Originally Posted by Chief Pedant
“The score difference cite I gave you is from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, as you may have noticed.”
…and it seems rather unlikely they would advance genetic differences as a possible explanation for the performance difference.
Like Jared Diamond, their set of possible explanations does not include the possibility of gene disparities, and like Dr Diamond, the list of possible explanations are pure speculation without any support whatsoever.
I do not understand your tack of asking for a cite for parental education as if I were giving unsupported arguments, and then simply dismissing it as “irrelevant” when I give you a cite. It is “irrelevant” only in the sense that parental education turns out to be irrelevant as an explanation for differences.
If we are examining the marked disparate between blacks and the white/asian group in performance on standardized exams, the argument most commonly advanced–and indeed, advanced in this thread–are that whites/asians have a fundamental opportunity advantage either because their families could afford a decent education for them, or because their parents were themselves educated and were able to pass along to their children both the value of an education as well as a more directed path to it. Neither of these hold up to scrutiny, and this fact remains: black and white/asian performance disparities on standardized education tests are not explained by income level, opportunity, parental education or any other supposed advantage of opportunity.
I don’t know if you had a chance to read all of the thread, but your questions have been addressed here and elsewhere. First of all, external circumstances, including political systems, have an impact on the overall wealth of a nation. No one is arguing there is some sort of simplistic correlation between an average population IQ and economic success. Among other factors, religion and politics play a part, of course.
What one does see, even in countries with rotten political systems, are pockets of success related to high-functioning cognition even where political systems are disastrous. North Korea’s ability to create a nuclear arsenal is an example of that. So is India’s success in becoming a place to outsource IT. To date, no such pockets of innovation or success in high-cognitive fields exists in sub-saharan Africa. University programs in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) are full of eastern Europeans and asians from underperforming countries. Those programs do not have an equal complement of sub-saharan Africans despite robust efforts to recruit and fund them.
It has become popular to blame Africa’s current problems on colonialization, and as far as I’m concerned, that debate is not worth undertaking. Certainly other countries have suffered substantial devastation and recovered, and to date the billions of dollars and thousands of programs poured into Africa year after year have had limited success even forty years later.
I have said before that I hope my hypothesis is incorrect. I see no evidence that it is.
Well maybe it is because the average black spends their lfe too busy trying to scratch a living essentially from childhood that they don’t get a chance to get any sort of education that will actually let them compete - if you have to skip days because you need to farm, or garbage pick, or melt down electronics for metal, or in the case of females because they lack sanitary supplies once a month to go out in public no matter how black or lily white you happen to be you just would not be able to compete.
As I proposed way up above, when you build factories, add in daycare and k-6 at least so the kids instead of being left at home would get educated, the parents would have both jobs and a safe place to park the kids during the work day and the kids would get an education and at least a lunch to address the nutrition issue. That could bootstrap the country into the 21st century faster than many other suggestions. It would require random companies with an interest in 3d world factories to actually want to help the country instead of just their bank accounts …
Sure but don’t you see that looking at the present is a very limited way of examining the issue? Each of your points could once have been addressed at various other ethnicity’s across the globe.
This quote was from Coolidge, it was regarding the national origins formula. The popular belief in America at the time was that the Southern European race’s were worth less compared to the North. In effect what you’re arguing about black people now.
I would compare it to the Criminal Castes of India these people are not particularly genetically different to any of those surrounding them - or similar to each other. And yet many Indians are utterly convinced of their genetic criminality and stupidity, and lo and behold the statistics bare this out (indicates why).
And as to your comment about colonialism I find it bizarre, but I’m going to open up a new thread on it.
Overall I think you’re really ignoring the enormous power of norms, values and socialisation when looking for explanation of economic decline and I would ask if you acknowledge that factors such as religion and politics play a part how much culpability would you attribute to these rather than genetic differences?
You seem to arguing that the only reason for variation in outcomes among populations is circumstance of one kind or another, and not genetics.
I argue that it is both.
Suppose this were the OP: Turning the Inuit into track stars
Or perhaps this: Turning West Africans into track stars
Now ask yourself: Is this an equally realistic goa for both groups? Does the incredible over-representation of West Africans in track and field or the Kalenjin in long-distance running lend automatic credence to the notion that the only problem is the right development program since both of those groups were historically under-represented before the field became open to all?
We have decided, culturally and arbitrarily, and without a shred of evidence, that all populations are equally enabled for various pursuits given equal opportunity. I argue that such a position is devoid of supporting evidence. While I support your charitable intentions, the history of development in Africa is more often typified by the Motor Company of Botswana than it is by Tata Motors of India.
There are so many difficulties with this analogy that it’s hard to know where to start.
You’re completely ignoring the cultural aspect of sport. You have no idea if Inuit can be world class sprinters, because none of them attempt to become world class sprinters. You may as well argue based on the NBA player population ca. 1980 that Slavs are no good at basketball. Oops.
To my knowledge, no one has ever established that West Africans are, on average, any faster sprinters than any other population. All we know is that the very fastest West African sprinters tend to be faster than the very fastest sprinters in other groups. But that could just be a different slope on the bell curve rather than a different mean.
Most importantly, it’s no great surprise that a singular physical characteristic should become predominant in a genetically similar population. This is, after all, why we can distinguish between Swedes and Italians at a glance (usually). But singular physical characteristics are usually controlled by relatively few genes, and genetically similar populations are, well, genetically similar.
By contrast, your ‘dumb African’ hypothesis supposes that a very large, incredibly genetically diverse population all exhibit a complex mental characteristic which is likely controlled by a vast array of genes.
I don’t think anyone would be stunned if it turned out that certain genetically similar populations exhibited to a high degree some singular mental characteristic. Like, say, if Arabs turned out to be better able than average to distinguish between faces, or some unusual number of Basques turned out to be able to read back from memory documents they had seen briefly years before. But what you’re postulating isn’t anything like West African sprinters or Ethiopian endurance runners. It’s as if you were arguing that, on average, North Americans and Northern Europeans are better ice hockey players than other groups because of genetic factors. And that is a preposterous hypothesis, even though those groups are better at ice hockey.
Throwing in another book recommendation: The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier.
Essentially the problem is that poor countries with poor neighbours are a ticking time bomb. Any progress they make can be set back decades by internal or external strife, bad governance or natural resource discoveries (which are frequently bad for very poor countries: they can devalue all other economic activity and fund rebellions / dodgy government).
All the preceding problems can affect any developing nation, of course, but africa thanks to its history, climate and the way it’s been divvied up (e.g. it has a higher proportion of landlocked, resource-poor* nations than any other continent), mean the traps are more numerous and deeper than elsewhere.
Also relevant from the point of view of the OP title, is the distinction the book makes between developing countries and failed, stagnant countries.
For the most part the gap between developed and developing is closing, but both kinds of nation are pulling away fast from the nations essentially going nowhere (the “bottom billion” of the title).
This isn’t contradicting what I said before about natural resources. What I mean is, for poor countries, not having diamonds/oil = good, not having any exportable crops or a decent freshwater supply = bad.
Would you consider the economic success of SA a result of European settlers or is it the case that the Europeans simply stumbled into an economic system fundamentally developed by, and directed by, sub-saharan Africans?
My contention that large groups–including those defined as broadly as “races”–have disparate abilities is based on any number of arguments, which I have cited here and elsewhere.
These include an observed difference in successes for different arenas, observed differences in a variety of measurements including standardized scores and IQ studies, an observed similar performance ranking across cultures and political systems, and a failure to eliminate differences by (for instance) equalizing economic and educational factors for families of subjects being measured.
It would appear to me that your principal appeal is based on a general discomfort with the idea that this could be true, but is not based on a single study or fact or practical observation in the real world.
I stand ready to be corrected. Do you have any data with which to correct me? The OP is about turning a developing country into a developed one, and even sven is frustrated that “racists” like me think part of the difficulty–with Africa as a case study in point–is that populations are disparately enabled in their ability to become developed. While this may be a racist view, the question is whether or not it is a correct view. Lamenting the fact that it is “racist” does little to counter the argument itself.
Labels are easily applied, and even sven is welcome to apply them under what I assume to be a general assumption that applying a label of “racist” constitutes sufficient counter-argument. I propose instead that those who think all populations are equally enabled supply some sort of data suggesting that is actually the case. Perhaps you would be able to find some data that sub-saharan Africans, when removed from Africa and transplanted to the US, achieve equal success to Indians removed from India, for instance…or will a special circumstance for sub-saharan Africans also be proposed for that situation?
If differing abilities to become developed is a part of the picture, it’s a small part.
After all, if you look through history which countries are the most developed has changed many times: there was a time that you could have visited earth and found africa the most civilised continent.
Today many of the fastest-growing economies are in africa (ok, some are due to resource discoveries, but many aren’t), so how can this square with the idea that they cannot develop?
Of course, many of these countries will, sadly, see their growth crash back at some point, which is the real point:
I think most world economists agree that african nations are poor because africa is one huge poverty trap. Even a perfectly-governed african nation, with a hard-working workforce needs extraordinary luck to develop versus, say, a poor eastern-european country’s escape from poverty.
The reasons for this, and the possible solutions, are complicated.
And there are always those that prefer simple explanations to the complex reality.
We’ve hashed this out in thread after thread. It’s been made pretty obvious that you are not actually interested in examining the evidence and perhaps re-considering your ideas, so what would be the point in engaging you in debate?
No, my principle appeal is based on the fact that large groups of disparate populations are unlikely to share any unifying features unless there’s some basis to expect them to. The only unifying features sub-Saharan Africans share is high melanin content in their skin, for fairly obvious adaptive reasons. They don’t share any other physical features. Why would we expect them to share any mental features?
Or I’ll even make it easier.
Can you point to any feature shared by any race, beyond the superficial physical characteristics used to categorize those races? Note that you can’t point to any features exhibited by smaller populations. These have to be features that are shared by all members of a race, where race is taken to mean one of the 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 broad categories of humanity that span continents and are made up of many disparate sub-populations.
I have looked over the comments made in this thread since my original post within this series, and I agree that the comments I made ended up causing the OP’s debate to be sidetracked. It was not my intention to hijack the original thread. I posted on what I thought was an important angle to consider, and in defending that post against criticism of it, I contributed to derailing the entire original discussion.
I was wrong to pursue a peripheral point so vigorously in a thread whose title OP clearly did not intend for it to take that tack.
I am sorry. I was not paying attention and I make no excuse for it other than my own carelessness and haste to debate my own point of view.
Please forgive me. I look forward to pressing the issue in a thread appropriate for it, but I will try to be more careful in the future not to inject a highly sensitive issue which ends up derailing a thread.
In order to better integrate two of our schools here in Nashville many years ago, a white neighborhood and a black neighborhood were brought together as one school. We were the exception to your rule. So look no farther than my classroom.
That statement is really lacking in substance. The correlation would have to begin with the intelligence quotient and it is impossible to measure that against success. Everyone has a different idea of what success actually is. It isn’t measured in wealth automatically or even the perception of happiness.
Also, one year my predominately black senior class had the highest percentage of students passing the state proficiency test of any high school in the city. I think there were thirteen high schools at that time. Another year, before the merge, our entire school out scored all of the other high schools.
I don’t think that scientists use the words “superior” when talking about cultures. They are more interested in describing them rather than in passing judgment on them. So this statement wouldn’t have much meaning one way or the other:
The discussion in this thread was the hypothetical strategies and techniques that one would employ to bring a country from the status of “developing” to “developed.”
It is unfortunate that the example chosen happened to mention Africa, leaving an opening for our typical, separate IQ discussion, BUT THAT IS NOT THE TOPIC.
If anyone wishes to respond to the comments of Chief Pedant that involve discussions of inherent intelligence, you are free to open a new thread.
Discussions that continue the potential hijack will not be tolerated.
It is unfortunate that even sven’s complaint carries so much weight. Her frustration is simply another expression of her bias on the topic rather than staying open minded to dissenting opinions.
If Chief Pedant’s comments (at least his initial ones about “pasting education”) are a hijack, then Bryan Ekers and Steve MB about building schools for education (on page 1) are also a hijack. They both rest on assumptions on the cognitive capacity of a population.
[ul]
[li]Thinking building schools build wealth assumes the population is a tabula rasa blank slate, etc.[/li][li]Thinking schools don’t help assumes the population has innate characteristics that are not optimized to high-cognitive work.[/li][/ul]
Regardless of which belief you vehemently agree with, neither assumption has established 100% absolute certainty to the same level as a mathematical proof that 2+2=4.
To 100% prove that the population is a blank slate, there must be an educational program or methodology that boosts IQ scores (I stress IQ not intelligence). To date, no such teaching methodology or learning curriculum has been found yet to accomplish this. Cognitive researchers may someday invent such a method, but the fact is that it doesn’t exist today. To clarify, education has been proven to increase knowledge, but it hasn’t been proven to increase IQ. Knowledge (recollection of facts) does not equal IQ. This leaves an open door to dissenting opinions.
To 100% prove that IQ cannot be taught, scientists must identify the smoking gun of genes that manifest themselves as cognitive capacity. To date, no such genes have been identified. This also leaves an open door to dissenting opinions.
If we do not want to discuss IQ with Africa, that’s understandable. However, to be consistent, we should also never discuss the education of African children either (unless we all narrow our understanding that education only increases factual knowledge instead of intelligence). Both positions rest on assumptions that haven’t been 100% verified. Both positions depend on interpretations of correlation. Both positions either deserve equal time, or both deserve zero time.
So my question: Is the discussion of African education now off limits too?
This is a ridiculous straw man. Neither assumption follows.
But to dig down to your point, one fact that is indisputable is that there exist black people that are doctors, scientists, engineers etc, and/or that have very high IQs.
My family includes many of them.
So it’s a safe bet that there are those that will benefit from education. The question is merely one of how many will be helped.
So, yeah, it is off-topic. When someone suggests that schooling will help that’s trivially true, and there’s no need to state an opinion that a lower proportion of blacks have a high IQ or whatever.
As for whether IQ can be taught etc, it’s off-topic, but I recommend you google “flynn effect” and note how the gap between developed and developing countries is closing.