America doesn't have as much social class mobility as we might think. People who do well now generally have kids who do pretty well. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one that's kind of obscure is the increasing complexity of the meritocratic ladder, often justified in the name of Rights. The result is that kids with smart, hard-working, married parents can get an edge on the system in multiple ways.
For example, when I was a kid, taking the SAT was pretty simple. For example, you didn't have any right to look at your test once you turned it in. But, now, you have the "right" to order (for a non-nominal although not extortionate sum) from College Board your SAT test booklet along with a reproduction of your answer sheet (at least for certain test dates) so that you can study what you messed up on. I just spent two hours looking at my son's May test performance looking for patterns in his mistakes so he can do better on his next try. It's an intellectually challenging process.
I suspect there are a lot of little angles like that that have emerged in recent decades that help upper middle class families stay ahead of broken lower middle class families.
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66 comments:
I did quite well on my SAT's (99th+ percentile); my advice for you would be to hire a good math tutor for your son. Do it. You'll regret not doing it if you have the resources.
My math tutor raised my math mark by close to 100 points between the first sitting and the second one. I don't know how the process works for the verbal/writing sections (I didn't need a tutor for them), but I know that for math it's down to tutoring. There are only a limited number of types of questions, and if you are expertly and thoroughly tutored you can grasp the answer in seconds for most of them.
I thought you did a blog entry on test prep and found it pretty much had no effect.
Was that you?
Am I imagining that?
This is a great line of reasoning you are on, along with the idea that America's greatest resevior of untapped talent is in lower class White broken homes.
Channeling individual talent upwards to its highest potentiality would seem to be a great thing for society to support.
Now, we seem to be operating in the opposite direction. The single group most negatively affected by affirmative action reverse descrimination, are the children of lower class Whites.
Some of the biggest obstacles today for young people from non-wealthy backgrounds are the unpaid internships and "enrichment" programs that are required for the track that leads to many elite schools and careers.
"The Bell Curve" talked about this a lot. Increased complexity in society favors those of increased cognitive ability. Murray wrote that this trend would continue indefinitely and, short of whole-sale genetic engineering of the human race, that little could be done about it.
I confess I don't understand what this post is getting at. "increasing complexity of the meritocratic ladder ... justified in the name of Rights," and then we just revert to talking about the SAT? A discussion devoted to complexity and Rights might focus on pursuing SSI disability benefits, or a public school principal's attempt to reconcile the diktats of the Department of Education, but how do we connect this with the "meritocratic ladder"? Want a real-life example of the meritocratic ladder? At Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, one of the librarians is a former biglaw lawyer with a Harvard law degree. The issue is rampant and needless credentialism.
steve, why should broken lower middle class families get a free pass? its their choice to spend on lotteries, cigarettes, booze, hard drugs, teenage pregnancies etc instead of say, productive investments in human capital. for a person who claims to believe in individual responsibility you seem to forget about it pretty conveniently. why should the state subsidize their failure as human beings? or should we elites just rule them like the dogs they are?
"America doesn't have as much social class mobility as we might think." It's probably got about as much as I might think, though. I base my guess on the fact that all my life I've heard Americans treating their country's social mobility as an unexamined assumption, unsupported by any facts.
Steve
take a look at the recent article on Germany:
Ninth-graders from 1,500 schools across the nation were tested for their English and German skills, and the clear leaders were the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. They were followed by Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate, while the worst performer was the city-state of Bremen.
The tests taken by some 41,000 students were the first measure of new nationwide educational standards set in place after the country's embarrassing show in the European standardised PISA test performance in 2000.
Steve,
If I understand correctly, if two young people have exactly the same IQ, the young person with professional parents is four and a half times as likely to go in to the college prep track as the young person whose parents are skilled laborers.
In Germany, more so than any other nation I know of, professionals really do add to the standard of living of the whole country, they really do enhance the honest per capita GDP. So if Germany is steering children who are capable of becoming professionals away from the professional career track, that seems like a real dead weight loss to the nation's well being.
Richard, what is the explanation here? do those children whose families are skilled laborers have the IQ but lack the academic discipline to actually succeed on the professional track? do they have the discipline but somehow lack the motivation to become professionals?
Overall, this makes Germany sound like a nation in which large numbers of young men who are intellectually capable of becoming high end engineers are not put on the engineering track but instead are put on the track to be laborers. If I am reading the report correctly that is indeed a sad commentary on Germany - it means Germany is not as much of a meritocracy as I would have hoped, and indeed that social classes among the white, native born germans have hardened to an extent that the talents of the laboring class are not fully utilized.
Steve, with this evidence that Germany is wasting some of the talent of boys who grew up in working class families, it doesn't seem that America is alone in this regard
"steve, why should broken lower middle class families get a free pass? its their choice"...
The point was, I believe, that enhanced spending on poor white kids is a better gamble than AA/diversity spending on NAM kids.
Poor white kids have no advocates. NAM kids have both public and private advocate groups as well as structural policy advantages.
"why should the state subsidize their failure as human beings? "
Poor white kids are not responsible for their lame-ass parents.
I think your example doesn't support your conclusion. You have demonstrated I think that America does indeed have social mobility not the opposite.
If there were no social mobility then SAT scores would be pointless. An intelligent but impecunious person needs good SAT scores precisely so that he can rise.
Mass ability testing of school children began I believe in 1932 in Scotland precisely so as to aid social mobility.
Social mobility in the other direction is likewise robust in America. Remember the sons of Jesse Unruh and Marlon Brando? Neither was able to inherit their father's place in their respective industries. They would have in the Ancien Régime.
Albertosaurus
Steve, you make a very good point.
There are really three ways to allocate the prestige jobs in a society.
(1) allocation on strictly racial grounds. The fine folks who are white separatists wish for a state in which 100% of the prestige positions are allocated to whites.
(2) allocation on the basis of IQ tests that can not be gamed, IQ tests that can not be cheated.
(3) allocation on the basis that we have in the USA now, where the brain surgeons and the software billionaires are MOSTLY people with super high IQ and super high work ethics, but where there are lots of opportunities to game the system, lots of unfairnesses.
Steve, I know you are a meritocrat and you would design a society that is most like option two. (is Singapore such a society? I think so and I urge you to spend some time reading about Singapore - the allocation of prestige in Singapore may be more to your liking than the system here in the USA)
Steve, you make a very good point.
There are really three ways to allocate the prestige jobs in a society.
(1) allocation on strictly racial grounds. The fine folks who are white separatists wish for a state in which 100% of the prestige positions are allocated to whites.
(2) allocation on the basis of IQ tests that can not be gamed, IQ tests that can not be cheated.
(3) allocation on the basis that we have in the USA now, where the brain surgeons and the software billionaires are MOSTLY people with super high IQ and super high work ethics, but where there are lots of opportunities to game the system, lots of unfairnesses.
Steve, I know you are a meritocrat and you would design a society that is most like option two. (is Singapore such a society? I think so and I urge you to spend some time reading about Singapore - the allocation of prestige in Singapore may be more to your liking than the system here in the USA)
Steve, to continue my earlier thoughts...
I guess this post about the SAT and "gaming the system" raises the issue, is the white ethnostate that the separatists want to establish going to have a cut off, and as long as someone meets the cut off they are treated equally, or is it going to be a sliding scale where some whites are more white than others.
This is relevant since there will be some people with at least some non euro christian lineage living in the ethno state.
So the residents of the ethnostate will differ along two spectrums. from most european to least european, and also on the spectrum from highest IQ to lowest IQ. how will prestige in this new ethnostate be allocated?
Sheila raised a few very interesting points in her posts on this subject Sheila is of course someone who, just like Lawrence Auster, grew up jewish and has all jewish dna but who in adulthood decided to become a strong practicing and believing christian, and also to become a strong practicing and believing white survivalist
Anyway there are really three totally separate paths for someone with all Jewish DNA who wants to not be part of the leftist Jewish mainstream. And all three paths are represented in the steve-o-sphere. Path one for a jew to join a group that is identical to the Amish - live a life totally separate from the larger society, have no impact on the culture. Live apart. This seems to work ok for the Amish. And also seems to work well for the Chasids or the people in New Square. Total disengagement.
Path two is to follow Noah Friedman - marry a non jew with very high IQ, and abandon the idea that your grandchildren will be in any way Jewish. Melt in to the general high IQ class of the USA. Generally campaign for a meritocracy, campaign for the general idea that the intellectually demanding jobs in our society like brain surgeon should be allocated on the basis of IQ. Train your children and grandchildren to emulate you in ignoring religion and marrying people with super high IQ. Be secure in the knowledge that your children and grandchildren will do ok since you have imprinted on them behaviours that will lead to your lineage having high IQ in to the future. Pursue a strict meritocracy without opportunities for rigging or gaming the system.
Path three is Sheila's path. Realize that white separatism or white survivalism is the right way to go, marry a spouse that is of white Christian ethnic background, become a believing, intense, practicing christian, and teach your children the value of believing intensely in Christianity and also believing intensely in White survivalism. Push for an all white ethnostate and when such a state is established, move there and guard its borders.
Three totally different paths, with no overlap between them.
In the South, the ACT is the standard test, and I suspect there's greater variability in it than the SAT. Those I know of who take the SAT don't report as great of improvement in scores from repeated testing, but I keep hearing stories of kids raising their scores from 22 to 30 over the course of three or four rounds of the ACT, which is a significant gain.
The Science part,as everyone who's taken it knows, is a joke, just a charts and graphs speed reading exercise. The math and English parts are pretty fair all around. It's the Reading part which I find significant. Four passages are pulled from extended works (novels, social science texts, a critical study from the arts, etc). This is the section where the kids with a solid, educated family break out from the pack. I've heard complaints of how the passages are chunks cut out with no context, but I think that's the point: it separates the readers from the nonreaders. Kids who have grown up reading/discussing a veriety of genres of writing can instantly decode the context of the passage. The ones without a diverse reading background have to fake it, or not make it. It's this part of the ACT that probably reveals who is college material the most.
"Richard, what is the explanation here? do those children whose families are skilled laborers have the IQ but lack the academic discipline to actually succeed on the professional track? do they have the discipline but somehow lack the motivation to become professionals? "
I think you misread what he said.
Students of the same IQ. That is the key.
A student with a 106 IQ from a poor family is less likely to go to college than a student with a 106 IQ from a wealthier family.
why should broken lower middle class families get a free pass...why should the state subsidize their failure as human beings? or should we elites just rule them like the dogs they are?
Well, you aren't even smart and creative enough to pick a handle. Above that, Sailer wasn't suggesting that the taxpayers buy Beast Ice for lower class whites. He was suggesting that there is more untapped talent in white kids who are punished for their parents' failure (with your endorsement, by the way)to do things like fill out fafsa forms or parental sections for magnet schools, TAG programs and whatnot. Resources that are currently devoted to getting children of middle and upper-middle class minorities into programs that they fail out off could be more efficiently used getting whites from low income families who actually have the ability to do well.
Hell, you can think of it as depriving the broken lower class dogs of people smart enough to lead them.
"Overall, this makes Germany sound like a nation in which large numbers of young men who are intellectually capable of becoming high end engineers are not put on the engineering track but instead are put on the track to be laborers."
A young German who gets into the apprenticeship program at Porsche or BMW will end up well educated and well paid, without necsessarily becoming a degreed engineer.
There cannot be any doubt that family contacts advance children.
As a die-hard hater of nepotism/cronyism , and all-around believer in the American Way, I am strangely persuaded that AA in theory may allow previously excluded deserving families/tribes to more fully participate in the American Dream.
When I awake, I realize it can't be that simple.
"Poor white kids are not responsible for their lame-ass parents."
I'm not sure the state can do anything to replace what those kids, an interested, caring intact family as their audience. Who to perform for? Who cares? When you're from a broken fucked up home it doesn't seem to matter what you do.
Steve,
Plenty of white separatists like to complain in blogs that they have exceptionally high IQ but have been unable to earn more than a modest income due to anti white discrimination.
There is a kernel of truth in what they are saying. Admission to the top schools is harder for whites than for NAMs, and the case of Kushner proves that some spaces are sold off to not too bright wealthy people.
_____
Jared Kushner , now the youthful owner of The New York Observer. While Jared was applying to colleges, his dad, New Jersey billionaire developer Charles Kushner , pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in installments. (Kushner pere pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other counts in 2004 and recently completed a prison sentence.) An official at Kushner's high school told Golden: ``There was no way anybody in . . . the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen." Kushner graduated from Harvard in 2003
_______
That being said, there is enough upward mobility in America that I fail to believe that large numbers of white supremacists are forced to work as janitors when they really have the IQ to be radiologists.
I mean, there is some level of unfairness and gaming of the system here in America, but the degree of complaint is way out of proportion to reality
"In the South, the ACT is the standard test, and I suspect there's greater variability in it than the SAT. Those I know of who take the SAT don't report as great of improvement in scores from repeated testing, but I keep hearing stories of kids raising their scores from 22 to 30 over the course of three or four rounds of the ACT, which is a significant gain. "
Elvisd, I've never heard of an 8 point improvement, but 3 and 4 point improvements are pretty common. Of course, I was always stuck at 30 despite taking the test three times haha. =/ And yeah, I agree that the science section is a total joke.
It may be difficult to estimate how many talented white men have been suppressed since the 1970's.
Think about the level of aggression and disapproval directed at the typical white male born in 1970 throughout his life, and the disincentives to achievement that go hand in hand with being told your culture is wrong, you are wrong. BY YOUR OWN WOMEN, in many cases.
I never took math after my sophomore year in HS, I thought an engineer was the guy who drove the train until my junior year in college (no joke). I am in my early 40s. Ten years ago I scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal part of the GRE. I find it hard to believe that nobody took an interest in what turned out to be a bright person, but that is what happened - no teachers, no parents, no encouragement to strive.
I was Caught in the Rye in HS, and State U was a joke. Horatio Alger would have been better.
I am not some blog addict with no life - I have a great wife and kids and a highly sought after professional career - but I am not a scientist or engineer or historian or someone who otherwise moves humanity forward.
It sounds like sour grapes in a way to wonder what might have been, but given the obvious hate campaign against us, I am not right to ask?
"steve, why should broken lower middle class families get a free pass? its their choice to spend on lotteries, cigarettes, booze, hard drugs, teenage pregnancies etc instead of say, productive investments in human capital. for a person who claims to believe in individual responsibility you seem to forget about it pretty conveniently. why should the state subsidize their failure as human beings? or should we elites just rule them like the dogs they are?"
Perfect example of white individualism and why it leads to the dispossession of our race - we throw our weak to the wolves, and cozy up next to the powerful haters on the coasts.
Channeling individual talent upwards to its highest potentiality would seem to be a great thing for society to support.
While it might be great from the point of view of the common good, it is not great from the point of view of the average member of the elite.
What would be the point of helping un-related people to compete with your dumber children?
"The point was, I believe, that enhanced spending on poor white kids is a better gamble than AA/diversity spending on NAM kids."
According to Mr. Sailer's beliefs, there is a reason that they are poor; they're stupid, and they're stupid because they're parents are stupid.
(1) allocation on strictly racial grounds. The fine folks who are white separatists wish for a state in which 100% of the prestige positions are allocated to whites.
Actually, nobody anywhere proposes a situation in which the only requirement for a high prestige job is being white.
"cigarettes, booze, hard drugs, teenage pregnancies etc "
That sounds like George w Bush's lifestyle while young, but he was from a rich family. The rich families just have abortions I guess.
"Think about the level of aggression and disapproval directed at the typical white male born in 1970 throughout his life, and the disincentives to achievement that go hand in hand with being told your culture is wrong, you are wrong. BY YOUR OWN WOMEN, in many cases. "
I posted this before but I'll repeat it here. There was an Indian immigrant who wanted to start a white male club at my office to counter all the other diversity clubs, but he was told he couldn't. He is kind of a white-phile. He says white people have created superior places to live and he can't believe all the white bashing in this country.He supports white supremacists.
If we were to randomly redistribute wealth, making the poor rich and making the rich poor, we would see a lot of social mobility going both ways. Suppose we took away all of Bill Gates's wealth while making welfare mothers millionaires. In time, poor Gates will rise socially--even if he doesn't make billions--while rich dummies will slip on the social scale. There will be a lot of socio-genetic correcting to do.
There used to be a time when poor but talented people from the Old World arrived and made something for themselves. But over time, smart ones rose to the top and the dumb ones got stuck in the bottom. And that's that.
And after WWII, the rise of American industry enabled even dummies to have good factory jobs and move up somewhat. With those jobs gone, even many middle class folks are stuck in the rut.
Steve,
Did you spot that impressive recent UK report, 'Social Mobility Myths' by Peter Saunders (published by Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society), that blew away many social mobility myths – and proved that IQ is a key determinant, though no-one wants to talk about it?
Press release here:
http://www.civitas.org.uk/press/prSocMobJune10.htm
PDF is here:
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/SocialMobilityJUNE2010.pdf
Depending on what your initial score was, the Princeton review seems to really work. They divide students based on an initial test and teach different skills for different sets of students with the lowest learning certain "tricks" for things like how to answer questions without actually reading all of the excerpts.
Of course, if your initial score is quite high, its basically the same studying you could do on your own.
>I fail to believe that large numbers of white supremacists are forced to work as janitors when they really have the IQ to be radiologists. I mean, there is some level of unfairness and gaming of the system here in America, but the degree of complaint is way out of proportion<
Not from where I sit. It's later than you think.
>"Poor white kids are not responsible for their lame-ass parents."
I'm not sure the state can do anything [about it]<
Sure it can. It can stop positively closing off the already limited opportunities poor white kids have. How? By stopping AA.
Not more government action - less.
It takes an army of bureaucrats working day and night to keep white talent down. If you don't believe this, you haven't been around lately. (Of course, talent is rare in any population, but what there is of it is being denied opportunities that a meritocracy provides.)
>I find it hard to believe that nobody took an interest in what turned out to be a bright person, but that is what happened<
Imagine mulitiple instances of being told, verbatim, "you are the wrong color" and having job offers rescinded on account of it at every step in your early career path. With no family lawyer or Uncle Moishe to call. (That was the early 1990s; dunno if things for white greenhorns are now better or worse. Probably worse.) I.e., active hostility from the government, never mind the (anti-)culture.
The opponents of meritocracy are not coming from a good place, and they do not do any good in this world, no matter whose side they are (allegedly) on.
To the commenter who believed that Mr. Steve Sailer would prefer an IQ Meritocratic society--if you read Steve Sailer, you would see that this a patently FALSE understanding of the man.
Steve Sailer favors whatever system that most benefits *HIS* people. Whites generally do well in a merit society, so he favors that. In situations where Whites are not favored, Steve is against merit.
The Science part,as everyone who's taken it knows, is a joke, just a charts and graphs speed reading exercise.
//////////////////////////
And yeah, I agree that the science section is a total joke.
You fellows didn't score too well in the Science section, did you?
You talked out this at Vdare, highlighting the mountain of paper work needed to apply for Los Angeles private schools.
"A young German who gets into the apprenticeship program at Porsche or BMW will end up well educated and well paid, without necsessarily becoming a degreed engineer."
I find this surprising, because many jobs we consider menial and semi-skilled low rung jobs here in the US, like waste water plant worker, are held by engineers.
I just spent two hours looking at my son's May test performance...
I took the test once, and never for a moment thought about trying again. I'm not sure if it was even possible to try again (back in the late '70s).
And my father never showed the slightest interest.
"According to Mr. Sailer's beliefs, there is a reason that they are poor; they're stupid, and they're stupid because they're parents are stupid."
AA type programs should be culling the poor and disadvantaged for those who have potential (i.e. high IQ). But AA type programs don't look for poor whites with potential.
I sat at an assembly my senior year as the first to graduate from HS in my family; ten generations of Americans on my mom's side and twelve paternally.
More than $200,000 in scholarships and grants were awarded that day at our small high school. Every single penny went to students with Spanish surnames. Only ONE of the eight Mexican American student-recipients completed university.
I along with the rest of my smart white trash friends went to community college and graduated from the CSU while working.
That $200,000 would have been better spent on the poor white kids with high GPAs.
Truth said:
"According to Mr. Sailer's beliefs, there is a reason that they are poor; they're stupid, and they're stupid because they're parents are stupid."
That last "they're" ought to be a "their." Also, this is a patently absurd statement. Steve realizes, as I'm sure even you're capable of understanding, that while intelligence is highly heritable, the IQ of one's parents isn't perfectly predictive. There are indeed many poor 95-105 IQ parents with bright kid. How many? Probably quite a few considering the sheer number of cognitively average people in the country. Even if only a couple percent of them have bright kids, you're still talking about thousands of potential engineers, doctors, and lawyers being left in the dust so we can assuage our guilt and promote large numbers of NAMs who proceed to fail out of the elite schools in which they're placed.
"America doesn't have as much social class mobility as we might think. People who do well now generally have kids who do pretty well."
This sounds like you are bemoaning the lack of downward social mobility.
Totally anecdotal, but I grew up in a broken home (divorced mom with series of sketchy boyfriends) and went to a high school of rural, working-class whites that had a 25-30 percent dropout rate. I got decent grades and a really high SAT score but didn't realize I needed to take the Achievement tests as well, so I skipped them. I only got into the UC system because some people in the admissions office saw my scores as well as my background and cut me a break.
Of course now I've become a deracinated upper-middle class liberal with a lot more in common with my Jewish and Asian nerd coworkers than the rednecks I grew up with.
An Anonymous said . . .
"Poor white kids are not responsible for their lame-ass parents."
I'm not sure the state can do anything to replace what those kids, an interested, caring intact family as their audience.
Think about the way the U of California system used to work, say in the 70s. You took the SAT, which was, at that time, an IQ test. If you scored high enough, then you got into Berkeley (more or less). You went to Berkeley for free, and if you were poor, you got grants and work study to cover living expenses.
It is really different today. You take the SAT, which is no longer an IQ test but a game-able mess. But the SAT does not count for all that much. High school grades count for a lot, and those are driven by the quality of your parents---if they don't crack the whip, your grades are not that good. Plus AP classes---same story. Application essays (edited by your parents) count for more than before. Then, if you get in, there is high tuition, which your parents pay for if you have rich parents. If not, there is the hideously complicated financial aid form which you (and your parents!) have to fill out.
The IQ meritocracy which the SAT brought in from the 50s to the 80s is being disassembled. The big winners of the disassembly are dummies with rich or attentive parents. The big losers are smart kids with crappy parents. You can think this is good or bad, but this is what is happening.
There is no perfect method for skimming off highly talented children of loser parents, but the current system of post-secondary education is getting steadily worse at it. This is Steve's point, I think.
OTOH, even poor Americans have color TVs and cell phones. And free everything from gubment.
If all the smart children graduate from college were will the great auto-mechanics, plumbers, carpenters etc. come from? Some professions are not very net production i.g. lawyers. And BTW high school drop outs can still make millions here.
"Of course now I've become a deracinated upper-middle class liberal with a lot more in common with my Jewish and Asian nerd coworkers than the rednecks I grew up with."
You are exactly the type of white that needs to get re-racinated. Ideally, you could embrace the better things about our culture and leave the trash behind. Sounds like you already have, in a way. But you do not need to let your Jewish or Asian co-workers guilt you about anything.
As the demographics in this country change, and as women realize what a scam feminism was you will by default embrace your race. Just like me.
Because races exist - they are complex, organic systems that function at times as a single sentient being, for all intents and purposes.
This is why I think the present birth rate catastrophe for whites will eventually correct - despite the seeming overwhelming forces opposing it.
I posted earlier about "hard to estimate the number of talented.."
By "complexity", do you mean intellectual complexity, that comes with high technology, or do you mean social complexity?
That latter creates only a byzantine morass of contradictory social rules. This of course favors "socially skilled non autistic" liars, hypocrites, and psychopaths.
The single group most negatively affected by affirmative action reverse descrimination, are the children of lower class Whites.
Once again this is asserted without any evidence or argument in support. Discrimination reduces elite whites' share of matriculants in the Ivy League by 60%.
"Also, this is a patently absurd statement. Steve realizes, as I'm sure even you're capable of understanding, that while intelligence is highly heritable,"
Yes, it is, according to Sailer, highly heritable; half from one's mother and father and half from the "mean" of one's cast.
"the IQ of one's parents isn't perfectly predictive."
Certainly not, if it were, you geniuses would have to admit that a politician with two Ivy league PHD parents was a genius, which many of you seem to have a hard time doing.
"There are indeed many poor 95-105 IQ parents with bright kid. How many?"
Define "many".
Again IQ = roughly 1/4 mother's, 1/4 fathers, 1/2 mean. Therefore, and average white kid with and average white mean and average white parents is probably going to be average. If he is not, according to your own psudeoscience, he will distinguish himself in life anyway with or without mentorship because "the cream rises...and just as there is nothing that can be done to help ghetto children succeed, there is nothing that can force brilliant white kids not to.
Bill is right. I had a crappy broken home, a lousy school, and mediocre grades, but a 1410 on the old-style SAT still got me into UC Berkeley and onto the meritocratic ladder. But a lot of subtle barriers have been thrown up to keep out bright kids from lousy backgrounds who aren't from designated minority groups.
"You fellows didn't score too well in the Science section, did you?"
Haha. No, not comparatively.
steve, why should broken lower middle class families get a free pass? ... why should the state subsidize their failure as human beings?
For one damn good reason: the state caused their failure by imposing no-fault divorce, by outlawing discouragement of bastardy [Gomez v. Perez, 409 U.S. 535, 538 (1978); Mills v. Habluetzel, 456 U.S. 91 (1982)], by forcing them to choose to (a) go to school and live in neighborhoods with blacks or (b) move to a place where they face poor job prospects or a long commute, by taxing the hell out of them, by subjecting them to competition from immigrant labor, by requiring employers to discriminate against them, by requiring universities to discriminate against them, by prohibiting schools from exposing them to constructive religious principles [School Dist. of Abington Tp. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963)], etc., etc., ad infinitum.
In the South, the ACT is the standard test...
Not true. It's the standard test in a couple Gulf Coast states, but no one takes it in Georgia or the Carolinas or Virginia.
That is to say, life is a team sport.
for a person who claims to believe in individual responsibility you seem to forget about it pretty conveniently.
Is that a claim Steve makes? It would seem a bit inconsistent with the claim that it matters who your relatives are.
(1) allocation on strictly racial grounds. The fine folks who are white separatists wish for a state in which 100% of the prestige positions are allocated to whites.
I see what you did there.
A white sepratist state would be all white, therefore 100% of the prestige positions would be allocated to whites. As would 100% of low status positions.
If you are implying a white overlord class reserving prestige positions to themselves leaving the crud for everyone else, you are not talking about a white sepratist state are you.
Why would an all white state not operate a meritocratic system?
Your implication is that a truly meritocratic system would have no borders, open to all. Well the US is a bit like that but it also has AA thus destroying its meritocratic credentials.
I think that the wealthier, college-educated parents are the only ones who get much out of the "counselors" that most public schools have. My school had several full-time counselors for a school with 750 students, and NEVER had any sort of assembly for parents or students to explain the pro and cons of early admissions, re-taking the SAT, etc. These people COULD be helping the children of non-college graduates get into an appropriate college with appropriate financial aid, but they don't. Most of the good information that I got about college came from elder siblings. My oldest brother did NOT have anyone to guide him.
"For one damn good reason: the state caused their failure by imposing no-fault divorce, by outlawing discouragement of bastardy [Gomez v. Perez, 409 U.S. 535, 538 (1978); Mills v. Habluetzel, 456 U.S. 91 (1982)], by forcing them to choose to (a) go to school and live in neighborhoods with blacks or (b) move to a place where they face poor job prospects or a long commute, by taxing the hell out of them, by subjecting them to competition from immigrant labor, by requiring employers to discriminate against them, by requiring universities to discriminate against them, by prohibiting schools from exposing them to constructive religious principles [School Dist. of Abington Tp. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963)], etc., etc., ad infinitum."
Excellent post. As someone who grew up in a all white area. I mean all white. I am seeing that prospects of being a minority in my own country and even town. My kids,if I have any, will have to go to school most likely with a bunch of illegal immigrants, Indians and blacks which is not the country I grew up in,while the elite ,who lecture us about 'racism', are nicely insulated from it all. This country has been completely stolen from right out under our noses.If I hear about diversity one more time at work, I am going to puke.
Steve, students who get fee waivers get free Student Answer Service (the returned test) and quite a few other goodies. So there's not that much privilege.
I work a lot with the wealthy and the low income on test score analysis, and there's not a huge difference in what they have available to them.
"This country has been completely stolen from right out under our noses.If I hear about diversity one more time at work, I am going to puke."
That's not exactly true, Sport: Actually, it wasn't stolen, you gave it away. With your voting for puppets, your joining the consumer culture, your "killing the ragheads overthere, so we won't have to fight them over here!", your buying bullshit you didn't need on credit, your addiction to cheap, stupid entertainment, fattening dumbing foods, getting your head-lies from the evening news, and allowing yourself to be indoctrinated into your own life as a pathetic spectator, YOU got the country you asked for.
Enjoy.
"and they're stupid because they're parents are stupid."
lol@truth
lolol
Grammarfail!
The current system’s implied filtering based on parental engagement is slightly reminiscent of how the Victorian/Edwardian British upper class was concerned with the breeding/family background of their kids’ prospective spouses (individual merit alone would not suffice).
E.g. in The Importance of Being Earnest, Aunt Agatha did not want her daughter to marry a guy who was found in a handbag.
Elsewhere in this general region of the blogosphere, I’ve read that the best predictor of smart offspring are 4 smart grandparents, and that high-IQ outliers in lower-IQ families often end up with mean-reverting offspring.
If this is the case, then a parental filtering system is (presumably unconsciously) about the emphasis on genetics/biology/long-term evolutionary improvement that the HBD blogosphere supports when it comes to other applications.
Yes, it is, according to Sailer, highly heritable; half from one's mother and father and half from the "mean" of one's cast.
Mind sharing where he made that exact claim? Because I don't remember that post.
"White identity politics is often NOT correlated with interventionist foreign policy."
The country has been in touch with it's "white identity" until recently, yet the foreign wars have always been contested mostly with white people. Why is that then?
>The complaint is NOT that the state is taking things that belong to us and giving them to others with lower IQs. The complaint is that the state is taking things that belong to us and giving them to others, period.<
Yes, but it's particularly socially destructive to steal the things created by and belonging to higher-IQ people and give them to lower-IQ people.
Also this problem is more prevalent than is its reverse. Few higher-IQ people are taking at gunpoint the riches of stupid people. Stupid people don't create many riches. (I do not define laborers as stupid.)
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