December 10, 2007

And another Eyferth sighting!

From The New Yorker:

None of the Above
What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
by Malcolm Gladwell

And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances.

Judging by how often this unreplicated 1961 study gets cited in 2007, you'd have to say that one side in this debate is a little short on evidence.

Anyway, I just had time to skim Malcolm's new piece looking for Eyferth so I can't say how good it is overall. It's a review of James Flynn's recent book, so that's a good omen. Malcolm's modus operandi is essentially to fall into a deep, credulous infatuation with whichever social scientist he's writing about, but, fortunately, Flynn is a worthy subject, a gentleman and a scholar. So, hopefully, Malcolm won't go too far off the rails this time.

Here's my VDARE.com review of Flynn's book from last Labor Day, which both Dr. and Mrs. Flynn liked very much. And here's my preview of the 2006 Flynn-Murray debate. And here's my 2006 article with graphs showing that the long-assumed Flynn-effect convergence in IQs hasn't happened yet on a global scale.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

on

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous12/10/07, 2:15 PM

    in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.”

    "proposed" and "argued against" are so close in meaning that its easy to get them confused

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous12/10/07, 2:21 PM

    Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation

    Speaking of eternal sightings. Almost 15 years later, and undying Bell Curve hatred would still be just a tad bit more convincing if any of its critics showed any evidence that they actually read the book.

    H+M predicted such an America, but certainly didn't want America to look like that! Unfortunately the same American elites who condemn the book are doing everything in their power to make America look like that. So who really wants that future for us?

    Rain And

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12/10/07, 2:35 PM

    a quick check of Wikipedia shows what H&M really wrote:

    In a discussion of the future political outcomes of an intellectually stratified society, they stated that they "fear that a new kind of conservatism is becoming the dominant ideology of the affluent - not in the social tradition of an Edmund Burke or in the economic tradition of an Adam Smith but 'conservatism' along Latin American lines, where to be conservative has often meant doing whatever is necessary to preserve the mansions on the hills from the menace of the slums below" (p. 518). Moreover, they fear that increasing welfare will create a "custodial state" in "a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation's population." They also predict increasing totalitarianism: "It is difficult to imagine the United States preserving its heritage of individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives, once it is accepted that a significant part of the population must be made permanent wards of the states" (p. 526).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous12/10/07, 3:24 PM

    Is there some special signifance to the fact that Mrs.Flynn liked your review?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous12/10/07, 5:04 PM

    Steve, I had the chance to read the article this afternoon at a local borders. You really should read it and post your full thoughts, Steve. It's an excellent piece.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Robert VerBruggen12/11/07, 4:28 AM

    I wrote about the piece myself; it is rife with errors:

    http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com/2007/12/malcolm-gladwell-on-iq.html

    I think some of them deserve retractions.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated, at whim.