Posted on 05/21/2013 10:04:09 AM PDT by servo1969
As is often the case with my brain, I need to mull over things sometimes to decide what I think about them. Such is the case with Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation scholar who was driven out when it was discovered that his thesis (which passed inspection at Harvard) reached the following conclusions:
So what is actually in the dissertation? The dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on many different types of IQ tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive gap rather than to culture or language bias. It analyzes how this cognitive gap could affect socioeconomic assimilation, and it concludes by exploring how IQ selection might be incorporated, as one factor among many, into immigration policy.
I have a few anecdotes plus a theory.
1. Back in the late 1980s, before political correctness wrapped its smothering embrace around free speech, I ran into old family friends whom I hadn’t seen in years. They were a Hispanic couple in their 60s, and very wealthy. What were they doing with themselves since they retired, I asked. Retired!? No way. They had founded an outreach program to work with poor Hispanic families. Their specific focus was school drop-out rates. The problem, they told me, was that immigrant Hispanic families resented that their children had to go to school. They came from an agrarian society and saw only backbreaking labor as the path to survival. While the news was talking about the gang culture turning Hispanics away from education, this couple told me that the problem was the parents.
2. In the mid-1980s, one of the girls at my law school informed us that she was the first woman in her family, not only to go to college, but to go on to graduate school Her Hispanic family was not proud of her, considering that she was a fool for wasting her time instead of getting a clerical job, getting married, and having babies.
3. In the early 1980s, I met a nice gal at Berkeley. She considered going to Berkeley a major triumph because her Hispanic family had done everything possible to stop her. Education, they said, was a waste of time. With Berkeley, they might have been right, of course, but having the degree alone definitely gave her probably higher life-time earnings than her siblings.
My takeaway: American Hispanic culture was highly anti-intellectual. Not everyone, of course, but the majority of immigrant parents worked ferociously hard as physical laborers and saw that as the only way to get ahead. Education was a time waster. Kids who went to school were not contributing to the family welfare and needed to be made to see that they should work in Dad’s autobody shop or Uncle’s gardening business. In this way, Hispanic culture was very different from the Jewish and Asian culture surrounding my youth, which was completely focused on educational achievement.
So my thought has always been this one: If your culture is distinguished by a pervasive anti-intellectualism, will that fact reveal itself in your academic performances and tests? I’ve always assumed the answer is “yes.” If you think something is a stupid waste of time, you’ll almost certainly do badly. I think the IQ test results reflect this fact. They measure a specific culture — and not a culture of poverty as the Left says, or a culture of pervasive discrimination against Hispanics, as the Left also says, but an agrarian culture that both consciously and unconsciously can’t be bothered.
Put another way, observing an objective trend on IQ tests is not wrong or racist. It’s a fact. Richwine makes that point too:
Why did I discuss differences between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites at all? Because the largest portion of the post-1965 immigration wave has come from Latin America. Studies of Hispanic IQ are naturally useful in estimating overall immigrant IQ and its intergenerational transmission.
That last point bears elaborating: There is absolutely no racial or ethnic agenda in my dissertation. Nothing in it suggests that any groups are “inferior” to any others, nor is there any call to base immigration policy on ethnicity. In fact, I argue for individual IQ selection as a way to identify bright people who do not have access to a university education in their home countries.
We can pretend that nothing is going on, consigning further generations of Hispanic Americans to manual labor, even as Asian or other immigrant groups that value education move ahead of them. Or we can acknowledge the need to convince legal Hispanic immigrants that, in an information-rich age, the one who cracks the books is the one who gets ahead.
We’re constantly importing the dregs of Mexican / South American society, not the cream. And we’re surprised they collectively exhibit low IQs ?
Puhleeze.
I challenge any Hispanic organization to come up with something similar.
Whatever discrimination Hispanic immigrants may suffer today, it pales in comparison to what Italian immigrants suffered here a century or so ago. Maybe the emphasis on Americanization has something to do with why Americans of Italian ancestry are so accepted here today. Ya think?
Also, that most IQ tests measure the type of intelligence that best correlates with academic achievement; types of intelligence that relate to other forms of achievement are not necessarily measured.
My neighbor in my new home in rural Kentucky only has an eight grade education, but he is one smart cookie. And his intelligence serves him very well here.
One of the great benefits of higher education, to me, is demonstrated in the concept of “music appreciation”. The more you know about the creation of music, the more you enjoy it. The more you know about how things work, the more you enjoy the world that contains those items. The more you know how to deal with them. The more accurately you can anticipate their future actions and adjust your life course accordingly.
But you don’t need to go to college to know how to drive over that shiny spot in the road in the dead of winter. And this touches on why I gained so much value back in 1970 from spinning donuts in the snow of the school parking lot. :-)
Good point. The wealthy and successful hardly have a strong pull to emigrate!
You gotta be kidding.
Where in the article does it show the actual IQ differences?
And where in anyone’s experience have you seen higher IQ people become more “successful” than people with normal range IQs?
Think, man, think.
Having worked in the construction industry, I was always amused by this joke:
Q: Why do Mexicans re-fry beans?
A: Have you ever known Mexicans to do anything right the first time?
Asbestos suit in place; flame away....
On a similar tack, I sometimes tell groups to which I speak that if I was caught in a desert, I would certainly prefer a Kalahari Desert Bushman for a guide over a cultural anthropologist from Columbia. (I would also, inter alia, have more respect for the integrity of the Bushman!)
Both good arguments.
The culture of peasant Mexicans or other Latinos is you can survive with hard work, which they do. Whether that is equally reflected in IQ is a good question, I think it is.
Critical thinking and curiosity are key to success American style and probably the same in upper classes in Latinos. Critical thinking and curiosity are downplayed in peasant culture.
Thank you. For the hundred and first time, there is no such thing as a Hispanic. What you say about Mexico is 100% accurate.
You never see mexicans in the software biz either.
Ha! Fred Reed (fredoneverything.net) discussed this. He said the “average mexican” has no more desire to come to the US for work than the average american has to go to Mexico for work. What we get is the dregs. Those that can’t make it in Mexico come here for the “quick buck”.
On a side note, if I may make a wild generalization, I see mexico as divided into basically two different races: native american (or central american) and European (Spanish). If the US were similar, the native american segment of our population would be a huge percentage of our nation’s demographic.
Again, it is a huge generalization.
If different rates of achievement could be attributed to individual, hard-wired genetic characteristics and not one group oppressing another, the edifice of lies that constitutes leftism would be thoroughly discredited.
Hans Eysenck, and others, in the 1960's established that IQ was in a large part biologically based and there were biological differences in intelligence between the races. One can hear the screams of rage against Eysenck to this day.
The world needs ditch diggers, too.
Agreed. But then, our Italian ancestors were not affirmed in maintaining their culture with bilingual schooling, government documents in every language, ethnic TV channels, and welfare programs. You worked or went hungry. We were expected to learn English and assimilate, to become American. Being American was the ultimate prize.
The race baiters pretend that no one else in the history of America experienced discrimination.
We all have different aptitudes, different incentives--different personalities. The more we know about any segment of the population, the better we can acutally help them solve their problems. The mythical ostrich that handled his social problems by putting his head under the sand, epitomized failure.
On your points in Reply #33, see The Greatest Mischief Ever Wrought.
William Flax
I worked with a Hispanic engineer who lived in Florida. There were times I had to ask him to send me an email (I was in California at the time) because I couldn’t understand his heavy Spanish accent over the phone. I finally asked one of his co-workers how long the guy had lived in America.
“Well, since he was born, and he’s in his 50s...”
She also said he didn’t allow English spoken in his home unless they had a visitor who didn’t speak Spanish.
“Anybody remember the book, The Bell Curve?”
Anybody remember “An Essay on the Principle of Population?”
Anybody remember “An Essay on the Principle of Population?”
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