Inductivist

Some liberal researchers contend that the black/white IQ gap is due to income inequality. If that is true, then changes in the IQ gap over the past few decades should parallel changes in income disparities.

Here are graphs for males and females generated from General Social Survey data (sample size = 25,589).  (For many analyses, it is appropriate to use median income, but we are interested in inequality so the mean makes more sense).

Mean individual income (constant $)--males



Mean IQ--males

















For men, the black-white gap in income grew over the past five decades. The gap in constant dollars is $12,300 in the 1970s and $18,400 in the 2010s. This kind of widening should lead to a larger IQ gap, but the IQ difference shrunk from 10.6  to 8.2 points over the same period.


Mean individual income (constant $)--females



Mean IQ--females

















We see the same widening income gap for women from $1,300 in the 1970s to $5,900 in the 2010s.  Over the same period, the IQ gap dropped from 11.6 to 8.6 points.

Once again, the trends contradict the liberal prediction.

Now, you might respond that GSS data do indicate a narrowing of the racial IQ gap over the past five decades, and indeed they do. We don't know for sure why that is--it might be due to the horrible black high schools in the South getting better in the last few decades (perhaps vocabularies can be improved a little with decent schools)--but the point of this post is that it does not look like the difference in black and white IQs is due to the fact that whites make more money.

UPDATE: Sean Last posted this Pew graph which shows a widening in the black-white income gap:

Feminists instruct us that men are organized to oppress women everywhere.  Women have incredible talents and ambitions, but these are crushed by male rule.

If this were true, we should see high levels of female dissatisfaction. Gifted individuals who are blocked from success surely cannot be happy about it.

A new meta-analysis of hundred of studies and more than one million people from many countries -- some of them with low levels of gender equality -- reports that there are no significant sex differences in being satisfied with life or one's job.

How can this be?  The truth is that women have it pretty good.  Surveys are not going to detect the handful of women who fantasize about Evil Males and push the lie on others, usually in a classroom somewhere.

Using CIA data on race (admittedly crude), I calculated the Pearson correlation between percent black and national homicide rates. For 180 countries, it is .50--a strong association. More blacks means more homicide. Percent black is as predictive as mean IQ or the GINI measure of income inequality. While we're at it, the black-inequality correlation is .45. Bigger gaps between the wealthy and the poor go hand in hand with more blacks. 

Using data from Richard Lynn and the recent WHO study, the correlation between national level IQ and the homicide rate across 181 countries is -.51. This is a strong association, so smarter countries are much less violent. The only cross-national correlate of homicide that is this strong is income inequality (more unequal countries are more violent). In my data set, the correlation between the GINI inequality index and homicide is .48.

UPDATE: Since I mentioned inequality, any thoughts on how to explain the correlation? The inequality-homicide link is reliable in macrolevel research. Sociologists claim that a large gap between the wealthy and the poor generates anger and resentment which low-status people take out on convenient, low-risk targets. It doesn't seem plausible to me that Bill Gates is an important cause of black-on-black ghetto violence. Compared to Europe, the US has a fairly high level of inequality, but racial diversity probably explains its inequality-homicide correlation. As for the cross-national link, is it that poorly endowed populations are both violent and unlikely to create more equal arrangements? I'll have to see how much the inequality-homicide link is reduced when adjusted for mean IQ.

Back to the US question: if American liberals are so concerned about large gaps between the wealthy and the poor, why would they invite large numbers of both Chinese and Mexican immigrants? At least the immigrants of a century ago were similar (with the exception of Jews).

Zbigniew Brzezinski said on Morning Joe this morning that the U.S. is the most socially unjust country in the world because our GINI coefficient is the highest in the world. He's close: We are 40th.

I love American elites. They import tens of millions of poor immigrants over the years and then point and say, "The U.S. is evil because it's so unequal!"

From this knowledge there has arisen that fine dictum of morality so much bandied about by the philosophical crowd that men are everywhere the same, and that having everywhere the same passions and the same vices, it is rather useless to attempt to characterize the different races; which is just about as reasonable as if one were to say that one could not distinguish Peter from James, because each of them has a nose, a mouth, and eyes.

Okay, who wrote this? And no google cheating.

One of the most important contributions that the Steveosphere can make is to demonstrate and promulgate the reality and durability of unequal abilities. Radical egalitarianism has been a deeply destructive force in the West, and it's based on the assumption that everyone is interchangeable and thus any observed inequalities are unfair.

The truth is that abilities vary widely, sometimes by an order of magnitude. Let's use a convenient example--vocabulary. Most years that the General Social Survey is conducted, respondents are given a vocabulary test of ten words. I have not been able to track down the actual questions, but I'm sure they ask about words that are beyond a basic vocabulary. I'm treating the test as a sample of the population of advanced vocabulary words. Prior analysis has shown that vocabulary increases through age 30, so I've listed the percent earning each score for those ages 30 and up:

So everybody included has had at least 30 years to develop an advanced vocabulary. Everyone in America--even smelly homeless people--has access to a library where every imaginable word can be found. You can buy a dictionary with 75,000 definitions for about six bucks. Yet with all this easy access, there are people who don't even have 10 percent of the the vocabulary of the folks in the smartest category. Over one-fifth of the sample doesn't even know half the words that the smart people do. 

This wide variation is largely genetic. This article cites studies that put the heritability of vocabulary at over 70 percent. Malcolm Gladwell assures us that anyone can have a mammoth vocabulary if he just puts in the hard work necessary to build it, but wishing it to be true doesn't make it so. In the world of actual people, some absorb difficult words like sponges while others can't get past the basics. Simple as that. I run up against a wall every time I try to teach people what standard deviation means. It is just beyond many of us. God knows I've got my limits as well. I feel like an adult admitting that. We need to help everyone else grow up too.    

Percent Hispanic predicts poverty better than percent black: I'm putting together Census data on all U.S. counties with populations over 250,000 as of 2000. Allow me to list some interesting findings. First, it turns out that percent Hispanic is positively correlated with a measure of income inequality (GINI index). And the correlation becomes stronger with percent black added in:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/inequality .39
percent black/inequality .34
percent poor minority/inequality .58

Liberals are so concerned about inequality, they created an entire discipline--sociology--devoted to its study. Somehow in their thousands of studies, sociologists failed to report that mass Latino immigration is growing our inequality problem, and immigration restrictions will make America more equal.

Next let's look at the percent poor:


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/poverty .56
percent black/poverty .36
percent black-Hispanic/poverty .74


Blacks are the stereotypically poor group, yet a Hispanic presence predicts poverty even better. I don't recall the researchers telling us that a key approach to fighting poverty in America is to shut the door on Latino immigration.

Finally, let's look at the unemployment rate.


Pearson correlations, N = 220

percent Hispanic/unemployment .57
percent black/unemployment .07
percent poor minority/unemployment .53


Once again, unemployment brings to mind young blacks hanging on the steet corner, yet the percent of the county that is black does not predict the unemployment rate. (This is the only correlation in this post that is not statistically significant at the .05 level). Having lots of Latinos around, however, is a good sign that many people are without jobs. (Perhaps some of the unemployed are native-born people who have lost jobs to immigrants).

This, of course, contradicts the liberal claim that the American economy would come to a dead halt without the heroic labors of Latino immigrants. And would I sound repetitive if I mentioned that our beloved professors have not pushed reduced immigration from the south as an important way to reduce unemployment?

Class differences are bread and butter for sociologists: what would they have to study without it? I found the above chart on the New York Times' website today, which focuses on the recent increase in income inequality, but also shows a gap that has been increasing since 1980. According to sociologists, the growing chasm should lead to Armageddon. Well, it's been more than 25 years, but I'm not sure that American society is less stable now than in the 70s. One indicator of instability--street crime--rose in the 70s and peaked around 1980. It should be peaking now if sociological theory were correct. On the other hand, the number of people incarcerated is MUCH higher now, so perhaps our get-tough policies are keeping a lid on the social chaos.

The other blessings of economic freedom: If you just read my post right below this one, you might say to yourself that, ok economically free countries are rich, but they are both unequal and indifferent to the welfare of others. Wrong on both accounts: using the same sample I just described, I found that economic freedom is positively related to a willingness to help others (.57) and basically unrelated to income inequality (-.14). Evidently, markets create wealth, they distribute it broadly, and the wealth they create gives people the luxury to worry about the well-being of others.