Posted on 05/20/2013 9:46:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On Tuesday, May 7, I had one of my most productive days as an employee of the Heritage Foundation. Our big report on the fiscal cost of amnesty had just been released, and I packed in 18 radio interviews to promote it.
I expected more of the same on Wednesday. Instead, I found myself unplugging my office phone to avoid pesky reporters, trying in vain to do any real work, and watching helplessly as a public-relations crisis sprang up around me. Two days later I would resign.
I’m telling this story not because I want or expect pity for my personal situation. Rather, it’s important for people to understand how hostile the political class can be toward scientific facts that make them uncomfortable. That discomfort is what caused a mainstream policy analyst to be rebranded overnight as a bigoted extremist.
Although my Ph.D. dissertation was about immigration, I was hired by the Heritage Foundation in 2010 to be a jack-of-all-trades quantitative analyst. I worked a little bit on immigration during my time at Heritage, but I developed a specialty in public finance — fair-value accounting for student loans, public-pension reform, teacher compensation, etc. My frequent co-author Andrew Biggs and I have gotten some press for demonstrating over and over that generous pensions push public-sector compensation above fair-market levels. A teachers’ union in Texas even put us on its “Top Ten Most Wanted” list. But even as we attracted this attention, I could still see people’s eyes glaze over when I told them it was based on accumulated benefit obligations using fair-value discount rates.
Given all my wonkery, it felt especially strange to be suddenly characterized as an extremist. That happened on Wednesday morning, when the media first reported on my 2009 Harvard dissertation. Entitled “IQ and Immigration Policy,” the dissertation obviously deals with some sensitive topics. Media reports grabbed short quotes from the text and presented them as shocking. Some bad words started getting tossed around: eugenics, racism, pseudoscience, and, of course, extremism.
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 got into all of this because I found the science of mental ability to be fascinating. I wanted to learn more and think about what lessons it might hold for public policy. Doctoral students are told to pick a topic they’re sincerely interested in, since they’ll be stuck with whatever choice they make for three years or more.
I was not so naïve as to think my topic wouldn’t generate controversy. But individual quotes from my dissertation are much more understandable when placed in their full context. For example, this sentence on page 66 has been widely circulated: “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
I don’t think someone reading my full dissertation would find this statement objectionable, for two reasons. First, as Chapter 1 makes clear, the simple existence of ethnic differences in IQ is scientifically uncontroversial. (Skeptical readers should consult the American Psychological Association for confirmation.) Such differences are revealed by tabulations of test scores and calculations of arithmetic means. Their existence is no more debatable than the widely publicized ethnic differences in SAT scores. What the differences mean and what causes them are the interesting issues, which I discuss at length.
Second, the prediction that IQ differences will persist over generations does not rely on assumptions of genetic transmission, but rather on observational data from past immigrant waves. The IQ differences have been persistent — for whatever reason — and nothing is happening to the education or socialization of the current generation of Hispanics that gives reason to expect a break with past experience. Therefore, it is literally “difficult to argue against” continued differences in the next generation — unless hope trumps experience, but I doubt my dissertation committee would have found that argument compelling.
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. I realize that IQ selection rubs some people the wrong way, but it can hardly be called “extremist.” Canada and Australia intentionally favor highly educated immigrants. My proposal is based on the same principle they use (pick skilled immigrants), but it offers a much better chance for disadvantaged people to be selected.
If the dissertation were taken seriously, its real contribution would be to open a forthright debate about the assimilation challenge posed by the post-1965 immigration wave. Because regardless of what one believes IQ scores really measure, or what determines them, they are undeniably predictive of a wide variety of socioeconomic outcomes that people care about.
We’re still waiting for that assimilation debate to start. I am not aware of a single major news outlet that acted as if my results merited real discussion. The reporters scanned the text for damning pull-quotes, giddily pasted them into stories about “extremism” on the right, and presented my statements as self-evidently wrong. Liberal bloggers piled on with ignorant condemnations. Even some conservative supporters of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty eagerly joined the hatefest. At no time did the critics seem to wonder whether what I was saying might be true.
The reason for that is simple. The media were never interested in me or in the substance of my dissertation. They wanted only to use my work to embarrass the Heritage Foundation and, by extension, all opponents of amnesty. It’s a familiar formula for “gotcha” journalism: Uncover an “extremist” associated with a mainstream organization, then demand to know how the organization could possibly associate itself with him. Keep turning up the pressure, hour after hour, with “shocking” new revelations.
To see how the furor over my dissertation is so inextricably linked to today’s heated debate over immigration, consider that no less a mainstream-media institution than the New York Times reported on some of my dissertation’s ideas in 2009. The newspaper’s Idea of the Day blog discussed my proposal for IQ selection in neutral terms. No moral panic ensued. What’s different now is that immigration reform is at stake, and the whole conversation is hopelessly politicized.
I don’t apologize for any of my writing, but I deeply regret that it was used to hurt my friends and colleagues at Heritage. Seeing them struggle on account of me was the most painful aspect of the whole ordeal. I remember a particularly difficult moment when a Heritage spokesman went on Univision to defend the Heritage report. He explained, accurately, that I was just the number cruncher for the study. Here’s the question he was given by the host:
"So you’re telling me that you used the numbers from a man who has written that Hispanics have a low IQ and will have a low IQ for generations. So what makes you think, unless you agree with that premise, what makes you think that his numbers are sufficiently good in order for, for them to be included in your study?"
How can anyone respond to a question as absurd as that one?
Claims that my dissertation influenced the Heritage fiscal analysis are completely false. Anyone who reads the Heritage study will discover that the basic framework — adding up government benefits received by immigrants and comparing that sum to the total taxes they pay — was developed by the National Academy of Sciences in 1997. Robert Rector adapted that framework for his 2007 fiscal-cost study, and he chose the same framework again in 2013, when I helped him run the numbers. In my judgment, the initial criticisms of the Heritage study were not enough to sink it, so the media latched on to my dissertation as a convenient distraction. Better to shoot the messengers than to deal seriously with what they are saying.
Some students at Harvard are now using the same strategy to denounce my dissertation findings. An open letter signed by 23 ethnic student groups contains this gem: “Even if such claims had merit, the Kennedy School cannot ethically stand by this dissertation whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under the guise of academic discourse.” It would be difficult to find a more explicit embrace of censorship.
A student petition is currently circulating that calls on the Harvard administration to reject all scholarship based on “doctrines” that the signers don’t like. The petition, which at last count had nearly 1,000 signatures, isn’t just shameful, it’s worrisome. Many of these students will come to positions of national leadership, yet they openly oppose intellectual freedom. Going forward, I wonder what other thoughts they will seek to ban.
The furor will soon pass. Mercifully, the media are starting to forget about me. But a certain amount of long-term damage to political discourse has been done. Every researcher who writes on public policy over the next few years will have a fresh and vivid memory of how easy it is to get in trouble with the media’s thought police, and how easy it is to become an instant pariah. Researchers will feel even more compelled to suppress unpopular evidence and arguments that should be part of an open discussion. This is certainly not the way science should be conducted, and it’s not the way our politics should be either.
— Jason Richwine was a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation from March 2010 to May 2013.
Ethnic and racial identity are self-reported. There is no objective means to identify a person’s ethnicity as used on numerous government forms and on the affirmative action forms used by companies and universities. DNA is not taken in these studies. Furthermore, studies of DNA have shown that we are all related a few times removed.
Get with the program. Of course there are Hispanics -upi capitalized the term, the census counts them, the government gibes them affirmative action benefits, and the leftists bribe them. Guess what -some of those Hispanics are also 'gay beings'... Who needs science?
The Indian and Filipino statistics really jump out at me.
My Seattle based company uses about 200 semi-skilled temp workers.
They are about two thirds foreign born, and earn $10-$16 per hour.
We usually have zero percent Indian temp workers.
We usually have about 20% Filipino temp workers.
There are thousands of Indian software engineers in Seattle, but no Indian day laborers.
Do you have any idea what occupations Filipinos work in to generate such a large median income?
Perhaps the critical word is “Household” income?
Perhaps Filipinos have more children and most of the children work?
One other possible distortion in these numbers.....
Virtually all first generation Asian children live with their parents until the children marry.
Thus, Asian “Households” are probably much larger than white and Black “Households.”
I think it might be more helpful to see the “Per Capita” income for each race.
Also, college statistics on immigrants can be quite deceptive.
Allegedly, one third of immigrants have a college degree, which is actually higher than native born white Americans.
One problem.....
Most immigrants come from third world countries, their degrees are NOT accredited by American corporations, and they usually spent their entire professional career working in a non-competitive job for their native government, or for a company owned by their native government.
From my associations in university and corporate environments in the US, I have a large number of Indian-ethnicity American friends, and almost all of them are of the typical nuclear family model - husband, wife and one or two kids. Most of the couples hold very traditional views on sex, and often, the husband and wife were introduced to each other by their parents. Very few divorced / single mom households in that community. It’s a stark contrast and something that stands out when you prod at the works to examine their social dynamics.
They all had an Indian bachelors degree topped by a US masters degree (and in some cases, a US PhD). US universities and companies recognise Indian university degrees, and based on how Indian students perform academically in the US, I doubt any trust deficit issue exists over the quality of the Indian university education these people received.
I am aware Filipinos and many Asians live in joint-family households. This may be a factor in skewing the Filipino statistics, but I would doubt its application on the Indian community. A nuclear family with two incomes from individuals with a BS and MS education usually in the hard sciences, medicine or engineering ought to account for the high numbers in that table for this ethnicity.
Yes.
The Indian income level looked quite reasonable to me.
If my comment implied otherwise, I did not mean to.
Pew Research had a survey in 2012 on Asian voting patterns.
On that issue, the news is not so good.
Indian-Americans vote 90% for the Democrat Party, which was a complete shock to me.
Even Americans from Communist China only vote 80% for Democrats.
The Filipinos “only” vote 55% for Democrats, which makes them the most “Conservative” Asian group.
I’ve asked about it.
Indians, like most American Jews, are ticked off by what they identify as religious extremists in the Republican Party. I wouldn’t be surprised if voting patterns between the two ethnicities / cultures also matched.
I’ve asked about it too. Many Indian Hindus are proud of the religious tolerance and diversity in their country, but also think Americans lack an understanding of the Muslim issue there.
And they still have a view that however good the free market is for increasing wealth, much needs to be done for the poor. I take this to be because they have seen such poverty, as well as due to the political history and mix in which they were raised.
Let me parse the above:
An open letter signed by 23 ethnic student racial segregationist groups contains this gem: “Even if such claims had merit We know these claims are scientifically true, the Kennedy [Our Holy Martyrs of the Elites John and Bob] School cannot ethically stand by this dissertation [and still be purveyors of white guilt/white elitism] whose end result can only be furthering discrimination [against those low-IQ immigrants illegally entering our country] under the guise of academic discourse [contrary to the established ruling liberal politics currently accepted].”
No, this guy is better off funded privately. His case can be discussed over and over again in the coming months. As FReepers we should make his conclusions the topic of our regular personal discussions, radio programs and call in shows.
Write the reporters who slandered him and call them out on it. Post on their blogs with links to scientific sources. Make this a topic.
Political Correctness thrives where debate is limited or silenced. Use your God-given 1st Amendment Right and tell the truth.
Smell that - that’s conservatives speaking “truth to power” - and it smells like victory!
Take it easy. It’s the lingua franca of academia. They use Hispanic. Some prefer Latino, which is only a mild improvement. We know they’re frauds, but the lie’s been told so many times that, well, you get it, right?
Correct and he does us a further favor. When the left discusses “income inequality”, usually using the Gini-coefficient (a tool invented for the purpose of promoting a ‘need for’ fascism), they leave out the massive increase in low-IQ, low education, illegal immigrants and fatherless households (which don’t include the net cash benefits of welfare).
Comparing households is a statistical trick, effective in fooling the uninitiated.
There is no standard definition for ‘household income’. What is a household?
Better to look at mean individual incomes and then I’d still like to see the raw data.
So, you've read his dissertation section on how he constructed the statistical analysis and what criteria he used to represent the word 'hispanic' for purposes of discussion. Awesome! What else did his dissertation say?
I am very disappointed.
I remember when Judge Douglas Ginsburg, back in the 80s withdrew from consideration for the Supreme Court because he had smoked pot in college; I thought at the time he should have just stood up to it, like the lefties always do. But because Reagan had nominated him, it was a big foofahrah.
As he said in the article:
Second, the prediction that IQ differences will persist over generations does not rely on assumptions of genetic transmission, but rather on observational data from past immigrant waves. The IQ differences have been persistent — for whatever reason — and nothing is happening to the education or socialization of the current generation of Hispanics that gives reason to expect a break with past experience. Therefore, it is literally “difficult to argue against” continued differences in the next generation — unless hope trumps experience, but I doubt my dissertation committee would have found that argument compelling.
That's not to say that the Social Utopianists won't put an aggressive program in place for future Hispanic children; although they've had many years to do so and Spanish language instruction has been a non-starter everywhere it's been tried. And at the rate they are already spending, there won't be any money left over for such.
This abstraction might make sense to a fairly bright 10 year old, but actually making the effort to learn is practice for more learning. IQ as an innate quality is highly suspect.
But by the time a person is old enough to be able to overcome their early circumstances and apply themselves to learning, the forces of conditioning, environment and other forms of are already bearing down, since the majority of brain growth takes place before the age of 6.
Can you show us any statistical study of individuals who have "broken the mold"? My guess is that it would be a small percentage. In fact, as many bright parents have found, their own children may not be as bright, since "regression towards the mean" is also a real phenomenon.
The fact that some phenomenon like "a better environment producing better results in one generation" is possible most certainly does not mean it will take place for the majority of immigrants. They will be products of their family life, same as everyone else. Public school and school lunches are certainly not going to be enough. They have never been enough for our present crop of underclass.
Your IQ isn’t something you can ‘learn’. It is there or it isn’t.
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