Charles Murray’s *Human Diversity*
His new book is coming out in January, and the subtitle is The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. I will get to the details shortly, but my bottom-line review is “Not as controversial as you might think,” but do note the normalization at the end of that phrase.
Here is one bit from p.294 toward the end of the book:
Nothing we are going to learn will diminish our common humanity. Nothing we learn will justify rank-ordering human groups from superior to inferior — the bundles of qualities that make us human are far too complicated for that. Nothing we learn will lend itself to genetic determinism. We live our lives with an abundance of unpredictability, both genetic and environmental.
Most of the book defends ten key propositions, laid out on pp.7-8. The first four of those propositions concern differences between men and women (“Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide…”) and I do not find those controversial, so I will not cover them. The chapters on those propositions provide a good survey of the evidence, and a good answer to the denialists, though I doubt if Murray is the right person to win them over. Let’s now turn to the other propositions, with my commentary along the way:
5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.
True, but Murray’s analysis did not push me beyond the usual citations of lactose intolerance, sickle cell anemia, adaptation to high altitudes, and the like. That said, pp.190-195 offer a very dense discussion of target alleles for various traits, such as schizophrenia, and how those target alleles vary across different groups. I found those pages difficult to follow, and also wished that discussion had been fifty pages rather than five. Toward the end of that discussion, Murray does write (p.194): “…proof of the role of natural selection for many genetic differences will remain unobservable without methodological breakthroughs.” With that I definitely agree.
On p.195 he adds “It is implausible to expect that none of the imbalances will yield evidence of significant genetic differences related to phenotypic differences across continental populations.” That returns to my core point about this book not shifting my priors. You could agree with that sentence (noting the ambiguity in the word “significant”) and still have a quite modest vision of what those differences might mean. In any case, nothing in the book pushes me beyond that sentence in the direction of the geneticists.
And here the contrast with the chapters on men and women becomes (unintentionally?) glaring: those biological differences are relatively easy to demonstrate, so perhaps hard-to-demonstrate biological differences are not so significant. That too is just a conjecture, but there are multiple ways to play the “absence of evidence” and “how to interpret the residuals” cards, and I wish those had received a more extensive philosophy of science-like discussion.
Now let’s move to the next proposition:
6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.
That one strikes me as a miswording or misstatement, though I do not see that it corresponds to any actual mistakes in the broader text. You might think that general, non-local evolutionary selection for all humans has been quite large over the millennia, relative to local selection. I genuinely do not know the ratio here, but Murray does not seem to address the actual comparison of “across all human groups” vs. “local” as loci of selection pressures.
Next up:
7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.
Clearly true, but note this proposition does not claim biological roots for those differences. The real question comes in the next proposition:
8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personalities, abilities, and social behavior.
Here I have what I think is a major disagreement with Murray. If he means the term “shared environment” in the narrow sense used by say twin studies, he is probably correct. But in the more literal, Webster-derived conception of “shared environment” I very much disagree. Culture is a truly major shaper of our personalities, abilities, and social behavior, and self-evidently so. For my taste the book did not contain nearly enough discussion of culture and in fact there is virtually no discussion of the concept or its power, as a look at the index will verify. The real lesson of “twins studies plus anthropology” is that you have to control almost all of a person’s environment to have a major impact, but a major impact indeed can be had. I behave very differently than my Irish potato famine ancestors, and not because I am genetically 1/8 from the Madeira Islands. That said, within the narrower range of environmental variation measured in twins studies…well those studies seem to be fairly accurate.
9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.
Correct as stated, but I see those differences as much less genetic than Murray does. For instance, IQ is to some extent heritable, but how much does that shape economic outcomes? It is worth turning to Murray’s discussion on p.232 and the associated footnote 17 (pp.428-429). His main source is what is to me a flawed meta-study on IQ and job performance (Murray to his credit does also cite the best-known critique of such studies). I would opt more directly for the labor market literature on IQ and individual earnings, based on actual measured wages, which shows fairly modest correlations between IQ and earnings (read here, here and here). So, at the very least, the inherited IQ-based permanent stratification version of The Bell Curve argument is much more compelling to Murray than it is to me.
10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.
Clearly this is literally true, if only because of the meaning of “constrained.” But mostly I would repeat my remarks on culture from #8. Cultures change, and over time they are likely to change a great deal. For instance, early in the 20th century, Korea, Japan, and China often were described as low work ethic cultures. As cultures change, in turn those cultures can shape the personalities, abilities, and social behaviors of subsequent generations, in significant ways albeit constrained. So while Murray is correct as stated, I believe I would disagree with his intended substantive point about the weight of relative forces.
Overall this is a serious and well-written book that presents a great deal of scientific evidence very effectively. Anyone reading it will learn a lot. But it didn’t change my mind on much, least of all the most controversial questions in this area. If anything, in the Bayesian sense it probably nudged me away from geneticist-based arguments, simply because it did not push me any further towards them.
Murray of course will write the book he wants to, but my personal wish list was two-fold: a) a book leaving most of the normal science behind, and focusing only on the uncertain and controversial frontier issues, in great detail, and b) much more discussion of the import of culture.
Most of all, I am happy that America’s culture of achievement is inducing Murray to continue to produce major works at the age of 76, soon to be 77.
You can pre-order here.
Social science explanations don’t usually require so much intentionality
“What will you do to stay weird?” Ah, how many people responded with claims like:
No offense, but I think if you’re doing a lot of these things consciously and for the expressed purpose of being weird or differentiating yourself from those around you, you’re just a poseur. Truly weird people don’t have to come up with lists like this about how to be weird; they just follow their preferences.
But it’s not about intentionality. Take one of today’s MR stories, namely that universities are tracking the locations of college students to make sure they come to class. That is bad for the weird! So if you are weird, and you like to cut out on class and read Gwern instead (recommended), maybe you shouldn’t go to a school like that.
Going to those schools might be bad for you. Going to those schools might make you less weird. But you don’t have to sit around thinking “I’m going to try to look really weird, as if I were getting a bizarre tattoo, by refusing to attend schools with surveillance.” No, you need only to say “I love Gwern more than class!” And then think through the means-end relationship of how to keep the weird stuff flowing to the weird you.
Thus refusing admission at such schools is part of how you stay weird. But it need not have any element of poseur, artificiality, or deliberate image construction. What you want is to read Gwern instead of attending class, which indeed is weird (and good). At the same time, without artificiality you still to think through ends-means relationships, so you don’t end up stuck in class all day. And thus it is worth thinking about how to keep your freedom to be weird, poseur-free at that.
Thinking that social science explanations require more intentionality than in fact they do is one of the classic mistakes of internet comments.
Privacy.edu (and an anti-weird technology, at that)
“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.
And:
The students who deviate from those day-to-day campus rhythms are flagged for anomalies, and the company then alerts school officials in case they want to pursue real-world intervention.
But don’t worry:
Carter said he doesn’t like to say the students are being “tracked,” because of its potentially negative connotations; he prefers the term “monitored” instead. “It’s about building that relationship,” he said, so students “know you care about them.”
Here is the full WaPo story by Drew Harwell.
Christmas assorted links
1. Disney cuts the same sex kiss scene from Star Wars in Singapore. And a good Tim Kreider Star Wars essay (NYT). And this NYT header brought a guffaw but also feelings of sorrow and pity: “‘Star Wars’ Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans.“
2. There are tens of thousands of volunteers doing the dangerous work of fighting the Australian fires.
3. Is Christmas just a tax on women?
4. “According to new data from the restaurant reviewing website Yelp, the share of Chinese restaurants in the top 20 metropolitan areas has been consistently falling. Five years ago, an average of 7.3 percent of all restaurants in these areas were Chinese, compared with 6.5 percent today.” (NYT link).
Presentation of the Infant Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem
The Indian Mughal emperor Akbar was interested in and tolerant of many religions and in 1579 invited Portuguese Jesuits from Goa to his court. They brought with them paintings illustrating the European style, which influenced Indian artists of the day including in this piece from Bijapur circa 1600. From the V&A.
There is no great holy water blessing stagnation
A Roman Catholic church in rural Louisiana hoping to maximize its blessings has come up with a way to do it: filling up a crop-duster plane with holy water and letting the sanctified liquid mist an entire community.
“We can bless more area in a shorter amount of time,” Rev. Matthew Barzare of St. Anne Church in Cow Island, La., told NPR.
Following this past Saturday’s mass, parishioners from the church in southwestern Louisiana headed to an airstrip about five minutes away from the church.
Churchgoers brought with them 100 gallons of water, which was loaded into the crop duster.
“I blessed it there, and we waited for the pilot to take off,” Barzare said, noting that it was the largest amount of water he had ever turned holy.
“I’ve blessed some buckets for people and such, but never that much water,” he said.
The pilot had instructions to drizzle certain parts of the community, including churches, schools, grocery stores and other community gathering places.
Word of it raining blessings spread fast in Cow Island, which Barzare points out is not really an island. But when hurricanes strike, he said, the community is typically surrounded by water, hence the name.
Here is the full NPR story, via T. Greer.
The U.S. Public Debt Valuation Puzzle (uh oh)
The market value of outstanding federal government debt in the U.S. exceeds the expected present discounted value of current and future primary surpluses by a multiple of U.S. GDP. When the pricing kernel fits U.S. equity and Treasury prices and the government surpluses are consistent with U.S. post-war data, a government debt valuation puzzle emerges. Since tax revenues are pro-cyclical while government spending is counter-cyclical, the tax revenue claim has a higher short-run discount rate and a lower value than the spending claim. Since revenue and spending are co-integrated with GDP, the long-run risk discount rates of both claims are much higher than the long Treasury yield. These forces imply a negative present value of U.S. government surpluses. Convenience yields for Treasurys are much larger than previously thought and/or U.S. Treasury markets have failed to enforce the no-bubble condition.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Mindy Z. Siaolan.
Tuesday assorted links
1. The penis-shaped ice rink culture that is Russia.
2. The Economist on Peter Chang and the revolution in Chinese cuisine. Price variability is rising in the Chinese cuisine market.
3. Dylan Matthews favorite social science studies of the decade.
4. “Impact funds earn 4.7 percentage points (ppts) lower IRRs ex post than traditional VC funds.”
5. Arnold Kling’s books of the year. And Scott Sumner responds to me on national security and trade.
6. “Relative to low-income households, high-income households enjoy 40 percent higher utility per dollar expenditure in wealthy cities, relative to poor cities. Similar patterns are observed across stores in different neighborhoods. Most of this variation is explained by differences in the product assortment offered, rather than the relative prices charged, by chains that operate in different markets.” Link here.
Countries where the average person was richer in 2009
Libya, Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Greece, the Central African Republic, Sudan, East Timor, Lebanon, Greece, and Trinidad & Tobago. In Syria and Venezuela data collection has stopped altogether, but they would make the list too.
Ethiopia had the highest growth rate of the decade, with Nauru, Rwanda, Ghana, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Laos, China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Myanmar as other winners too. Note that the numbers for Turkmenistan are disputed, especially for the last few years of the decade, but still the country had a strong performance early on.
Here is the full FT piece by Steve Johnson.
“What will you do to stay weird?”
That was a question I asked someone while discussing the topic of careers, in this case academic careers but it applies more broadly. Virtually by definition, the major pressures are toward conformity, yet a budding innovator may wish to stay weird for purposes of superior creativity and perhaps enjoyment as well. What strategies can be used, or passively allowed to operate (in case one is weird already) to stay weird?
I thought of a few options:
1. Adhere to a weird ideology.
Libertarianism used to serve this function fairly well. If you were a libertarian, the mainstream forces might decide you are hopeless and stop pressuring you to conform. Furthermore, your libertarian peer group would encourage you to stay weird, so that you would stick with them and also weirdness was all they knew.
But these days libertarianism isn’t so weird anymore, even if most people strongly disagree with it. (“You want to legalize all drugs? Ho hum. Just yesterday I read a guy on the internet who wants…”) And there is a libertarian establishment that will encourage you to conform more than it encourages you to stay weird.
You might thus opt for a weirder view yet, perhaps to be found in the Bay Area. In any case, this strategy deserves to make the list, even if it does not always work or is less effective than it used to be. This gets at one of the problems with the internet, namely that by normalizing or at least regularizing the weird, it can be harder to actually stay weird.
Nonetheless support for Trump may offer some new hope here, even though he won 48 percent of the vote.
2. Be gay or lesbian or bisexual.
No longer so effective in keeping you out of the mainstream, mostly for good reasons, but there is a cultural loss attached to this progress.
3. Be a jerk.
People might then just ignore you altogether, or conspire against you. Either way, the pressures toward conformity will weaken. Still, you have to be a jerk and that is a high cost for you and for others. I don’t recommend this method, but it does seem to have worked for a number of leading scientists, just ask Eric Weinstein for his list.
4. Move to the middle of nowhere. Or move to another country.
The internet might be limiting the effectiveness of this strategy too, although it lowers its costs for the same reasons.
5. Cultivate a highly unusual physical appearance.
6. Marry someone from another country.
A weird country, preferably.
7. Develop a small group of intensely weird but smart friends, and treat them as your relevant audience.
A very good path, though due to the problems with the other options, your weird friends might themselves turn too normal. This may require a kind of collective bootstrapping method.
8. Read extensively in weird areas, outside the present and outside of your home nation, and refuse to read much news.
9. Adopt impenetrable terminology.
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoord-enenthurnuk to that one!
10. Blog rather than tweet. Stay off Twitter altogether.
Duh.
11. Avoid conference attendance. Especially for conferences that are more than five years old.
12. Avoid becoming famous for reasons other than your weirdness.
13. Develop and maintain a highly unusual family structure.
What else might you try?
Should the Left embrace Robert Moses more?
Here is a fantastic Politico essay by Marc J. Dunkelman, telling the whole story of Penn Station, new and old, and how it came to pass that New York finds it so difficult to construct new infrastructure. Here is one short excerpt from a much longer story:
Since the mid-1960s—really since the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island—no major new piece of public infrastructure has been built within the five boroughs of New York City.
And toward the end:
For anyone convinced that government is an indispensable tool in the progressive mission to improve peoples’ lives, Penn Station is a monument to conservatism. If public officials can’t even clear the way for a serviceable facility at the nation’s busiest transit hub, why give them any more authority?
Recommended. By the way, Madison Square Garden is now a dump and should be rebuilt from scratch, somewhere else of course.
Monday assorted links
1. California law vs. the arts.
3. Politically correct takes on The Rise of Skywalker (full of spoilers).
5. Grand Rapids, Rochester, Buffalo, Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City are the American cities with the shortest average commutes. On the other side of the distribution: “In the New York metropolitan area, 3.8 percent of traveling commuters reach their jobs by transit in less than 30 minutes. The San Francisco is second, at 2.7 percent, more than one quarter lower than New York.”
6. “Rio averages 24 shootouts per day. Large hours-long gun battles often don’t even make the headlines.” The link focuses on data on the bullets.
Conversations with Tyler, year-end retrospective
The show’s producer, the excellent Jeff Holmes, interviews me about what I thought of the year’s episodes (including most underrated), here is the audio and transcript, a very fun episode for me to do. We cover:
…who was most challenging guest to prep for, the most popular — and the most underrated — conversation, a test of Tyler’s knowledge called “Name That Production Function,” listener questions from Twitter, how Tyler has boosted his productivity in the past year, and whether his book and movie picks from 2009 still hold up.
And if you have enjoyed this year in Conversations, please consider donating here before the end of the year.
Work on these things
Here are some projects I’d like to see funded, some through my own ventures, or others through alternative mechanisms. On these issues, the right person could have an enormous impact, whether through the research side or directly coming up with actionable ideas, including of course creating and building companies.
More studies of super-effective people. Either individually or collectively. If you take the outliers in any domain, what should our intuitions be for understanding the underlying processes determining how many people could have ended up in those positions? How many people had the right genes but had the wrong upbringing? How many people had the right genes and the right upbringing but the wrong luck, or perhaps society failed them in some other manner? The answers to these questions have significant policy implications.
A comprehensive analysis and critique of the NIH and NSF. The US funds more science research than any other country — about $35 billion per year on the NIH and $8 billion per year on the NSF. How exactly do these institutions work? How have they changed over time and have these changes been for good or bad? Based on what we now know, how might we better structure the NIH and NSF? What experiments should we run or what kind of studies should we perform?
Why is life expectancy so long in Hong Kong? Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this?
Bloomberg Terminal for everything. This might be a nonprofit, a company, or a government project. To state the obvious, many analyses hinge on having the right data. If you’re in finance, getting the right data is often easy: just pull it up on your Bloomberg terminal. But there is no practical way to ask “what most correlates with life expectancy in Hong Kong?” (See above on that topic.) Figure out a way to build a growing corpus of structured data across the broadest variety of domains.
A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system. The American healthcare system is by far the world’s biggest and also by a considerable margin the world’s most influential. Yet there is no comprehensive, dispassionate, and analytical disaggregation of how it all works. Who are the actors and what are their incentives? To the degree that the relationships between different entities are in equilibrium, what are the forces ensuring they stay there? What is the Sankey diagram of fund flows within the U.S. healthcare system?
Better answers for how to quantify worker productivity. In most knowledge industries, companies have nothing better than highly subjective measures (i.e., supervisors’ assessments) of worker productivity. In theory, it seems significant improvements should be possible. In the short term, is it possible to measure the productivity or efficacy of individual managers, software engineers, educators, scientists? How about teams, and what size of team? And can we do so without creating Goodhart’s Law problems?
What should Widodo do? Indonesia is a large, populous middle-income country. It faces no major near-term security threats. It has a small manufacturing base and no major non-commodity export sectors. What is the best non-bureaucratic 10 page economic development briefing document and set of prescriptions that one could write for Indonesia’s president? For Indonesia, substitute Philippines, Chile, or Morocco.
A comparative study of foundations and their efficacy. Philanthropic foundations are behind a lot of important work. But how does a foundation decide what it wants and how the resulting grants should be structured? How effective are the programs of that foundation? In practice, how have its institutional mechanisms evolved? Imagine some kind of resource that answered these questions for the major American foundations.
Institutional critiques. More broadly, there is no discipline of institutional criticism. There is a very rich literature of policy criticism in economics, journalism, and non-fiction books. There is also a rich literature of “corporate criticism”: there are thousands of articles about how Facebook (budget: $20 billion) works and how it might be good or bad. But there is relatively little analysis of the most important institutions in our society: government departments. How is the Department of Agriculture (budget: $150 billion) organized and how effective or not is it? How about the Department of Energy (budget: $32 billion)? And why are not those questions paramount in the minds of policymakers?
Cultures of excellence. If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”. It seems that some kind of “culture of doing things really well” has very persistent and generalizable effects. South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies. Russia still has higher GDP per capita than Mexico despite Mexico’s economic policies having been much better than Russia’s for many, many decades at this point. How should we think about cultures of excellence?
Regeneration at the government layer. Herbert Kaufman (unsurprisingly) concludes in an empirical study that government organizations don’t die. While we might all agree that this is a problem, actionable solutions are in short supply. What can or should we do about this?
IQ paradox. Ron Unz points out that intergenerational variation of IQ may be much higher than is often assumed, citing Ireland and Croatia as examples. For instance, not long ago Ireland had sub-par measured IQ and now that figure is much higher, following growth and prosperity. The policy implications of IQ disparities across nations may therefore be different to what might otherwise obviously follow: perhaps environment matters much more than is assumed. If so, what should we be doing more or less of?
Credible plans for new top-tier universities. 7 of the best 25 universities in the world (Times ranking) were started in the US between 1861 and 1891 by ambitious reformers. It’s probably harder in many ways to start an impactful new university today… but it’s likely not impossible and the returns to doing so successfully might be very high. What might be a good plan? Why have so few of these plans come to fruition?
Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields. As a general matter, a lot of oral knowledge in the world is still not readily available, and reflection on this fact might lead one in many interesting directions. One obvious application is helping people more readily understand the present state of affairs in different domains. If I want to know “how we’re doing” in, say, antiviral drug development, I could spend a few hours hunting for top researchers, email a few, and perhaps get on calls to obtain their candid assessments. Are we making good progress? What are the most important open problems? What’s holding things back? And so on. How can we make all of this knowledge publicly available across all fields?
Mechanisms for better matching. One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem. Online dating demonstrates that significant change (and maybe even improvement?) is possible, with some figures suggesting that up to two thirds of relationships in the US may now be initiated through online dating services. Accomplished people often seem to struggle with this challenge. Good solutions would be important.
What should Durkan do? Jenny Durkan is the current mayor of Seattle. As cities become more important loci of economic activity in the world, the importance of effective city governance will increase. As with the Widodo challenge, what is the best 10 page briefing document and set of prescriptions that one could write for her? What about Baltimore and St. Louis?
China isn’t close to being the #1 economy
From my latest Bloomberg column:
The key point is the difference between income and wealth. GDP and related numbers measure income flows: namely, the quantity of goods and services produced in a given nation in a given year. Wealth is a measure of the total stock of resources in a nation and is much higher. Furthermore, the gap between wealth and income is usually higher for nations that have been wealthy and stable for a very long time, such as the U.S.
When it comes to national wealth, the U.S. has a big lead over China, possibly as much as three times greater. That is a very rough estimate by Michael Beckley of Tufts University, drawing on data from the World Bank and the United Nations.
For a relevant pointer to Beckley, I thank Evan Abramsky of AEI.