The Dumbbell Curve

John Derbyshire thinks that there isn't much hope for reducing racial disparities in employment and education, because black people (on average) are a bunch of dummies:

I don't believe the disparities under discussion can be eliminated...[R]acial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can't be legislated out of existence; nor can they be "eliminated" by social or political action...

There is a huge academic literature on the gaps in cognitive test results, practically all of it converging on the fact that African American mean scores on cognitive tests fall below the white means by a tad more than one white standard deviation.

Now, John Derbyshire is or was a mathematician guy who writes books about math by trade, so I assume that he himself is smarter than, say, your average opossum. He must have been resting his brain a bit when he made this presentation. Thus, it is up to long-suffering Yours Truly to do his thinking for him.

Suppose Derb is right, and black people as a global group are, on average, not as smart as white people. So? That has nothing to do with the African-American average, since everyone in America arrives by immigration. We are a nation comprised purely of selection effects.

In other words, all we have to do to eliminate ability-based racial disparities in employment and education (to the extent that those disparities are not going away on their own) is to recruit a whole bunch of really smart Africans. Given Africa's exploding population, these should not be in short supply, even if Derb is right about global racial gaps in ability*.

There is a precedent for this - two, actually. I am referring to Indians and Chinese. Few people would assert that, on average, people of the South Asian or "desi" race are on average much smarter than whites (who knows,it may be true...but few will assert it); yet thanks to selective immigration, Indian-Americans are the highest-earning, highest-achieving group in America. Similarly, there was a time when Chinese-Americans were poor, having mostly immigrated as cheap railroad labor. Decades upon decades of selective immigration later, Chinese-Americans are, on average, high achievers.

So over time, smart Africans will reduce, and even reverse, our black-white disparities. There are signs that this is already happening. One is the extremely high educational attainment of African immigrants. Another is the President of the United States, the son of an African immigrant. It is a bit depressing that Derbyshire fails to realize this.

On a somewhat related note, the fact of selective immigration substantially undermines Derbyshire's claim about global racial disparities. He assumes that low average ability among African-Americans is due to the fact that African-Americans are black**, and uses this fact to conclude that black people in general are of low average ability. This assumes that selective immigration - the fact that most African-Americans are descended from people brought over as slaves to do purely manual labor - had no effect on the African-American population. In light of the history of Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans, that assumption looks more than a bit ridiculous.

Yes, Africa itself is a poverty-ridden basket case. That does not mean Africans, on average, are dumb (as biologist James Watson once alleged). Europe and China were both poverty-ridden basket cases once upon a time, and then one day they got their political institutions in order and suddenly they were rich and their people were regarded as intelligent. When Africa has had good nutrition, political stability, low incidence of disease, access to education, and property rights for a number of decades, then, and only then, will I be willing to listen to theories of race and intelligence. Until then, I must regard people who propound such theories as cranks - intellectually sloppy people, or (more realistically) people with political agendas.

So, to reiterate: selective immigration will eventually solve our race problems. Highly intelligent Africans should be our number one target group for immigration.


* Given the low fertility rates of the African-American population, this shouldn't be very difficult.

** Yes, I know that race is not really a hard-and-fast thing at all, but more of a loose clumping of unrelated traits, so technically there is no "black race", but I'm being as generous as possible here to the racist fucks folks...