If you believe that people basically can't be changed and children are like their parents, you should be concerned with the kinds of people who are coming into the US with plans to stay here for good.
The picture does not look good when we focus on IQ. I typically use a vocabulary test given to participants of the bi-annual General Social Survey. One problem with this measure is that it is biased against people who weren't raised speaking English. For this blog post, let's focus on non-whites who also not black as a rough way to capture people born in this country whose family came to the U.S. in recent decades. It's crude (for example, American Indians get included), but we do what we can. Here is the mean IQ for this group listed by decade:
Mean IQ for nonwhites (blacks excluded, N = 764)
1980s 88.4
1990s 93.0
2000s 94.0
2010s 92.4
(If you're familiar with the GSS, you know surveys were conducted in the 70s, but not enough native-born non-whites were surveyed to be included.) Mean IQ improved for this group for 30 years (80s, 90s, 00s) but that has reversed in this decade.
This is consistent with most of the IQ trends I've looked at recently. This past decade has seen a downturn for every group I've looked at (all whites, English/Welsh, German, Italian, Mexican, East Asian) except for blacks and the Irish.
The cause of the fall in IQ is, I imagine, different for different groups, and I assume that the drop for non-whites (excluding blacks) is due to changes in the mix of immigrants. Whatever the reasons, most trends do not look good for America.
Despite what Nassim Taleb thinks, average IQ predicts quite well how a country performs, and the US seems headed for mediocrity. This, of course, could be reversed if we were picky about who gets to come to America, and if intelligent citizens had more babies, while dull ones had fewer.
Showing posts with label Non-whites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Non-whites. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2019
Monday, February 22, 2016
Non-whites saving us from the socialism of young white idiots!
In an earlier post, Jayman wrote that non-whites shouldn't be characterized as liberal but as more likely than whites to vote for Democrats. This graph shows self-descriptions for non-whites. As Jayman suggests, a plurality--more than 40%--describe themselves as moderates, and that number has grown a bit over the past 2 decades. Twenty-one percent currently say liberal or very liberal.
Maybe the large number of non-white moderates helps explain the strong support for Hillary. Non-whites seem to be saving us from the socialism of young white idiots!
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
"We were here first"
In the immigration debate, a common argument made by Hispanics goes something like this: "We've been in this country for generations. We were here before you were."
To borrow a term from our postmodernist friends, let's deconstruct that a bit. "We" clearly means Hispanics, or perhaps some narrower group like Mexicans. "You" refers to whites. The meaning of the argument is that the America is just a piece of land claimed by two racial groups--whites and Latinos--and Hispanics have dibs since they arrived first.
Set aside the question of who showed up first. In this scenario, there is no United States of America and no American citizens. There are two racial groups fighting over land. This is the worldview of a thoroughgoing racialist. How is the logic of the argument different from the white nationalist who argues that North America belongs to the white race because it was developed by them?
The outlook of a true American citizen is that only Americans can decide who can move here, and that decision should be based only on what is in the long-term interests of the nation. We Americans have all been here the same length of time--since the birth of the country. Arguments advancing the interests of one racial group against another are illegitimate to the citizen.
This "we got here first" argument betrays the mind of a tribalist: "I am a cell in a racial body that is in conflict with the racial body of which you are a cell. I operate on this understanding, and so do you, white guy. Your kind believes the same way and always has. Nationhood and citizenship have nothing to do with it. We're not on the same team."
Liberal delusions to the contrary, very few whites think like that. When whites criticize illegal immigration for its lawlessness and cost to the country, they mean just that. Of course, "illegal immigration hurts me" is a common underlying sentiment, but "it hurts my race" is rare indeed.
Whites, even savvy whites, let minorities pull this crap all the time. Activists start talking like brown Nazis, and whites think it's a perfectly legitimate argument.
Critics are right when they claim that whites think they are superior to others, but they're looking at the wrong attitudes. White superiority goes like this: Enlightened humans are not tribalists. Non-whites are naturally (and properly) tribalists. Therefore, non-whites are not enlightened humans like us. (The last step is usually not thought through, but it's the logical conclusion). White tribalists are especially low because, while such behavior is normal for people of color, it is beneath a white person.
I'm not a supremacist because I think non-whites are equal to me and therefore should be held to the standards I impose on myself (non-tribalism). They are not inferiors like children who cannot reach the lofty heights where I reside.
The only problem with my expectations of non-whites is that I look like Pollyanna in a pink dress.
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