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Benjamin Friedman
Right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, Clark’s is about as stimulating an account of world economic history as one is likely to find. Let’s hope that the human traits to which he attributes economic progress are acquired, not genetic, and that the countries that grow in population over the next 50 years turn out to be good at imparting them. Alternatively, we can simply hope he’s wrong.
Here is the full review.
Addendum: Here is today's NYT essay, arguing for the genetic unity of mankind, here is a previous Slate piece. Here is a good NYT excerpt:
During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.
Second addendum: Here is Deirdre McCloskey's review of Clark.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 9, 2007 at 06:43 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Hope is not a plan.
Posted by: that guy at Dec 9, 2007 7:39:49 AM
Military servicemen have all taken IQ tests before they're allowed to sign up, so that study doesn't show what it purports to. Lower IQ types, whether black or white, don't get in. In other words, the fathers of the German-American children were pre-screened.
Posted by: Dennis Mangan at Dec 9, 2007 9:02:35 AM
Dennis,
"Lower IQ types, whether black or white, don't get in."
You gotta be kidding, especially during wartime. And I can offer plenty of anecdotal evidence from my stint that you oughta be kidding during peacetime, too.
If you really gotta grab at a straw, you'd be better off trying to find a reason why high-scoring whites would not have been in Germany (college deferments or somesuch).
Posted by: burger flipper at Dec 9, 2007 9:15:33 AM
The Eyferth 1959 study of the illegitimate black and white children of US occupational forces with German women is discussed by Arthur R Jensen in 'The g Factor' of 1998 on pages 482-3.
Jensen suggests that the evidence of this study does not refute the hypothesis of hereditary IQ differences because:
1. Although the children's IQ was measured, the parents' IQ was not measured (neither was the rank of the US military father measured). So it is not known whether the children inherited the parental IQ.
2. About 30 percent of US blacks failed pre-induction mental tests for the military, compared with 3 percent of white. So US black soldiers were a more IQ-selected and less-representative sample of their population than were white soldiers.
So 'Dennis Mangan's point seems to be supported by the evidence, and 'burger flipper's incredulity may not be well-founded. .
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Dec 9, 2007 9:48:07 AM
Lower IQ types, whether black or white, don't get in.
Metcalf addresses this objection in his piece:
But, Saletan says, [the study] suffers from a fatal flaw: Blacks in the military had been screened for IQ. Saletan concludes, "Even environmentalists (scholars who advocate nongenetic explanations) concede that this filter radically distorted the numbers." But this is flatly untrue. The two most prominent environmentalists, Richard Nisbett and James Flynn, have dismissed this very objection. Both have pointed out that white soldiers were also screened, and so had higher IQs than the general white population. James Flynn has argued extensively that the black-white gap in the military was the same as in the population at large.
Posted by: Raghav at Dec 9, 2007 9:59:15 AM
Gotta think Steve Sailer awoke with a start at 6:44 from some fever dream in which he secured a Superbowl win by tackling Malcolm Gladwell from behind on a breakaway run.
My apologies to Dennis. My only excuse is life has been a little hellish since the introduction of the McSkillet burrito, working the q'ing oven with one hand and my blackberry with the other.
A 30% turnaway rate during wartime seems implausible. Those must have been very different times. And if Bruce's info is correct, it certainly seems to change the implications. I don't follow Raqhav's reasoning. Even with both groups screened, I would expect the group who advanced their "top" 70% to have an advantage over the group who advanced their top 97%.
Posted by: burger flipper at Dec 9, 2007 10:57:13 AM
I haven't read Greg's book, but he seems to allow for cultural evolution as well as natural selection, saying that parents with certain habits impart them to the children they raise.
You should have noted that Nisbett's piece is for subscribers.
James Flynn and Charles Murray discuss that study and others here.
Metcalf's objection is silly, simply saying both groups are subject to selection without mentioning the degree of selection.
I've heard that some of the soldiers were North Africans rather than African-Americans of West African descent, which could make a difference.
Posted by: TGGP at Dec 9, 2007 11:25:29 AM
It's also worth noting that German women were themselves a selection mechanism. though of what kind could be debated. That said, I thought both pieces, NYT and Slate, were good summaries of the IQ-egalitarian point of view.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Dec 9, 2007 11:33:51 AM
I've only read reviews of Farewell To Arms but the premise seems awfully reductionist. I'm somewhat surprised by the claim that downwardly mobile offspring of the rich procreated to the extent that Britain ended up with a class of highly productive workers.
The rich in Britain during the Industrial Revolution era were mostly landed feudals who spent their time hunting and had very little use for learning, thrift, a work ethic and other bourgeoise values. The default occupations for sons who weren't going to inherit everything were the armed forces and the priesthood. It's hard to imagine that those of the rich who weren't able to keep their earlier footing on the social ladder would be responsible for spreading values that had little to do with the class they came from.
Also how does he explain how other European nations like Germany were able to rapidly industrialise?
Posted by: Ali Choudhury at Dec 9, 2007 1:01:12 PM
Ali Choudhury, once again I haven't read Greg's book but I think he said that the nobility was prone to getting itself killed off (it helps to avoid getting the inheritance divided up). Part of the evolution (cultural or otherwise) was towards less violence. Rather than the poor or the nobility the ancestors of modern britons are supposed to be the wealthier farmers, which in the Soviet Union were called kulaks.
Posted by: TGGP at Dec 9, 2007 2:45:28 PM
According to some genetist intelligence is trasmited by the mother . So the race of the father is indiferent.All the children in the study had german mothers.
Posted by: jcm at Dec 9, 2007 2:49:09 PM
No, merely not primary according to this view. The father's DNA would still modulate the basic intelligence given.
Posted by: Bobbo at Dec 9, 2007 4:00:58 PM
No, merely not primary according to this view. The father's DNA would still modulate the basic intelligence given.
Posted by: Bobbo at Dec 9, 2007 4:02:54 PM
Deidre McCloskey has a review of Clark's book on her website.
She is not impressed.
Posted by: PEmberton at Dec 9, 2007 4:34:05 PM
I do not get the "During World War II" part. Weren't most of the babies in this study fathered by American GIs after WWII ended?
Posted by: Randall Parker at Dec 9, 2007 4:53:02 PM
The exception proves the rule. This German black/white study is probably one of the top two or three datapoints presented as refutation that there is a black/white IQ difference. Given this is from WW2, and hasn't had corroboration. The key problems are small sample (60 or so subjects, I think), pre-screening (military creates selection bias), and that Northern African was counted as 'black', though sub-saharan Africa and North-saharan are considerably distinct. In anycase, you have the ubiquitous 'achievement gap' on any standardized test that is g-loaded. If you could generate a g-loaded test that did not generate a racial disparity, you would be both rich and famous. Since Jensen's 1969 paper, the gap hasn't closed.
Posted by: ef at Dec 9, 2007 5:33:40 PM
Also with regard the German black/white study: At what age were the children tested? Did anyone go back and test them as adults? Kids tend to get closer to parental IQs as adults.
Posted by: Randall Parker at Dec 9, 2007 5:45:47 PM
@ef and TGGP: What is this 'North African'-business? How many (if any) North-Africans served in the [b]American[/b] army?
Posted by: JSK at Dec 9, 2007 6:52:11 PM
ef: This German black/white study is probably one of the top two or three datapoints presented as refutation that there is a black/white IQ difference.
No, it's not; at least not in either of the two articles cited. Both of them acknowledge that there is an IQ difference.
Posted by: Raghav at Dec 9, 2007 7:52:15 PM
Here is a review of McCloskey's review from an untrustworthy reviewer.
Tyler's point about the German women being a selection mechanism was brought up in the Flynn-Murray talk, but we don't really know what they selected for and to what degree, whereas we have a lot of data on the Army's selection measures.
JSK: North African troops fought for the Free French, and they also had a presence in Allied-Controlled Germany. Maybe the study excluded them and only looked at Americans, I don't know. I had just people elsewhere bringing up the North African point.
Posted by: TGGP at Dec 9, 2007 8:51:36 PM
Some quick googling turned up this from Nisbett which mentions a figure of 20-25% of the black fathers being North African. Nisbett says the North Africans would have to have implausibly high IQs for it to have made that much of a difference.
Posted by: TGGP at Dec 9, 2007 8:56:14 PM
This Eyferth study from West Germany will soon be almost 50 years old, and its results have never been replicated, and yet it's _still_ one of the two or three most commonly cited pieces of evidence rolled out by the nurture side in the nature-nurture debate. That tells you a lot about who has most of the evidence on their side.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 10, 2007 6:00:11 AM
By the way, anybody interested in nature-nurture questions should keep an eye out for the milestone paper on human evolution by Cochran, Harpending, Hawks, Moyzis and Wang, which will be released Monday at 5pm EST.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 10, 2007 6:02:34 AM
By the way, anybody interested in nature-nurture questions should keep an eye out for the milestone paper on human evolution by Cochran, Harpending, Hawks, Moyzis and Wang, which will be released Monday at 5pm EST.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 10, 2007 6:03:29 AM
I only ever hear about research into racial components of IQ when it reinforces local stereotypes (blacks aren't as smart as whites, or Asians are smarter than whites). This makes it really hard for me to take this research seriously, because it's reeks of bias. If I'm a researcher who believes there is a significant racial component to IQ, I should be arguing that Inuit are smarter than Australian aborigines, or native South Americans are smarter than Africans (a study which could be done in Brazil, I would think). Arguing that the masters have always been smarter than the slaves is always going to sound like racist bias.
Posted by: MostlyAPragmatist at Dec 10, 2007 11:18:54 AM
