Heritage Foundation Exposes its Racist Underbelly With "Paper" from a HahVahd Numbnut

The Heritage Foundation, a conservo think tank (and I use that term liberally)  has always harbored an odious brew of vile crypto-facsists, Libertarian assholes and right wing screw jobs. They are also known for concocting refuse published in assorted academic "papers" - which term I also use loosely.  Most people of sense and acumen knew that once Jim DeMint - Demented Tea Bagger got the top job there- the place would slide down at an accelerated rate.

Well, we didn't have long to wait. As Rachel Maddow exposed last night, this bunch of troglydytes are now at the center of a storm that threatens to engulf them. It concerns an academic paper to do with the intelligence of immigrants. It claims, and I shit you not, that their I.Q.s are substantially lower than whites and moreover they will add $6.3 trillion to the deficit if wide-open immigration legislation is passed.

All of this is based on the numbers "crunching" of a former Harvard Ph.D. grad - a Jason Redwine-  who actually wrote in his dissertation (making one wonder how the quality of Harvard Ph.D. dissertations has descended):

"The average I.Q. of Immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population. And the difference is likely to persist over several generations."

In other words, this bozo with three letters after his name (which don't mean diddly) is claiming that "immigrants" (no distinctions, just one general category) will become poverty-stricken "takers" that will have to go on whatever dole is available, and their year-by-year taking (from gov't) will bring us all much further into debt.

Well, it doesn't take much exposure to his claptrap (and btw, ANY thesis adviser at Harvard that allowed the quoted rot to pass muster  for a Ph.D. ought to be fired forthwith.) to see the similarities to bollocks produced by another Heritage alumnus, Charles Murray. Readers may recall Murray was the author of The Bell Curve in which he attempted to tie IQ to racial genetics, with African-Americans and Latinos at the lower end of "the Bell Curve"- a Gaussian distribution.

Murray followed this up with a knock-off  book, (Coming Apart)  that extended his poverty -taker paradigm to poor whites. He basically took 300 odd pages to "document" how working class whites were detaching from the "four founding virtues of industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion".  Because of this profound moral laxity, these poor whites were damaging the white brand, and also ramping up deficits because of their entitlement mentality. They ranged from middle age working whites just fired from white collar jobs, who refused to flip burgers, to younger Gen Y types who refused to respect "the Man" and put their asses to work without whining. HIs worst diatribes were reserved for those who grabbed benefits, whether Social Security or Veterans disability, and these were tagged as "parasites".

 In any case, he attributed the Whiteys' grafting ways and laziness to their collective failure to hold up the four props as explaining why they are perhaps now embracing government "entitlements" and in the process reducing their collective IQ. For example, we learn that in blue-collar America (in contrast to the white upper class in which divorce rates hav declined) divorce has soared since the 1980s, and nonmarital child-bering is skyrocketing Worse and worse, 40% of white females with just a high school diploma have children outside of marriage, compared to 5% with college degrees.


Murray's suggestion? That the poor white's wealthier class betters teach them morals!

Now, anyone who's read Murrary's codswallop cannot fail to see the extension of the same statistical errors and nonsense to Jason Redwine's pseudo-science. (Btw, where do these crackpot "Jasons" come from anyway? Recall my earlier exposure of the Ph.D. moron Jason Lisle, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/06/why-jason-lisle-is-wrong-in-his-solar.html )

In the case of Redwine, statistical errors are evident merely from reading his statement-quote above from his dissertation, using the catch all "immigrants". Has he never observed or studied Asian immigrants, for example, who have some of the most industrious habits and actually display higher I.Q. s than Caucasians? Obviously not!   This means he's using the blanket term "immigrants" to pin the blame mainly on Mexican immigrants. But this doesn't wash nor are his skewed numbers worth much.

Right now, for example, the census figures show net zero immigration between the U.S. and Mexico. That means the numbers coming and going are balanced at about 1.4 million each way. This hardly can be used to make the case that we will see milions more Mexican Takers and then they're ramping up deficits by another $6.3 trillion. Where does he get that figure anyway?

That's another case of bogus use of stats, which we call selection effect. In this case, Redwine never bothered to factor in the immigrants' contributions, via their labor and paid tax dollars (amounting to $11.2 billion a year). In other words, Redwine - genius that he is- left out one whole side of the ledger projected over a generation (40 yrs.). 

This is as bad as not distinguishing between the economics of the assorted immigrant groups, or their educations, etc. Worse, he makes a typical error of many naifs in not appreciating several things about I.Q. itself: 1) that I.Q. can change over time, it's not some fixed number that follows you the rest of your life, and 2) I.Q. measurements and tests themselves vary and are highly subjective relative to a population's aptitude and skill set.

I mean really! Does this turkey believe that an I.Q. test - say devised in by Pygmies in Africa- would be expected to be the same as one for the U.S. and Canada?  Does he think a related rates  math item  or vocabulary item - like 'write the synonymn for derelict' would appear on a Pygmy I.Q. test.?

Is he even aware of the fact that the SAT, for example, has not been used by Mensa since the mid-90s as an alternative I.Q. entry determinant? (Only the SATs taken before about 1994 qualify, else one must sit Mensa's own test). Why the change? Because the College Board that administers it no longer was convinced the SATs met the basic requirements of an I.Q. format aptitude test.  This means that if Redwine used SAT scores, say, to assess Mexican or any immigrants' I.Q. scores, he'd be off base. They results would have to be tossed into the dumpster.

While Redwine and Heritage seek to clean themselves up from this fiasco, one thing is clear: The Repukes still haven't learned - even after the last election- that when they spit on immigrants (especially including all those who are also naturalized citizens) they will never get their votes.

‘The Flynn Effect’: Are We All Becoming Über-Geniuses?

 

University College London; Nature

The phenomenon of incrementally increasing IQ first circulated in 1984, following a study in that year by James R. Flynn, purporting to show that citizens in advanced nations like the U.S. have experienced massive IQ gains over  time. (The term itself was coined by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of The Bell Curve ).

Specifically and quantitatively, Americans – for example – have gained 3 IQ points per decade from the early 1900s to today, as reflected in both the Stanford –Binet and Wechsler Intelligence scales. By another test’s standards (the Raven’s Progressive Matrices) – for which scores go back to people born in 1872- the gains disclosed amount to 5 IQ points per decade.

Using the Raven’s and scored against today’s norms (a key point to which I will return) our ancestors in 1910 would have an average IQ of 70, or about moron level. By comparison, our mean IQ today – that is, disclosed within the ‘hump’ portion of a Gaussian distribution – would range from 130 to 150 depending on the test. Now, for reference, 130 basically gets you into Mensa (accepting the top 2% of IQs) and 150 marks you as a “genius”. Are we all geniuses on our way to becoming Über-Geniuses?
I don’t think so, for a number of reasons.

First and most importantly, the ranks of neither Mensa or Intertel have increased markedly. Select a random sample of the populace, say 10,000 – and dispatch them to sit the Mensa and Intertel IQ tests and only 2% and 1%, respectively, will get through, as has been the case for decades. Ditto for the ever receding proportions in the Über IQ societies such as 'The Poetic Genius Society’. (If you believe seriously that you measure up to the standards of the latter, google 'Mega Test' and try to take it to qualify!)

This means, again, that under current norms of IQ testing, geniuses will still be geniuses, Mensa high IQ types will remain in the upper 2%, morons will remain morons, and average (IQ = 100) types will remain stuck in the middle of the Gaussian ‘hump’. Hence, under the ‘Flynn Effect’, one can only regard oneself as some kind of daunting high IQ type relative to the (IQ-testing) norms of one’s ancestors, say your Great Grandpa or Great Grandma – alive in 1910.

Second, we know IQ changes or can change over time. Indeed, a teen’s IQ can rise or fall as much as 20 points in just a few years. This can be traced to environmental conditions, internal brain changes or both. If true, it means IQ is not a stable quantity or entity but can fluctuate. If it can do so (and some studies disclose it can in adults as well!) it means ‘Flynn Effect’ type conclusions come with lots of provisos and qualifications. These variations also imply the standard deviations (and standard errors) will be significant, so the question then is whether these will be large enough to wipe out any abiding significance.

There is some truth also in the claim (‘Are We Getting Smarter?’, WSJ, Sept. 23-24, p. C3)that the Flynn Effect shows that education in the modern world “has changed the human mind itself”. The very act of Googling, for example, enables a rapid assimilation of information, knowledge unthinkable ca. 1910 or even 1960. The use of computer number crunching, solving software – like my Mathcad 14 program – would have appeared like ‘magic’ to my 1962-63 high school self, still working with a Mannheim slide rule. Indeed, the first time symbolically solving an integral using Mathcad – say in front of a math prof from Loyola in 1964, might have enticed him to speculate about “demonic influence”!

Then there is the wide array of You tube physics experiments, chemistry experiments etc. that can be instantly downloaded, not to mention the raft of high level abstract courses (see examples highlighted in my previous blog, from MIT and Yale).  These comprehensive visual learning vehicles would confer an immediate advantage over any guy from 1910 stuck with ordinary text books and hardly any dynamic interplay or control over learning rate.  This advantage would also be reflected in abstract tests, say like the Raven's or Stanford-Binet.

Add to that the spate of video –computer simulated games. For example, older adults have actually managed to enhance their fluid intelligence (how well a person tackles new problems or tasks, as opposed to factual knowledge).after playing the video game ‘Rise of Nations’ (cf. Scientific American Mind, ‘Building Better Brains’, p. 61).

Back in the early 20th century, however, my great grandpa wasn’t worried about such things nor did they matter. Life then pivoted not so much on 'book learnin' but on the practical issues of how to make enough profit for a given crop acreage – and given enough livestock – to last through the winter and into the next year.

Somehow, I doubt the average genius today or computer game wunderkind – if suddenly transported back to 1910 and a fifty acre farm in rural Arkansas with 1,000 hogs and 500 cows, along with assorted crops, would know how to translate those assets into livable profit to last a year or more. It would be one time-travel experiment I'd really be curious to perform.

But imagining ourselves as rapidly becoming Über-Geniuses is the sort of mistake we make, in assessing something as subtle as intelligence, especially when we try to compare chalk and cheese.