The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism #3

My last post on this topic will not include quotes from Andrew Sullivan’s article. Of course, income and IQ are partly correlated, but not near as much as argued by Sullivan and DeBoers.

This article shows a graph of lifetime income based on AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) score. Note the degree of dispersion above and below the gray line. The article includes the following.

But a lot of other things also predict income. So, what’s the unique contribution of AFQT scores? More precisely, how much of the variability in income can they explain? Statisticians often answer this question by reporting a statistic called r-squared that varies from zero to one. In this analysis, zero means AFQT has no predictive power, while one would mean that someone’s income can be perfectly predicted by knowing their AFQT score. An r-squared of 0.5 would mean that half of the variation in income could be explained by knowing someone’s AFQT scores (or, less scientifically, half the time you can predict someone’s income by knowing how they did on the AFQT).

The data show that AFQT scores explain 21% of the variation in income between survey respondents. That translates to a correlation coefficient of 0.46.

Is that a large correlation? It depends upon your perspective. If your cup is half full, you can correctly point out that 0.46 rivals the largest observed correlations in social psychology, sociology, and other relevant fields. But if your cup is half empty, you’ll say that many things determine how much money people make, and smarts is only one of them.

In fact, the true contribution of AFQT to income is probably smaller. That’s because AFQT is serving as a proxy for other attributes correlated with earnings. People with high AFQT scores probably stayed in school longer, and most likely had more successful parents. These and other correlates of intelligence factor into the aforementioned 21 percent.

A reader might wonder how the 0.46 and 0.21 are related. Two statistical metrics are the correlation coefficient, r, and the coefficient of determination, r^2 (link).  The range of r is [-1, +1] while the range of r^2 is [0, 1]. 0.46^2 = 0 .2116.

Two other oft-used statistical metrics of dispersion, standard deviation σ and variance σ^2, are similarly related.

Related: 10 Jobs Where Employees Tend to Have the Highest IQs

The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism #2

Again I will put excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s article in all italics followed by my comments.

Freddie [DeBoer, author of The Cult of Smart] notes that “if the average white student sits at 50 percent of all students at a given academic task, the average black student lies somewhere between 15 and 30 percent,” which is not a minor difference. DeBoer doesn’t explain it as a factor of class — he notes the IQ racial gap persists even when removing socio-economic status from the equation. Nor does he ascribe it to differences in family structure — because parenting is not that important. He cites rather exposure to lead, greater disciplinary punishment for black kids, the higher likelihood of being arrested, the stress of living in a crime-dominated environment, the deep and deadening psychological toll of pervasive racism, and so on: “white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it’s irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it in our investigations of the racial achievement gap.”

DeBoer’s collectivist, victimhood, and oppressor/oppressed mindset is patently clear. He makes culture and individual character, attitude, and effort irrelevant, too.

Sullivan: I suspect that many smart people have mistaken their own unearned gift for some kind of moral virtue, which is why they are so reluctant to note that others may not be so smart, and if they do so, think less of them. Remove the elites’ vanity, and self-love, and you can see their irrationality for what it is.

Heh. What about the elites at the vanguard of leftism, critical race theory, and people like Sullivan? Are none of them irrational or smart?

My big brain, I realized, was as much an impediment to living well as it was an advantage. It was a bane and a blessing. It simply never occurred to me that higher intelligence was in any way connected to moral worth or happiness.

In fact, I saw the opposite. I still do. I don’t believe that a communist revolution will bring forward the day when someone like my grandmother could be valued in society and rewarded as deeply as she should have been.

A high IQ doesn’t guarantee its being used well or wisdom, either. Sullivan seems like a good example. Value to whom for what? There must be plenty of other uneducated grandmothers as good or better than his. Does he value any of them as much as his own? He seems to want a communist revolution, but is too cynical to believe that people in general are good enough for it.  

The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism #1

Andrew Sullivan is a popular political commentator. He recently resigned from New York magazine – not to be confused with The New Yorker magazine or The New York Times magazine – and started his own publication The Weekly Dish. 

His 9/11/2020 edition included The Logic of Bell Curve Leftism, much of it based on a recent book The Cult of Smart by Fredrik deBoer. I haven’t read the book, but Sullivan’s article and reading a few reviews on Amazon is enough to get the book’s gist. When writing for The New Republic magazine in 1994 Sullivan wrote about the controversial book The Bell Curve, about race and IQ, which resulted in a lot of controversy for him. 

My comments that follow will be mostly based on Sullivan’s article. I will put excerpts from his article in all italics followed by my comments.

DeBoer proclaims. “It is the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth. It is pernicious, it is cruel, and it must change.”

Sullivan doesn't disagree. However, academic value is not the only value, nor intelligence the only true measure of human worth. The high incomes of pro athletes, movie and tv stars, popular singers or musicians, many business executives, and some politicians have a strong basis in other values – rarer kinds of ability, creativity, and hard work. Politicians obviously value political power and use it.

Also, neither academic value nor intelligence imply a high income or wealth. How many Nobel Prize Winners are in the Forbes 400 richest people? Physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, college professors, and some other professions rank high in IQ, but that doesn’t entail a high income.

“Critical theory leftists insist that everything on earth is entirely socially constructed, that all inequality is a function of “oppressive systems”, and that human nature itself is what John Locke called a “white paper, void of all characters” — the famous blank slate. Freddie begs to differ: “Human behavioral traits, such as IQ, are profoundly shaped by genetic parentage, and this genetic influence plays a larger role in determining human outcomes than the family and home environment.”

This shows a big misunderstanding of John Locke’s “white paper, void of all characters” or “blank slate.” Locke was an Empiricist, which means he held that all knowledge is based on experience. He was arguing against innate ideas, which were claimed to exist by Rationalists. This puts the emphasis on “void of all characters” and “blank.” It does not mean everyone’s paper or slate is identical. There are nature-given capacity differences – e.g. intelligence, athleticism, and musical.

What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.

For DeBoer, that means ending meritocracy — for “what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?” It means a revolutionary transformation in which there are no social or cultural rewards for higher intelligence, no higher after-tax income for the brainy, and in which education, with looser standards, is provided for everyone on demand — for the sake of nothing but itself.

This implies that becoming a doctor – with all the time, effort and often a lot of debt – should not be rewarded with a high income. If an equal income could be made in work that requires less effort, fewer hours, less stress, or gives more personal enjoyment, why become a doctor? In other words, lower pay to doctors would also reduce the supply of doctors and patients’ access to them. DeBoer wants to have the cake and eat it, too. He wants doctors' income confiscated -- "no higher after-tax income for the brainy" -- but still wants the services they provide. 

What DeBoer endorses to end meritocracy is far more political power, the power to coerce others one envies or doesn’t like.