Analysis of the Third Republican Debate

First the losers. By far and away, the biggest losers were the liberal numskulls who moderated the debate for CNBC. These three liberals, Becky Slow, John Hardhead and Carl What's His Name began the debate and ended the farcical performance by asking a series of, what they considered gotcha questions designed to embarrass the candidates. These infantile attempts at journalism backfired big time and Ted Cruz and the audience let them have it with both barrels! For me, the audience's response was the highlight of the night. As for the winners, once again a candidate on the JV team stole the show. That would be Lindsey Graham, who woke from a career long slumber to slam the democrat candidates and Obama's defense policies. By far and away, the best one liner of the evening was his quip, referring to Obama's bungling policies dealing with Iran and Iraq " Make me commander in chief and this crap stops!" The crowd went wild. Other winners on this night were Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. None of the other candidates hurt themselves, but they didn't do much to improve their chances of winning the nomination either. When all is said and done, the republicans have an extremely strong field. I believe most conservatives could vote for any one of them. Consider for a moment the democratic opposition, a congenital liar who is a bit long in the tooth: an avowed socialist who spent his honeymoon in Russia and never really returned; and a third liberal moron whose name I can't recall.

Another Veterans administration Medical Center scandal

Surprise , surprise another scandal at a VA Medical Center. This time in Phoenix where several vets were allowed to die before they received treatment for their bladder and kidney cancers. There are 152 VA hospitals and medical centers and 1,700 VA hospitals and clinics in the United States. Around 9 million veterans use the VA medical system. The VA budget is around 132 billion. The VA medical system began in 1924. I expect the politicians wanted to do something special for the men and women who served our country so they gave them their very own medical system. To prove the point once again, the road to heaven is paved with good intentions that somehow go amiss. What we have 84 years later is a gigantic government bureaucracy corrupt and incompetent from top to bottom. What can be done to right this floundering ship of state. As with most of the social ills in this country, the inherent flaws in the VA can be corrected relatively easily and cost effectively just by applying a little common sense. We should not try to "fix" the broken medical system that is the VA; rather we should just abolish the VA Hospitals and clinics, every last one of them! In the first place, it makes no sense whatsoever to have a separate system of medical care for veterans, none at all. This is especially true, if the medical care provided our vets is inferior to the standard medical care provided to all other members of our society. Veterans who serve our country should be provided, free of charge, Medicare A and Medicare B. It's as simple as that! This is a win-win solution for everyone. The vets get the same medical as everyone else, at no cost, and the tax payers save billions of dollars each year, probably tens of billions. There, what was so hard about that?

The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 17-Raising Cognitive Ability

Do we favor training programs for chronically unemployed men? These programs will fail, as they have in the past, unless they are targeted for a population half of which have IQs below 80. Do we wish to reduce income inequality? If so, we must understand how the market for cognitive ability drives the process. Do we aspire to have a "world class" educational system for America? Before changing the present system, we had better think hard about how cognitive ability and education are linked. Part 1V explores some of these important relationships.

Chapter 18 reviews the American educational experience in the last decades of the twentieth-century. In Chapters 19 and 20 the focus shifts to affirmative action policies in education and the workplace. In the recent past, our country has dedicated itself to coping with particular types of inequalities, trying, unsuccessfully, to equalize outcomes for various groups. During this period of time the country has retreated from previous principles of individual equality before the law and has adopted policies that treat people as members of groups. The authors will attempt to make the costs and benefits of policies associated with affirmative action clearer than they usually are. In the final two chapters of The Bell Curve the authors attempt to predict the future. But first, Herrnstein and Murray discus the ramifications of policies designed to raise the nations mean IQ. Raising intelligence significantly would circumvent many of the social problems our country faces in the twenty-first century. In recent times we have concentrated on needed environmental improvements- better nutrition, stimulating environments for preschool children, good schools thereafter, etc. Nothing that has been tried has raised the intelligence of the people in our nation. There is ample evidence that improved nutrition has raised the mean IQ in several nations but this approach remains unproven in America. Special programs, such as Head Start, have had minor, and at best temporary, effects on school performance but have proven not to improve intelligence. The one intervention that has worked consistently is adoption at birth from a bad family environment to a good one. The average gains in childhood IQ associated with adoption are in the region of six points. Taken together, the story of past costly attempts to raise intelligence is one of high hopes, flamboyant claims, and disappointing results. It seems abundantly clear that the problems associated with low cognitive ability are not going to be solved by outside interventions, no matter how well intended, to make children smarter. We may be deeply and properly dissatisfied with the nurturing of American intelligence, but finding solutions that are affordable, politically tolerable, and have not been already tried, is another matter altogether. In this chapter the authors review the results of several social interventions that have employed to raise childhood intelligence. They close with their thoughts on what the results of these attempts to increase the intelligence should mean for policy in the future. They begin with a review of the programs to increase intelligence by improving nutrition. Historically, it is a fact that people in affluent countries are larger than their ancestors, presumably because they were eating better. IQ scores also have been rising in the well-fed segments of the population. This does not mean, however, that better eating makes smarter people. Recent studies on the subject have given, at best, mixed results. The most damaging blow to the proposition that nutrition effects IQ came from a study of over 100,000 Dutch men who were born during a time of intense famine at the end of the second World War. Nineteen years later the men took intelligence tests to qualify for national military service. These men scored no lower than men born to mothers who had no exposure to famine. A small sample of Welsh school children were given vitamins and mineral supplements for eight months. Their test scores were compared with an equal number of their schoolmates who received non-nutritive placebos. Those getting the supplements gained eight points in their nonverbal test scores but there was no improvement in their verbal scores. A study of 600 California eighth graders produced similar results. The vitamin and mineral supplements raised scores on most of the nonverbal tests of intelligence but failed to improve the scores designed to measure verbal intelligence. Other studies failed to show that vitamin and mineral supplements had any effect on IQ. It should be noted that most, if not all, of these studies were flawed in one way or another. As a result, as of 1995, when The Bell Curve was published, the effect of diet in the development of IQ remained unclear. Can IQ be raised by improving educational opportunities? Most people assume that below-average test scores from children from the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution results from the fact that they have received poor educations. Improve the schools, it is assumed, and the test scores will rise. Differences in schools do matter but not nearly as much as most people think. In a massive study of 645,000 underprivileged children mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, failed to find any benefit to cognitive ability that could be attributed to better school quality. The attempts schools made to improve their effectiveness did not reduce the cognitive differences among different children or those between ethnic groups. The Coleman report concluded that parochial schools generally do a better job of developing the cognitive abilities of their students than public schools. Yet the basic conclusions of the report have stood the test of time and criticism: Variations in teacher credentials, per pupil expenditures, class room size and other objective factors in public schools do not account for much of the difference in the cognitive abilities of American School children. The Coleman report told us that the cognitive differences among individuals and groups cannot be reduced significantly by further attempts to equalize the kinds of bricks-and-mortar factors and teacher qualifications that school boards and taxpayers most often concern themselves with. The failure of programs like school busing, Head Start and affirmative action make this point abundantly clear (my conclusion, not the authors). Can education improve IQ? A Swedish study performed 70 years ago was designed to determine the effect of education on IQ. Several hundred ten year old boys were tested for IQ and retested again ten years later. By far the most important determiner of IQ at age 20 was their IQ at age 10. In fact, the students IQ at age ten was five times more important than years of schooling. Other studies have shown that the more uniform a countries schooling is, the more correlated adult IQ is with childhood IQ. The conclusion the authors draw from these studies is that equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling in America will have little or no effect on the nations mean IQ. Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, thereby initiating a massive and continuing effort to improve the education of disadvantaged students that continues to this day. Billions of dollars have been spent on this effort to level the educational playing field each year. In 1992 expenditures on ESEA were at an all time high of $5.6 billion. Hundreds of studies have been performed over the years to determine the effectiveness of ESEA funding. The data showed that students in compensatory programs still tended to fall behind students who were not in government subsidized programs, but not as fast as they would have if the schools they were in had received no compensation, an outcome that the institute treated as evidence of success. There was no evidence whatsoever to support a conclusion that compensatory education narrowed the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged school children. In recent years the focus has been on teaching specific academic skills and problem solving, not expecting improvements in overall academic achievement or general intelligence. Most often the large test score increases in local schools routinely reported by the drive-by media over the years have been plagued by fraud and teacher led institutional wide cheating on the standardized tests. The authors go on to surmise two studies that suggest that that educational improvements can increase the mean IQ of a nation. In 1979 the incoming president of Venezuela appointed to his cabinet a Minister of State for the Development of Human Intelligence. The new minister was convinced that the nation's average intelligence level was fundamental to its well-being and set out to determine what could be done to raise the IQ of Venezuelan school children. Nine hundred seventh graders in a poor district of the Venezuelan school system received sixty, forty-five minutes lessons of special instruction in addition to regular curriculum, the controls did not. At the end of one year the students who had received special instruction were between 1.6 and 6.5 IQ points smarter that those who received a normal education. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up to determine if these gains faded with time or how much a second or third year of special tutoring would have accomplished. A second source of data that suggests that education can raise an individual's IQ has been gleamed from SAT scores taking advantage of the fact that innumerable commercial coaching services are designed to raise SAT scores through a variety of educational pursuits. The question is not whether these preparatory courses raise a student's SAT score; rather, the question the authors address is whether or not taking these educational courses also raises a person's IQ. The data shows that the coaching services that successfully raise SAT scores consist of many hours of training, compatible to going to school fulltime. In this respect, 100 hours of study, on average, will increase the verbal SAT score 24 points and add 39 points to the math SAT score. There is no significant additional improvement in either score after 150 hours of study. The results of these studies show that prepping for a SAT test can, at least temporarily, raise a student's IQ between 0.1 and 0.4 standard deviations. It also is clear that these modest gains in IQ, brought on by intensive study, are short-term and fade with time. During the 1970s, when scholars were getting used to the disappointing results of programs designed to level the playing field for school-aged children, they were also coming to the consensus that IQ could not be changed after age six or at the age that most children enter school. If we start our educational processes sooner the results will improve, the academics predicted. Enter front and center, Head Start. One of the oldest, largest and most enduring program designed to foster intellectual development came about as a result of the Economic Opportunity act of 1964, the opening salvo of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Project Head START was designed to break the cycle of poverty by targeting preschool children in poor families. Before long thousands of Head Start centers were employing tens of thousands of workers and annually spending hundreds of millions of dollars at first, then billions, on hundreds of thousands of children and their families. The earliest returns on Head Start were nothing short of amazing. A few months spent by preschoolers in the first summer programs were said to increase IQ scores by as much as ten points and the summer programs were made year around projects. By 1966, however, the experts were noticing the dreaded "fade-out," the gradual convergence in test scores of children who participated in the program with comparable children who had not. Cognitive benefits that were picked up in the first grade usually were gone by the third grade. Bt the sixth grade they had vanished entirely. No lasting improvements in intelligence have ever been statistically validated with any Head Start Program. As with most of Johnson's social programs, Head Start proved to be total waste of time and money, a lot of money! (My conclusion, not the author's). Contemporary advocates of Head Start maintain it has reduced long-term school failure, crime and illegitimacy while improving employability. These supposed delayed benefits are called sleeper effects and have led some to claim "every dollar spent on Head Start earns three dollars in the future." Such claims do not survive scrutiny. The evidence for sleeper effects never comes from Head Start Programs themselves but from more intensive and expensive preschool interventions such as Perry School. One hundred twenty three black children from the inner city of Ypsilanti Michigan were enrolled the study in 1960. The IQs of these children varied between 70 and 85 at age three. Fifty eight received intensive cognitive instruction five half-days a week in a highly enriched preschool setting for one or two years and their homes were visited by teachers weekly for further instruction of parents and their children. The teacher-to-child ratio was about one to five and the teachers had master degrees in child development and other social work fields. Perry Preschool resembled the average Head Start program as a Ferrari resembles the family sedan. At the end of the two year program the children in the Perry program were scoring eleven IQ points higher than children in the control group. Again, as with all other Head Start programs, by the end of the fourth grade, no significant difference in the IQ of the two groups remained. Yet another example of "fade-out" and the futility of programs designed to alter IQ by preschool interventions. At best, the effect of such programs is small and cannot justify the investment of billions of dollars in run-of-the-mill Head Start programs. But, what would be the outcome if you started these interventions earlier in a child's life? The Abecedarian Project did just that, concentrating on babies that were at high risk for retardation because of their mothers' low IQs and low socioeconomic status. The programs started when the babies were a month old and provided care for eight hours a day, five days a week and fifty weeks each year. The programs emphasized cognitive enrichment activities with teacher-to-child ratios of one to three for infants and one to four until the children reached age five. At the end of the fifth year, the children in the day care groups outscored the controls by half a standard deviation on the various IQ tests performed. At last report, the children were 12 years old and were still doing better than the controls. This would be unequivocal good news were it not for charges that the subjects of the programs and their controls were not comparable in their intellectual prospects at birth. In fact, the experimental children were outscoring the controls by age one or two years and some were doing so by six months. This means that either the interventions had achieved all of their positive effects in the first 6 to 12 months of the project or the experimental and control groups were different to begin with. To complicate the issue further, it is well known that tests of intelligence in children younger than three are poor predictors of later intelligence and tests for infants under 6 months are extremely unreliable. The Abecedarian Project also suffered from its small sample size, the experimental and control groups being no larger than 15 and some as small as 9. The debate over the results was ongoing and unresolved when The Bell Curve was published in 1995. When all is said and done, there is only one way to completely transform a child's environment beneficently: adoption out of a bad environment into a good one. So, how many points does being raised in a good adoptive home add to an IQ score? As a group, adoptive children do not score as high as the biological children of their adoptive parents. The deficit is roughly seven to ten points. It is not completely clear what his deficit means. One hypothesis, and the most likely, is that the adopted children's genes hold them back or the negative effect of not being adopted immediately after birth (as only a few of them are) loses the benefits their adopting parents would have provided earlier on. None the less, researchers believe that adopted children have higher scores than they would have had if they had been raised by their biological parents. This difference is about six points. How does all this effect the policy agenda? Nothing is more predictable than that researchers will conclude that what is needed is more research. But certain kinds of research is not needed. Nothing will be learned by more evaluations of programs like Head Start. We already know it is difficult, and probably impossible, to alter the environment enough to positively affect the development of IQ by anything short of adoption at birth. The authors predict that the most promising leads will come from research designed to determine the psychological basis of intelligence rather than more studies to determine the cultural and educational variables that effect the development of intelligence. The authors close this depressing chapter by suggesting that we accept a good dose of realism. An inexpensive reliable method of raising IQ is not available. The wish that it were is understandable, but to think that the available repertoire of social interventions can do the job, if only the country spends more money on them, is illusory. No one has the slightest idea how to raise IQ substantially on a national level. We need to look elsewhere for solutions to the social problems described in the earlier chapters of The Bell Curve. Comment: The message of this depressing chapter is clear. Nations cannot raise the IQs of their children by preschool interventions that are practical from a financial point of view. Programs that have raised the cognitive ability of children are simply too costly to implement nationwide. Routine Head Start programs are nothing more than expensive "make-work" programs for those in the teaching profession and have no long term beneficial effects on the impoverished low IQ children of the underclass. Our efforts should be directed towards decreasing the numbers of these children by stricter immigration policies and by reducing the numbers of children born to welfare mothers. Both of these goals could easily be archived if there was the political will to do so.

The Bell Curve Chapter 16 Social Behavior and the Prevalence of Low Cognitive Ability

In this chapter, the question is not whether low cognitive ability causes social problems but the prevalence of low cognitive ability among people who have those problems. For most of the worst social problems of our time, the people demonstrating the anti-social behaviors are in the lower portion of the cognitive ability distribution. Practical solutions must therefore be capable of succeeding with such people. In previous chapters ethnic groups other than white were excluded. The data in this chapter are representative of all Americans aged 26 to 33 as of 1990.

In 1989, 11.1 percent of people aged 25 to 34 were in poverty. Forty-eight percent of the poor were from the bottom 20 percent of intelligence. In fact, 32 percent of the poor come from the lowest IQ decile (10 percent) and 48 percent of the poor are from the lowest two deciles. Finally, 80 percent of those impoverished are in or below the fourth decile. These people have IQs of 87 or lower. Only 2 percent of people in the tenth decile, with IQs above 119, are in poverty. The statistics are similar for permanent high school dropouts wherein two-thirds of dropouts come from the bottom 20 percent in intelligence. Overall, 94 percent of permanent dropouts were below average in IQ. On the other hand, intelligence was not a major factor in determining whether men were at work. By and large, men who were employed throughout 1982 were spread across the full range of IQs, with only a minor elevation for those in the top four deciles of intelligence. The authors do not provide an explanation for this finding which is dissimilar to the other conclusions in this chapter. It also if contradictory to the finding that those who did not work at all in 1989 had mean IQs of only 84 and 64 percent of able bodied men who were chronically unemployed were in the bottom 20 percent of intelligence. Now let's consider men and crime. Just who are the criminals? The mean IQ of men locked up in a criminal facility in 1989 was only 84 and 45 percent were in the bottom 10 percent of cognitive ability. A full ninety-three percent of those in prison were in the bottom half of the cognitive ability distribution and 62 percent came from the bottom 20 percent of intelligence. The statistics were similar for women on welfare. The mean IQ of women who ever received welfare was 89. Overall, 85 percent of these women had below average IQs and fewer than 4 percent had IQs in the top 20 percent of the population. For women who were chronically on welfare the cognitive distribution was even lower. A full 57 percent of women on chronic welfare had IQs in the bottom 20 percent of intelligence and 88 percent were in the bottom half of the distribution. What effect does this have on children? The authors start with illegitimacy. The mean IQ of mothers whose children were born out of wedlock was 87 and one out of three was born to mothers in the bottom 10 percent of the intelligence distribution with IQs below 81. With respect to children living with divorced or separated mothers, the women in these single parent families had mean IQs of 93 and 50 percent had IQs in the bottom 30 percent of the IQ distribution. The prevailing notion that separation and divorce are so endemic that they affect everyone more or less equally is wrong as regards cognitive ability. With respect to deprived home environments, the mean IQ of mothers of children in the worst home environments was 86 and three of eight had IQs below 81. Fifty-six percent of all children in the bottom of home environment were born to mothers in the bottom 20 percent of intelligence. Mothers whose children lived in poverty throughout their first three years had a mean IQ of 84 and 41 percent of these mothers were in the bottom 10 percent of cognitive ability. Of all the social problems examined in this chapter, poverty among children was preeminently associated with low IQ, in this case low IQ among the mothers. Most importantly, the authors found that 72 percent of the children in the bottom decile of IQ had mothers in the bottom 20 percent of intelligence. In other words dull mothers beget stupid children. The finding that low IQ mothers have low IQ children should come as no surprise. However, that it is predictable does not make the future for these children any brighter. The authors close this depressing chapter by pointing out that most people in the lower half of the cognitive distribution are employed, out of poverty, not on welfare, married when they have their babies, provide a nurturing environment for their children and are law abiding. However, this does not change the fact that the behaviors and problems of people who dominate the nation's social policy agenda have limited cognitive ability. When the nation attempts to lower unemployment or lower the crime rate or get mothers off of welfare, the solutions must be judged by their effectiveness with the people most likely to exhibit the problems: the least intelligent people. The search for practical solutions to these IQ related social problems are the subject matter of the remaining chapters of The Bell Curve. Comment: It should come as no surprise to the reader, that people who live in poverty or exhibit one or more of the antisocial behaviors have lower IQs than those who are successful in life. Although the authors do not emphasize it in this chapter, our nation's falling mean IQ is a major contributor to almost all of our worsening social problems, including the increasing crime rate, the increasing rate of illegitimacy, the escalating rate of unemployment, and the ever increasing numbers of those who are on some form of welfare. Until we, as a nation, come to grips with, and do something about, the fact that Americans are becoming dumber by the minute, nothing is likely to change. In the closing chapters of The Bell Curve Herrnstein and Murray suggest solutions to the social problems of our time. Unfortunately, I believe, they were far more successful in pointing out the causes of antisocial behavior than they were in suggesting meaningful solutions to the ills that plague our nation.

Thoughts on Catholicism

Americans obviously have changed their opinions of Catholics and their popes over the past 50 or 60 years. When I was growing up in Southern Humboldt County our Catholic neighbors were some of our best friends; however my parents would not have voted for a catholic, they despised the papacy. Those of us who are long in the tooth will recall that JFKs biggest impediment to becoming president resulted from the fact that he was a Catholic and many feared that his catholic beliefs might influence the way he governed. My earliest years were spent in the Seventh Day Adventist Colony in Eel Rock California. The colony was comprised primarily of elderly retirees who had moved to the colony to await the second coming of Christ which their leader, the false profit Sister Ellen White, assured them was imminent. These elderly SDAs believed, and rightly so, that the Catholic Church was an evil institution and that the church's popes were among the most wicked men to ever walk the face of the earth. These people knew full well that tens of thousands of innocent people were slaughtered by Catholic popes during the Medieval and Spanish Inquisitions. Most of these innocents were Jews who were murdered for their money. I am sure that it would come as no surprise to these elderly SDSs to learn that many catholic priests were later discovered to be pedophiles. My first experience with Catholicism occurred when I was around eight years old. Our good friends the Salazar's ( MR Salazar was the railroad section foremen at Eel Rock at the time) had a daughter named Hope and twin boys around four to five years old. I do not recall their names. Tragically, both of the twins drowned in the Eel river after entering a row boat that turned over while they were playing in it. Freddy Nunnemaker, Billy Gallagher and I were pallbearers at their funeral mass in the Fortuna Catholic church a few days later. I recall thinking that it was, with its holy water, incense burners and lighting of candles and mumbling Latin homily, the most bizarre and ludicrous event I had ever attended. But the absurdity of the Catholic mass is not the reason for writing about this tragic event; rather, it was the episode that preceded the mass that drew my attention. The Salazar's went to the Catholic Cemetery in Eureka to chose a final resting place for their boys. Mrs. Salazar was appalled at the appearance of the weed infested place and refused to have her sons buried there. She ultimately chose to have the twins buried at the nondenominational Ocean Side Cemetery next door. But, unbelievable as it may sound, the Catholic Priest at Fortuna refused to set foot in the Ocean Side Cemetery and, thus, refused to mumble his unintelligible words or sprinkle holy water over the boys before they were laid to rest. Mrs. Salazar was devastated by the refusal of the church to assist in the proper burial her boys. When we visited the family some ten years later in San Rafael, it was clear that she had never recovered from the unseemly way her boys were treated by unholy father of the Fortuna Catholic Church. For my part, I have never set foot in a Catholic Church since the day I participated in that ludicrous funeral mass some 70 years ago and will not do so in the future. It is clear that the public's view of Catholicism has changed drastically since the Salazar twins drowned in the Eel River and JFK was elected president, probably because the last three popes, especially Frances, have seemed more likable and humble than the churches previous leaders. Whether this perception is a reflection of meaningful change in this evil establishment's hierarchy remains to be seen. I, for one, am skeptical.

Chapter 15- The demography of Intelligence

When people die they are not replaced one for one by babies who have identical IQs. If the next generation of babies grows up with systematically higher or lower IQs, the national distribution of IQ changes. The evidence indicates that demographic trends are exerting downward pressure on the distribution of cognitive ability and that these pressures are strong enough to have significant social consequences. Throughout the western world modernization has brought falling birth rates. More importantly, the birth rates are falling faster for educated women than the uneducated. Furthermore, education leads women to have their babies later, which also produces additional dysgenic pressures.

Current immigration policies provide the other major source of dysgenic pressure. The mean IQ of immigrants in the 1980s was about 95. This in itself may not be much of a problem; in the past, immigrants have shown large increases in such measures after a few generations. But the evidence indicates that the self-selection process that used to attract the classical American immigrant- brave, hard working, imaginative, self-starting and often high IQ- has been changing and with it the nature of the immigrant population. Putting the pieces together, something worrying is happening to the cognitive capital of the country. Whatever good things we can accomplish with changes in the environment would be much more effective if they did not have to fight these demographic head winds. As the population replenishes itself from generation to generation by birth and immigration, the people who pass from the scene are not going to be replaced, one for one, by people with the same IQ scores. This is what the authors mean by the demography of intelligence. The question is not whether the demographic processes themselves can have an impact on the distribution of intelligence, that much is for certain, but what and how big the impact is. Mounting evidence indicates that that these demographic changes in the mean national IQ are exerting downward pressures that are significant enough to have major negative social and economic consequences. The authors refer to this downward pressure as dysgenesis. Children resemble their parents, for whatever reason, in IQ and immigrants with low IQs and their decedents will not duplicate America's resident cognitive ability distribution. If women with low scores are producing more rapidly that women with higher scores the mean IQ of our nation will decline irrespective of whether the women with low scores come by them by nature or nurture. The author's exploration of this all important issue proceeds in three stages. First, they describe the state of knowledge as to when and why dysgenesis occurs. Next they look at the present state of affairs regarding differential birth rates, the effects of differences in the age of childbearing and lastly the effects of immigration. Finally, they speculate on the shape of the future and describe the magnitude of the stakes involved. Hold your hat, we are in for a bumpy and disquieting ride! In pre-modern times, privileged young women were better nourished, better rested and had better medical care than the underprivileged. They married earlier and suffered fewer disruptions. As a result they ended up with more surviving children. As modernization proceeded these advantages narrowed. Modern societies provide greater opportunities for privileged women to be something other than house wives. On average modern women spend more of their reproductive years in school. The cost of raising a child is another reason privileged women bear fewer children and postpone the ones they do bear. Meanwhile, children impose few opportunity costs for poor women because a "career" usually is not seen as a viable option. Children, on the other hand, continue to have the same attractions that have always led young women to find motherhood intrinsically rewarding. Finally, in most countries in the contemporary west a baby is free or even profitable depending on the welfare system in her country. For all these reasons reproductive rates are correlated with income and educational levels, which in turn are correlated with intelligence. What is the evidence that this type of dysgenesis is actually happening? In the 1930s the eminent psychometrician Raymond Cattell was predicting a loss of 1.0 to 1.5 IQ points per generation. Another predicted that "If this trend continued for another century England and America would be well on the way to becoming nations of near half-wits." Their pessimism was based on the fact that the average IQ in large families was lower than in smaller families. However, during the 1960s a number of studies seemed to show that the IQ of the nation was almost stable, or perhaps rising slowly, despite the lower average IQs in larger families. This optimism proved to be ephemeral because the studies were of nearly all white populations in the upper Midwest and, as such, were not representative of the national population. In 1982 demographer Daniel Vining showed that when birth rates were high, people with higher intelligence tended to have more children than those who had lower cognitive ability while in times of falling birth rates the opposite was true. The American fertility rate has been falling since the late 1950s and so have the birth rates of educated white women. Since the flawed studies in the 1960s and 1970s, all the news has been bad. A 1980s study of a nearly all-white sample of people in Wisconsin found a dysgenic effect of 0.8 IQ points a generation. Several other studies have suggested that the 0.8 figure underestimates the actual decrease in IQ that is occurring with each generation. When considering the dysgenic pressures in America there are three major factors to take into account: the numbers of children born to women of various IQ levels, the age at which they have them and, most importantly the cognitive ability of immigrants. First, let's consider the cognitive level of the women who are having children. Demographers take a fertility rate of 2.1 as a dividing line between having enough children to replenish the parent generation and having to few. Overall, women who were college graduates had 1.56 children, one child less than the lower IQ women without even a high school diploma. this means that high school dropouts had 71 percent more children than women who had graduated from college. The overall IQ of American mothers in 1992 was a little less than 98 which suggests a decline in IQ of about 0.8 points per generation. Population growth depends not just on the total number of children women have but on how old they are when they have them. The effect is dysgenic when a low-IQ group has babies at a younger age than the high-IQ group, even if the number born in each group eventually is the same. Suppose that over several generations low and high IQ mothers have the same number of children but the low IQ mothers always have their first baby on their twentieth birthday and all the high IQ mothers have their first baby on their thirtieth birthday. The low IQ mothers will produce three generations of children to every two produced by the high IQ mothers. Studies of fertility rates among ethnic groups tells a similar story. In a 1992 analysis of American fertility women ages 35 to 44 had given birth to an average of 1.94 children; 1.89 for white women,2.23 for black women, and 2.47 for Latino women. More disturbing is the fact that, in all three groups, the more educated the women were the lower were their fertility rates. We cannot conclude, however, that whites, blacks and Latinos are on the same downward slope because each ethnic group has different proportions of women at different IQ levels. For example, black and white women with IQs of 90 or below have similar birth rates but only 15 percent of white women fall in the 90s and below range compared to 52 percent of black women. As of 1992, 69 percent of all black children were born to mothers with IQs of 90 or lower. The figure was 19 percent for whites and 64 percent for Latino mothers with low IQs. Immigration is an even older trip wire for impassioned debate than differential fertility. American has more people flowing into it than any other country. About half of the world's immigrants are coming to America. The nation's political ground rules have yet to accept that the intelligence of immigrants is a legitimate topic for policymakers to consider. To the contrary, politicians on both sides of the isle seem to believe that the IQs of illegal immigrants from Mexico and south America are similar, if not identical, to those of the population already living here. To begin the discussion the authors assume that immigrants to America have similar mean IQs to those living in the countries from which they came. (This is an absurd assumption considering that well educated Mexicans are not among the hordes of illegal's crossing our southern border each day.) Using this rational the average IQ of immigrants in the 1980s was 95- essentially unchanged from the 1950s and 1960s. With respect to ethnic groups, white immigrants have slightly higher mean IQs than the native-born American population, although somewhat lower than native-born American whites. For reasons not known, foreign born black immigrants have IQs five points higher than American born blacks. Finally, Latino immigrants have mean scores more than seven points below native-born Latinos. With respect to IQ, there is no reliable information on the large immigrant population from East Asia and Vietnam, who might be significantly boosting the immigration mean IQ. The United States maybe expected to draw high-ability workers from countries that have more extensive welfare states and less income inequality than we do and will draw low-ability workers from countries that have less extensive welfare states and higher income inequality (such as the poorer countries in the third world). Borjus used the census figures from 1970 and 1980 to examine the experience of immigrants from 41 countries. In the 1960s and 1970s the United states became much more of a welfare state. During this period of time, the earning potential of Latino immigrants fell substantially from 1955 to 1980. Among the non-European countries, the steepest declines in earning potential were among immigrant groups from Columbia, the Dominican Republic and Mexico. Only the immigrant groups from Cuba, Brazil and Panama had improving potential in America, by Borjas's measure. When all is said and done, just how important is dysgenic pressure? The higher fertility rate and faster generational cycle among the less intelligent native born Americans and the immigration population, that is somewhat below the national average, suggests that something worrisome is happening to the cognitive capital of the country. Just how big is this effect? Using the usual metrics for such analysis it would be nearly impossible to make the total fall in the nations cognitive ability less than one IQ point a generation and it might be twice that. But, so what if the nations mean IQ is falling a point or two each generation? One obvious reason is that the drop may be increasing ethnic difference in cognitive ability at a time when the nation badly needs narrowing differences. Another reason to be concerned is that when the mean IQ of the nation shifts a little, the size of the tails of the distribution (the tails of the bell curve for intelligence) change a lot. For example, a three point drop in the mean IQ would reduce the proportion of the population with IQs over 120 to 31 percent and the proportion with IQs above 135 by 41 percent. Similarly the proportion of the population with IQs below 65 (the very dull) would rise by 68 percent. Changes this large would profoundly alter most aspects of American life, none the authors can think of that are good. Even a fall in mean IQ of only three points will have a profound effect on our society. The overall poverty rate will increase by 11 percent and the proportion of children living in poverty will rise by 13 percent. The proportion of children born to single mothers will rise by 8 percent and the numbers of males in jail will increase by 13 percent. The proportion of children living with non-parental custodians, of women forever on welfare, and the number of high school dropouts will all increase by 14 percent. A cascade of secondary effects, all of which were ignored in this analysis, may make social conditions worse than the authors suggest or perhaps not as bad. But the overall point is irrefutable, that relatively minor shifts in the nations mean IQ can produce profound social consequences. So what would happen if the mean IQ of Americans went up three IQ points? For starters, the poverty rate would fall by 25 percent as would the numbers of males in prison. The high school dropout rate would fall by 28 percent. Children living without their parents would decrease by 20 percent and the numbers on welfare would drop by 18 percent. It is easy to understand the historical, social and political reasons why no one wants to talk about the demographics of intelligence. The authors purpose was to point out that the stakes are large (I think huge) and that continuing to pretend that "there is nothing worth thinking about" is as feckless as it is foolish. Comment: The Bell Curve was first published in 1995. During the intervening 20 years the socioeconomic problems have become significantly worse. Seventy two percent of all young black males are either in prison or on parole. The illegitimacy rate is 72 percent for blacks and a whopping 40.7 overall. Over 90 million Americans are out of work. Undoubtedly, these grime statistics are due, at least in part, to the fact that Americans, as a whole, have become increasing dumber with the passage of time, just as the authors predicted. Things could have been done to change the situation, but for political reasons were not. We should have build the damned wall 20 years ago, but did not. We should have reversed course after The Bell Curve was published two decades ago and started paying welfare mothers not to have babies rather than paying them to have babies, but we did not. We should have stopped shipping jobs that low IQ people could perform overseas years ago, but we have not. In short, there are many things we could do to improve the economy and decrease the social problems we are facing in the twenty-first century, but as long as the cabal of big business, who want cheap labor, and liberal democrats, who want a consistent source of low IQ voters, nothing will be done. You can take that to the bank!

Chapter 14- Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ

Ethnic differences in education, occupation, poverty, unemployment, illegitimacy, crime, and other signs of inequality have preoccupied scholars and thoughtful citizens for hundreds of years. In this chapter the authors examine the differences after cognitive ability is taken into account.

Herrnstein and Murray found that Latinos and whites of similar cognitive ability have similar social behavior and economic outcomes. For blacks and whites, the story was more complicated. For the two most vital indicators of success, educational attainment and entry into a prestigious occupation, the black/white discrepancy reverses. After controlling for IQ, larger numbers of blacks than whites graduate from college and enter a profession. On the other hand, the B/W gap in annual income or in persons below the poverty line narrows after controlling for IQ but still remains sizable. Similarly, differences in unemployment, labor force participation, marriage and illegitimacy get smaller but remain significant after extracting the effect of IQ. These inequalities must be explained by other factors in American life. The role of cognitive ability has seldom been considered in past studies of the various inequalities that exist in American culture. The authors believe that doing so in future research could clarify issues and focus attention on the factors that produce the most troubling inequalities. America's social problems are most often expressed in ethnic terms. For example, in the 1992 recession white unemployment was under seven percent, but it was fourteen percent for blacks. Similarly, the poverty rate at that time was twelve percent for whites and thirty-three percent for blacks. Such statistics, and the deliberation over what they should mean for policy have been hotly debated in the press and political circles since the early 1960's. Today, as Latinos have become an increasing larger percentage of the population, the discussion has centered on similar disparities between Latinos and whites. This chapter examines the question of what happens to these ethnic differences in economic and social behavior when intelligence is held constant. The primary goal is to broaden the search for answers after three decades during which scholars have ignored the contribution of IQ to ethnic differences in the main social outcomes of everyday life. First the authors look at the indicators of success that were the focus of Part 1, then the indicators of problems that were the focus of Part 11. They begin with what should be considered one of Americas great success stories. Ethnic differences in higher education, occupations and wages largely disappear after controlling for IQ, often they vanish. In this sense, America has equalized these central indicators of social success. In 1990, 84 percent of whites had achieved a high school diploma as compared to 73 percent of blacks and 65 percent of Latinos. But these percentages are based on everybody, at all levels of intelligence. What are the odds of blacks and Latinos with average IQs of 103 (the mean IQ of all high school graduates at the time) completing high school? The answer may surprise you, it did me. The odds of graduation from high school were 93 percent for blacks, 91 percent for Latinos compared to 89 percent for whites, assuming again that they all had IQs of 103. The statistics were similar for college graduates. Overall, before controlling for IQ, the probability of achieving a bachelor's degree was 27 percent for whites, 11 percent for blacks and 10 percent for Latinos. But for persons with mean IQs of 114 ( the average IQ of college graduates) the graduation rates for whites was 50 percent, 68 percent for blacks and 49 percent for Latinos. The authors discuss the black advantage in Chapter 19. One of the positive findings about ethnic differences has been that education pays off in occupational status for minorities roughly the same as it does for whites. Holding education constant, similar proportions of blacks, Latinos and whites are found in the various occupational categories. However, as with education, after accounting for intelligence blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in high-status occupations like medicine, engineering and teaching. The probability of being in a high-IQ occupation, for those with an average IQ of 117, was 10 percent for whites, 26 percent for blacks and 16 percent for Latinos. The story was the same for wages. In 1989 white workers made an average of $27,373, blacks $20,994 and Latinos $23,409; however, people of average IQ made roughly the same, around $25,000. With the exceptions of managers/administrators and unskilled laborers where blacks earned about 16 percent less than whites, the job market rewards blacks and whites of equivalent cognitive ability nearly equally in all nine job categories studied. Turning now to poverty the narrative does not change, controlling for age but not IQ, the poverty rate was 7 percent for whites, 26 percent for blacks and 18 percent for Latinos. But for a persons of average age and mean IQs of 100, the poverty rare stayed the same for whites (6 percent) but dropped to 11 percent for blacks and 9 percent for Latinos. But, even after controlling for IQ the black poverty rate remained almost twice as high as the rate in whites. Why does this gap persist while the differences in educational achievement, occupations and wages did not? The search for the answer to this question takes us further from things that IQ can explain into ethnic differences with less well understood roots. Black unemployment has been higher than white unemployment for as long as records have been kept. In 1992, 21 percent of blacks were unemployed, more than twice the rate of whites (10 percent). The unemployment rate for Latinos was 14 percent. Controlling for cognitive ability reduces this difference for Latinos but not for blacks. Fifteen percent of blacks with average IQs of 100 were unemployed in 1998 as compared to 11 percent for whites. The unemployment rate of Latinos with mean IQs of 100 was 11 percent identical to that of whites. With respect to blacks, there are ethnic differences other than IQ which explain their inability to do well in the work force. The authors do not speculate further along these lines. Historically, the black-white difference in marriage rates was small until the 1960s and then widened. By 1991 only 38 percent of black women ages 15 to 44 were married, compared to 58 percent of white women. Only 8 percent of the black-white marriage gap disappears after controlling for IQ. A black women with a mean IQ of 100 has a 58 percent chance of being married by age 30 compared to a 79 percent of a white women with the same IQ. The difference between black and white rates of illegitimacy goes back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1960, 24 percent of black children were illegitimate as compared to only 2 percent of white children, a huge proportional difference. By 1990 68 percent of all black babies were illegitimate as compared to 39 percent for Latinos and 18 percent for whites. This disparity cannot be explained away no matter what variables are entered into the equation, including controlling for IQ. In this respect, the illegitimacy rate for women with average IQs of 100 was 10 percent for whites, 17 percent for Latinos and 51 percent for blacks. Welfare, in 1991 about 21 percent of black women ages 15 to 44 were on AFDC as compared to 12 percent for of Latino and four percent of white women. At that time 49 percent of black women, 30 percent of Latino women and 13 percent of white women had been on welfare at some time in their life time. After controlling for IQ, 12 percent of white women with mean IQs of 100 were on welfare as compared to 30 percent of blacks and 15 percent of Latino women with average IQs. Children living in poverty. In 1992, 47 percent of black children under the age of 18 were living in poverty. This extraordinarily high figure was nearly as bad for Latino children, with 40 percent under the poverty line. For non-Latino whites the proportion was 14 percent. In women with average IQs of 100, 6 percent of white children were living in poverty while 14 percent of black and 10 percent of Latino children born to women with average IQs were living below the poverty line. The story was much the same for the intellectual development of children in the different ethnic groups. Seven percent of children born to white mothers scored in the lower decile on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test while 55 percent of black children and 54 percent of Latino children did so. Controlling for IQ, reduced the ethnic disparities considerably but there still was a 20 point gap between white children and both black and Latino children born to mothers with average IQs. Finally crime, blacks are 3.8 times as likely to be arrested, relative to their numbers in the population, than whites or Latinos. Sociologist Robert Gordon analyzed black-white differences in juvenile delinquency and found that the difference in the prevalence of black and white delinquency is explained by differences in the IQs of the delinquents, independent of the effect of socioeconomic status. The relationship of cognitive ability to adult criminal behavior among whites and blacks is similar. Before controlling for IQ the chances of a white being incarcerated for a crime is 2 percent for whites, 13 percent for blacks and 6 percent for Latinos. After correcting for IQ the ethnic criminality gap is two percent for whites, five percent for blacks and three percent for Latinos. If one of Americas goals is to rid itself of racism and discrimination we should welcome the finding that a Latino and white of equal cognitive ability have the same chances of getting a college education and working in a white-collar job. A black with similar cognitive abilities has even a higher chance of having those good things happen. We also should rejoice at the fact that Latinos, blacks and whites of similar cognitive ability earn annual salaries within a few hundred dollars of each other. On the other hand, the evidence presented in this chapter should give those who write about ethnic inequalities reason to avoid flamboyant rhetoric about ethnic oppression. Racial and ethnic differences in this country are seen in a different light when cognitive ability is added to the equation. Awareness of these complex relationships is an essential first step in our everlasting attempt to create an equitable America. Comment: This chapter will be a difficult pill to swallow for liberal academics who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that we are all born equal except, of course, for obvious differences such as skin color and athletic ability. The refusal of the genetic inheritance deniers to accept the fact that a large part of our innate intelligence is inherited from our parents has led to a much of the social unrest in America since the inception of Johnson's great society political blunders in the 1960s. These programs including school bussing, affirmative action and head start, to name only three of the worst offenders, have been a total waste of time and money. In fact, they have destroyed the black family, increased the rate of poverty, crime and illegitimacy while bankrupting the country. As my mother used to say "you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, no matter how hard you might try."