Silliness

Mr. Noah takes on "academic racism"!

Dr. James Watson, Nobel prize-winning biologist and discoverer of the shape of DNA, has pissed off a lot of people by saying that black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. You can tell I'm really procrastinating all my econ work when I spend my time on statements like that one...

Anyway, let's take Watson's assertion at face value (as opposed to the semi-senile racist ranting that it probably is). Ever unafraid of political incorrectness, I charge into the fray.

A quick Google search reveals that the average IQ of black four-year-olds is 95.4 (the US average being 100 by definition). IQ is not a perfect measure of intelligence, of course, but it's probably about as good as any other, so let's use it for now. One standard deviation of the IQ distribution is about 15 points, so that means that the African-American average is slightly less than one-third of a standard deviation below the average. If you have a higher IQ than 50% of black Americans, you have an IQ higher than about 38% of all Americans.

So how high is 95.4? According to this Wikipedia article, Israel has an average IQ of 94, Ireland 93, Greece 92. So your average African-American kid has a higher IQ than your average Israeli, Irish, or Greek adult. Not bad.

Also, note that the IQ tests get re-centered every year because people keep doing better at them (the so-called Flynn Effect). Thus, someone with an IQ of 80 today (not too bright) would have been measured at 100 (average) in 1932. So, on average, modern African-Americans are a full standard deviation "smarter" than the people who won World War 2, built the mightiest industrial machine the world had ever seen, invented radar and nuclear power and, well, you get the point.

But, even though 4.6 IQ points doesn't seem like a big gap, and even though studies indicate the gap is getting smaller over time, it does appear to be a real gap. So how important is that gap, economically?

Yesterday I sat on the phone as a black woman patiently explained to me for the umpteenth time how to change my username and password for Chase online banking. A year ago, a black plumber first showed me what a Bluetooth headset was and how to use it. My friend, who teaches an all-black junior high class in downtown L.A., told me stories about how her kids figured out how to hack the school network to get around security software and log onto MySpace - a task I would have no hope of accomplishing without weeks of reading. For the record, I just took an IQ test and found that my IQ is 141; I'm sure this is higher than most or all of the people in the stories I just related.

The point here is that our modern technological society doesn't run on IQ, any more than it did back in Roosevelt's time. It runs on a lot of other things - energy, hard work, curiosity, eagerness to learn, and above all motivation. These things are not genetic.

If we're going to look for the source of the problems of black America, the small IQ gap between blacks and whites is almost certainly the wrong place to look. James Watson has simply become what many once-brilliant scientists become when they get old - a kook.


(Snarky Note: Isn't it interesting how much time these "academic racists" spend pointing out the IQ gap between blacks and whites, and how little they spend pointing out the gap between whites and asians? Snicker snicker.)