What is going wrong in this country these days is the willingness of our "leaders" to sacrifice our culture for political gain. That has to end or we are doomed as a civil society.
Posted on 10/08/2015 7:27:42 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The prevailing social dogma of our time — that economic and other disparities among groups are strange, if not sinister — has set off bitter disputes between those who blame genetic differences and those who blame discrimination.
Both sides ignore the possibility that the groups themselves may differ in their orientations, their priorities, and in what they are prepared to sacrifice for the sake of other things.
Back in the early 19th century, an official of the Russian Empire reported that even the poorest Jews saw to it that their daughters could read, and their homes had at least ten books. This was at a time when the vast majority of the population of the Russian Empire was illiterate.
During that same era, Thomas Jefferson complained that there was not a single bookstore where he lived. In Frederick Law Olmsted’s travels through the antebellum South, he noted that even plantation owners seldom had many books.
But in mid-18th-century Scotland, even people of modest means had books, and those too poor to buy them could rent books from lending libraries, which were common throughout Scottish towns.
There is no economic determinism. People choose what to spend their money on, and what to spend their time on. Cultures differ.
On a personal note, as a child nearly nine years old, I was one of the many blacks who migrated from the South to Harlem in the 1930s.
Although New York had public libraries, elite public high schools, and free colleges of high quality, I had no idea what a public library was, or what an elite high school was, and the thought of going to college never crossed my mind.
Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York, generations before me, seized upon the opportunities provided by public libraries and later their children flooded into the elite public high schools and free city colleges. This was consistent with the values of their centuries-old culture.
For most of the black kids of my generation, those things might as well not have existed, because nothing in their culture would have pointed them toward such things.
There was no reason to believe that I would have been any different from the rest, except for the fact that members of my family, who had very little education themselves, wanted me to get the education that they never had a chance to get.
They had no more idea of the role of public libraries and elite-quality high schools and colleges than I did. But they knew a boy a little older than I was, who came from a better educated family, and they decided that he was somebody I should meet and who could serve as a guide to me on things they knew nothing about.
His name was Eddie Mapp, and I can still recall how he took me to a public library, and how patiently he tried to explain to me what a public library was, and why I should get a library card. He opened a door for me into a wider world. But most other black kids in Harlem at that time had no one to do that for them.
Nor did kids from various other ethnic groups in New York have someone to open doors to a wider world for them. It didn’t matter how smart they were or whether opportunities were available for them, if they knew nothing about them.
An internationally renowned scholar of Irish American ancestry once said in a social gathering that, when he was a young man of college age, he had no plans to go to college, until someone else who recognized his ability urged him to do so. There was no reason to expect all groups to follow in the footsteps of the Jews.
In my later years, two middle-class couples I knew took it upon themselves to each take a young relative from the ghetto into their home and, at considerable cost in time and money, try to provide them with a good education.
One of these youngsters had an IQ two standard deviations above the mean. But both of them eventually returned to the ghetto life from which they came. It wasn’t genetics and it wasn’t discrimination.
The youngster with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean will probably never achieve what a Jewish or Asian youngster with an IQ only one standard deviation above the mean achieves.
Those who are celebrating the ghetto culture might consider what the cost is to those being raised in that culture. And they might reconsider what they are hearing from charlatans parading statistical disparities.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Four things are required for success:
Morals - ability to make the right choices and avoid poor choices
Skills - ability to perform valuable tasks (obtained through Education and training)
Drive - ability to set goals and work to complete them
Dedication - ability to continue working on the success plan despite hardships and opposition
This likely explains much of what ails the Islamic world. If you only read one book over and over again in your entire life, your mind is going to stay pretty small.
Just another of Thomas Sowell’s brilliant essays - of course. He has such common sense, and uses his own experiences and observations along with formal learning to describe the difference between those who desire to learn and those who have no desire to better themselves.
What is going wrong in this country these days is the willingness of our "leaders" to sacrifice our culture for political gain. That has to end or we are doomed as a civil society.
You won’t find too many ghetto dwellers with an IQ much over 85, and a large number of them with an IQ of less than 80. That’s genetics, and despite massive spending on attempting to educate them hasn’t improved things one bit. The corrosive and destructive “culture” among them makes things worse for everyone, but much worse for themselves.
People are always looking for some magical way to succeed, but the truth is there is no magic, it takes hard work determination and resilience.
And de industrialization is going to cause the Marxist revolution all of the Free Traitors™ are so against.
It’s a good thing Sowell is black. Otherwise he would be call a racist. “Blaming the victim” (blaming blacks who are failures) is racist, but doing so by accurately identifying the problem angers liberals more than anything else in their delicate and easily perturbed lives. The problem is culture, and the solution is neither midnight basketball nor blaming “white privilege”.
The only real solution is for individuals who do not want to fail at life to work their butts off until they succeed, just like the Jewish immigrants of a century ago and the Asian immigrants on the past two generations.
And all of these things you mention are lacking in ghetto youth, for whom the Sharptons of the world claim racism is holding them back.
Why is it that liberals seem to make excuses for the bad choices some people make??? Is the man really holding you down, if you choose to go off with a youth gang, doing God knows what illegal activities????
IQ is not genetics. IQ is a measurement of how much you know divided by your age. Thus a well-read 16 year old will score higher than those older who have the same knowledge and divided by 30 or 40 or 50. Also a high-testing 16 year old would have scored much lower at age ten if they had been someone who read little or had little reading experience.
There can be some deviation in how much one can learn, but it is majorly determined by how much one DOES learn.
The nature versus nurture debate is not just about IQ.
bkmrk
...much of what ails the Islamic world. If you only read one book over and over again in your entire life, your mind is going to stay pretty small.
... You're right jpl - read one book over and over - a book that supports violent cultural ideas - and an inferior culture is the result.
It's also why all the stooges the CIA props up in the ME don't work...
Response: With due respect to the author of the article certain groups must blame their environment(aka culture)for their overall lack of performance in academia and in life in order to to avoid accepting the fact that their neuro-biology is inimical to learning, invention etc.
Comment: The vast bulk of the Third World have low IQ's(Yes, the IQ is defective but at least it measures the odds for success in school and correlates well with success in life). In addition centuries of common observation demonstrate third world inability and in general lack of intellectual achievement. Reliable measurements indicate that intelligence is about 80% biological. The confusion comes about as a result of variability in any given trait.
Because man has free will,one's fate and destiny depend on a combination of all three factors: nature, nurture, and one's own personal choices.
Your post, the bit about “just reading one book”, you did that to pull someone’s chain...I like it. You should have added...reading one book written in the bronze age by people who could not fathom man walking on the moon, cell phones, airplanes, rockets, etc., etc.
Not all IQ tests are the same.
The good ones have very little written material/questions and focus on pure computational capacity.
But you are correct in the assertion that most IQ tests test what you know.
Would like to know what Charles Murray thinks of this.
Beautiful.
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