This social-science thesis has _nothing to do with race_. Imagine an alternate history where humans never [migrated across the Bering land bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas) to become Native Americans, and where the [Atlantic slave trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade) never happened, such that, in this alternate world, European explorers found a continent empty of humans and founded a civilization that was monoracial from the start, unable to oppress and exploit blacks and Native Americans who simply weren't present.
-In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential confounding by racial issues. (Thus, _Coming Apart_ is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_, not that this would endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the rationale and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.)
+In that world, _most_ of _The Bell Curve_ (so infamous in our world for its reputed racism) could be published unchanged! Most of the analysis is strictly about differences _between_ different white people, in order to avoid potential confounding by racial issues. (Thus, _Coming Apart_ is subtitled _The State of White America, 1960–2010_, not that this would endear Murray to progressives who don't understand the anti-confounding rationale for studying "white America" (!) and wouldn't be caught dead reading the book.)
I mean, yes, there are those two chapters in _The Bell Curve_ about ethnic differences in IQ, and two chapters on affirmative action—I can see why people are pissed about _that_—but there's so much more to the man's work than that! Even 2020's _Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class_ (that subtitle!!) was much more muted than what a racialist ideologue would have written: the race section mostly just covers the Science of SNP frequencies while punting with "More research is needed" about what population differences in SNP frequencies _mean_; the visibility of the two pages of discussion on the interpretation of ethnic differences in IQ is reduced by discreetly tucking it away into footnote 4 of the "class" section.
-In contrast, this little book is more—focused. (I don't want to say "more direct" and undermine my case that most of Murray's thought isn't about the racial stuff that inevitably sucks all the air out of the room.) In the wake of [the events of summer 2020](/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/) and the rise of identity politics on the left, Murray perceives a threat to the American creed that individuals should be treated equally as individuals, rather than as representatives of an ethnic or religious faction. Murray's response: this book about the "two truths" of the subtitle ... that American Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks have different means and distributions of intelligence and of violent crime (!!).
+In contrast, this little book (125 pages, plus notes) is more—focused. (I don't want to say "more direct" and undermine my case that most of Murray's thought isn't about the racial stuff that inevitably sucks all the air out of the room.) In the wake of [the events of summer 2020](/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/) and the rise of identity politics on the left, Murray perceives a threat to the American creed that individuals should be treated equally as individuals, rather than as representatives of an ethnic or religious faction. Murray's response: this book about the "two truths" of the subtitle ... that American Asians, whites, Latinos, and blacks have different means and distributions of intelligence and of violent crime (!!).
Murray acknowledges the irony: if the _goal_ is colorblind individualism, why write about group differences!? The problem is strategic: if we can't _talk_ about group differences, but group differences actually exist and are actually pretty stable, then well-meaning people who are distressed by group differences in socioeconomic outcomes end up conducting an increasingly paranoid witchhunt for systemic racism, eventually casting aside the American creed. Murray quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan—I feel like I've [mentioned him on the blog at some point?](/2020/Nov/nixon-on-forbidden-hypotheses/)—"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts."
After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense when you consider that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California).
-Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound more racialist or essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as! (The aim of the book is to argue that intelligence and crime differences _exist_ as not _trivially_ mutable facts of our world, as contrasted to the theory that outcome differences are solely due to discrimination by employers, schools, and the justice system; the strawman of "And this is 100% genetic" is not implied.)
+Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound _more_ racially essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as! (The aim of the book is to argue that intelligence and crime differences _exist_ as not _trivially_ mutable facts of our world, as contrasted to the theory that outcome differences are solely due to direct discrimination by employers, schools, and the justice system; the strawman of "And this is 100% genetic" is not implied—not that "And this seems likely to be somewhere between 40–80% genetic" would be more than 40–80% less unpalatable.) [TODO: "Causes are irrelevant" (!) p. 47]
+The next four chapters follow a formula: "Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", "Race Differences in Violent Crime", "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", and "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Violent Crime." (Those chapter titles felt awful just to type!! Am I really doing this?) Much of the value of these chapters is in the graphs and tables documenting statistics that many readers will be unfamiliar with. In such a small book, there's not much room to defend the _interpretation_ of the statistics in enough detail to satisfy skeptics: for example, Murray casually mentions Arthur Jensen's 1980 _Bias In Mental Testing_ as "documenting that the major [IQ] tests were not biased against minorities", without summarizing the detailed evidence and arguments by which one could claim to document such a thing; the distrustful reader is going to have to [read Jensen for themselves](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Bias-in-Mental-Testing-Arthur-R.-Jensen.pdf). [TODO: revise/delete/reconcile with later interpretation discussion]
+The scatterplots of nationally-representative test scores are interesting. The black–white gap _did_ shrink between '70s when it was about 1.3 standard deviations, until about 1990s, but has been stubbornly stable since then at about 0.85 standard deviations. Murray estimates the current white–Latino difference at 0.62 standard deviations, and the current white–Asian difference at 0.3 standard deviations (favoring Asians).
+
+Of course, one can't just point to test scores and say "Those are the facts" without addressing what test scores _mean_. A vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number. (People with more letters in their name take longer to say their name out loud, on average! Cats do better than humans on a test of scratching, on average!) In this matter of cognitive ability scores by race, Murray briefly addresses two popular (but mutually in tension) classes of objection: that the gaps will vanish with better education, and that the tests are biased. [TODO: ... finish summary]
+
+At times, Murray's inability in his commentary to consider flaws in the _status quo_ seems like a blindness bordering on complicity—even while, simultaneously, I find many of his specific arguments convincing!
+
+Of the criminal justice system, he writes:
+
+> The social scientist's view of who commits crimes is a set of snapshots—the report of a crime, an arrest, the decision to prosecute, the charge on which the suspect is tried, the outcome of the prosecution, and the sentence for a guilty plea or verdict. At each step, the authorities are usually trying to get it right, but "getting it right" means different things. Decisions to prosecute depend on many factors besides the likelihood that the arrested person committed the crime (e.g., whether these is evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt if it goes to trial). The decision about the charges that will be filed is a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation.
+
+This is all very "reasonable" by the methods and epistemology of Murray's world, and I'm afraid—not a figure of speech, actually afraid—that there's nothing I could say, no words I could possibly type to explain the cruel and capricious insanity of that world's "reasonableness" to those who haven't personally been on the other side, who have never been abused by a total institution like the "justice" system.
+
+(Two three-day stints in the psych ward are [what did it to me](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/). Going to school might not be bad enough if you went to a good school.)
+
+_The authorities are usually trying to get it right._ [by the authority's standards!!]
-going to school might not do it if you went to a good school,
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff