this welfare comes from the pockets of the most productive groups in the world: middle class men.”
Close to correct – make that “middle class WHITE men.”
White men are forced by the welfare state in to supporting our own eventual dispossession and displacement by interlopers in the countries our heroic and hardworking White ancestors settled, founded, and built. It’s sickening, and it’ll be coming to an end fairly soon…we’re already in the beginning stages of the backlash.
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what the fuck is this shit
roissy, just talk about pussy
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I’ll grant that cultural changes are often very slow because of an immense amount of cultural inertia. I’ll also grant that said inertia is often increased by the fact that people are more prone to adopt memes from people with whom they identify – which means that a given person is more likely to adopt behaviors/values within their ethnicity and world-view. But exceptions do exist, and culture does change. Sometimes the rate of change is frustratingly slow. Other times it’s alarmingly fast, especially if the change is in a direction we judge to be negative. The use of the word “immutable” in the question, though, strikes me as untenable – even with the dubious qualifier “over generational time spans”.
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Look – it seems to me that the Government of Reagan ?Bush hit us with a 400 billion Savings and Loan fiasco – and they used that as training for the 4 trillion (so far) disaster they just did with the boy of Bush from Reagan / Bush…
It’s a huge game of TAKEAWAY by not enforcing government oversight on all of the fucking businessman thieves in this country – in addition to selling (and selling out) our country to foreign interests while they were at it.
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At first I thought you were joking with this post but judging by the coherent answers I guess… not.
—————————————–
I knew this post would bring out the morons.
—————————————–
i think we gotta face facts and consider these morons aren’t here by accident. his silence was already a sign of implicit agreement but with this post he’s finally moving past that and slowly moving into outright explicit endorsement.
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Short answer: not really
Economists are already very comfortable with the fact that people differ in their inherent ability. Gary Becker has done some very un-PC work on theories of “rational discrimination” which means exactly what you’d think.
Of the fields you listed, all either assume differences in ability outright, or have had them integrated into the models in later work. Not that it really matters though, since the study of economics has degenerated from a practical and scientific analysis of human behaviour into an abstract mathematical circle-jerk.
Also, since economists have an above-average grasp of statistical theory, they are more likely to grasp that the claims of HBD are 1) Not evil, and 2) Not falsified by the existence of highly intelligent black people, i.e. several frequent commenters on this blog and that dude in the white house.
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It is obvious that Roissy has two interests in life –
Being an alpha PUA
and
some intellectual interests
I humbly suggest that Roissy run two separate blogs –
one blog that will only discuss game and PUA
and another blog that will discuss Roissy’s other interests.
I think it is best to keep the two discussions in separate places – i don’t want the people only interested in game and PUA to flee and i think there is a danger of them fleeing due to this thread
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wouldn’t you say if they flee because of this thread it’s probably a good thing – I haven’t seen that fat lady on this thread yet.
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#53 Anonymous, you should have stopped with European colonizers.
Just to pick on one of your examples, the Industrial Revolution was the alternative to subsistence agriculture, not unicorns and rainbows. Nobody rounded up people and forced them to work in factories at gunpoint. To a lot of people, it looked like a better bet than starvation following a bad harvest. Yes, it sucked, just not as badly as the alternative.
Inflaming the mob against the haves is a historical staple. The Jews have had 2000 years of it.
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Not falsified by the existence of highly intelligent black people, i.e. several frequent commenters on this blog and that dude in the white house.
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i don’t think detractors dispute the iq findings as false, they dispute the whole “immutability” claim and some of the other exaggerated implications hbd people come up with from their data. also they don’t seem to have any coherent, practical long-term unified policy goals outside of just pointing out to anyone who’ll listen how smart white people are.
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Good points by Patrick Bateman.
Rational choice theory is already up shit creek, if you take rational choice theory to mean the assumption that people are always rational, all the time. It’s not though. The principle of rational choice just says, assume people are behaving rational unless proven otherwise. Calling behaviour we don’t understand “irrational” is intellectually lazy, in my opinion.
Some examples: Crime, addiction and family. Until the 1960’s economists just figured these were outside the scope of economists. Then Gary Becker came along and developed insightful, prediction-generating models that explained them. As readers of this blog probably know, when the legal incentives for women to divorce are increased, divorce rates go up. The irrational has become rational.
Bryan Caplan just wrote a book on irrational voting behaviour. Great book, and people certainly do seem to vote against their own self-interest at times. Irrational right? But look at voting and party affiliation as primarily status signalling, and it becomes very rational.
And yes, these posts do bring out the morons. The fact that we are having an open and un-PC conversation about race gives many the impression that we are all closet stormfront members, apparently. Steve Sailer has the same great-posts-idiotic-commenters affliction, but such are the consequences of outlawing these discussions in polite society.
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I don’t want people interested in game/pua commenting on economic theory. As the comments demonstrate, an overwhelming majority of them are entirely ignorant of economic fundamentals.
“Deutschebag: My people have made tremendous contributions to math and science. What have yours ever done?
Me: Dave, I published my research in ______ when I was 19. What the fuck have you ever done? You know all those great German scientists you’re talking about? None of them are you.”
Nice
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#57 LHC, So the Democrats were blameless in this fiasco?
There is one team, government, half called Democrats and half called Republicans. You support one half, oppose the other half, while both collude to take your money and use it to buy votes. How astute of you.
Mrs D belongs to a union that takes about five to six hundred bucks a year from her pay. When some customer gives her a hard time, management backs the customer, and the union does nada. So, the proper behavior for her is to either give the customer whatever they want (store’s money, why should she care), or call the manager. Tell me again about how the union is helping her. The union helps themselves, management doesn’t, and that small percentage of customers who are thieves and cheats get away with it.
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There is, however, one pesky little concept that is starting to gain ALOT of traction in today’s economic climate: the Black Swan. An event so rare, so unpredictable and so outside the norm that it disrupts the entire status quo. By its very definition it should not be possible, and thus, economic theory does not even account for it. Models are constructed excluding it. Lives and careers are built around its non-existence.
Would this be a reference to the current banking crisis? Because I would have told you that it is entirely predictable that bundled mortgages that included $300K homes sold to roofers and hotel maids or just plain unemployed frauds in Compton would eventually tank.
The problem is not “Black Swan events,” it’s the presumption that the economy can be modelled.
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The implications of HBD are very very simple.
Let’s assume that the people of the USA decide to import five million unskilled young workers to do the jobs americans won’t do like picking grapes.
If the USA imports five million people from Central America, 100 years from now their descendents will have an IQ under 92. Their descendents will be very costly to America
If instead the USA imports five million unskilled young workers from inland China, those workers from China will do just as good a job picking grapes, doing other jobs Americans won’t do. But 100 years from now the descendents of those Chinese will test with an IQ over 102. They will be high paid professionals and will pay more in taxes than they take in benefits.
America benefits from bringing in 5 million folks from China to pick grapes and America is hurt by bringing in 5 million people from Central America to pick grapes.
HBD proves this.
This has very very important practical long term implications for our country.
This actually has nothing to do with how smart white people are or are not. The IQ of white people is irrelevant to this argument.
As far as i know **NO** political party, no organized group, no one except the real experts on HBD are saying that America is better off bringing in Chinese people instead of Central Americans.
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Does the economic liberalization of China and India prove that population groups are not immutable? At least among the governing elite.
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Let’s assume that the people of the USA decide to import five million unskilled young workers to do the jobs americans won’t do like picking grapes.
Ahhhh yes. My favorite phrase uttered by Dubya.
Does anyone ever ask WHY IT IS there are jobs that American’s “won’t” do?
It’s because they don’t HAVE to.
Why do back breaking labor when you can milk the system, get section 8 housing, foodstamps, and a welfare check to pay for the daily 40 ozs. of malt liquor and crack cocaine?
Let the imported immigrants work for slave wages!
End illegal immigration…and end the welfare state…and suddenly we’ll find a whole bunch of Americans willing to do the jobs again.
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“The problem is not “Black Swan events,” it’s the presumption that the economy can be modelled.”
Yes, that term is getting beaten to death and not even used correctly in the process, poor Taleb.
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I think people mis-understand the Black Swan event.
The problem is perception of reality, not reality itself. In Europe before the discovery of Australia, all Swans were thought to be White. There were no known Black Swans amongst Europeans, though Australians (Aborigines) were quite familiar with them.
What shocked biologists at the time was the discovery of how wrong they were, how wrong their estimations, their models really were. Because of in-built assumptions, and willful blindness.
The same would apply to the mortgage meltdown (PC driven blindness) or the willful pretending away of the nuclear proliferation threat (Obama will give a big speech, and it will go away).
This also includes the fact that humans are very adaptable, and capable of rapid cultural change and indeed evolution of IQ or other biological adaptations. Harpending’s work on Ashkenazi Jews, under apparent selection for IQ during the last thousand years only, is a case in point. As is the massive cultural shift in Europe from pagan rivalry and bloody tribalism to monogamous, Christian cooperation in about 200 years (900-1100 AD).
And just as important as IQ is cooperation and family structure. There’s no reason to suppose the Aztecs and Incans were stupider than the Conquistadors. But instead, the Conquistadors, far from home, had a culture of cooperation that produced superior weapons, and the Aztecs and Incan habit of enslaving and sacrificing their neighbors produced enemies that willingly allied themselves with the Conquistadors KNOWING they themselves would be enslaved, but critically, their children not sacrificed on an Altar.
Cooperation, marshaling of resources, creation of enemies (and either keeping them in place or destroying them like Rome), all matters. Rome at it’s height had a habit of methodically destroying and enslaving significant enemies. Had Augustus been succeeded by a younger, more dynamic man, and the anihilation of the Ninth and Seventh Legions been avenged in typically Roman fashion (i.e. cutting down Teutoborg Forest and marching in with whole new legions to wipe out Arminius/Germanicus and his forces), well it’s possible the Roman Empire in the West would not have fallen at all. Since the barbarians would have been made Roman by the time the pressure of the Huns pushed people West (Visigoths).
i’d say that cooperation and social structure of a society matter at least as much as raw IQ. China was very good in producing men with magnificent IQs, who were promptly castrated into Eunuchs, and produced nothing lasting. In Europe these men had families, often founding manufacturing or other dynasties, producing technical and social change constantly through a social system adapted to rapid technical and social change while retaining cooperation.
The problem with the West is not social change, that’s been part of the West since 900 AD or so. It’s that this particular change has reduced social cooperation. Which is the key for wealth building and power vs. one’s enemies.
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Look,
you have to fight battles you have some chance of winning.
Many powerful americans in both political parties want tons of cheap labor.
The feminists want to have nannies willing to work for very little money – only the existence of these nannies allows professional women with young kids to work in lefty fields.
the big businessmen want cheap labor
the small businessmen (owners of restaurants for example) want cheap labor
we in the HBD community just can’t win a battle to stop the influx of cheap labor
but we can perhaps set it up so the cheap labor comes from places like China.
Look at it this way – it is very simple – the people that were dirt poor who moved from china to the USA 100 years ago have by now produced great grandchildren with super high IQs – great grandchildren who pay high taxes
The people who were dirt poor who moved from central america to the USA 100 years ago have by now produced great grandchildren that earn low incomes and collect lots of welfare – that is after 100 years in this country and many many generations born in this country
We CANT WIN the battle against import of cheap labor (the fix is in) but perhaps we can win the WAR
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DfH: “the people of the USA decide to import five million unskilled young workers to do the jobs americans won’t do like picking grapes…end the welfare state…and suddenly we’ll find a whole bunch of Americans willing to do the jobs again.”
Or just pay native-born Americans A LIVING FUCKING WAGE to do back-breaking and boring manual labor…then I’m quite sure that many more would be doing it.
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«My point is, by having a huge group with a low IQ living near you, the economists say that you get huge benefits (cheap servants, cheap labor etc) but really in practical terms the economists are wrong – the drawbacks are too great.»
Economics is not about making choices for people (people’s preferences is subjective). Maybe in a Soviet style economy, but in a bottom-up one, it is not about saying how the market should be shaped, but e.g. studying possible factors such as externalities that may result in people not making good choices as a group.
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Or just pay native-born Americans A LIVING FUCKING WAGE to do back-breaking and boring manual labor…then I’m quite sure that many more would be doing it.
As long as you have a massive influx of illegal immigrants willing to do the work for far less than the “living” wage, you won’t be able to do that.
See, the dirt poor illegals living wage is at a far lower standard than the standard American welfare recipient.
The illegal alien will live in squalid, crowded conditions, make his much lower wages, and send it back to his family in his home country or save it up to improve his life.
The welfare recipient, on the other hand, lives in comparative wealth. Even in the ghettos, they have A/C and Heating, tv, dvd players, refrigerators, cars and all other sorts of conveniences that are considered normal for “poverty.”
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Do you guys actually enjoy debating this shit.
WHAT THE FUCK does any of what you guys are saying have to do with having sex with young women. Thats all that matters. It’s friday.
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Jesus fucking christ, Roissy! I have to laugh. You’ve just asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question that has been the ongoing subject of all philosophical and scientific endeavors regarding human nature since people began thinking about these things. Armies of smart people have worked in whole or in part on aspects of this subject, and millions of pages has been written about it. Assumptions about the meaning of the words and concepts in the question itself are the subject of endless debate. So a part of me thinks you’ve asked this question just to fuck with your blog readers and see what kind of crap they write. Like that fake test from the 80’s called “The Most Difficult Test Ever”, where people were asked to “Define the universe. Give examples”, or “use the small medical kit and pocket knife under your seat to remove your own appendix. Diagram your work”. I’m not going to even try to answer your question. But I think all the ridiculously simplistic answers that others will write will be entertaining, to say the least.
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“Behavioral finance” and “behavioral economics” are fields in which researchers have discovered that people do not necessarily act rationally, where “rationally” mean “according to the traditional tenets of economics”. Such concepts as loss aversion and the endowment effect are a couple area where people do not act the way that they are ‘supposed to”. To answer Roissy’s question, where group differences will change the assumptions of economics should be looked for here. If, say, Mexicans showed half, or twice, the loss aversion of white Americans, that would be interesting. I don’t know if anyone has ever looked at that.
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MarkD, yes it was better than starvation. that doesn’t change the fact that it was horribly exploitative and barbaric. unless you think children under 12 years old being chained to machines and forced to work 14 hour shifts is not exploitative, or making people work dangerous machinery continuously for over 12 hours straight without sleep, which increased their risk of injury by alot. then firing them if they had the audacity to get hurt from being overworked. it’s barbaric exploitation, plain and simple. what, do you think that somehow admitting that somehow invalidates your point that low iq people can be barbaric to high iq people? isn’t it possible that both sides are right and the abuse flows both ways? why does it have to be one or the other?
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Your question is kind of awkward, in the sense of poorly phrased. The models themselves are pretty robust to intra-group differences, in fact the majority of them are predicated on it. Trade theory probably gets more robust if there were immutable differences between states, based on the proportions of groups inhabiting them, and the recommendations would probably be stronger.
What you really seem to be asking is, what outcomes would change between an egalitarian world and an immutably heterogeneous one? That’s more speculation about what an egalitarian world would look like than a heterogeneous world, considering the extent of human diversity that exists now. You’d have to jack up heterogeneity way above what anyone who isn’t in the Klan says before you’d see serious effects. Seriously, cherry-picking the data most in line with heterogeneity only gets you like a ~10 point inherent IQ difference, which is totally swamped by many other socio/economic/political factors (and this data is questionable to say the least).
Here’s a better question: why is there such an overlap between rationalizing pre-Stormfronters and this whole PUA scene? (the standard response of “they both acknowledge uncomfortable truths” kind of begs the question). My theory is that both correlate with initial sexual insecurity, which makes y’all decide to get much better at seducing women, but leaves a lingering fear that the Other is STEALING YER WIMMIN.
Speaking as an economist.
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The key assumption that would change is the assumption of equal imputs.
But the value of specialization remains.
Two things change:
1) Free movement of labor
-would have to be restricted if nations want to maintain their standard of living will have to put limitations on low quality humans entering.
2) Rationality
-The lower IQ the lower rationality. Hence the economic fiasco.
I blogged about this here and here
Check out this article by brooks on the model
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“Deutschebag: My people have made tremendous contributions to math and science. What have yours ever done?
Me: Dave, I published my research in ______ when I was 19. What the fuck have you ever done? You know all those great German scientists you’re talking about? None of them are you.”
Perhaps this pride that seems so irrational to you is simply an expression of genetic self-interest. His people are more *him* than are your people, just as his family and relatives are more *him* than someone else’s family. Why do most parents feel more pride in their own children than in someone’s else’s child? Simple, because the child is theirs. There is a high degree of genetic similarity. It matters little that someone else’s child is more beautiful, smarter or more talented. People tend to favor their own.
Humans seem designed to have such attachments, and they exist for very practical reasons (encouraging cooperation, trust, and high investment among those who likely share more genes). In a multiracial context, race will often serve as a visible marker of genetic similarity.
Of course, pride can exist in other contexts as well, such as Reagan High School versus Roosevelt High School. The football fans may get rabid about these artificial tribes, but when you look at where people will actually invest great amounts of resources (or sacrifice great amounts of resources), it tends to be family and a few concentric circles outward. The same guy that has never donated a dime to charity, and has never really given even his closest friends more than a few beers (and perhaps grumbled about even that) will think nothing of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on his children. So yes, we have these attachments, and they are powerful.
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My theory is that both correlate with initial sexual insecurity, which makes y’all decide to get much better at seducing women, but leaves a lingering fear that the Other is STEALING YER WIMMIN.
this sounds like something a deluded fat woman would write.
“you just hate on me because you secretly want to fuck me!”
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“this sounds like something a deluded fat woman would write.
“you just hate on me because you secretly want to fuck me!””
Nah, you’re hating on Other People because they want to fuck your chosen targets. Or at least that’s my theory. I can couch it in pseudoscientific evolutionary psychology terms if it helps.
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Here’s a better question: why is there such an overlap between rationalizing pre-Stormfronters and this whole PUA scene? (the standard response of “they both acknowledge uncomfortable truths” kind of begs the question). My theory is that both correlate with initial sexual insecurity, which makes y’all decide to get much better at seducing women, but leaves a lingering fear that the Other is STEALING YER WIMMIN.
gotta delurk for sec: betas grow up being told by their mommies and tv that betaness will make them win out in the end and they will eventually get the women and the jerks will lose in the long run. they end up misfits with women for life and jerks keep winning with women until they die. they get bitter and need someone to blame like feminists and sex and the city.
high iq people get told in school that the real world is just like school, an iq meritocracy that they will run because they are good at taking tests and studying. in real life, plenty of high iq people are middle managers or outright failures relative to where they expected to be in life, and many dumb people who know how to kiss ass and people like athletes do extraordinarily well. they get bitter and need someone to blame like non-asian minorities and white liberals.
thus the overlap. and if someone is a combination of both these groups, they’re double bitter and double looking for scapegoats. they need to convince themselves that if not for groups x,y, and z, they’d all be the multimillionaire, industry controlling playboys mommy and teacher always told them they deserved to be.
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Nah, you’re hating on Other People because they want to fuck your chosen targets.
false premise.
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i like these conversations; they separate the cranks from the people with something thoughtful and meaningful to say.
so a few things:
This country needs to get back on the gold standard and we need to abolish the Federal Reserve “Bank”
Inflation was a non-issue until the FED was created in 1913.
if inflation was a non-issue before 1913, why does dante mention the debasers of currency in the the divine comedy? governments can easily inflate with a gold standard by changing the prices. by abolishing the fed and going back on a strict gold standard, we completely lose the ability to operate any kind of monetary policy. if the world operated as a perfect economic model that always found equilibrium, then it might make sense to deprive governments of that ability; since, however, there are always market failures, it’s probably not wise to do so.
first of all, let me say that I don’t want to hurt the feelings of any person of any race by pointing out that the races differ genetically. I don’t think it is polite to speak in specifics.
fuck polite. if you’re so sure in what you believe, just come out and say it. speak your bullshit, self-serving race realist nonsense, so it can be refuted for the shoddy social-science it is.
You are a loser. It’s always the lowest quality members of a group that take the most pride in the achievements of other members of that group.
true. and there’s plenty of these losers who post on this site.
Or just pay native-born Americans A LIVING FUCKING WAGE to do back-breaking and boring manual labor
labor costs account for a large percentage of inflation. when you substantially raise wages, you substantially raise the cost of most goods; so while people may earn more money nominally, their living standards haven’t actually changed.
We CANT WIN the battle against import of cheap labor (the fix is in) but perhaps we can win the WAR
economic development is not a war. using that metaphor makes as much sense as fighting a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on poverty’; that is to say, no sense. for one thing, it’s not a zero-sum game. we don’t profit at china’s expense, or vice-versa. when economies grow almost everybody wins, and when they shrink, almost everybody loses. unfortunately we spend far too much time in this country arguing over how to split the pie then we do figuring out how to grow it.
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too.. many.. big.. words…
brain.. cannot.. compute..
lol… if u said this while we were out on a date, i’d laugh and tell you to stop showing off.
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Roissy @ February 6, 2009 at 5:19 pm
“false premise.”
Oh come on, are we really gonna play the game of “But I never actually SAID that”?
Judging from your entertaining stir-shit-up writing, it’s quite possible you’re just asking questions that have stupid premises, without actually holding them. Whatever. But please don’t pretend that posing the question doesn’t lend any implicit credence to its premises.
In any case, the point still stands, at least wrt the people who do actually believe certain groups are inherently inferior. Do you think I’ve got a poor explanation for the overlap? Is there at least a more entertaining one?
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My point was not that high IQ people cannot be barbaric. They certainly can. Take Hitler and the Gypsies for a modern example. A bunch of people riding around on horse drawn wagons were no threat to the Third Reich.
The industrial revolution is a bad example that does nothing to advance your point. I suppose that sweat shops are terrible atrocities in the third world, right? Is it better to let the people live on nothing than to give them the opportunity to earn a few bucks a day?
When you frame everything in the context of your situation and experiences, a lot of things look bad. I wouldn’t want to work in an industrial revolution era factory, but it beat the alternatives. Even for the kids.
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houellebecq makes the observation that sexual liberation operates very similar to economic liberation. both have undergone similar changes over the last century. many of those changes fall under the category of more competition.
competition is why no american can expect to find a job out of high school that pays enough to raise a family on one income. the US now has too many rivals to dominate manufacturing the way it once did.
competition is why you’re average beta male can’t expect that he’s going to meet a ‘nice’ girl, take her out on a few dates, marry her and expect her to raise his kids and clean his drawers for the rest of his life. women have more options now, so expect them to exercise those options.
is this is a good thing? it depends. is it fair? what the fuck is fair? it’s life. deal with it. figure out the skills you need to successfully compete or go the way of the dodo. end of story. i have no pity for anyone who whines on as if they’re entitled to anything just because they fell out of their mother’s crotch and began to draw breath. that goes for minorities, women, white males, illegal immigrants, anybody.
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And btw, you shouldn’t assume libertarians know anything about economics. It’s like assuming catholics know about theology.
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“America benefits from bringing in 5 million folks from China to pick grapes and America is hurt by bringing in 5 million people from Central America to pick grapes.”
Agreed that importing low IQ immigrants is damaging. In this day and age, with healthcare, education, general infrastructure, etc., there is no such thing as cheap labor. It’s just privatizing the profit for the employers, and socializing the costs (which are enormous) on the backs of the general citizenry. Not to mention the inevitable political and cultural implications (group conflict, more big government voters, affirmative action, and a zillion other things).
As to high IQ foreigners, it gets more nuanced. At first glance it would seem like a benefit, but that is not necessarily the case. For instance, what can happen (and historically has happened many a time) is that the high IQ immigrants will either form a new ruling class, or they will serve as administators for the ruling class. Empires have often utilized foreigners who feel no connection to the general population as tax collectors, administators, and what have you. This can lead to an ever more insular, detached and exploitative ruling class. Elites use foreigners for their own purposes, often at the expense of the general population. And if the foreigners themselves should actually become a new ruling elite, then that creates a massive new set of difficulties.
Also, as we are seeing in the present day, the importation of high IQ foreigners allows us to dumb down our own educational system. Why bother with rigorous standards sufficient to produce high quality doctors, scientists, engineers, and researchers? We’ll just import Chinese and Indians for that. For the children of the general citizenry, we’ll instead subject them to year upon year of leftist indoctrination. Chang can do the real thinking, your kid can read Heather has Two Mommies and watch To Kill a Mockingbird for the umpteenth time.
I shouldn’t have to elaborate on the disaster that this is leading to. Bottom line: high IQ immigrants are far from an unmitigated blessing. A survey of our current educational system is evidence as to why that is. After Sputnik, we ramped up our schools and produced a generation of quality scientists. Now we don’t even bother. Chang can do it.
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Ryder you are 100% correct – import of high IQ foreigners is not an un mitigated blessing
however, there is an immense coalition in the USA of people across the political spectrum that want a massive influx of people willing to work as nannies and maids for $4 an hour
This coalition includes people on the left, the right, feminists, anti feminists, all sorts of people.
You can’t defeat the cheap labor coalition
it is too diverse and strong
if you bring in millions of un educated chinese who work for $4 an hour you are better off than if you bring in millions of people from central america.
It is well known that the grandchildren of poor chinese grow up to have high iqs while the grandchildren of poor central americans grow up to have low iqs
don’t fight the battle against cheap labor – that is not a battle that can be won
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Economists, and especially libertarians tend to ignore group warfare. Capitalism emerged out of germanic trading outposts and free cities, hanseatic league style. Who was allowed in was completely regulated, and only approved merchants could hawk their wares. In the countryside were only farmers working asses off, so no immigrants there either.
Skip forward couple of hundred years. The germanic free cities have been centralized (absolutist french kings helped there), but have spread their systems around the world, most successfully in the USA, which is now also centralized. A system has been set up that permanently and completely taxes the farmers and the producers, distributing the revenues to greedy voters. Germanic or European group loyalty is completely discredited by Hitler, and thought irrelevant and unnecessary.
In a bureaucratic centralized welfare state adding low quality immigrants that will form a permanent angry underclass along racial lines is extremely stupid. If we want to “help” people just drop dollars bills in slums or colonize again.
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Roissy, interesting question, and since I’m an actual fancy boy economist, I’ll take a stab or two.
The first answer, the plain vanilla Economics 101 answer to get you through the night, is that it shouldn’t make much of a difference. Heterogeneity provides the basis for gains in trade, so these differences just produce opportunities for gains from specialization. This answer gets us a long way.
But there’s some deeper answers, reflecting recent work in “behavioral economics” that fuses economics and cognitive psychology. This area is more fun to discuss.
First, and this finding is just statistical common sense, variation in the ability to correctly perceive risk will cause market distortions. If I own a business that puts workers in risk situations, I can offer wage premia that don’t fully reflect the risk, but still attract individuals who underestimate the risk. Consequently, the free market wage premium for risk is lower and flatter than the “true” risk premium.
In addition, a lot of important economic decisions that we make have a cognitive component. When deciding how much to save or how to invest or making a host of decisions, cognitive ability matters. More importantly, cognitive ability has predictive power.
In fact, variations in cognitive ability really explain important differences in willingness to save and the ability to perceive risk. I’m attaching the link one of my all-time favorite papers…the kind of paper I keep around me to badger people with and tell them they must read:
http://www.mit.edu/people/shanefre/CRT.pdf
The authors develop a test of “cognitive reflection.” They ask questions that have a seemingly obvious and intuitive answer, but that answer is wrong, and the respondent should catch the error with a fairly small amount of reflection.”
For example, there’s the question: “A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much do the bat and ball each cost?”
The intuitive temptation is to answer $1.00 for the bat and $.10 for the ball, but that’s wrong. The answer is actually $1.05 for the bat and $.05 for the ball.
People who did a better job of reflecting and arriving at the right answer displayed much more patience when it came to questions about rewards at different points in time, and also had much more rational risk preferences.
Roissy, you’ll especially like this part: “Furthermore, even if one focuses only on respondents who gave the wrong answers, men and women differ. Women’s mistakes
tend to be of the intuitive variety, whereas men make a wider variety of errors. For example, the women who miss the “widgets” problem nearly always give the erroneous intuitive answer “100,” whereas a modest fraction of the men give unexpected wrong answers, such as “20” or “500” or “1.” For every CRT item (and several other similar items used in a longer variant of the test) the ratio of
“intuitive” mistakes to “other” mistakes is higher for women than for men. Thus, the data suggest that men are more likely to reflect on their answers and less
inclined to go with their intuitive responses.
One might draw the opposite conclusion from self-reports. Using the scale described earlier, respondents were asked “How long do you deliberate before reaching a conclusion?” Women reported higher scores than men.”
Tyler Cowen also loved the paper:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/01/the_best_senten.html
So your belief in group variations in cognitive ability can certainly drive some implications beyond classic Economics 101. Mainly, if you belive some groups have lower cognitive ability, then you believe they’ll earn less money and make worse decision with the money they do make. In addition, you might like this paper by Ed Glaeser of Harvard
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310585
The abstract: James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. We present a model of the Curley effect, in which inefficient redistributive policies are sought not by interest groups protecting their rents, but by incumbent politicians trying to shape the electorate through emigration of their opponents or reinforcement of class identities. The model sheds light on ethnic politics in the United States and abroad, as well as on class politics in many countries including Britain.
So you could have a model where politicians (especially in areas which can have serious out-migration) play to the poor dumb group that likes them, and consolidate power by driving out the rich smart group that doesn’t like them.
Here’s another good paper on health economics, which presents evidence that economic explanations like the discount rate don’t really explain variations in health behaviors:
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/2005/HIER2060.pdf
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“don’t fight the battle against cheap labor – that is not a battle that can be won”
Well, I would certainly agree that the situation is difficult. On the other hand, there are developed countries that have resisted the lure of mass immigration of cheap labor (Japan being a prime example). So it is certainly possible.
As to our situation in the U.S., with the chickens coming home to roost, it may well be that the current paradigm (and all of its underlying assumptions) is on its death bed. It is becoming more discredited by the day.
I happen to believe that the current system is unsustainable, in significant part because of the false assumptions upon which it is based (i.e. we *need* lots of cheap immigrant labor). We’ll see. But I suspect that possibilities will present themselves in the coming years that will alter all of our expectations, whether for good or ill. The left-liberals and the right-liberals (modern conservatives) don’t have the answers. Joining their assumptions is like buying a ticket on the Titanic. They still rule the deck, but the iceberg is not that far off. Again, we’ll see.
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roissy…it’s friday.
I won
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DB…
You are too enticing with that photo. Please, tell us some more about yourself. Do you have a blog? A few little sexual secrets would be nice too.
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nhe, got cut off…:(
but yeah, I wouln’t add much to my first sentence anyways.
It’s FRIDAY.
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Lance —
The flaw in your thinking is that Houllebecq also notes that a system of competiton tends to produce losers, who do not go away, and tend to make themselves terrible threats as they have zilch invested in the system and want to upend the whole thing.
Take for example the rise of the Freikorps in Germany. A nation of great technical, economic, artistic, and other accomplishments. A nation with great historical experience of the cost of war, and many memories enshrined in culture (the Thirty Year’s War 1618-1648 killed a third of German speakers).
Nevertheless, a bunch of young men, experienced in war, priced out of girls/women, made into losers, with little hope of forming a family, in a nation of newly independent women, exercised their own options to make themselves into winners. Attaching themselves into any leader who offered them the opportunity to throw out the whole system and make themselves kings and princes and dukes. Weimar could not find defenders in the street or in the public square because it offered nothing but losing to most young men.
This is the same deal with bin Laden, since he saw coverage of the 1979 Mecca Mosque take-over, he’s wanted to overthrow the Saudi government and make himself king, and he’s found plenty of followers. Same with Zawahari. Or the various groups in Pakistan.
The West’s relative stability vs. other places/cultures has not been IQ — it’s been cooperation, and minimizing fights over women. No more Helen of Troys, or Strongbows (Norman invader called in by an Irish King after a rival stole his wife), or Lancelot-Guineveres (Camelot comes crashing down because Lancelot steals Arthur’s woman). Instead you get widespread cooperation and trust.
This relates DIRECTLY to PUA. Japan’s slowdown, is at least as much a function of Japanese men deciding they are not getting married, so why slave away? As they did from nothing in 1945 to say, 1989. The slowdown in American productivity gains, technical innovation, etc. is not because we don’t have enough smart people, or too many low IQ laborers from Mexico (it doesn’t help of course) but because cooperation and stakes in the game are pretty much zilch by the short-term preference of women.
Paraphrasing Spengler, Women in the West (where they have genuine choice) get the men they deserve, and create: PUA pump and dump players, man-boy geeks opting out of a losing game for diversions, and angry older bitter losers.
This is likely to produce a bunch of guys willing to follow anyone promising to overturn the whole system and make themselves kings. A Caesar, a Napoleon, a Castro, a Chavez, a Mussolini, a Franco, the record is not good.
FAR too many commenters here make the assumption (a SWPL cultural bias) that society runs on the principles of the “West Wing” — “smart” guys running around doing stuff, or maybe “24” or most action TV shows. In reality it is the everyday drudgery and cooperation based on cameraderie in such things as “Big Fixes” or “Dirty Jobs” or “Deadliest Catch” that makes 99% of society function.
Undermine it enough with a PUA-oriented society, the whole thing collapses, no matter how many smart guys you have, or ass kissers for that matter.
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pete:
I was less happy in the west. In talking to other expats, many claim to have more western friends in their newly adopted country. The west can be a lonely place.
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With a few notable exceptions, black people generally drag down all the statistics in America. They are 12% of the population, but :
Are 40% of AIDS cases
Commit about 50% of all violent crime
Virtually all run-down inner-city areas are full of blacks. Cities that have no blacks, have no run-down districts (Salt Lake City, Portland, Canadian cities, etc.).
Are responsible for about 40% of all out-of-wedlock births
Reduce the average educational attainment of the US
Consume 40% of all welfare outlays
Whenever a black guy shoots someone, it is white people’s taxes that have to pay for the police, court, ambulance, and other costs.
Blacks vote Democrat 90% or more (even if the Democrat is white). Gays and single women don’t have nearly as lopsided a political slant. Leftism in America would be a curiousity if not for the blind, unconditional support that blacks provide to any candidate with the letter ‘D’ next to their name on the ballot. Blacks are familiar with the letter ‘D’ as they saw it on their school report cards for 10 years (after dropping out after the 10th grade).
Blacks in Africa are no better. The country of Liberia was created so that blacks from the US could return to Africa and have a country of their own. Liberia even has the same constitution as the US. But left to their own devices, these blacks have let their country degenerate into one that is shoddy even by African standards. Liberian political process involves killing your opponent, eating some parts of his body, and then chopping up the pieces so that mobs in the street can dance around with the pieces. That is what blacks have produced on their own merit.
Each inner city in America is a little Liberia that would become far worse if the non-black fabric wasn’t propping it up.
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“Each inner city in America is a little Liberia that would become far worse if the non-black fabric wasn’t propping it up.”
See Zimbabwe and South Africa for a better understanding of what happens when YT ain’t around to run shit and supply the money. Backs can’t even keep up their own yard, much less a city or a country.
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“See Zimbabwe and South Africa for a better understanding of what happens when YT ”
Uganda too. Idi Amin chased out all the Indian businesspeople (and he even ate a few of them). As a result, Uganda is much poorer now than it was in the 1960s.
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Read this article about why some cultures succeed and others do not.
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That was a truly awesome comment, Keith.
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Ditz.
If you said that while out on a date I’d tell you the STFU and go get me a beer.
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Whiskey:
Clear post. Basically you are saying that everything that men do, we do for pussy. Take away the reward, and we won’t do much.
I’m following you, but wonder if you are missing men’s available adaptations. Or over-estimating men’s need for kids. I understand your notion of soft-polygamy – but is that truly what is happening? Are girls on average fucking a few times a week while the hottest guys are fucking every day?
From my experience, I’d have to say… yes. While in the west, unless I was rolling in the dough, I could not compete. When rich, all of sudden I had a social calendar. In Asia I can have a social calendar, or a cute and young live in.
Those experiences, coupled with the usual marriage/divorce experiences, led me to forget the silly belief system that young boys and girls are fed. It’s just childish romance. And so what – who needs marriage anyway? All I need is young female. I’m adaptable about the details. Kids? Forget about it.
So back to your premise – that without the reward, men won’t work. I’ll agree, but disagree on what the reward is. You say the reward is a mate. I say it is young female. Men will continue to work, to try to get young female.
My experience is that a guy spending cash like water on dates gets young female.
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It seems like the only solution to the Group A with high IQ fearing Group B with low IQ problem is to simply eliminate Group B. It’s not merely enough to expel them, but one must eradicate it from the world and do the best to erase it’s history from the world. The last thing one wants to leave a rump group that has memories of being expelled and cravings for revenge. Besides, in the long term, you spare them the indecency of them being second class citizens in their own nation, or as some would say, the world.
In reality it is the everyday drudgery and cooperation based on cameraderie in such things as “Big Fixes” or “Dirty Jobs” or “Deadliest Catch”
Nobody wants to be a white nigger.
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GNP, Blacks changed over time.
Blacks used to vote reliably Republican, until about 1944 or so (Eleanor Roosevelt demanding open, no racial barriers in primaries was a key). Jackie Robinson was a life-long Republican.
Blacks used to have slightly higher rates of illegitimacy than Whites, higher but not orders of magnitude higher rates of criminal behavior, and the like.
Meanwhile producing the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz, the Blues, some of the greatest music of mankind. If you take the ills you must take the good. You cannot have America without Blacks, they have been part of America since the beginning. They are only 12.5% of the population, but are indeed part of the nation. They are not however the dominant part.
What happened to Black Culture, in 1935 easily the match for White American culture in sophistication, achievement, mastery, and so on is a warning: loss of traditional boundaries, ties, attachments, social structures (Black America used to be THE place for all sorts of societies that provided social cohesion and services outside the Government) … brings with it extreme individualism that causes social collapse.
Within living memory, Blacks in Segregation could walk freely in their own neighborhoods, secure from thugs and gunfire. Now with a Black President but extreme individualism, we see a twisted, violent mirror of the voluntary societies that kept Blacks together morphed into violent gangs in a winner take all society.
Black Culture went from the pinnacle of musical, literary, and culinary achievement to absolute degradation in about sixty years. A warning to us all.
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DA – Sure, your idea sounds good on paper. Didn’t work well for Hitler. The history of humanity is the history of attempted ethnic cleansing. Aside from Native Americans cleansing very small bands of European and East Asian explorers and boat-migrants in pre-columbian times, your plan seems to hold no historical precedent of success, and plenty of precedent of hell on earth.
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You’ve obviously never been to a jazz festival. Or seen many middle or upper class oriented black movies. Black culture is alive and well.
You’re confusing black culture with getto culture.
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“My experience is that a guy spending cash like water on dates gets young female.”
Then you clearly haven’t understood Game. A broke man man with Game will do better than a man who spends $1000 on a date each week.
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Didn’t work well for Hitler.
In roughly 4 years, Hitler managed to wipe away roughly 12 million people. I’d imagine that with modern tech, we could accelerate that schedule to 12 million in a month.
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xsplat, how does laughing at a desperate attempt to sound intelligent by throwing together every word learned in econ 101 make me a ditz? oh well, if it does i’m cool w/ that. this blog needs a resident ditz.
i’d laugh at your response, too. but it’s good game – impressive.
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whiskey,
To add more to what you’ve said, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in which the first minimum wage bill was passed in the U.S. Before and up to that point, blacks had similar unemployment rates to whites. Here’s Thomas Sowell’s article on that:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-11_15_05_TS.html
A lot of the degradation in black family life can be attributed to the trend of higher unemployment. I also see the same trend in the white American male’s feelings toward women. Their liberation and subsequent homing in on “our turf” in the workplace has caused a lot of the anxiety in men today.
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Todd:
And what about a broke man with equal game to a filthy rich man? Money IS game, fool. It’s ALL game.
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To add more to what you’ve said, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in which the first minimum wage bill was passed in the U.S. Before and up to that point, blacks had similar unemployment rates to whites.
So in other words, we have to pay black people less in order to keep them employed. Is it better to have lower wages for blacks but full employment for the black community, or higher wages and higher unemployment? It’s akin to the affirmative action question of whether sending as many black people to the highest ranking colleges possible to make them palatable to whites will is better solution then sending few to elite colleges, some to regular colleges, and the rest to “prolehood”.
A lot of the degradation in black family life can be attributed to the trend of higher unemployment.
Some have argued that the first wave of deindustrialization simply turned urban black males with few skills and little schooling into men that their female counterparts were unwilling to support, which made welfare attractive. This eventually lead to the destructive perpetual cycle where kids in the ghetto think kids come first, then marriage.
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Markets seem to deal quite well with such variations. However immigration that changes the makeup of a society may have broader consequences.
One of Ibn Khaldun’s central concepts was ‘asabiyyah’ – social cohesion – that arises spontaneously amongst kinship groups but that may be amplified by a religious ideology. One might argue that in the US national myth serves this function – immigrants become American, much more so than in other countries (say in England or France). It is possible that some groups may tend to cohere less well than others with US mainstream society.
Over and beyond this immigration obviously changes the makeup of the voting population. So if you have a state with functions much more than that of a night watchman, one that already has redistributive powers there may be the chance that poorer but influential groups that have recently arrived may be appealed to by rent-seeking politicians seeking to put together coalitions.
There seems to be a clear relationship between climate and degree of individualism. So allowing a lot of people from cold countries in might bias policy over the years towards towards freedom and markets. And of course the opposite holds true also.
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“So in other words, we have to pay black people less in order to keep them employed.”
Overall, yes. Unfortunately, black labor is relatively unskilled compared to whites. Sowell’s writings were the first ones that actually clued me in to the pitfalls of hiking the minimum wage.
“Is it better to have lower wages for blacks but full employment for the black community, or higher wages and higher unemployment?”
I would argue it is better to maintain something closer to full employment with lower pay. This keeps people productive, off of government aid, and provides a sense of participation. Other externalities, such as high crime, arise from having a segment of poor people without jobs.
“It’s akin to the affirmative action question of whether sending as many black people to the highest ranking colleges possible to make them palatable to whites will is better solution then sending few to elite colleges, some to regular colleges, and the rest to “prolehood”.”
Sowell and Walter Williams speak a lot on this subject as well. They argue that sending underqualified students to top colleges for the sake of affirmative action only sets those students up for failure. (The statistics show that black students don’t fare as well in these top notch universities.) The effect of being thrown into an academic situation that is too rigorous can be very detrimental to the students as well.
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Chuck said:
“I also see the same trend in the white American male’s feelings toward women. Their liberation and subsequent homing in on “our turf” in the workplace has caused a lot of the anxiety in men today.”
And more will be coming. Did anyone see today’s New York Times story, “As Layoffs Surge, Women May Surpass Men in Job Force?” It says that 83 percent of all recent job lesses have been men’s. Women will soon hold more jobs than men in the US.
Link here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/business/06women.html?_r=2
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The US isn’t going to re-industrialize as long as the Chinese can work cheaper than can blacks. Or as long as the Japanese can mass produce with their robots at prices lower than can a less automated US workforce.
So the getto is here to stay. The argument seems to be about whether they partake of a government sponsored safety net, or not.
Why not re-frame the argument? It was once not unheard of to give economic incentive for becoming infertile. That could be done, on a private basis. Private welfare contingent upon norplant.
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“It is possible that some groups may tend to cohere less well than others with US mainstream society.”
Richard Dawkins, in “The Selfish Gene” presents an argument that selection takes place for genes rather than species. Organisms look after not only themselves, but those organisms that most resemble their genetic makeup. A book called “Social Dynamics” by Sidanius and Pratto cleared this up further:
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“The greater the genetic overlap between two organisms, the greater the degree of altruistic behavior among these organisms one should expect. Among other things, this implies that altruism can really be regarded as an act of genetic selfishness.”
They go further to point out that ethnic groups consist of closely genetically related individuals. This can help explain not only altruism but also inter-group turmoil and ethnic discrimination.
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Good point, Chuck, but don’t neglect that Greek traders of old assimilated cultures across vast tracts of land, became rich, and spread their seed far and wide.
Inter-tribal co-operation is also genetically valuable.
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Keith, shut the fuck up you low IQ prole.
Your answer doesn’t mention low median IQ or mention superiority of white people, therefore you are an idiot liberal talking pc gibberish bullshit. I never read any of that reasoning you wrote on Sailer, so stop making shit up.
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I wish I knew the economic theory to be able to partake in the discussions. I never had much curiosity about economic theory. I’ve always considered it a voodoo art, like astrology or reading chicken entrails. Makes sense only to those who think it makes sense.
But as for free movement of labor and different groups abilities, obviously a Chinese employee is more valuable than a native Fijian of the same wage. Production always goes to where it is cheapest, up until automation and engineering can offset cheap labor. So Germany and Japan can still compete with factories in Indonesia. But in a non-homogenous country like the US, there needs to be room for stratification to allow for Indonesia within Germany, in order for all to participate in production.
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someone: Here’s a better question: why is there such an overlap between rationalizing pre-Stormfronters and this whole PUA scene?
Is there? It seems like it’s on just this PUA blog.
roissy makes most of his posts part culture and gender hbd commentary, so it’s not surprising that he draws a more political crowd. That reinforces itself as some of us stick around for the politics.
My theory is that both correlate with initial sexual insecurity, which makes y’all decide to get much better at seducing women, but leaves a lingering fear that the Other is STEALING YER WIMMIN.
That is universal and it’s not even fear. If there’s no ethnic difference, young men will just make up one. I grow up in a totally un-diverse universe and one of the themes of rural life is trying to steal the neighbouring village’s women while fighting any visiting guys from other towns. It’s human nature.
someone else: high iq people get told in school that the real world is just like school, an iq meritocracy that they will run because they are good at taking tests and studying. in real life, plenty of high iq people are middle managers or outright failures relative to where they expected to be in life, and many dumb people who know how to kiss ass and people like athletes do extraordinarily well. they get bitter and need someone to blame like non-asian minorities and white liberals.
Nice theory, except that the complete opposite seems to be true. The first thing I learned at the university was that to be “in” with the liberal intellectual crowd, it’s best to give the impression that you hate jocks and sports and that you were nerdy in high school. The personalities that fit well in school tend to become left-wingers: they will believe in central authority, rules and regulations and will be afraid of freedom of association with no teacher to run to.
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You mis-spelled right-wingers.
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I would argue it is better to maintain something closer to full employment with lower pay. This keeps people productive, off of government aid, and provides a sense of participation. Other externalities, such as high crime, arise from having a segment of poor people without jobs.
The problem with that solution is that it creates disparities between blacks and whites which blacks and some whites will view as racist, and it will simply create antagonism between blacks and whites. Even if we fully employ black people, you’re still stuck with a poorer group who still needs government assistance to live in high cost of living areas. Even crime won’t go down because some will view a life of crime (or selling drugs) as less degrading than working for low wages. The sense of participation is gone because they’re earning crap living in shitty neighbourhoods while they see whites living middle class lifestyles. Such disparities are unsustainable and will create riots in the long-term.
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Why not re-frame the argument? It was once not unheard of to give economic incentive for becoming infertile. That could be done, on a private basis. Private welfare contingent upon norplant.
According to “Lloyd G.” in a recent Sailer comment thread, this has been attempted:
“Seems like it was about 10 years ago that I saw a story on the nooz about a woman who was giving crack-addicted women money (a couple thousand bucks) if they consented to have their tubes tied. Private money from the benefactor. Consent on the part of the recipients. Fewer crack babies. Who could possibly object? It turns out the woman whose idea this was happened to be white and most of the crack heads were black. As I recall, she had to stop because of threats of lawsuits.”
Next time, it’ll have to be done by someone who can look the traitorous lawyers in the eye and mobilize the public outrage against them that they deserve.
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I take it you’ve never been to Bangkok?
Inequity does not create riots. A sense of entitlement does.
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It seems like the only solution to the Group A with high IQ fearing Group B with low IQ problem is to simply eliminate Group B. It’s not merely enough to expel them, but one must eradicate it from the world and do the best to erase it’s history from the world. The last thing one wants to leave a rump group that has memories of being expelled and cravings for revenge. Besides, in the long term, you spare them the indecency of them being second class citizens in their own nation, or as some would say, the world.
One problem with this Final Solution is, where does it stop? After Group B is eliminated, I’m sure there’ll be some culturally and physically distinct subgroup of Group A which seriously underperforms compared to the new average. Do they go too?
Another problem is that the only way I see such a thing actually happening in the future is via biotech. And as soon as everyone finds out the hard way that a motivated guy, pissed off by his civilization degrading around him due to his government embracing adverse demographic change, has successfully designed and released pathogens capable of practically wiping out the lower-performing races… I don’t give humanity good odds of surviving far beyond that. The Doomsday argument scares me a lot more than most because, given the tech advances within our reach, it really does seem as likely as not that I’m within the second half of humanity.
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If Bush had the balls to outsource to religious groups the ability to dole out welfare (what did he call that program again?), then surely someone else could have the balls to outsource some wellfare to pro-family planning groups.
All it would take is grass roots organizing that can raise enough dosh to lobby government officials. At the very least a little lobbying and an organized group is some sort of legal protection.
You don’t see lawsuits against Planned Parenthood. Or if you do, who cares? Planned Parenthood has political clout.
Start up Planned Community as a social welfare group, and go at it.
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The personalities that fit well in school tend to become left-wingers: they will believe in central authority, rules and regulations and will be afraid of freedom of association with no teacher to run to.
You mis-spelled right-wingers.
Uhm, yes, because left-wingers are known for supporting laissez faire and right-wingers known for supporting command economies?
Almost all of what the left-wing liberals do is about inventing government jobs for people who never really want to leave school.
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I see I’m not the first guy to have had that fantasy. I obsessed over that one about 6 years ago. Yup, you can bet your assets on a targetted plague.
However it might be a benevolent plague. It’s within current technology to unleash a plague that would make everyones children smarter. No kidding.
The idea of race is a bit historical. Biotech to pick your babies brain power is not far off – and like i said – that type of biotech needn’t even be a choice.
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Jaakkell, are you telling me that Jocks are liberal and the stoners are conservative?
Are you an astronaught from the alternate earth on the flipside orbit of this one? Twilight zone reversal? Can you read text in a mirror?
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It turns out the woman whose idea this was happened to be white and most of the crack heads were black
The problem is that it looks racist to some people even if it’s a privately accepted arrangement. A white women funding sterilization for poor black women would look suspect to most people…
I take it you’ve never been to Bangkok?
Even in Haiti, the poor black people started rioting over the fact the rich black (well, light skinned) people had all the wealth and resources, so why would the similar situation in America not create similar violence?
Inequity does not create riots. A sense of entitlement does.
Being natively born in a white country does give a sense of entitlement, even to the non-whites who expect to be as rich as whites.
Do they go too?
If it’s a trait that’s deemed to be inferior and causes poor standards of living, I don’t see why not.
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However it might be a benevolent plague. It’s within current technology to unleash a plague that would make everyones children smarter. No kidding.
The idea of race is a bit historical. Biotech to pick your babies brain power is not far off – and like i said – that type of biotech needn’t even be a choice.
Yeah, that may be the best outcome we can hope for. The problem is that if such plagues can be designed and released by lone wolves, it only takes a single one with bad intentions to pretty much end us all. And the other problem is that it’s probably easier to design a pathogen to kill lots of people — after all, such things randomly evolve on their own, and it’s not unheard of for a disease to be less dangerous to some races than others — than it is to design one that makes hosts smarter or more conscientious or whatever other attributes are preferred. (But there’s some hope since dead hosts stop infecting others, giving one advantage to benevolent plagues — that’s why no disease has wiped us out yet, after all…)
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I’m not familiar with the riots in Haiti, but wasn’t genuine hunger a part of the equation? And what about fantastic levels of unemployment? And lack of natural resources?
Are you suggesting that a lowered minimum wage combined with fertility-punitive welfare would cause riots? Well, in what alternate universe won’t we have riots then? Because you seem to say that in this universe, the riots are inevitable – its only a matter of timing. Either we’ll lose the ability to pay welfare, or we’ll stop paying welfare. Or something like that. Right?
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Uhm, yes, because left-wingers are known for supporting laissez faire and right-wingers known for supporting command economies?
Almost all of what the left-wing liberals do is about inventing government jobs for people who never really want to leave school.
it all depends on who the disappointed and entitled high iq person blames for the life he wanted being “denied” to him. if he thinks that capitalist fat cats and redneck jocks have the status and money his teachers told him would be his, he will be a left-wing socialist intellectual. if he thinks that affirmative action advocates and the non-asian minorities who benefit from AA are to blame for him not having the status and money and power his teachers all told him he’d have in the real world, then he’ll hop on the race realism bandwagon and dedicate his life to proving that iq is the most important thing in the world and that his race is more likely to have it. sooner or later he’ll make the world give him the same recognition his teachers did, just like the beta-turned-PUA hopes sooner or later he’ll find a woman who loves him like his mom did. thus the overlap between race realism and puas. a bunch of whiny man-children who just can’t cope with the fact life ain’t fair. wah.
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Chris, as someone who is middle aged, my own mortality is no longer my greatest fear. I, for one, welcome our pathogenetic overlords. Beats the hell out of nuclear doom or WW3 over water and food resources.
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I can’t believe that noone has mentioned the fact that this question was asked and answered by David Ricardo almost 200 years ago.
The answer is that when certain peoples or regions differ in abilities or resources, EVEN if one group exceeds the abilities or resources of another for every conceivable output, each of the groups can still raise their standard of living by trading with the other.
Let us say that Americans are better at mining coal, better at building TVs, better at making window squeegees, and better at writing software than members of Retardistan. The RATIO at which we do these various things (1 ton of coal in a man day, 500 lines of good code in a man day = 1:500) will differ from the ratio at which the members of Retardistan do them (0.1 tons of coal in a man day, 100 lines of good code in a man day = 1:1000), and thus we should each specializing in the area that we do better – relatively – at.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
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“And what about a broke man with equal game to a filthy rich man? Money IS game, fool. It’s ALL game.”
You clearly have never practiced Game, or met anyone who has.
You said that ‘men who spend money like water get hotties’. Such a sentence is ultra-Beta. Once you have Game, wealth is a tiny factor, as the poor guys with Game beat the large number of rich Betas hands down.
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TJIK, that works, up until automation becomes cheaper than man hours. This is why China is staying competitive, because a human workforce is cheaper than re-tooling the robots.
But at the point when the engineers can output new tools on their prototyping machines, then the labor force can’t compete with the engineers. At least China can re-tool a good bulk of their labourors to be engineers. Not all societies can.
Cheap labor is not always cheaper than cheap tech.
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“I take it you’ve never been to Bangkok?”
Or Mexico. Or Brazil. Or India. Or Russia.
Inequality is the norm. Wealth is naturally spread among a pyramid-shaped distribution. A diamond-shaped distribution with the middle class as the largest group was a historical anomaly that lasted in the US for a half-century, but it is not the norm.
A pyramid-shaped distribution, with the poorest as the largest group, is the norm, and what America will become.
Even the poorest, however, do have technologies at their disposal that even the richest of 100 years ago did not have.
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And why does every post devolve into something resembling the discussions of 19th century eugenicists.
“devolve?” this post started out at that level to begin withh!
hope we finally stop hearing commenters act like the hbd crowd is misinterpreting roissy. the way the guy eagerly smacks down anybody he disagrees with, if he was against them he’d have been on their asses ages ago. fact he always stayed silent screamed volumes. now at least he’s comin closer to openly stating he’s a race realiast, even tho hes still dancing around it a little by phrasing this post soambiguously.
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Tood, you overemphasize what you are the variables you play with, and discount the ones you don’t play with. Being handsome is an advantage, as is being tall. Being rich is an advantage. Sure, we can use other advantages. You don’t HAVE to be rich to get young girls, but if you are old and ugly, it sure helps.
Maybe you’ve never tried to drip money like you just don’t care?
In my example, as a late thirties guy of below average physical attractiveness, I dated some, but struggled. After I was earning $1000 a day with my business, suddenly I had three girlfriends. Spending a hundred or two on a night out because it makes no difference to you will get you complements totally unrelated to money. You just go up an attractive notch.
Don’t get all polerized about what game is. Having a full head of hair is game, as much as having nice clothes. Just because you have more choice over one than the other doesn’t mean both are not game. Your genes are game too. Whatever you bring to the table is game. Whatever works is game.
Money works. Argue with that.
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Roissy,
Thomas Sowell covered this topic thoroughly in his trilogy on race (Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture and Conquests and Cultures).
Here is a brief summary of some of the results from these three works
“Internationally, empirical evidence shows colonialism, imperialism, and/or claims of genetic superiority are all theories failing to explain technological or economic differences among nations. Sowell’s trilogy, Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture and Conquests and Cultures exemplifies his broad analytical approach to historical processes, cutting across centuries of history, and many different peoples. He compares nations and minority groups within nations, particularly migrants. On an international scale, cultural factors are very important. Some countries heavily subjected to imperialism and colonialism are themselves among the most prosperous. For example, he notes that once backward Britain survived centuries of Roman colonialism and imperialism, to emerge centuries later as the most powerful empire on earth.
Too often, Sowell maintains, trendy explanations of racism and imperialism, or their reverse- simplistic claims of genetic superiority- are used to explain significant historical patterns, when mundane factors such as geography can be much more relevant and useful in understanding an issue. Factors such as the presence of navigable rivers, good harbors favorable for transportation and trade, mountain ranges that capture water for later irrigation, fertile land, climate patterns that facilitate the movement of productive plants and animals, etc. all heavily influenced nations’ or people’s successes over the span of history. Tropical Africa for example, is particularly deficient on a number of such geographic advantages. Sowell shows that for centuries, non-white nations like China were more advanced that those of Europe until comparatively recent times. He also argues that the European West borrowed and adapted freely from other nations and regions- from the writing systems and domesticates of Southwest Asia, to the numerous inventions or innovations of China (gunpowder, compass, etc), to various other strands in-between. Within national settings, students of East Asian origin in the West frequently outperform their white counterparts and score higher on IQ tests. These patterns undercut simplistic white supremacist theories of inherent genetic superiority. In 1983’s Economics and Politics of Race Sowell predicts that the long cycles of history may yet again reshuffle the success of nations and peoples.”
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Jaakkell, are you telling me that Jocks are liberal and the stoners are conservative?
No. Can you please at least read the comments before replying?
Although now that I think of it, I probably threw a bit of a cultural miscommunication. You think of jocks as people who fit in school, I most certainly don’t – where I’m from there are no school sport teams. When I say people who fit in school, I mean people who do well with tests, teachers, a work environment with low risk and set rules and regulations for advancement = ends up liking academia and secure government jobs, will never start a business (notice how it’s much more commonly women that are left-liberal?)
As for stoners, where I’m from, people who did drugs were anything from neonazis to anarchists or just too apathetic to care.
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Roissy
I appreciate the candor and freedom to discuss taboo subjects that your blog affords. It also highlights just how focused on race, people in America are.
In the near to middle east, race is not the primary form of identity. Religion is. Whether you’re a muslim, jew, christian, hindu or buddhist is what’s important. In the far east, ethnic, nationalistic and linguistic identity prevails. In Africa, in countries that have few non-blacks, tribal identity is the prevailing form of identity. In America, however, race reigns supreme. A pity.
I don’t believe that race plays the dominant role in the success of a people. It is culture. Culture is key. I can’t recall the study…….but a study was undertaken of post colonial societies. It found that out of all the former colonies, the former British colonies have done the best. These former colonies, now countries, are thriving in relation to their Spanish, French and Portuguese counterparts. Take note, the British did not intermix with their subjects to any large degree. Not nearly as much as the Spanish did. Virtually no interracial mixing took place but cultural assimilation did take place and those colonies are now thriving countries. It is culture that makes the difference. Not race.
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Not mentioned is SE Asia or Africa in your quote. Everyone knows East Asians are high IQ. And your SW Asians – which class of Indians are you referring to?
This notion of no such thing as genetic superiority is not rigorous. Some groups are generally superior at some things. Twin studies, my man, twin studies. It always comes back to twin studies.
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Jaakkell – ah, ok – ya, we need to define our terms, don’t we? In our Canadian town we had the stoners, the geeks, and the jocks. We didn’t even count the dolts as a group, because everyone knows they don’t count.
The stoners included a few geeks, but the geeks included no stoners. The stoners were widely social, and many were academically talented, many were not. Pot was common to the time.
By fitting in, I assumed you meant fitting in socially. Fitting in has always meant fitting in socially. High school has no academic fitting in, as far as I saw. University has that. In high school, you have to dumb down your vocabulary in order to have friends. Has that changed?
I guess you mean that the Geeks of the chess and camera club tend to be liberal. Wouldn’t doubt it.
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Correction, the former British colonies with a high proportion of Chinese and high staus Indian did best.
Don’t forget all the other colonies. How’s Burma doing, lately?
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Correction, the former British colonies with a high proportion of Chinese and high CASTE Indian did best.
Don’t forget all the other colonies. How’s Burma doing, lately?
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Chuck — good points. I had not seen that Sowell data. Thanks.
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Correction, the former British colonies with a high proportion of Chinese and high staus Indian did best.
jamaica seems to be doing okay.
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Ya, good one! Anyone have a list of colonies we can compare? I’m guessing the SE Asian colonies with primarily Malay bloodlines and no compensating Chinese ruling class aren’t faring well. I’d expect any African colonies to be faring as expected.
Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan. Of course they are doing well! What else would you expect! Malaysia is above average for the region only because of the Chinese interbreed to create the ruling class there. Everyone knows the locals don’t create the local econonomy there, or anywhere else in the SE Asia region.
Previous colonialization can be good – but no better than the people who were colonized. It’s like IQ – you are born with a maximum potential, and no amount of training will raise you above that maximum potential. And that potential is hereditable – not cultural.
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No way I am reading 150 posts. I figure no one will read this either, but what the hell:
Econ major, last year of school, avid reader of the econ blogosphere, so take it for what it’s it worth. I’ll try to make it worth your while to read.
The fundamental concepts won’t change: markets are supposed to allocate markets in accordance with supply and demand, and when they function correctly, they do it perfectly. Doesn’t matter if people are productive or unproductive…people will still demand stuff, people will still work, and markets will put people to where they are most wanted. At least, wanted in terms of who can pay the most.
You still will want to encourage positive externalities, and still want to tax people for negative externalities.
I don’t see why the fundamentals would change much at all. True, it would no longer make as much sense to provide as much schooling to a less intelligent group…but that would be MUCH more easily accomplished by abolishing factory schools and tailoring it to individuals…cause, even if you thinks blacks have a 10-15 point lower IQ than whites, there are still lots of blacks smarter than a lot of whites, or of equal intelligence.
Plus, even if there are GENETIC differences, two more things:
1. That doesn’t mean we have completely eliminated social effects. For instance, if we found out tomorrow that the children of rich kids were 50 points smarter just by genetics, that STILL wouldn’t change the fact that there are crappy schools.
2. It doesn’t mean people can’t learn. It means people can’t learn as fast or as much. If you put your mind to it, you probably can learn the fundamentals of economics and finance easily, because it isn’t rocket science. Because of this, there are a lot of smart people that believe a lot of stupid things, because they don’t put in the effort to learn properly. Karl Marx was relatively intelligent, but his ideas were still made of fail.
Also, the fundamental concepts of economics don’t require that much intelligence:
For instance, the Law of Demand. When the price goes down, buy more of it. Not hard to understand.
Law of Supply: If someone is paying you a lot of money to do something, you should do it.
Similarly, externalities: I am not being punished for dumping acid into your drinking water. That’s not an intelligence issue, that’s a morality issue. Smart people will still do it, which is why we have dicks at Wal-mart that store pesticides right next to a river.
So, Roissy, I think economics won’t change very much, at least fundamentally. Politics might change, and economic recommendations might change as a result of new knowledge (as well they should) but the fundamentals won’t
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I’m not familiar with the riots in Haiti, but wasn’t genuine hunger a part of the equation? And what about fantastic levels of unemployment? And lack of natural resources?
Of course, that’s the main problem in the country, but just because the situation is better in the United States is magically going to mitigate the situation.
Are you suggesting that a lowered minimum wage combined with fertility-punitive welfare would cause riots?
Yes, the problem is that black people would realize that they’re poorer than their white counterparts, and their lives are more “miserable”, and that black people don’t “run anything”. In effect, affirmative action is a release valve that essentially benefits those in the programs by promising them a middle class lifestyle.
Besides, we’d need welfare for people who’d earn below the current minimum wage. $130 to $150 per week (gross pay) isn’t going to pay for basic living for an adult, especially in high cost of living areas unless you want 20 people crammed into a home…
jamaica seems to be doing okay.
I’m too lazy to look up the GDP per capita stats, but by Caribbean standards, Jamaica’s on the lower end of the scale, but still considerably better than Haiti. In contrast, Barbados, Bahamas, and Trinidad have GDPs per capita in the range of some Eastern European nations, and for all intents and purposes, Black Caribbeans live better than their African counterparts in countries with relative stability, democratic elections, and few incidents of massive starvation. Sadly, the only real exception to Caribbean prosperity is Haiti which lacks the mineral resources, tourism industry, and off-shore banking that the other islands have.
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Sure, but that’s not saying a whole lot, is it? The hereditable aspect of IQ is the fixed maximum potential people are born with. That isn’t even contentious nowadays.
That obvious fact has little to do with how various groups of various abilities interact economically.
But as I’ve said, I think all these arguments are historical. The coming singularity makes them out out date.
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Only if there is going to be a singularity, which is still pretty sketchy 😉
Also, it does say a lot…simply because there’s still a lot of room for improving schools.
One of the things it reminds me of is the Solow Growth model. Higher savings=higher wealth, but only up to a point. As far as we know, no nation is even close to that point.
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I haven’t been in the west in some time – but let me tell you what I see in Asia. Families live according to their means, and that means many famiies live in hand to mouth poverty in slums, alongside communities of wealthier families.
Race plays a part of who gets to be born where. Even whites have their white trash who marry white trash and have white trash babies. In the Philippines, the richer tend to have more western blood. In SE Asia, the richer tend to have Chinese blood – and maybe some Western in the Spice Islands.
So if those economies can have poor getto neighbourhoods where the value of a house is only slightly higher than it is now in bad areas of Detroit, and where the cost of food is roughly the same, why can’t that happen in the US?
Oh, wait, it already has.
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OK, Champ, I’ll bite. The schools have room for improvement. But then what are you going to do with a better educated workforce? The US still can’t compete with China for manufacture, no matter how educated they are. And for service industries there is India.
Whatcha gonna do with all that fancy book learnin’?
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DA, I’ll repeat my point. In Asia, people are explicity racist. People of all classes assume race. People make decisions based on race. It isn’t a dirty little secret, like it is in the west. Are there race riots here? Sure, but not too often, nor too serious. The Chinese move about when they smell them on the wind, but own enough of the governments to keep their investments safe.
Will there be more race wars in the US? Sure. But neither too serious or often.
Economically speaking, it’s best to have Indonesia inside Germany, or black gettos of productive workers inside a re-industrialized US, rather than to outsource all production.
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@ Realist
“In America, however, race reigns supreme. A pity.
I don’t believe that race plays the dominant role in the success of a people. It is culture.”
You have misinterpreted Roissy’s question in terms of his definitions to race, ethnicity, and religion to help your own counterpoint. You are equating race to ethnicity and separating culture for your example. In metropolitan USA, there is a distinction between all three. Take the phrase ‘conservative American Jew;’ Jew impies a race, American denotes an ethnicity, and conservative implies a culture. There are is no distinction in the Middle East between a conservative Muslim or a liberal Muslim because no distinction is encouraged to exist (in such terms). An Afghani Muslim versus a Pakistani Muslim is a trivial contrast to the Western culture, but it might have some conceivable importance regionally (although none that most Americans can interpret).
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“Economically speaking, it’s best to have Indonesia inside Germany, or black gettos of productive workers inside a re-industrialized US, rather than to outsource all production.”
That is some crazy shit that I have never even come close to contemplating before. I look forward to contemplating this… “on the TREE OF WOE!”
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While you are contemplating that on the Baribian’s tree of woe, consider that modern societies, even in Asia, admit to some social maneoverability – so there is alsways some chance to move out of the getto. An extremely low minimum wage and areas of extremely low property value don’t mean an inability for the industrious, talented, and lucky to change fortunes.
For instance in the Philippines, where poverty is extreme and rampant, some families work hard as hell and with very little resources to climb out of an impossible situation. And so step by step, those families do.
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I put my first comment up before Roissy had refined his question, so I missed the cue about racial realism that wound up snowballing. I assumed the temporal, seemingly off-topic inspiration came from that ‘stimulus package,’ which I had recently capitalized upon as a double entendre in my facebook status.
Regarding race realism, I am not inclined to disagree with any of the inconvenient truths. However, I would never run with race-specific statistics that condemn blacks only because I confidently presume a socioeconomic correlation. Clearly a black person is capable of high intelligence, whether or not it is likely. Furthermore, I visualize an aptitude bell curve of sorts, where the least intelligent penalize the average to a greater compound amist the conformists.
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“…because I confidently presume a socioeconomic correlation”
You mis-spelled causation.
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“For instance in the Philippines, where poverty is extreme and rampant, some families work hard as hell and with very little resources to climb out of an impossible situation. And so step by step, those families do.”
I (south Brooklyn) am friends with three Philippine contemporaries and they are all from first generation entrepreneurial alpha males. Absolutely anecdotal of course, but it coincides with your point.
As for sweatshops, I love em. Atheism, am with it. Continental stifling of IQ inheritance? The emotionals will wage that war for me. So what about any of my statements argued against what you were saying exP?
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Socieconomics caused by IQ, rather than the converse, of course. If you believe in merely correlation, there are studies that correlate IQ, as measured in infancy, with later economic success. Causation.
Of course there are also other causative factors, such as executive-control – or being able to wait for rewards.
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“So what about any of my statements argued against what you were saying exP?”
I had misunderstood what you meant by:
“Furthermore, I visualize an aptitude bell curve of sorts, where the least intelligent penalize the average to a greater compound amist the conformists.” and “Clearly a black person is capable of high intelligence, whether or not it is likely. ” to mean something similar to you thought IQ was largey a cause of environmental factors. Which would go along with your presumption that I endorse ” Continental stifling of IQ inheritance”
I am of the opinion that it takes very little to realize ones IQ potential, and that we usually do. It takes abuse and neglect and a lack of a stimulating environment to stifle IQ potential. Anyone with access to the internet or their friends books and a loving family member ought to grow themselves up just fine.
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Are there race riots here?
Well, that’s the problem. There shouldn’t be *any* race riots in the first place.
Even whites have their white trash who marry white trash and have white trash babies
Yes, but even white babies have the privledge of being white. Their IQ maybe low, but nobody presumes that they’re potential criminal or the reason why America’s economy imploded. Steve Sailor and race realists don’t write about white trash, they write about black people.
Families live according to their means, and that means many famiies live in hand to mouth poverty in slums
So in other words, it’s better for the US to look like a richer version of Brazil with even less race mixing? Having even greater disparities of wealth simply exacerbates the problem between blacks and whites.
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” “…because I confidently presume a socioeconomic correlation”
You mis-spelled causation.”
I like the cut of your gib. At the University of Michigan, I hated walking amongst my IMPLIED peers; blacks who clearly were admitted from shit-eating public schools of Detroit. I have always been able to rally myself around the point that ‘what one man can do, another can do.’
Unless, of course, he can’t.
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Also – I would not “run with statistics” because they are always taken from an open system. Thus the yearning for a one-handed economist.
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Yes we do. We’ve seen Cops. All the reality cop TV shows are in persuit of some white trash thug. I never knew whites could be so dumb until I saw those shows. Damn right white trash are a criminal class. What else could they be? Drunken idiots, the lot. Fat, drunken idiots, I meant to say. And you call being white a priveledge? I doubt you’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting an upper class black. Educate yourself at a Jazz show as to a cultured society. I’d choose being black in that culture than being born of white trash any day.
Anyone who uses the word “should” is equal to anyone who uses the word “forever”. A mental proton lost in vaste space of his expansive head.
Why do you assume that your white trash brothers won’t be there beside you in the slums and slum factories? And who ever said that the races will mix less? And do I care about problems between blacks and whites? I already mentioned that strife is inevitable, and acceptable.
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The point I really wanted to make an hour or so ago is that most Americans/humans/capitalists don’t use their brain to 100% capacity over the course of a workday. Even our globe’s best and brightest are economically inclined to slack off when their production can be tempered. If whites require 80% of their intellectual capacity to process a job and blacks require 95% of their own, does an employer attempt to exploit the remaining 15% of the white man’s capacity for dividends? If some guy gives 65% of his capability and his counterpart is much smarter but demonstrates only 25% of his talent in his willingness to produce, WHO IS MORE VALUABLE?
Let’s assume I could sell debt obligations to small timers with equal sales aptitude as my black colleague. Black has no value (or disvalue) as a characteristic. But say some blacks applied themselves more to a job that came “more simply” to whites. As long as it wasn’t too sophisiticated, there is no tradeoff in productivity. I mean, if I sell many bonds myself but I should actually select the money behind each of them, I am underscoring my potential and acknowledging my inferior to get busy (on my behalf).
So, like I said before, if a man stands next to me, I will determine his aptitude before I go into business with him. If he is smarter than me, I will defer decisions to him as I imagine dependable.
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I used to employ a small workforce for a website design company. I found no correlation between IQ and artistic ability.
Sales people aren’t screened for mathematical ability.
I don’t screen women based on being self aware.
All employers hire based on getting the job done. That’s a given. A hard worker who works well is rewarded more than a lazy one with more competency. Stating the obvious.
People rise to their ability. Or, in my case, we slack off to the best of our ability. Some are better at rising or slacking than others – and that seems to be economically important, in an era of free trade, where people of high ability can at the same time have a low valued currency.
Peope rise to both their level and their motivation. And some groups have less of both – and some have less of one.
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I’m an economics professor at George Mason, FWIW.
What you might want to glance at:
As a previous commenter noted, Greg Clark’s Farewell to Alms is well worth reading. He’s now collecting even more evidence that more capitalistic Brits had more kids.
Giovanni Peri, like Clark, is at UC Davis. Peri’s work on immigration points out that the division of labor reduces the costs of immigration: If immigrants really are different from natives, then there’s room for wealth-increasing specialization, Adam-Smith-style.
One upshot: Unskilled Mexican immigrants take physical jobs, unskilled natives take talking jobs. They’re not in direct competition.
From Brown: Weil and Putterman’s new stuff, which will be the Next Big Thing: They collect data on who immigrated where since 1492 and draw some fascinating, fascinating economic conclusions. Years ago, Weil coauthored one of the most famous articles in economic growth research–Google Scholar will find it for you.
And take a look at my work on how IQ matters more for nations than for individuals: In a few papers, I show that smarter groups are more cooperative, low-skilled immigrants aren’t likely to hurt skilled native wages (and may raise native wages substantially) and that the average IQ score in a country is an incredibly strong predictor of national economic performance. I wrote a lot of this with psychologist Joel Schneider.
I also have some stuff on the IQ of immigrants. It’s been a fun field to work in.
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We’d appreciate some links, Garrett. Or at least details.
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Oh, and my GMU colleague Bryan Caplan has a paper showing that high-IQ people are more likely to favor markets. He uses survey data to make the point….
That probably matters a lot at the national level: Harder to get voters to support pro-market policies in lower-average-IQ countries. Here’s hoping IQ differences have a substantial manipulable environmental component….
So IQ apparently matters for public choice on both the public opinion side and on the peaceful cooperation side….
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Link to my papers in my name. I’ve given enough info for Google Scholar to find the rest of it for you….
…That tenure clock is tickin’, so I gotta get back to work….
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Realist makes an important point about the Anglosphere and its reluctance to interbreed racially. One common theme there is a rather strictly enforced segregation, historically speaking. At least until very recently.
However, it must be noted that both Black and White segments of those populations shared the same Anglo culture, in the main. Can we say the same of the Spanish situation? And exactly what does Realist mean when he lays empahsis on “culture”? I need further clarification on these points.
Comments?
The Obsidian
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Found this, Garrett:The “Free Market” and the Asian Crisis | Garett Jones
Abstract: The Asian financial crisis, which devastated many of the newly industrializing countries, is said to have demonstrated the inherent fragility of economies built upon laissez-faire principles. However, it appears that the major sources of disruption have come from policies that deviate from laissez faire, such as government-guaranteed bailouts and international monetary policy. That capitalist economies were afflicted by the crisis does not constitute an indictment of free markets.
This is why I don’t pay close attention to economics – it seems an in-group squabble with no predictive value. Chomsky pointed out decades ago that the west doesn’t practice capitalism. and socializes huge swaths of its economy, from research to agriculture. This is also a reason that within debates or discussions, the admonition google is not always pertinent. It’s too broad and doesn’t address specific arguments. It’s like saying – well, if you would only go to school, of course you’d never have that erroneous belief.
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with blockquotes:
Found this, Garrett:
This is why I don’t pay close attention to economics – it seems an in-group squabble with no predictive value. Chomsky pointed out decades ago that the west doesn’t practice capitalism. and socializes huge swaths of its economy, from research to agriculture.
This is also a reason that within debates or discussions, the admonition google is not always pertinent. It’s too broad and doesn’t address specific arguments. It’s like saying – well, if you would only go to school, of course you’d never have that erroneous belief.
Summaries of arguments with links to backup articles seems more educative.
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obsidian re-wrote history with:
Sadly, the only real exception to Caribbean prosperity is Haiti which lacks the mineral resources, tourism industry, and off-shore banking that the other islands have.
Haiti used to be the jewel in the crown of the French possessions in the new world. That was when the French ran it.
The real problem in Haiti is that immediately upon independence, the 2nd country to achieve that in the Western hemisphere, about 1801, the new black govt murdered all whites in the country.
Haiti became Weissfrei, and has stayed that way. What has Haiti done to attract business?
Haiti had been a big player in global trade until that time. Why do you think France fought so hard to keep it? Haiti then fell off the map economically.
Haiti is a prime example of the impact of race on economic development.
And of racism.
Of course, poverty in Haiti is due in part to regulations. Haitians used to get very low wage jobs from the USA, like tying the webbing in baseball gloves. I think at one time Disney made T-shirts there. That stopped when the American do gooders campaigned against such low wage sweat shops, so the jobs went elsewhere.
I have a friend who went to Haiti some years ago with a church group to do good. What impressed her was the poverty and the huge number of children. There were children everywhere, she remarked. Duh.
Well, that is the future of the USA. Same people, same outcome.
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Joel:
Even with extrapolating demographic trends, no, that is not the future. It might be a future closer to Malaysia, with a ruling class that is of pure and mixed ruling class race, and largely separate class of voting blocks. Or think Thailand. Or Indonesia. Whites are rather good at dominating other cultures, as we do so roughly the same way the Chinese do. Through trade and intermarriage.
You don’t think Obama is Black, do you?
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i fear that the HBD discussion is going to scare off the pua crowd
can we separate this blog in to two separate blogs – one that is all hbd and one that is all pua
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Garett:
When you state that illegal immigrants don’t displace native labor for jobs, I think you overlook our underclasses. Every job some Mexican illegal takes under a table is one less job that our poor white trash or inner city black man can apply for.
Some economists, such as Paul Craig Roberts also doubt that comparative advantage is really applicable in a globalized economy, esp where there are few, if any, transnational labor laws.
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Put the question another way: which influencial power or culture brokers in the US are pure race African? And of the most influencial, what is their relative mixture, compared to the least influential? I wouldn’t know, as I can’t see past Beyonce and her beauty and talent. Or Vanessa Williams and her suave charm. Tiger Woods? Colin Powell?
In SE Asia there is no race controversy. Sure, many Indonesians and Thais hate the Chinese, but none will begrudge that the Chinese are clever with money. Or that between them and the Arabs own most all commerce. And they’ll still vote in a mixed race Chinese, or even a pure bred Chinese.
No, don’t worry that the whites will lose power to the blacks. We’ll just let them think so.
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Pete – what is HBD an acronym for? And why do PUAs use uncommon acronyms without first using real words?
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hbd = human biodiversity
Not a PUA term. Check out the links to Steve Sailer and GNXP for the HBD blogosphere.
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Jaakell, I never implied HBD is a PUA term. I implied that PUAs like to talk in code, like professors like to use latin. Makes them feel in the know, in the in crowd.
Just use regular old English, at the beginning of posts or at least once in a thread, as if you gave a crap about people outside your clique.
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Speaking of cliques and their preference for ingroup language, Pete, it seems you have a preference for not only cliqueish acronyms, but cliquish discourse. You’re being rather feminine, aren’t you? Trying to use social sanction to limit other’s speech towards a direction you favor? Why not limit your choice of blog posts and comments upon which to comment? Tightly limited discourse can’t pull together from a wide range of disciplines to get a big picture. At least, that’s the new business management theory. Get a group of disimilar professionals to get innovation.
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expat, I see what you mean and it’s true, but it doesn’t actually fit well in the case of HBD. HBD is forced into a clique because polite society just shuts it out and you get a lot of screaming if you speak of it to the wrong person. Mentioning HBD without immediately spelling it out is a sort of a secret handshake…
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Well, I’d never heard of it, and I’ve been speaking my mind for many years now. As have many others. Regardless, it’s convention because it is polite to firstly define acronyms when using them in public.
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what i find most interesting about hbd is that it is obviously true and yet polite society has decreed it to be taboo
I mean the fact that on average the members of some races are born with dramatically lower iqs than the members of other races, and the fact that there is nothing you can really do in terms of better nutrition or education to eliminate that gap
that is an incredible taboo
and the people i associate with are not stereotypical swpl types but just a normal spectrum of high iq high education folks
for me personally knowledge of hbd has led me to have much more sympathy for those born with a low iq – i mean i think that those of us born with a high iq should structure society in such a way as to help out or fellow citizens born with a low iq
somehow or the other every person in america who works 40 hours a week should be given a living wage – and hbd makes me realize that people like me born with a high iq have it really easy – i can if i want work ten hours a week and make six figures while my janitor probably has to work 60 hours a week to just scrape by
hbd has made me care more about those born with low iq – i wonder – as hbd gets accepted more over time by others with a high iq whether it will lead them to feeling more protective and generous towards our fellow citizens born with a low iq
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Jim
Jim
Nope. It was. Read edge.org . It’s trickling down, from big thinkers, as well as it’s trickling up from what people know but in peculiar company dare not speak. fredoneverything.com . Stickmanbangkok.com . It WAS taboo. Now it merely a matter of factions. No longer is acedemia one of those factions – now academia is leading open discourse. Well, how can you argue with genetics and twin studies? Seriously – how could it be done?
People are becoming resigned.
And besides, which is better, a colt or a thourougbred (did I get that right?) A purebred or a mutt? A Purebred Jew or a mix Jew Latina? Mix breeds are hot.
Well, that’s very racist of you, isn’t it?! Or should I say nationalistic? Why are only those within your country of your care and concern? Why think of the poor Ecuadorian sweater knitter the next time you shop for knitwear?
And is it so improbably to have two economies functioning on the same currency? Detroit already has near zero value in some of the real estate. Food is already subsidized and the basics are the same price globally. Food and shelter – what did I miss?
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Cheap labor isn’t only about immigration. In a global economy with cheap shipping, cheap labor is also about manufacture.
And this is why the question of race and how to deal with gettos comes down to minimum wage. At what wage do you want to just outsource, and go ahead and pay your getto folk to to not work?
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Google “citizenist”
This is the philosophy of putting your fellow citizens ahead of the people that are not citizens
Makes sense to me
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No, there isn´t. This is particular of Roissy´s blog.
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As usualy, replies to questions like Roissy’s don’t get done in one blog post. It won’t get done in two, either, but here are some more important pieces on cognition, economics, and politics.
First, some more from Ed Glaeser. If you want to get smart real fast, read his stuff.
In this piece , http://www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/hier/2005/HIER2097.pdf , Glaeser argues that cognitive limitations interact more strongly with phenomenon like “rational ignorance” and other factors in public choice critiques of government, so cognitive biases augur in favor of limited government.
In a big sense I agree, but I also see lots of cases where businesses pratice what I call “cognitive predation,” where they pull crap designed to sort out stupid consumers from smart consumers, and then shear the stupid consumers.
In general, for instance, retail stores offer much higher percent commissions on the sale of extended warranties, which are a crappy deal for customers. In fact, you’ll see many commission structures for salespeople which reward them most for screwing dumb customers. The effort that salespeople then expend selling crap to dumb people is deadweight loss; the effort could have been expended into value-creating activity, instead of raw wealth transfer.
The counter-argument, based on Glaeser’s paper, is that attempts by government to deal with this will simply generate worse policies, because the political process exacerbates this kind of predation.
Another great paper, http://www.people.hbs.edu/rvargas/Randy/MoneyIllusion.pdf , shows how inflation illusion actually messed up stock prices. Essentially, because investors and especially stock market analysts used a rule of thumb where they discounted present cash values using nominal interest rates.
Therefore, when inflation is low, risky investments are overvalued, and when it’s high, they are undervalued.
The money quote, from the paper:
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we need not look any further than to the leading practitioner model of equity valuation, the so-called “Fed model (Despite this name, the model has absolutely no official or special status within the Federal Reserve system.),” to find corroborating evidence of stock-market investors falling prey to money illusion. The Fed model relates the yield on stocks to the
yield on nominal bonds. Practitioners argue that the bond yield plus a risk premium defines a “normal” yield on stocks, and that the actual stock yield tends to revert
to this normal yield. Consistent with this practitioner argument, Sharpe [2002], Asness [2000], and Campbell and Vuolteenaho [2004] find that the Fed model is quite
successful as an empirical description of aggregate stock prices — prices are set as if the market used the Fed model to price stocks. Logically, however, the Fed model is on weak grounds, as it is based on precisely the money-illusion error noted by Modigliani and Cohn.”
So because all the analysts used the same imperfect model, (it was “socially proofed”!) the market has oftentimes massively mispriced securities.
So yes, cognitive limitations, along with social phenomenon, cause market distortions.
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Ok, fine, citizenist. So let’s be citizen reaists then. in a global economy, how do you take care of those within your community who have no job prospects, because domestic labor no longer has value when applied to manufacture?
In the real world, you either have to let them compete with the third worlders on the third worlders terms, or you take care of them and pay their bills.
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Oops, left a sentence hanging in the last post:
Essentially, because investors and especially stock market analysts used a rule of thumb where they discounted present cash values using nominal interest rates, they suffered inflation illusion, which led them to misprice stocks.
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mildly
let me answer your question
if you have zero immigration of people with iq under 110 you will eventually have a shortage of people with iq under 100
this means that the free market would pay people with iq under 100 a living wage
all we need to do is import plenty of super high iq people and no people with iq under 110 and then there will eventually be a shortage of low iq people to clean houses and bus tables and thus wages for those low iq people will go up
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Keith, you don’t in real life think that stock market analyst mispriced stocks, do you? Have you ever known a real life stock BROKER? They are salesmen. Think used car salesmen. What led up to what happened was no surprise. People profited – follow the money. This is no accident or mistake – it’s just poor regulation and “buyer beware” applied to an entire economy.
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Jim, that would be true, IF:
– manufacture could not be outsourced out of the country
– service could not be outsourced out of the country
– tourism could not be outsourced out of the country
– natural resources were not purchased out of the country
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“Keith, you don’t in real life think that stock market analyst mispriced stocks, do you?”
Yes, read the paper. Feel free to explain to me why you don’t find the evidence convincing.
Yes, brokers are salesmen. Doesn’t change the gist of the paper.
You have a bunch of salesmen at the lower level. But at the higher level, you still had massive capital mispricing over decades because everybody was using a misguided rule of thumb.
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I pity the fools living in industrial societies during the Collapse. I’m not living in a bum fuck third world agricultural area for nothing. Food grows on trees year round, here.
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Ok, Keith, I hadn’t properly read your post. Still, many have said that the problem wasn’t entirely that investors didn’t properly value the risk of their stocks, but that it was under-regulated how brokers are forced to disclose the risk of their portfolios.
Buyer beware. Used cars. Sold a lemon.
Lemon laws.
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Keith,
I tend to agree with your argument here but mildly drunkpat has a point: analysts aren’t paid to produce analysis (since there’s no profit to be made in releasing research to the world), they’re paid to produce material that can be used to make money. The big “scandal” last crash was that analysts would get bonuses out of the IB pot because the bankers would use the “research” produced by the investment banks as a selling point in getting banking clients. In other words, some Merrill Lynch analyst would write a glowing report on company A’s stock if company A hired ML to take their company public (and this glowing report is valuable b/c our sales force would then push it on our retail customers, some of whom would buy the stock). The real profit was in the skim off of the IPO.
The other way to profit from research is to have it be accurate and to gain customers by using it as a sales point. This can’t work either because of reg FD. Reg FD requires that any research produced be available to all customers of the broker. This means that you can’t produce a report that has value because you have to release it to the public. Since it’s public immediately, no one would go somewhere that has good research but charges more in commissions (or whatever other means of charging) to pay for it because they can get the same research by having a small account there and the bulk of their money at a discount broker. Because of this, no one even produces research that has any value at all.
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wow. And it happened again and again, hundreds of times. And all those fools who worked in other banks and bought company A´s stock never ever could imagine that there was a relation between ML analysis and ML profit in the IPO. Go to google scholar and search for papers on IPO´s. You´ll discover that people have been studying your brilliant insight for half a century. Your opinion is the opinion of: a 12 years old kid, a marxist majoring in history, an uber-liberal uberSWPL journalist, a black community organiser.
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All those fools are rich now.
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In case you didn’t know, a lemon law is in opposition to the buyer beware law. Buyer beware, means that it is the consumers responsibility to research the value of goods purchased. Lemon laws apply when goods are sold without reasonable explanation of the faults of the goods.
If you buy a piece of shit car, you get to take it back to the grandmother pimpin dealer, if it falls apart and he ought to have known it was crap.
Regulation is for lemon laws. Deregulation is for buyer beware.
Clearly, lemon laws are sometimes in order. In the banking industry we used to have them, as we used to remember the last big crash.
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Expat:
“OK, Champ, I’ll bite. The schools have room for improvement. But then what are you going to do with a better educated workforce? The US still can’t compete with China for manufacture, no matter how educated they are. And for service industries there is India.
Whatcha gonna do with all that fancy book learnin’?”
We will all become marketers.
Alright, not exactly that, but education can still improve your economic prospects, even when your manufacturing base starts moving overseas. That’s because there is a LOT to business besides simply manufacturing.
See the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_Chain
And specifically the picture:
Even if all the Chinese are actually building the stuff, there’s still plenty of room for intelligent Americans doing different things related to business. We can be supply chain managers, marketers, accountants, human resource personnel, sellers of corporate bonds, strategy creators, etc etc. The demand for all of these people should increase, since there are a ton more laborers.
Plus, whole new industries start to open up: we can manage the investments of rich Chinese people. Or we can become a nation of artists.
Remember, we all used to be farmers…just because there are fewer manufacturing jobs doesn’t mean we are all screwed. In fact, having less of those means the rest of us can concentrate on other things that improve value.
Plus, there is still room for intelligent people actually on the line. Ex: Toyota’s total quality management gives EVERY worker the ability to totally stop manufacturing if he sees an error. That kind of involvement requires some degree of education to make judgements.
Some factories like to use employees to enter in data…some factories can’t do it because their employees don’t know how to use computers, and are actually too stupid to learn how to do it.
We can also improve our quality of life with education in other ways. Smarter people will hopefully manage their finances better, eat healthier, get lured in by fewer scams, and vote for better candidates.
So I still think that education can still offer a lot of improvement, even if we think IQ is genetically limited.
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moderately drunkpat
I was being sarcastic. That guy´s idea that people could be fooled by an scheme like : Bank A makes an analysis of firm B, firm B makes her IPO, bank A profits on his false analysis is so puerile that is hard to accept an adult expressing such an opinion.
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>> We can be supply chain managers,
India
>>marketers
Philippines
>>accountants
Indonesia
>>human resource personnel
India
>> sellers of corporate bonds
Estonia
>> strategy creators
China
>>, etc etc. The demand for all of these people should increase, since there are a ton more laborers.
Sure – but there is this new invention called the intertube now.
>>Remember, we all used to be farmers…just because there are fewer manufacturing jobs doesn’t mean we are all screwed. In fact, having less of those means the rest of us can concentrate on other things that improve value.
If labor is cheaper outside of your country, the ONLY thing that matters inside your country is either labor that can’t fit into the intertubes, or the physical. Trees, minerals, massage. Wait – we get trees from rainforests now. And minerals from Brazil. Ok, so we’ll all just do massage.
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Got it. When in doubt, follow the money.
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By the way, Champ – I’m oversimplifying. japan and Germany and even France are examples of funtioning societies that have value added labor within their borders – and I believe it comes from a combination of education, IQ, and social structure.
The added value is, in a word, engineering.
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I oversimplified for a reason. If you want to be protectionist of your citizens, you need the added value of engineering combined with the the value of unskilled labor and semi skilled labor and moderately skilled labor, etc. In short, you need employment more than minimum wage.
Unless you are have a trade surplus.
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This is the crash, people. The deficit was paid for with bonds, and the worlds trust that the dollar was stable.
China said out loud and in public that they aren’t buying our stinking bonds anymore. Out loud and in public that they will try to rely on domestic demand to fuel their economy in this transition period.
Trade deficit, no one buying deficit bonds – two options – out of control inflation as we print more funny money, or poverty as we no longer import on credit.
Walmart can’t buy stuff from China with funny money forever you know. What do you think “deficit” means, anyway?
Trade deficit.
Crash.
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“analysts aren’t paid to produce analysis (since there’s no profit to be made in releasing research to the world), they’re paid to produce material that can be used to make money. The big “scandal” last crash was that analysts would get bonuses out of the IB pot because the bankers would use the “research” produced by the investment banks as a selling point in getting banking clients.”
We’re talking across each other hear. I’m not talking about the latest scandal of this and that. I am presenting convincing evidence that “rules-of-thumb” by stock analysts in estimating stock values, even for their own internal consumption, produced systemic errors in stock prices over decades. We’re talking about errors that would still exist even with ethical stock analysts.
In short, if a newly hired stock analyst walked in the room, and looked at the “Fed Model” the stock analysts all used to value stocks, and said “Hey, I learned in Econ that we should distinguish between real and nominal rates,” he’d get “Quit wasting our time with your theoretical bullshit, and get yourself familiar with the real world, or get out.” Consequently, stock analysts as a group made systemic and predictable errors when it came to “money illusion.”
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“>> We can be supply chain managers,
India
>>marketers
Philippines
>>accountants
Indonesia
>>human resource personnel
India
>> sellers of corporate bonds
Estonia
>> strategy creators
China”
Yes, and this all benefits us, because now we consume these services more cheaply, which means our businesses now add more value and hire more people.
You’re confusing absolute and comparative advantage. You benefit from trade even if you’re higher-cost in every single product.
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Keith, when you go to 7-11, it is presumed that regardless of whether you pay cash or credit, your money is a trade of value for value.
So what, precicely, in the end, do you give the Singaporean Shipping Broker and the the Chinese manufucturer and the Indonesian assembler for the shoes that you import?
And don’t say US dollars.
What does the US export to pay for that? What do we give them, to pay for that.
Don’t say dollars – they lent us our dollars in bonds. What is the real world thing or service they receive.
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The theoretical bullshit is believing that the Pope is religious. The bankers got rich. They aint dumb.
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Seems to me that up until a few days ago the US thought it was the world and that China was poor and that the US economy was a powerhouse.
You guys watch too much CNN and not enough Al Jazeera.
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Seems to me that up until a few days ago the US thought it was the world and that China was poor and that the US economy was a powerhouse.
You guys watch too much CNN and not enough Al Jazeera.
You seem unaware that you owe not only credit card debt and student loans, but back rent, and that your trust fund was spent by Ronald Raygun, and that Walmart won’t be re-stocking the shelves with imports any more.
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“The theoretical bullshit is believing that the Pope is religious.”
Actually, if you quite being such a lazy douchebag and read the paper, you’ll learn that stock analysts left huge profits on the table for decades by making that exact error.
You can sit around pontificating and sniffing your own farts all day, or you can read and learn and develop some actual no-shit informed opinions that don’t waste everybody’s fucking time.
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“So what, precicely, in the end, do you give the Singaporean Shipping Broker and the the Chinese manufucturer and the Indonesian assembler for the shoes that you import?”
The Indian supply chain manager enables an American business to be more efficient and sell more goods and services.
Filipino marketers enable American businesses to sell more goods and services.
Indonesian accountants lower the overheads of American businesses, allowing them to sell more goods and services.
Ditto Indian human resource personnel.
In short, all of them are making us more productive.
In fact, the great thing about all of these services is that they raise the return on American ingenuity and creativity. Now, for example, if an American thinks of a product or service to sell, we can more cheaply produce and sell that product, for import or export.
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gig:
“I was being sarcastic. That guy´s idea that people could be fooled by an scheme like : Bank A makes an analysis of firm B, firm B makes her IPO, bank A profits on his false analysis is so puerile that is hard to accept an adult expressing such an opinion.”
Good luck with this one:
Why did banks pay analysts? Why did they get paid bonuses out of the IB pool? If no one believed the research, ML wouldn’t produce it.
PUA analogy. Women can read all they want about how PUAs use social proof but they’ll still be more likely to fuck a guy if another women is all over him (even if the guy paid the other woman). In the same way, people discount research from firms but “analysts up/downgrade stock x” is still a story on CNBC and in the WSJ. People have cognitive biases and don’t always make good decisions.
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Keith. Focus.
What does the U.Ss pay THEM? NOW. Not on credit.
Focus man.
The trade deficit era is over. The era of credit is over. YOUR international credit card is past it’s limit, and will not be extended. YOU are over extended. YOUR bill is due and past due. YOU owe.
YOU can’t get a new China made wrench until you pay for the last one. Walmart will no longer be restocked.
How will the US pay for imports, NOW.
Sorry to shout, but you are being dense and thick.
I’ve made it simple. You can’t import from China anymore, until you pay China. Exactly what will you export to China, that is of equal value to them, to pay for your wrench?
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Keith. Focus.
What does the U.S pay THEM? NOW. Not on credit.
Focus man.
The trade deficit era is over. The era of credit is over. YOUR international credit card is past it’s limit, and will not be extended. YOU are over extended. YOUR bill is due and past due. YOU owe.
YOU can’t get a new China made wrench until you pay for the last one. Walmart will no longer be restocked.
How will the US pay for imports, NOW.
Sorry to shout, but you are being dense and thick.
I’ve made it simple. You can’t import from China anymore, until you pay China. Exactly what will you export to China, that is of equal value to them, to pay for your wrench?
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Steve, you may be right. Some people in the Vatican might believe in the Trinity.
But history tells us stories that aren’t always compatible with that viewpoint.
And in the end, does it matter if the wench knows her inner motivations? She followed the money, right?
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People are losing focus, again and again. The bankers and brokers made money.
Those who say that the bankers and brokers made honest mistakes blind themselves to that. A mistake is not a real mistake if you profited by it.
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Pat, first, read the fucking paper.
Second, on China.
Based on the falling import statistics, we’re just not buying their wrench. This is partly because the Chinese wrench is more expensive now, because China’s reduced demand for dollar-denominated assets weakened the dollar, which makes imports more expensive.
And as for US exports to China:
Top US Exports to China
1. Computers and Electronics $13.3 billion
2. Transportation Equipment $9.4 billion
3. Chemicals $7.9 billion
4. Waste & Scrap $7.3 billion
5. Machinery (except Electrical) $7.1 billion
Hey, thank God those Filipino marketers are doing such a good job helping us sell computers to China!
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I am presenting convincing evidence that “rules-of-thumb” by stock analysts in estimating stock values, even for their own internal consumption, produced systemic errors in stock prices over decades. We’re talking about errors that would still exist even with ethical stock analysts.
Indeed. As Keynes famously observed, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”…
Actually, if you quite being such a lazy douchebag and read the paper, you’ll learn that stock analysts left huge profits on the table for decades by making that exact error.
…but one consequence is that analysts were NOT really leaving nearly as much money on the table as you imply. Only those with very long investment horizons, or private knowledge that the crash was about to happen, could rationally bet against the status quo.
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“Those who say that the bankers and brokers made honest mistakes blind themselves to that.”
Dude, the fucking paper, which you are too lazy/stupid to read, discusses stock prices over decades and how analysts left profits on the table, OVER DECADES, because of cognitive error.
Really, people much smarter than you think in longer terms than the scandal du jour.
This is like arguing with a homeless guy.
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keith,
Yes, we’re talking past each other because you’re using “stock analyst” to mean anyone who analyzes and stocks and uses that information to buy and sell.
When I hear “stock analyst” I think, sell side analyst. They don’t even try to predict price movements, they just pretend to.
No real disagreement b/w you and I here.
Markets have systematic inefficiencies all the time. Over time people discover those inefficiencies and by exploiting them for profit, dissipate them. See “the January effect” for an example. Academics discovered that stocks went up and down in a predictable pattern based on the calendar month. They published the result. The market adapted and their technique no longer works. In short, that paper you linked to may very well be right but if it is, it’s pretty much guaranteed that this effect will no longer be seen in 10 years.
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Interesting paper. Thanks, btw.
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“but one consequence is that analysts were NOT really leaving nearly as much money on the table as you imply.”
They were. Simply adjusting one’s own model would have produced more reliable valuations, that then would have enabled an analyst to pick stocks that the mainstream analysts were undervaluing with their model. That analyst would have made out huge. Some did, I’m sure, but not enough to arbitrage away the mistake.
“Only those with very long investment horizons, or private knowledge that the crash was about to happen”
Again, this isn’t about crashes or CNBC shit or any of the recent stuff. It’s about persistent mispricing over decades that produced major arbitrage opportunities to anyone, but these arbitrage opportunities weren’t fully realized.
“Indeed. As Keynes famously observed, “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”…”
That’s a different issue, dealing with a speculative bubble. A lot of people here are confusing chronic long-term mispricing of stocks due to a systemic error, with speculative bubbles. The two might have similar causes, but the chronic mispricing is actually more serious, because that’s a case where people simply left money on the table.
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Back to roissy’s post.
I first became convinced of HBD / race realism / whatever you want to call it because of my interest in economics.
If the labor market is at all competitive, firms have to compete for workers. Simplistically, you wouldn’t see racial differences in income unless there were racial differences in ability. Since you do see differences in average pay by race…
A bit more sophisticated / subtle view would find that the least regulated businesses (those that have the most competition) would use proportionally more labor from lower income racial groups if they were underpaid for the same talent. Over time, the pay gap would be bid away as the firms with a hiring advantage grew at the expense of those firms who irrationally discriminated against lower income racial groups. Is this the case? Most certainly not.
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“Markets have systematic inefficiencies all the time. Over time people discover those inefficiencies and by exploiting them for profit, dissipate them.”
I agree. But it matters a lot how long it takes to dissipate the systematic inefficiency. If cognitive biases means we have persistent 40-year errors in our capital markets, then that’s important.
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Keith: Polite of you to at least hand wave to one part of the trade deficit, with numbers. As if numbers actually mattered to you.
How bout the other half of that equation?
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Keith, it isn’t the US’s cognitive biases that are at issue any longer. Does the world community want to invest in our bonds and trade deficit any longer, or will they move trading blocks and move to other currencies?
The US can have whatever bias it wants. With a trade deficit, it’s like an ugly girl with a Cinderella complex.
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Steve: Exactly. Employers pay for results.
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“Simplistically, you wouldn’t see racial differences in income unless there were racial differences in ability.”
But what about cultural differences that correlate with race? If African immigrants, for example, have different labor market outcomes that African-Americans, then that points to culture, not race, as a driver of differences.
Second, if we believe that persistent cognitive biases caused people to leave major money on the table when it came to the stock market, then imagine how the serious cognitive biases related to race might affect labor market outcomes.
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And Keith: if you can’t make the argument that your Paper That I Am Better Off To Read supports, then you don’t understand your paper.
You may as well tell me to read the Bible if I have any questions.
If you are not articulate to make the argument, then obviously your Paper is not a good educational too.
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African Americans are mostly mixed race. It makes a difference.
Say that in a shorter sentence, please. And using only anglo-saxon root based words. Speak english. WTF. I don’t understand. Translate into normal talk.
If we think that people’s notions make them be conned by the market, then think how dumb people could be when thinking about race!
See? Ideas make a whole lot more sense when you make the easy.
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Keith, your “brain is flawed by cognitive bias” “relative reality” hippy trippy argument counts for academic bonus points only.
Truth is, you bought and drank the cool aid. The bankers didn’t. I didn’t.
Cognitive bias my ass. Stupidity is normal people call it.
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is what normal people call it.
Clarity. Stop speaking Latin, as if that made you know something. This is a PUA board. We learned about NLP and conditioning and biasing perception. Big words can’t hide small ideas. Keep it simple.
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If cognitive biases means we have persistent 40-year errors in our capital markets, then that’s important.
…and my point was that if the money on the table can only be collected every 40 years, then it isn’t worth trying to get it unless your investment horizon is that long or if you know the 40 years are almost up. When an asset is systematically mispriced due to a cognitive bias, there is unfortunately no guarantee that the price will move in the “right” direction before it’s moved far enough in the “wrong” direction to ruin many investors trying to pick up the “money on the table.”
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“and my point was that if the money on the table can only be collected every 40 years,”
No, you’re wrong. It could have been collected at any point throughout the 40 years. That’s the whole point.
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Chrish, my buddy bud. Hey. Come on over here. Sherioushly. Because I want to know.
Is what you are saying similar to that bonds sold to a fluctuating US currency hold little value if those bonds can’t be redeemed in the short term?
Is what you are saying is that faith in the US ability to re-structure is not a usefull long term investment if such faith becomes no longer widespread and tradeable on the open market?
Is what you are saying is that US investments are similar to holdings in US mortgages?
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“And Keith: if you can’t make the argument that your Paper That I Am Better Off To Read supports, then you don’t understand your paper.”
Yes, if, like some homesless schizo, you go off on rants and raves that have nothing to do with the subject because you’re too fucking lazy to actually read, then it must be somebody else’s fault.
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No, you’re wrong. It could have been collected at any point throughout the 40 years. That’s the whole point.
If so, why haven’t you made a killing exploiting this?
You cannot command the markets to become rational at a time of your choosing.
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“If so, why haven’t you made a killing exploiting this?”
A. Maybe I could have, if I’d read the paper earlier. Certainly at least one of the authors did and does exactly that. The earliest working paper is now 5 years old, and the paper was published 2-3 years ago.
B. We could certainly experiment with different portfolios based on the paper, and compare performance.
“You cannot command the markets to become rational at a time of your choosing.”
But people could’ve pick up the underpriced assets and avoid the overpriced assets, and made money well before any 40-year horizon. That’s what’s so wild.
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Is what you are saying is that IF faith in the US ability to re-structure is not a usefull long term investment if such faith becomes no longer widespread and tradeable on the open market?
…
Full faith and backing of the US government.
…
Ya, fuck that shit! I want the full faith and backing of my investment in milk cows!
…
Keith, you require religious training. Or better scholastic training. Any sort of training and practice among peers. Relying on sources is not making an argument. Anyone can point to a library.
Not only that. Anyone many can read a book, and some of those can understand it. That doesn’t win arguments.
Arguments are about synthesything what you know. YOU are responsible to make it clear, to teach, to see and give the big picture.
I’m doing my best to listen. As far as I can see, you are promoting a pamphlet. You aren’t selling me.
May mistake? Maybe. I’m not ignorant for not reading each and every Jehova’s pamphet that I glanced upon.
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And Keith, China is still asking about that wrench you bought from Walmart. You mentioned something about numbers and the other side of your balance due?
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Woops, looks like he’s slipped out the back door before paying his bill.
Never mind. I know where he lives. 2000 years of massages due to the Chinese.
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Oh, shit, now I’ve done it, haven’t I? No one wants to step up to the plate? Those I’ve beaten don’t want to be beaten again, and those that watched from the sidelines tend to agree.
Damn.
Funs over.
It’s difficult to find interesting forums.
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Unconscionably drunkpat:
Keith has a point about the stock market. There are all sorts of irrational effects out there that are waiting to be spotted, exploited and evaporated. As time goes on and more and more effects are understood, biases get more and more subtle and harder to find. Used to be buy small caps in December and sell them in January would make you money reliably. Now that this effect is known, it doesn’t exist.
Keith’s point, however, isn’t even close to true for what he’d like to extend it to. The idea that racial bias is responsible for the income gap between races is absurd. It would require that far too many people be so racist that they’d rather go broke than hire black people. Absurd. If people were that racist, society would look completely different. (At the very minimum you’d see movies and tv shows depicting violent criminals as occasionally being black, unlike our world, where movie and tv criminals are monolithicly white / asian.)
Businesses today if they are over a certain size are mandated to hire a certain percentage of people from various races. Again if there were bias against the people who were required to be hired, the average affirmative action hire would be more talented than the average non-aa hire. Does the phrase “affirmative action hire” conjure up the image of a super competent person?
I think we can declare the “racial bias causes differences in outcome” argument completely dead.
Funny thing is that this is the answer to the reverse of roissy’s question: “does economics tell us anything about HBD” rather than “what does HBD imply about economics”.
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Steve, you might want to listen to This American Life’s radio broadcast about how black business owners near the projects hire employees based upon the employees parents. Risk management, and all.
And that’s not an HBD (let me remind myself – human bio-diversity) argument. It’s a parentage arugment, which includes and is mostly about upbringing.
We use shorthand to make decisions. Sometimes our hand is too short. Sometimes it’s better to make a quick decision than to wait and feel the effect of your risk taking.
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You can’t get much more delicious than this amazing GNP!
Peter
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I’m signing out. I hadn’t read this part of your post:
“Funny thing is that this is the answer to the reverse of roissy’s question: “does economics tell us anything about HBD” rather than “what does HBD imply about economics”.”
and I’m unable to carry my weight at this point in the conversation. I’m just confused. I considered the Original Poster’s question to be a leading question. A spider’s web. A woman’s tease. A glance of leg. An intrigue. A beginning of a different discussion than we planned. Seemed to me that when he asked IF this were so, what would it mean to economic theory, he really was asking that SINCE this is so, is economic theory valuable.
Originally the question held no meaning to me, since economic theory holds no value to anyone other than economists. You can’t make any money off economists predictions.
I got into the question for narrative reasons.
I don’t know what economics could tell us about HBD, anymore than I know what astrology could tell us about that.
Others have written books about the converse. About the cold climate people tending to manipulate their environment with greater enthusiasm. The argument seems to hold up.
As a lazy man, I can’t say cold climate people win, in the end. They work too hard.
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what the?
who is this bitch that hijaccked roissy’s blog? and how do we go about planning a rescue mission….
WHOS WITH ME?!
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I just saved Steve Johnson’s last post. It truth is undeniable.
I think a civil war is coming, because this economic mess is just getting started. We cannot afford to keep blacks as pets any longer.
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Roissy
“are immutable over generational timespans”
Generational temperaments vary. You may find this very interesting. http://www.lifecourse.com/mi/insight/insight-overview.html
To sum it up: According to Strauss and Howe, humanity follows a four generation cycle, each generation, represents an archetype: Artist, Prophet, Nomad, Hero. Because people of a generation experience major events at the same point in life, they tend to unintentionally form similar traits in reaction to it. EG. the last hero generation experienced WWII as young adults and fought or sacrificed. The last Artist generation experienced it as children and were scared.
The point of this is that according to their theory, we are headed for a generational crisis. So yes, probably sometime of civil war or total economic collapse.
“would anything change about principal economic theories and concepts”
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Among the coolest lines in rock music:
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Among the most depressing lines in rock music:
Some friggin’ memories with that song. Year: early 90s; age: early 20s. Me: an idiot hothead wrapped around a crazy hot bitch’s finger. What kept me with her for longer that I should have been:
But I did me proud. Decades before I’ve heard of Game, of Roissy’s blog, I broke off with the she-demon. My resolve crystalized around these song lyrics, as I heard them on my CD player, and realized that it’s an idiocy to keep the thing going on as it is. The moneyshot:
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Among the most moving lines in rock music, albeit not in English:
Translation: “When the fruit was ripening in your orchard…”
One hell of a real-life back-story to this line too.
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“But Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas is the best Gentleman’s Club in America.
Hands down. (so to speak).”
YES. I have gone there about 10 times on the company dime. A lot of the women there will let you do *almost* anything in the VIP room.
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David Alexander: the high IQ race has nothing to worry about unless it is a minority among the low IQ race. This can be prevented, most easily by living in separate countries. A backwards country cannot conquer a high IQ country.
The converse is not true. Birth rates in high IQ countries are low right now, so migration tends to go from low IQ countries to high IQ countries. But suppose this changed and one or more high IQ countries went back to 19th century birthrates. They would soon need living space. Where do you think they would get it?
The reason Africans didn’t go the way of the Native Americans is that whitey didn’t want malaria and sleeping sickness. The black man can thank the tsetse fly and the mosquito for his continued existence. But those disease can be prevented or managed now.
Here’s an article by 19th century eugenicist Francis Galton advocating the replacement of blacks in Africa with the Chinese:
http://galton.org/letters/africa-for-chinese/AfricaForTheChinese.htm
That kind of thinking is out of style now, but fashions come and go and come back again.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if Galton’s program came to pass in the next several centuries.
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Roissy,
Well one thing that will definately happen, is the inevitable phenomenon of economic underclasses and market dominant minorities. That means huge inequality. Inequality makes people unhappy, jealous and after a few decades angry, even if they profit from the economically competent groups.
So, ethnic inequality will lead to economic inequality and economic inequality will lead to calls for government enforced equality. Ergo: Third World immigration + Western nations = Socialism + Affirmative Action.
How that will end up, I don’t know for sure — but the US will be the first country to know. Whatever the answer may be, it ain’t good news for Europeans/Asians/Jews and/or libertarians/economists.
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“The idea that racial bias is responsible for the income gap between races is absurd. ”
No, the idea that racial bias alone is responsible would be absurd. But racial bias and a race’s response to bias can interact in major ways.
My model looks more like this: You have a group that’s enslaved and then terrorized for hundreds of years. That group develops cultural habits and norms consistent with being the out-group.
In addition, that group is insular and socially isolated, so a lot of important social knowledge isn’t shared with them. Anecdotally, I know a lot of waiters who don’t like to see black customers because black customers often tip poorly.
In addition, as this paper indicates, black people often spend more on “bling” not because of intelligence or anything like that, but because black people, and people of any other race, spend more on visible consumption goods when their race as a whole has lower income. One spends on status goods in hopes of overcoming negative perceptions based on your race.
From the article: “That is, separate analysis performed on a sample of White households finds the same thing as separate analyses done for racial minorities: increases in mean income of one’s own race in the state are
associated with reduced visible spending.”
In short, you spend less on bling as an individual when your race as a whole is richer.
Here’s the paper: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/erik.hurst/research/race_consumption_qje_submission.pdf
Here’s an article from the Onion: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33490
As we established earlier with the money illusion and stock prices paper, even when there are huge financial rewards to getting something right, people don’t adjust.
So changing social norms takes a long time, especially when the out-group developed norms that socially ostracize intelligence and scholastic achievement.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/25/economics-discrimination-education-lead_achieve07_cz_th_0301discrimination.html
So a lot of this doesn’t look like a genetic difference, but a cultural issue. The cultural issue is mainly baggage. It was once optimal to respond a certain way to a certain environment, so the out-group developed certain norms and values. Even when the environment changes, the social norms are slow to catch up. These things don’t change overnight. Hell, even stock analysts left massive amounts of money on the table because their social norm led them to cling to a sub-optimal “rule of thumb” in valuing stocks.
And yes, of course residual racism also slows down the process of African-Americans updating their social and cultural norms.
No matter what I think of Obama’s policies (I don’t like the stimulus or his approach to the bailout), the signaling value from electing a black guy President will spur the African-American community change for the better.
Finally, African immigrants to the US are very well-educated and make very good incomes. Clearly, there can be a selection effect, but heck, slavery itself probably had a selection effect.
So no, I don’t buy the racist “race realism” arguments.
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While most people who have ‘got theres’ are screaming obscenity people like Tood, who while amusing himself at super-expensive gentlemen’s clubs tell others they need to have their wages thirded to be ‘competitive’, some of the mindlessly selfish thug boys have been scared sane.
From The Confluence:
Paul Krugman says:
Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.
End Krugman
Now, this above is obvious. But 40 billion for all the state governments of America isn’t 40 billion for Washington is it?
The State Government employees need to have their wages thirded. The Tood-Thugs of Washington have a great plan.
It will be a relatively short time till other people decide Toody needs his wages thirded.
Won’t that be fun? I think it will be Toody. I know, I know, Toody is irreplacable, he can talk pretty. Or maybe he is replacable, isn’t he?
In any case, NO REAL EFFORT IS BEING MADE TO FIX THINGS.
I think it’s time for us all to take a deep breath and run for the exits.
Not kidding here.
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Meant ‘got theirs’ not ‘got theres’.
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a good way to know if your point is stupid is if that fucking downs syndrome retard mark in ark gives you a thumbs up. the guy is a fucking low iq mongoloid like no other
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MarkD
#57 LHC, So the Democrats were blameless in this fiasco?
I forgot to mention people put words in your mouth a lot while the game of TAKEAWAY goes on…
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truthisntleftorright,
We will be the first market dominant minority so well armed. Obama’s cretinous supporters won’t stand a chance.
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Excellent point, Mandy. I never expected to see Strauss and Howe’s generational archetypes referenced here. I agree that their analysis has merit, though not necessarily for the reasons they cite. Still, I agree with your conclusion. I started warning friends and family about the current crisis more than two years ago, and no one I talked to at that time understood what I was talking about. The vast majority of people, even today, don’t understand the nature of this crisis or where it’s heading.
This is by far the biggest, most pernicious crisis anyone alive has experienced. The reason few people agree with that assessment is that this crisis is just getting started. Most people will never understand this crisis — why it occurred, who caused it, the mechanism by which it was propagated. And they will only understand its effects when they hit full force, since they’ve been conditioned to be reactive, rather than proactive. It’s a dangerous mix.
For a bit of further reading, here’s an excellent article that places Strauss and Howe’s work in the context of current events: http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/casey/2009/0113.html
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Back when the economy was booming, people were citing “Rich Dad Poor Dad” as the tome that captured the tone of the times and worshipping at the altar of Alan Greenspan.
These days, it’s the doomsaysers and philosophers, all of whom have a particular axe to grind and books to sell. In a few years it will be something else. This is the way the publishing industry works.
I don’t doubt Strauss and Howe’s theories have some validity (although their “Millennials” ideas now seem out of touch). I also don’t doubt Myers-Briggs had some points with their personality types tests (INFJ, and such).
But keep in mind that the media gives a voice to whomever is saying something that happens to be trendy at the moment. If we were in better times, the above would not be being discussed.
These are just people who, conicidentally, happen to have something to hawk that speaks to the times. There are also equally valid books collecting dust that didn’t, but that may be dusted off in ten years and looked upon as works of prophesy when times change.
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Strauss and Howe are too statist for my taste. Gov’t is the problem, not the solution.
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Off topic, but here is a great article about Obama hero worship amongst women and SWPLs in general. It’s actually really pathetic.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/02/ny-times-readers-fantasize-about-obamas.html
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truthisntleftorright:
“Well one thing that will definately happen, is the inevitable phenomenon of economic underclasses and market dominant minorities. That means huge inequality. Inequality makes people unhappy, jealous and after a few decades angry, even if they profit from the economically competent groups.
So, ethnic inequality will lead to economic inequality and economic inequality will lead to calls for government enforced equality. Ergo: Third World immigration + Western nations = Socialism + Affirmative Action.”
Well said. While some libertarians understand this, the doctrinaire ones do not. You can have diversity, or you can have liberty. You’re not going to have both. Diversity creates pressures for more and more government control, both concerning economics (affirmative action, redistribution, lending standards, etc.) and civil liberties (limits on free speech, freedom of association, and so forth).
And even to the extent that a market keeps functioning as a *market*, diversity creates distortions that libertarian economists don’t want to acknowledge. For example, take being a rational actor. If you are a low income white, either because you are of low IQ or because you are just starting out in life, the rational thing to do would be to seek out low cost housing. Problem is that, these days, the low income housing is scooped up by non-whites. Around here, show me a low income neighborhood or apartment complex, and I’ll show you a non-white neighborhood. As a practical matter, whites simply cannot live in these areas. Sure, it’s “legal” for them to do so, but as a practical matter it just isn’t realistic.
This was not always the case. As late as when my father was a young man, he was able to start out in a very modest neighborhood. Tiny homes, but no crime and friendly neighbors. No hassles. He was able to save up money to start his business, and became quite successful as a result. Could he have done that if he had been forced to pay a “premium” to live in a better neighborhood right from the beginning? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that whites have largely lost their lower income neighborhoods over the last few decades, and this has enormous implications for people’s lives.
Now you have to pay a premium just to live in a shitty neighborhood, and a helluva premium to live in a good one.
And as to the lower IQ white who is never going to make big money, he is just screwed. Non-whites have crowded him out of what would have been his habitat. He is not welcome in their neighborhoods. He’s got to pay more than he can afford just to get into a still crummy but not horrible neighborhood, where he is less likely to wind up as a crime statistic. So yeah, there is still a “market” at work, but it’s not working the way the economic textbooks say it should work. Diversity creates distortions, and housing is just one of many.
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One comment by Ryder is more intelligent and offers a better reflection of reality than the entire intellectual output of Randians, Catoians, Lew Rockwellites, et al. combined.
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Days of Broken Arrows — You should read the article I posted a link to; it was originally written in 1997, when the economy was “good”. While your point is well taken, in that there will always be snake oil salesmen waiting to jump on the bandwagon of the current trend, there ARE those of us who were warning people in 2005 (when times also seemed “good”) that housing was a bubble that would soon burst, and that the entire economy had likewise reached massive bubble proportions in 2007.
The masses believe (indeed, are intentionally TAUGHT to believe) that no one can actually predict what will happen, economically speaking. That is complete bullshit. That manipulation of public opinion results in what is now the most commonly-held belief about our current situation: “This is just a recession. It’ll pass in a few years and times will be good again, so what’s the big deal?” Sorry to say, but that is NOT the case. In a few years things will be far worse than they are now. That is not a “doomsayer” talking. That is reality.
Mark in Ark — I concur completely. While Strauss and Howe make arguments I find worthwhile, government invariably destroys everything it touches. Those who still hold to the belief that government is beneficial and necessary don’t understand how government functions, and probably never will.
ASDF — Agreed. Pathetic. And I can tell you from experience that the programming that results in these kinds of hallucinatory ideas about Obama isn’t limited to the U.S.
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Hypothetically speaking, if average human population group differences in aptitude, temperament, personality and decision-making exist and are immutable over generational timespans, and those group average differences are greater when the population groups being compared are larger (i.e. ethnicity versus race), would anything change about principal economic theories and concepts (e.g. free trade, externalities, free movement of labor, comparative advantage, public choice theory, opportunity cost, rationality of players, labor force growth)? If so, how would they change?
This is like one of those if one two trains going in opposite directions when will they meet questions. Who cares?
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Problem is that, these days, the low income housing is scooped up by non-whites.
So, kill off the non-white people, and you’ll have plenty of room for poor whites to have housing.
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roissy
sara, is that your idea of foreplay? you tease!
I’ve been accused of being bitter, but the truth is closer to salty. Kinda sexy, huh? Don’t tell me men do not love bitches. My poor ex has found another mother and misses his salty bitch! Don’t let that be your fate, roissy. Man up.
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david alexander
So, kill off the non-white people, and you’ll have plenty of room for poor whites to have housing.
A great idea, but you can’t kill them fast enough. Hitler tried it with the Jews and now look at what’s happening. KIDDING!!!
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No, I don’t think so. Economics depends on very broad assumptions, such as “people value things”, “people value some things more than others”, and “people act to get what they want and avoid what they don’t want”.
Also, anyone commenting about “the assumption of rationality” picked up their economics from the internet, or a very bad undergraduate program.
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Roissy,
I am also surprised you haven’t found Unqualified Reservations yet. I found you through him.
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Donnie,
I read the article you linked and think the author is completely off the mark when it comes to fividing up generations.
The reason is that he uses media categorizations to “define” generations, taking a cue from Strauss and co. This has no basis in statistical reality and everything to do with what we see on TV or hear on radio. In other words, he is getting his info from Hollywood and marketing types.
One example: Back in the 1980s, the teens and early twentysomethings were looked upon as kids of Reagan, all conservative and materialistic, like something out of Family Ties (an old TV show). A scant few years later, that same generation was now “Generation X,” mostly due to the media’s obsession with Seattle grunge scene.
In other words, TV producer Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties) and Nirvana “defined” a single generation in two ways, because the either wore ties or flannel shirts. Anyone who lived through that knows its far more complex. He also leaves the hero archetype out of this generation — what about the Gulf War vets?
Methinks his article is an example of yet another Baby Boomer beating his chest at how great his generatioin was, and then salivating over his kids (the echo boomers or milennials) whil again kicking sand in the face of Gen X.
No, thanks. I prefer Stever Sailor’s statistical analyses of race and IQ, because they’re based on hard numbers, not the ideas of Nirvana’s publicity people.
PS — I work in media and see how this is manipulated all the time. It’s buy and sell.
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Ryder
Historically, mid priced neighbourhoods drop in value as they become black dominant. So you’ve got that backwards. The blacks don’t snap up low value homes, they create low value homes.
Which could be a good thing, if you want to allow them to work for less than minimum wage, and have a separate economy as Nike Shoe manufacturers living within the US borders.
And the reason whites can’t find cheap housing is the housing bubble. It is rich folks investing in real estate, and renting out their investments. The speculation drives up the cost of rent and housing. It’s a funnel of poor man’s money to the wealthy. It’s a form of tax, that those who own capital place on those who don’t. That’s largely a white created problem.
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I’m curious if other people think that Walmart will soon have trouble stocking it’s shelves.
I believe in the mathematics of accounting, but “economics” are usually used as political tools to gain tax dollars; an excuse for deficit spending.
Accounting doesn’t require ideology. There is no room for belief systems in accounting. Economics is religious. Factions fighting for power.
I doubt that Walmart will be able to stock shelves. Do you agree?
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ryder,
while you make some interesting points, your understanding of political economy issues is hopelessly clouded by your inability to see the world, except through the prism of race. as keith points out, culture is probably a much better way of understanding these things. and if you accept that culture trumps race, then you understand that culture can be changed.
You can have diversity, or you can have liberty. You’re not going to have both.
by that argument, you can never have liberty; for that matter you can never have any social cooperation. even a homogenous population is still ‘diverse’. the classic example would be ireland: an island of nothing but white, anglo-saxon christians. if what you say were true, then the only society possible would be small familial clans.
The point is that whites have largely lost their lower income neighborhoods over the last few decades, and this has enormous implications for people’s lives.
no. the point is whether you believe in private propery or not. if you believe in private property, then the notion that there is such thing as “their” neighborhoods disappears.
yes, human beings compete with one another. and in furtherence of that, they often form ‘teams’ and those teams are often composed of individuals who share a closer genetic makeup than the ‘competition’. to go from that observation to the conclusion that races, or ethnicities, can never live together is simply not a valid conclusion. for one thing, it should be obvious that social norms/political conditions play a large role in regulating how people get along. unfortunately we have gone from one extreme, slavery and jim crow, to another, PC multiculturalism; both of those extremes only serve to excacerbate racial differences and make cooperation less likely in the long run. that, however, does not mean there isn’t a middle ground that makes a diverse society possible.
whether if fits your theory or not, there are places in this world where black, white, asian, latino live, work, and socialize together. is it the norm? perhaps not, but it exists. sorry that it bothers you so much.
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lance:
to go from that observation to the conclusion that races, or ethnicities, can never live together is simply not a valid conclusion.
i thought ryder’s analysis was less extreme than this. i thought he was suggesting his take as a ‘general rule’ of what happens with diverse cultures.
i would then posit that groups that are similar in iq would have the highest chance of potentially being able to live together harmoniously.
whether if fits your theory or not, there are places in this world where black, white, asian, latino live, work, and socialize together. is it the norm? perhaps not, but it exists. sorry that it bothers you so much.
really? are there a lot of places where all these groups live together in the same neighborhoods and all get along/socialize together? i can think of one great example of vastly different groups living together and thriving, silicon valley with high iq indians, high iq asians and high iq whites/jews all living together.
however, enough with my anecdotes or your suspicions. dr. robert putnam of harvard has actually researched this stuff so we don’t need to rely on personal experience, and much like ryder suggested, diversity has its downsides:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/
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lance, btw, amy chua’s world on fire is an excellent read and further shows the perils of diversity on a global and historic scale when society divides itself into market dominant majorities, market dominant minorities. let’s get away from kumbaya anecdotes and look at a myriad of historical examples. natives kill/rape/maim market dominant minorities that have higher iq’s. america was/is a market dominant majority, and this is extremely rare in human history.
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we should all be supporting the active eugenics movement as a way to rectify congenital inequalities:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gTwkwttdYv9W1hnGI_b-oS17fkPQ
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@ freak show
really? is that what you took from my comment? some people who post on this comment really do see things in black and white, and i’m not talking about race. anyone who isn’t a race realist must be a PC multiculturalist. my entire point is that the choice between the two is a false choice. as i’ve said before, it’s like choosing between the crips and the bloods.
the question is: does this ‘general rule’ arise from some immutable chatacteristic of human nature or is due in large part to our social conditioning. are there evolutionary reason that people may be more likely to cooperate with those who look more like them? of course there are, but that doesn’t mean that people simply can’t live together. american society became extremely race-conscious for economic reasons (i.e. slavery). that implies that good public policy can make it much easier to maintain a diverse society.
really? are there a lot of places where all these groups live together in the same neighborhoods and all get along/socialize together?
i guess you didn’t see where i said that it’s not the norm. so what? if people only did what was the norm, we would never evolve and would most likely die out. at some point these evo-bio arguments start to make little sense. human beings have minds, that is to say, the ability to be more than just our inate programming. there are times to rely on instinct and there are time to repress instinct and make decisions based on your god-given reasonable capacities.
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@ freak show
kumbaya anecdotes
again, man, there is a middle ground. just because i reject this race realism nonsense doesn’t mean that i have dreads, wear birkenstocks, and drive a prius with an obama sticker on it. quite the opposite.
you’ve completely missed, or just ignored, my main point. is it race or is it culture? are the observed differences in black vs white, native-born vs immigrant, ethnic chinese vs philipino/indonesian/african due to immutable genetic differences or are they due, in large measure, to culture?
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“amy chua’s world on fire is an excellent read”
above & beyond’s ‘world on fire’ is an excellent listen
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genetic differences or are they due, in large measure, to culture?
Both are true. But the kumbaya mindset, of which you do have some traces, depends on blaming it all on culture, like Amy Chua does. Because once you accept HBD you realize tthat some conflicts are beyond solution. You can say that whites in the UK show the same disfunctional behaviour of blacks in America, and it is true and culture is clearly responsible for the british case.
but white britons are 100 IQ proles they are smart enough to have an advanced civilization with trains, airplanes, financial markets. none of which any african country can sustain without white assistance, technology or management. You can improve the culture of the american ghetto, but they will never match british civilization without white americans paying for them
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Lance, God bless you for your patience. You pretty much summed up why I have had to give up arguing with these people. They’re so myopic and desperate for IQ recognition they can’t even process information outside of the parameters of race and IQ. Somehow only race realism equals conservatism, even if you believe in small government, no entitlements and personal responsiblity. Anything not dealing with race realism equals radical progressive liberalism.
The neighborhood where I live is Clinton Hill/Ft. Greene in Brooklyn. Incredibly diverse, tons of interracial dating, probably interracial dating capital of NY, lots of civic involvement and community interaction between people of different races. Yet very diverse. And not just among high IQ whites and non asian minorities. Why? Shared culture. Even though I’m not liberal, just about everyone here is and shares similar politics. Everyone is middle class or up. A majority of the people regardless of race are either American born or a European expatriate. EVERYONE is college educated or has grad school, and went to school at a Western institution. And also, there are lots of third places that encourage interaction. And also, there is not a large enough population of any one group of people that allows self-insulation from the community. There is no one in my neighborhood that isn’t totally western-assimilated, down to the bodega owners.
For example, look at how Ft. Greene celebrated as a community in the streets on election night:
You’ll see upper middle class and progressive whites, blacks, asians and others all interacting and celebrating and chanting like cult-following idiots. But you can’t say there’s little interest in civic life or community interaction simply because of racial diversity. It’s because culturally, despite their different races, these people are virtually homogenous when it comes to culture and politics.
For example where I lived in Flushing, Queens in the 80s, it was very diverse with lots of civic involvement until it the Asian population shot up in the 80s. Because these people are high-IQ, it was a race realist’s wet dream that would have caused them to furiously masturbation while closing their eyes and murmuring “high median IQ” softly to themselves all night long. But civic involvement went into the toilet, as they made no effort to assimilate or become a part of the community, they were just interested in setting up their own subcommunity. And that was the main point of that study freakshow linked to, that diversity without assimilation casues a lower level of community involvement. But somehow, he inserted high IQ Asians as an exception because he wants to believe IQ negates all problems under the sun, even though the study mentioned nothing of the sort and most people who have lived in a neighborhood filled with nonassimilating high IQ races like Russians and Asians know that the same drop in civic community involvement occurs no matter what the IQ of the race, so long as they refuse to assimilate. They set up whole enclaves of the neighborhood with store signs solely in Korean or Chinese and insulated themselves and did not assimilate at all. Had their own banks, stores, businesses, and in turn, their own Asian organized crime that extorted these businesses like crazy and having insane firefights in the streets. It got so bad, PEOPLE ACTUALLY MOVED OUT TO GET AWAY FROM HIGH-IQ ASIANS AND THEIR CRIME AND INSULAR COMMUNITIES. Think about that for a second. And if you think I’m exaggerating, check this NY Times article from 1992 about the Asian crime explosion in Queens.
In a neighborhood like Clinton Hill or Ft. Greene, you have blacks and whites living side by side with similar politics, education levels, assimilation levels and education levels and civic involvement is high and crime low. In Flushing the in the late 80s, early 90s, you had an influx of Asians but of all varying income levels, varying backgrounds from petty criminal to rich businessmen, very little assimilation, very different education levels and very insular.
The problem with race realists is that they are the same mindset as a Farrakhan, where science and politics and study of history exist first and foremost to reaffirm their self-esteem and worldview, and the quest for a greater truth and understanding of how the complexities of the real world actually work come in second. Just like Farrakhan’s followers don’t really care about liberalism’s grander ideas, they just find the left to be a convenient ideology to align themselves to because many people on the Left are antiwhite, race realists don’t really care about conservatism, the Right is just a convenient place for them to align themselves because the Right is anti-PC and is anti-affirmative action and is against radical egalitarianism. That;s why I find them accusing other people of not being conservative to be laughable, especially since many of the solutions I hear them proposing involve government growth and government intrusion into all types of aspects of people’s lives.
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The culture arguments as well as the IQ-based HBD arguments both have their merits but both also miss a crucial dimension: that various population groups have their own physical appearance, customs, tastes, likes & dislikes, etc.
And most seek to preserve their own way of life, regardless of its opbjective merits. I don’t want my 120+ IQ family kicked out in favor of a 160 IQ Indian family. All the best to those geniuses, live & let live, but I like my own way of life just fine, thank you.
Something extreme Libertarians and Lefitsts both have in common, which baffles me, is this loathing for particularism. Rather than having a world with one Finland and one Somalia, they’d like to flatten both into some ugly mash of the two.
I’m not objecting to some mixing among some people who want it that way. I am objecting to Libertarians and Leftists whose aesthetic vision of humanity resembles a bulldozer that levels all of the beautiful human variation into a billion uniformed Chinese workers marching in step into Mao’s factories.
Randie/Libertarians and Lefties are really of the same specie. It’s just that the former seek to flatten the world through international corporations and the latter through the power of the state. A distinction without a huge difference.
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once you accept HBD you realize tthat some conflicts are beyond solution
there you go. i don’t accept it. at least not your self-serving version of it.
but white britons are 100 IQ proles they are smart enough to have an advanced civilization with trains, airplanes, financial markets. none of which any african country can sustain without white assistance, technology or management.
that sentence betrays an incredibly poor understanding of history, economics, political science, the hard sciences, and grammar.
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Actually, I think race realists and leftists actually have more in common, particularly comparative victimology based on tribe and conspiratorial views on just about everything. Much of the same rhetoric and logic I encountered with I was an black radical is eerily similar to what I hear from race realists. Black radicals are not true progressive liberals, they just piggyback on liberalism and use progressive liberals as useful idiots for their cause. Similarly, race realists to me aren’t true conservatives, they just find conservatism useful to piggyback onto because it’s anti-PC, anti-affirmative action and has many anti-immigration advocates, three useful attitudes for their cause. But if they could get their goals done by measures that go against conservatism as well, such as limitless immigration for high-IQ whites, increased government involvement in multiple areas of people’s lives, creation of government agencies and special interest groups to advocate for rights of whites as a racial victim group, hiring and college admission quotas based on IQ, etc, I guarantee a ton of race realists would embrace these measures, even though they are not the least bit conservative and are usually associated with tactics progressive liberals use.
A leftist wants to force diversity and egalitarianism through social engineering. A race realist wants to force tribal purity through social engineering. Both are unrealistic utopians.
People like me and Lance, free-market conservatives, accept that integration is inevitable and forced racial purity just isn’t a realistic goal, and look for the least painful way to allow the inevitable to happen. Pandora’s box has been opened, and the way many race realists propose shoving everything back into that box simply isn’t realistic.
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@ PA:
a couple of things:
The culture arguments as well as the IQ-based HBD arguments both have their merits but both also miss a crucial dimension: that various population groups have their own physical appearance, customs, tastes, likes & dislikes, etc.
what’s so ‘crucical’ about this? maybe, but there are plenty of blacks who wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of baggy jeans or a straight-brimmed baseball cap; and plenty of whites who could be stand-ins for eminem. the problem with you race realists is that, in your desire to deal with the ‘average’, you forget that people are not populations.
my contention is simple: the individual, or maybe the household, is the basic unit of society, not the race, or ethnicity. a just society treats people as individuals and does not judge them basis on their race. i never thought that belief made me some kind of radical, but, hey, i could be wrong.
Rather than having a world with one Finland and one Somalia, they’d like to flatten both into some ugly mash of the two.
wrong. what i’d like is for the world to not be a function of someone’s master plan; rather, i want the world to be one that arises from the aggregate of individual choices. if people choose to segregate themselves, then so be it, but that decision should be left to individuals.
on another comment i took issue with the idea of racial or ethnic “self-determination”. to my knowledge, noone has presented a rebutal to that post. if you pull it apart ‘racial self-determination’ simply doesn’t make much sense.
you mention “beautiful human variations”, yet you seem to only want to see that variation through the prism of race. why is that?
ps – a point for clarification: all randians are probably libertarians, but not all libertarians are randians. equating the two is like equating christian with jehovah’s witness.
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Exactly, and if anyone is expecting the government and legal system to actively engineer the perfect racial society, yet they think they are somehow radically different in ideology from a progressive liberal, they are delusional.
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Exactly, and if anyone is expecting the government and legal system to actively engineer the perfect racial society, yet they think they are somehow radically different in ideology from a progressive liberal, they are delusional.
i’ll keep saying it: the fight between race realists and PC multiculturalists is like the fight between crips and bloods. there’s no real ideological conflict; it’s just a power struggle.
the real sad part is that neither side is willing to take responsibility for their part in maintaning their enemies. PC multiculturalism arose as a poorly-conceived reaction to very real institutional racism. it, in turn, gave rise to a conservative backlash. each side needs the other to maintain its own existence.
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to say that progressive liberals “expect the government and legal system to actively engineer the perfect racial society” simply misunderstands liberalism completely. could be why you are so radically opposed to it. it helps to shoehorn their policies into this description though, when trying to criticize.
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Only if you call things like national borders, passports, visas, sane immigration laws and their enforcement, and ethnic self-confidence “utopian social engineering.”
“Tribal purity” is somethign of a strawman. Not wanting Moroccans building mosques in Amsterdam is not “tribal purity,” it’s a basic response of normal, healthy men who like to keep their country as a larger reflection of themselves.
In other words, a normal man reacts to immigrants in excessive numbers and cultural belligerence in a similar way he’d react to a stranger trapeizing though his house: with protective feelings for what is his own. Gelded men — or opportunists who profit on social deterioration — “celebrate diversity.”
And yet we have laws that say you can’t do that. Are you in favor of repealing these laws for private clubs, private schools, and homeowners’ associations? You do believe in the free market, don’t you?
The last batch got messed up:
I am a free-market conservative as well but I appreciate the limits of the market’s usefulness.
It’s not the only prism, but it’s a fundamental one. We’re physical beings in nature, not disembodied spirits. This is why most people want their grandchildren to look like them.
Let me take the “race as a physical phenomenon doesn’t matter” into an analogous area: gender. You insist that you are a straight man and prefer to mate with females of your specie.
Why? Don’t some men have the kind of nurturing personalities you like? Isn’t it impossible that you might find a man’s personality most compatible with yours? Aren’t some men slender, and can’t they shave their legs just for you? Why’s it gotta be a woman for you?
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Even though I’m not liberal, just about everyone here is and shares similar politics. Everyone is middle class or up. A majority of the people regardless of race are either American born or a European expatriate. EVERYONE is college educated or has grad school, and went to school at a Western institution.
if everyone is middle class and up, and college educated, then most likely they are all similar in IQ as well.
i’ll keep saying it: the fight between race realists and PC multiculturalists is like the fight between crips and bloods. there’s no real ideological conflict; it’s just a power struggle.
was communism vs capitalism “just a power struggle”?
to say that progressive liberals “expect the government and legal system to actively engineer the perfect racial society” simply misunderstands liberalism completely.
the road to third worldism is paved with pc horseshit.
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And yet we have laws that say you can’t do that. Are you in favor of repealing these laws for private clubs, private schools, and homeowners’ associations?
yes, i am. if i were king for a day, i’d repeal all anti-discrimination laws that didn’t pertain to government. so, no gov’t agency could practice discrimination, nor could any private organization that took gov’t money or did business with the gov’t. individuals and purely private organizations, however, would be free to dispose of their resources as they saw fit.
Gelded men — or opportunists who profit on social deteriorationn — “celebrate diversity.”
i am neither. in fact, i would say that betas judge themselves on the accomplishments of their ethnicity.
It’s not the only prism, but it’s a fundamental one.
because you choose to make it such.
We’re physical beings in nature, not disembodied spirits. This is why most people want their grandchildren to look like them.
i don’t know that as true, but it certainly doesn’t hold for me. i want my grandchildren to be healthy, intelligent, and cared for; and i hope they have fond memories of me. in fact, since the women i will most likely end up marrying is of a different race, my grandkids probably won’t look like me, in that sense.
analogous area: gender
really? you really think that race and gender are analogous in this regard? so black skin is to white skin as a penis is to a vagina?
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T:
And that was the main point of that study freakshow linked to, that diversity without assimilation casues a lower level of community involvement. But somehow, he inserted high IQ Asians as an exception because he wants to believe IQ negates all problems under the sun, even though the study mentioned nothing of the sort and most people who have lived in a neighborhood filled with nonassimilating high IQ races like Russians and Asians know that the same drop in civic community involvement occurs no matter what the IQ of the race, so long as they refuse to assimilate.
T, i would not disagree with this point, which may surprise you. in my original assertion, i suggested that:
i would then posit that groups that are similar in iq would have the highest chance of potentially being able to live together harmoniously.
this doesn’t mean that having a similar iq is sufficient for inter-group cohesion, only that it is likely necessary. your example doesn’t negate this.
lance:
the question is: does this ‘general rule’ arise from some immutable chatacteristic of human nature or is due in large part to our social conditioning.
you and T might be further surprised that i’ve suggested on half sigma’s blog that i’ve been impressed with the dunbar high school example that T has previously cited to counter claims that the black- white iq gap is completely genetic. i suspect that at least part of the gap might be due to genetics. if there is a cultural contribution, is strongly suspect that the pseudo- black redneck culture (as thomas sowell describes it in ‘black redneck and white liberals’) has a seemingly immutable quality rendering most attempts to mitigate it useless, thus far. that is also why i suspect that the best method in this day and age to decrease the gap lies in genetic engineering, not cultural modulation.
as a side note, i suspect that at least part of what happened at dunbar high school for decades was that the peer-peer environment was optimized, allowing for maximization of the environmental contribution to iq development among blacks in d.c. at the time. just a guess.
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” so black skin is to white skin as a penis is to a vagina?”
Yeh, that’s it all right. We all bleed red. Race is only about skin tone. Yada yada…
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“Randie/Libertarians and Lefties are really of the same specie. It’s just that the former seek to flatten the world through international corporations and the latter through the power of the state. A distinction without a huge difference.”
What an objectionable statement! Let’s define the opportunity cost of particularism to Randians and Lefties: to a Lefty, personal preferences sacrifice one’s efficiency to the community. To a Randian, particularism is naturally justified and justifiable. If I value my race/ethnicity/culture, I practice separatism at the cost of my own personal efficiency. If giving to charity makes me jizz in my pants, I give it away. All together, a Randian rationalizes his own actions and modifies his behavior to optimize his fulfillment of preferences. A Lefty can never achieve such balance because every luxury must be expensed against the greater good. Air conditioning in the summer? No, suffer the heat and give the savings to the poor. Drive a car? No, ride a bike and… you get the idea. Free market economics will produce a ubiquitous equlibrium in theory and as an on-paper endgame, but Randians are free to resist at a cost to themselves.
PA, when you say something like “I don’t want my 120+ IQ family kicked out in favor of a 160 IQ Indian family,” you acknowledge your separatism, albeit in a completely nonsensical way. You could refine your statement to say “I don’t want my family to experience a decrease in quality of life as caused by being superseded by a different (i.e. 160 IQ Indian) family.” That doesn’t sound too bad, and it properly frames your self-interest. Or, you could say, “I don’t want my family upended by a low IQ foreign family,” though you would risk impressing no one without some doomsday scenario. On that note though, are you opposed, or as much so, to say, an 80 IQ family getting “kicked out” by a 160 IQ Indian family? How about a 81 IQ American family?
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was communism vs capitalism “just a power struggle”?
no, but communists vs fascists was. they both degraded the power of the individual and replaced it with some collective identity; the ultimate purpose being that some elite could maintain control over the population.
if anyone should see what i’m saying here, it should be you, roissy. what’s more beta than subsuming your own identity, your own thoughts, desires, passions, into some collective, wherein decisions about your life are made by someone else? that’s exactly what happens when you allow society to be organized along purely racial or ethnic grounds. you want to marry that really thai girl? sorry, she’s a different race and you must maintain the ‘purity’ of the gene pool; instead pick from one of these over-entitled urban shrews. you want to hire sanjay at your software business cause he came out of one of the best universities in india? sorry, that’s an “american” job. you want to sell your house to jamal? sorry, this is a white neighborhood. we don’t want his kind.
and to bring this discussion back to economics, all those constrained decisions have efficiency issues. when people are free to make their own decisions, they usually, not always, but usually, act to maximize their own welfare. when you start to put constraints on the choices available, people are no longer free to do what’s best. this can result in rent seeking behavior and an increase in deadweight loss.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss
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@ wounded animal:
was than argument or just the plaintive sigh of someone who thinks he is owed the world because of the color of his skin?
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Yes, they likely are. I never denied that IQ is an important component in analyzing these things. You are making the mistake many race realists make when debating this issue. You think because someone is saying that everything doesn’t revolve around IQ, they must believe that NOTHING revolves around IQ. The average race realist seems to have a total inability to understand that there is a middle ground and a myriad of relevant factors.
Of course IQ and race play a significant role in things. I just think culture, Westernized assimilation, income level, shared politics, grasp of community norms and self-balkanization must be factored in as well.
Yes, the people in my neighborhood are of similar IQ. That alone proves nothing. The asians in my Flushing, Queens example were also most likely of high average IQ. Even the Asian criminal element, although not college educated, were noted for how smart they were in how they organized their criminal element. In fact, based on how the fresh-off-the-boat working class Asians would enter into my school and immediately proceed to score off the charts in math and science courses, I bet they were even of higher IQ than the people I live around now. If IQ alone were the main determinant, the Asian influx would have gone swimmingly well. Yet as I described, the organized crime and community alienation and civic involvement all went to shit, and many people even moved out as a result of the neighborhoods transformation.
So yes you can point to my neighborhood now as an example of high diversity coupled with similar high IQs leading to increased civic cooperation, lower crime and high standard of living. And I can immediately point to my late 80s/early 90s Flushing Queens as an example of increased diversity coupled with high IQs leading to civic disintegration and higher organized crime. If IQ was the main determinant that you want to say it is, shouldn’t the same positive results have happened in both scenarios? Or if diversity is universally bad, shouldn’t both neighborhoods be in the shitter because they were both diverse? Obviously IQ does not trump everything, and obviously diversity is not always bad.
Mind you, I’m not saying IQ is unimportant. Of course it plays a role. But race realists create this false dichotomy where if someone dares to say that IQ isn’t everything and the be-all and end-all of an analysis, they are somehow claiming that the person is a blank-slatist liberal claiming IQ means nothing.
Take for example West Germany and East Germany. Same genetic stock. Same race. Even some of the same families on both sides of the border. Same shared history. Same shared culture. One side of the country changes its culture radically to communism. The other sticks to its Western enlightenment and capitalist traditions. Within decades the mindsets of both places are virtually unrecognizable to the point where they can barely even function together.
Within only decades of living apart under different governments, cultures and social policies, the character and culture of both sides of Germany became radically different to the point where 1 in 5 Germans polled actually wish the Berlin Wall would be rebuilt, and even more surprisingly most of those wishing it would be rebuilt are former East Germans. Only 3% of relationships are between a east and west Germans, showing a strong social divide still remains almost 20 years later. From this article:
These people were once genetically and culturally one and the same before, yet a few decades of central planning and redistribution of wealth on one side versus more free-market principles on the other side has made them severely incompatible to the point they can barely function or form relationships with each other today.
If IQ, race and genetics trump every other factor and everything is virtually irrelevant, how did this occur?
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Lance, a word of advice: Wounded Animal is just a Steve Sailer parrot who can’t really process higher-level arguments or create original thoughts, don’t bother engaging him. I’ve learned my lesson, you’ll just frustrate yourself. At least with freakshow, Roissy and others here I can disagree with them but find them to be highly intelligent and capable of processing higher-level arguments and generating independent thoughts. WA on the other hand doesn’t seem to be very bright.
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T:
Of course IQ and race play a significant role in things. I just think culture, Westernized assimilation, income level, shared politics, grasp of community norms and self-balkanization must be factored in as well.
i wouldn’t dispute this either. however, i suspect it’s more difficult to find examples of groups with differing iq’s living harmoniously than groups with similar iq’s living harmoniously. that suggests to me that iq is more important than the most (possibly all) other factors. that doesn’t mean that it renders any other factor irrelevant. again, having a similar iq is likely necessary but not necessarily sufficient for inter- group cohesion.
If IQ, race and genetics trump every other factor and everything is virtually irrelevant, how did this occur?
you keep implying that all race realists are of the same mindset as obvious white nationalist types, like blank or undiscovered jew on half sigma’s blog. this is a strawman, and i reject such a characterization for myself. i’ve delineated my views in more detail above. i suspect that many other race realists (not all) don’t harbor such extreme mindsets either.
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ps – the inter-racial marriage example seems to be the perfect illustration of what i’m talking about. i would assume that all of you who believe in “racial self-determination”, or who favor the “ethnostate” as the preferred means of political organization, would rightly view inter-racial marriage as a threat.
so, let’s suppose that there was a law being debated over making mail-order brides from less-developed nations illegal. who are the two groups that you would expect to support such a measure? the racial purists and the radical feminists.
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maybe this doesn’t apply to you personally freakshow, i can’t recall all the comments you’ve ever posted, but based on the simplistic, reactionary reasoning of many of the commenters i encounter on the various race realism blogs, i don’t think i’m inventing a strawman. there seems to be a sizable amount of extremists that are attracted to race realism, or at the very least a very vocal minority making the rest of you look overly simplistic.
i agree with the idea of race realism in theory. i do think race, genetics and iq are very important and should be taken into consideration. i do think that genetics definitely place limits on what some people can achieve, or at least forces them to work two or three times as harder as others just to achieve comparable results. i don’t throw out the whole discipline, much of it has merit. i just hate a few myopic tendencies of many race realists. first, i think they exaggerate the immutability factor. the jury is still out on that, as there is evidence on both sides for and against immutability. we simply don’t know enough about immutability yet. second, too many of them go from taking race, iq and genetics into account, which i agree with as i am against blank slatism, and take it to the other extreme of making race and iq their SOLE basis of analysis, which is just as myopic as a blank slatist. and third, many of them have a blind spot for any evidence that does not actively celebrate high IQ or the superiority of whites.
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Lance,
I was pointing out that your comparison was inapt. Otherwise, a negro with albinism would be “white.” Race is about more than skin tone.
Ricky,
You’re smart, but not smart enough to know what you don’t know.
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Brilliant retort. Thanks for proving my point.
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thought experiment for all interested parties:
let’s say you’re an astronaut, and you find yourself on a distant planet of humanoids where being tall is of the utmost importance. and on that planet there are two ideologies. one says that it’s all genetic, and the way to get the tallest society is by breeding the tallest people. the other says that people are born with a range of possible heights and, therefore, society should focus on proper health and nutrition to get the tallest people.
now let’s say they ask you to settle this argument. what would you tell them?
don’t answer. it’s rhetorical. the idea is that they’re both right and it doesn’t make sense to pick one to the exclusion of the other.
what are the public policy ramifications of this analogy? the first is something on which most of us will agree: the leftists got it wrong. their prescription of an increased welfare state, radical feminism, and forced multi-culturalism is a cure that was, in many ways, worse than the disease. if you structure a society in which the least capable are incentivized to have the most kids and the most capable are made to feel guilty, you’re just asking for trouble.
but this is not proof in favor a resurrected late 19th/early 20th century eugenics based on a racial pecking order. genes matter and environment matter. they’re not mutually exclusive. if they were, then rich, smart parents wouldn’t go to every extreme possible to give their kids advantages. the real question becomes: what’s the utility to increasing funding in schooling and in the social safety net, and how best to structure one that punishes unproductive behavior without creating a permanent underclass.
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the real question becomes: what’s the utility to increasing funding in schooling and in the social safety net
There isn’t any. No amount of funding will make stupid and/or lazy people smart, and by contrast, no lack of funding will prevent smart and/or ambitious people from educating themselves.
The social safety net seemingly works well in places like, say, Sweden: ethnically homogenous, high average IQ, low population density and lots of natural resources. But even there it inevitably leads to net tax consumption and barriers to affordable family formation. So now they’re running deficits and aren’t having enough babies and hoping desperately that imigration will plug the holes. Eventually, the place isn’t Sweden any more and good luck getting all those North Africans to pay nursing home bills for people with whom they share no ancestry.
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Now who is the generalist? Strawman. You define what race realists are so that you can call them, as a group, mistaken. What if someone considers themself altogether realist, as much as possible, and is unaligned with ideology? Can such a person also consider himeself “race realist”?
It is interesting to see how people don’t really fit well into purported ideologies, but I wonder if people even purporte the idealogies to begin with, or you just expect them to, or think they should.
Some people are unaligned to anything other than a direction towards truth love and understanding. You don’t have to be alligned with any belief system to have that general aim.
You whole attitude is that of setting up straw-groups – allignments where none exist.
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Lance: “while you make some interesting points, your understanding of political economy issues is hopelessly clouded by your inability to see the world, except through the prism of race. as keith points out, culture is probably a much better way of understanding these things. and if you accept that culture trumps race, then you understand that culture can be changed.”
Culture doesn’t trump race. Take the poster above who said that former British colonies do better than other former colonies. According to the “culture trumps race” crowd, this makes a lot of sense. Problem is, it just isn’t true. In reality, instead of doctrinaire delusion, former black British colonies perform (culturally, economically, and so forth) much like other black countries that were never under British rule. Former white British colonies (Australia, Canada, etc.) perform much like other white nations that were not under British rule. Same for former British Asian colonies, with Hong Kong performing much like other Pacific Rim nations.
Does that mean that the cultural legacy of British colonialism had no positive effects? No. But it does mean that the different ethnic groups still cluster, in terms of civilization, with their close racial cousins. Australia is not Zimbabwe is not Singapore. Race is a better predictor of the type of civilization that a country has than is its former colonial status. The poster who claimed otherwise is simply flat out wrong, though no doubt reality will have no impact on his opinion.
And, even if culture could trump race, just for argument’s sake, who exactly is going to do this enforcing? You Randians? I thought you were for freedom?
This is why I say that you guys are really enemies of freedom. Because you believe that culture trumps race, and that culture can be changed, it is only one skip and a jump to suppression of free speech, freedom of association, and massive leftist propaganda in the media and education. The Randian claims to oppose these things, but in fact helps lay the philosophical foundation that makes them possible. If man is so very malleable, why not force him to be different? You carry the water of the leftists, but they get paid.
Leftists are universalists. So are you. You both believe that everyone, everywhere, should live under the political system that you advocate. An important difference between you is that leftists are more in touch with reality than Randians. The leftists knows that racial diversity will create pressures for more government control, whereas the Randian sticks his head in the sand. In essence you help the Left out by pushing their universalism, and they reap all the power and benefits.
Lance: “no. the point is whether you believe in private propery or not. if you believe in private property, then the notion that there is such thing as “their” neighborhoods disappears.”
LOL!!! Amazing. I detail in the post above how racial integration has massively fucked over a very real group of people, and what is the response of the Randian ideologue? Just define it out of existence. Presto! No more problem. This response is the perfect illustration, a caricature really, of the mindset of the true believer. Doctrine trumps reality every time. The leftist does the same thing. Illegal immigrants cause massive problems in the real world. Solution? Define the problem out of existence. Just make them legal! Presto!
The rest of your post consists merely of missing the point, whether intentionally or not. You take things too literally, or you over generalize. This is a common failing of ideologues and true believers. They can’t stick to reality, because that would force them to reconsider their world view. Rather than do this, they obfuscate or willfully misinterpret their opponent. Believe it or not, I’m not trying to be condenscending when I say that you would be better served to drop the universalist doctrine and true believer mentality, and get more concerned with good old fashioned reality. Your Randian world view simply does not explain reality very well.
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expat:
“Historically, mid priced neighbourhoods drop in value as they become black dominant. So you’ve got that backwards. The blacks don’t snap up low value homes, they create low value homes.”
What you are saying is true, as far as it goes. But you are misunderstanding my point, as well as the historical record.
Historically, there were in fact lots of low income white neighborhoods and apartments. Part of this is because, as late as the 1960’s, America was overwhelmingly white. Large areas of the country were homogenous. In those areas the market worked normally, with a full range of housing options available. Whites could start out in inexpensive neighborhoods, and build from there. They didn’t have to pay a “race premium” that they couldn’t afford, or that hindered their future plans for saving or business creation (or higher education, whatever).
And even in the areas of the country where there were different races, de jure and de facto segregation allowed large numbers of affordable neighborhoods for whites. As I explained in my post, I lived in such a neighborhood as a very young child in the 70’s. Such neighborhoods were real, they were fairly nice, and they were very affordable.
Now, such affordable neighorhoods are typically all nonwhite. This is in part due to integration policies, and partly the result of massive demographic transformation from immigration. There are simply far more nonwhites in the country today, and they have to live somewhere. As a practical matter, they scoop up the low cost housing.
When my father was a very young man, he was able to start out in such an affordable neighborhood. Completely safe, friendly neighbors, and good schools. With the savings, he was able to start a family and a business. No more. By the time I reached homebuying age in the 90’s, such neighborhoods were not meaningfully accessible to me. Now it’s even worse. Displacement is real.
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Ryder, I didn’t misunderstand your point, and your last post was merely a repetition of what you said before. You didn’t address my argument fully.
For all you know, the reason there is less low cost housing in white neighbourhoods are for the reasons I mentioned, not the reasons you mentioned. Reason being, overinvestment in real estate, driving up real estate prices. You know, the whole housing bubble thing.
That overinvestment doesn’t affect black neighbourhoods so much is because such neighbourhoods aren’t seen as capable of holding or increasind in value.
You can’t just point to a change, and blame it on minorities snapping up all low value homes. There is still plenty of land available for development, in areas that are not black dominated. Fact is IF you make a house in a non-black area, the value will automatically be high. Because of real estate over-valuation.
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Expat: “For all you know, the reason there is less low cost housing in white neighbourhoods are for the reasons I mentioned, not the reasons you mentioned. Reason being, overinvestment in real estate, driving up real estate prices. You know, the whole housing bubble thing.”
The process of low income white neighborhoods disappearing was well underway long before the recent housing bubble. It is a process that has been ongoing for decades. In my metro area, the process was essentially complete by the mid nineties, well before the bubble. The reasons that you mentioned, as a matter of the historical record, do not come anywhere close to explaining what has happened.
expat:
“Fact is IF you make a house in a non-black area, the value will automatically be high.”
Dude, this is why I say that you are missing the point. They are only “automatically” high in the current multicultural environment. In a homogenous white society, it should be obvious that there is no “white premium” to be paid because ALL neighborhoods are white. Why would there be a white premium in a homogenous white society? It makes no sense. You are assuming a multicultural environment. My point, on the other hand, was to show how markets and price premiums worked prior to the current environment.
In a multicultural society, you pay a premium to live in a white neighborhood (relative to other neighborhoods in the same society). In a homogenous society, you don’t. Koreans in Korea don’t have to pay a premium to live in a Korean neighborhood. Why? Because, effectively, all neighborhoods are Korean. If Korea, on the other hand, beccomes multiculturalized, this will inevitably result in non-Koreans scooping up more and more of the low cost neighborhoods, and all of a sudden there would be a “Korean premium” to be paid.
Again, we are talking about prices relative to other neighborhoods in the same society, so overall price inflation of real estate is irrelevant. Inflate all you want, overinvest all you want, there are still going to be a range of neighborhood costs. There are still going to be neighborhoods that are relatively cheaper or relatively more expensive. In a homogenous white society, lower income whites will obviously be able to live in the lower cost neighborhoods. Again, this is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of the historical record. It’s also a matter of common sense.
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