Stereotyping is a fair method to reduce the work in making choices. However, there is always a harm in using a stereotype, and the benefit must be weighed against it. This harm must be considered from the perspective of:
[ul]
[li]the person applying it (i.e. the likelyhood the stereotype may produce a bad result for me), [/li][li]the person(s) it’s applied to (i.e. how does the stereotype directly harm an individual that is a member of a group), and [/li][li]the detriment to society in general (i.e. would widespread application of the stereotype create undesireable results for societies that have these different groups as members)[/li][/ul]
Stereotyping based on race in, say, choosing an employee produces unacceptable harm in all three cases: It can often lead to ehiring a poor employee (assuming, as most data now shows, racial employment preference isn’t based on objective data), it decreases the freedom of employment (and hence the economic status) for a member of the targeted race, and it creates a less productive society (e.g. because folks think the game is rigged for or against them anyway, so why work harder?).
But stereotyping based on race when choosing a security line at the airport (like in the recent film Up in the Air, where the lead character always made a point of choosing the line with the most Asians because it moves faster) produces very little harm. Note that I didn’t say zero harm, but in proportion to using the same standard to weed out job applicants it’s not even close.
If a stereotype must be employed, it should be chosen in a way that minimizes these harms (you can never make them zero). On the employment question, a stereotype based on, say, education credentials would produce less harm than one based on race. At the very least then, it is immoral to use a race-based stereotype when one knows that a substantially less harmful one exists.
For some reason someone’s political blog doesn’t seem very authoritative or scientific to me. Just for the laugh of it though, the author of it has updated it in the past few days, to whit:
Who needs a formal test? Wait for the apocalypse and see which communities continue to hunt, fish and live off edible plants. Anyone who can’t pass that fundamental test doesn’t need to be put on an ice floe or fed to the wolves – they will literally die from ignorance or be spared by the kindness of smarter communities.
Unfortunately, the practical effect of this would be to greatly diminish the already small pool of black matriculants. The only way to attain even a partially diverse group in secondary education is to heavily skew selection criteria toward race and not opportunity. Only race-based quotas will achieve racial diversity and secondary schools do not have the luxury of taking poor whites over wealthy blacks simply because the opportunity of poor whites was diminished.
We need to maintain race-based quotas (or some mechanism that allows consideration of race), or secondary schools will be full of high-scoring whites and asians. Non-black ethnicities with low-opportunity backgrounds still outscore blacks with higher-opportunity backgrounds.
To date no schooling feeder system of which I am aware has had equal results across its racial groups, even within the exact same system. In Illinois, for instance, you can look at the standardized score profiles for any school and predict which racial/ethnic categories are associated with which scores, even within the same school and the same service neighborhood.
No, Kanazawa claimed otherwise. His methodology has been challenged for many of his papers that attempted more than pop psychology and his inclusion of Murray and Herrnstein in his meta-analysis on that topic demonstrates that his efforts are not serious (or that he does not care to vet his sources).
He might be right, (by accident), but it seems unlikely and his “analysis” has not done what he has claimed.
I’m a libby fool, so if Lemkos or Quechua or Luxembourgers or whoever are proven stupider (for commonly accepted metrics of stupidity), I would lobby for special federal and state educational aid to their communities, possibly including remedial instruction in Lemko-Ukrainian or Quechua or Letzebürgisch until they’re ready to keep up with the general school population in English.
Just in terms of Kanazawa using the NLSY data, economist Bryan Caplan did a similar thing more recently in reviewing Tim Harford’s ‘The Logic of Life’.
I deny his major. I doubt that he has done anything more than cherrypick a few points to make a claim, basing his claims on such nonsense as the Bell Curve (as he claims, himself).
If his input is garbage, I see no reason to open up the 30 gallon trash bag to carry away his output.
Note that he is not doing primary research. He is doing meta-analysis on others’ works. I do not deny the potential validity of meta-analysis, but when it is based on nonsense or bias, any good outcome is going to be the result of an error that happened to accidentally correct for the original error.
Don’t know about the rest of the paragraph, but having lived in Asia for over half my life, I would definitely be inclined to back this particular assertion.
If the Bell Curve was true what would be different? Its findings continue to be backed up. See Philip L Roth’s meta analysis of 6,246,729 corporate, military, and higher education samples confirming a 1.1 SD b - w difference in g. Roth et al. found that the IQ gap between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics is 10.8 points.
Roth et al, 2001 Personnel Psychology, 54, 297-330.
Also, I’d recommend the June 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law which is dedicated to this debate.