<p>An excellent article from the New Yorker, in which Malcolm Gladwell dissects IQ tests and what they measure, coming to the conclusion that, in fact, Chinese-American students have lower IQs than European-American students. On his way there, he explains why children in 1991 were twice as likely to be diagnosed as mentally ■■■■■■■■ as children in 1990.</p>
<p>So the guy found that it was an unfair comparison. I agree.</p>
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<p>But he was okay with this one when one can argue the slightly lower verbal IQ of Chinese-American children may be due to the fact many of their parents probably don’t even speak much English. I’d think the fluency of your parents has more impact than income level!! Interesting!</p>
<p>I also thought that the Chinese-American kids’ verbal scores had to be a result of language effects. I know very well-educated Chinese-American people, who were born in this country to immigrant parents, whose use of English is different in subtle ways.</p>
<p>I’m glad you posted this link. I’m going to hunt up more of Flynn’s work. Thanks.</p>
<p>Gottaloveucla, Have you read The Bell Curve? The authors do not make the argument that race determines IQ. They do make the argument that IQ tests measure something real (it reifies the concept of “intelligence”) and that there are populations of people (“race”) that can also be reified, and that there are measurably different intelligence distributions between races. To the extent that “race” actually exists (see SJ Gould for a LOT more on this), the aggregate distribution is a normal distribution (“bell curve”). It’s more complex than “because you’re black, you’re stupid.” The authors would argue something more like, “If I know your race, I can make a prediction about your likely IQ score that is more likely to be accurate than if I don’t know your race.” My biggest problem with their conclusions has been that I don’t really know what “race” means. I’m not sure you should reify it. Now that other researchers are questioning the validity of the raw data, this is going to get really interesting.</p>
<p>Flynn’s analysis is very cool in that it suggests that IQ scores are at least in part determined by societal experience in how to cognitively map objects and concepts in the environment. It does map my qualitative experience that children raised in intellectually stimulating environments turn out to be brighter adults. I’ve wondered about the causal flow – do brighter parents provide better environments for their genetically brighter kids, or can any child benefit from a better environment? I suspect it is a little of both, personally, but I’m looking forward to learning more.</p>
<p>There are more overt environmental influences, as well. For example, there are good data showing that exposure to lead, even at levels below the threshold considered significant, results in reduction of IQ. Prenatal alcohol exposure is another well-established factor. And it’s hard to believe that nutrition, either prenatally or in early childhood, doesn’t affect brain development. So the idea that IQ (even accounting for differences in tests, norms, constructs, etc.) is entirely genetic is much too simplistic.</p>
<p>Scientists have long been been very unkind to African-Americans in the way the have assessed them. For example have you ever heard of DRAPETOMANIA or DYSAETHESIA AETHIOPICA.</p>
<p>The first was a disease specific to African-Americans, which caused them to run away from slavery. Can you image that? Slaves running away. Obviously they must have been sick. The second was also know colloquially by overseers as “rascality.” Can you image that, a disease which caused slaves not to cooperate in their slavery. [Africans</a> in America/Part 4/“Diseases and Peculiarities”](<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3106t.html]Africans”>Africans in America/Part 4/"Diseases and Peculiarities")</p>
<p>and the creation of African-American slums in port cities, with families headed by single moms.</p>
<p>During World War II, the government encouraged a massive migration of Black women from the South to port cities (Los Angeles/Long Beach, Tacoma, Washington, Oakland, California, Detroit/Windsor, Michigan, etc. to build ships for the Navy. The posters of Rosey the Riveter showed a redhead; the reality was that she was likely African-American. Wages were some 20 times what these women earned in the rural South. Culture was rich. The women purchased homes in East L.A., etc. Storefronts thrived.</p>
<p>Then, when WWII ended, the women (still without men) were thrown out of work, semi-permanently; what few jobs were left in shipbuilding, and all the jobs on the docks, were given to returning white veterans, who also received welfare funds, housing funds, and education funds under the GI bill. My father, barely a highly school graduate and barely literate, was one of the beneficiaries. (Black veterans also had GI education benefits, but large numbers of state universities refused to accept Black students, and more of the Black veterans had been high school dropouts.) No one gave any benefits to the Black women without whom the War couldn’t have been fought. And once welfare did arrive in the cities, it penalized intact Black families where they existed, providing incentives for Black men to leave the household if they wanted their wives and children to be able to eat. For those who worked, with Black life expectancy for men to be in the 50s, Social Security was a massive wealth redistribution program, from Black men to white women.</p>
<p>Let’s just remember who created the environments in which these IQ scores pop up.</p>
<p>mini, can you elaborate this? how did that work? what’s the difference between the welfare for intact Black families and and that for intact White families? why did it penalize one but not the other. thanks for the insight.</p>
<p>It wasn’t that the rules were different, but that white America had created a condition of semi-permanent unemployment for Black men, and took away jobs previously held by Black women – who were brought north mostly without their menfolk - and gave them to white men. So conditions for intact Black families in these areas only existed to the degree that they did so prior to World War II (and they did: i.e. Harlem Renaissance), and where non-intact families had come to exist, they received welfare that intact families could not.</p>
<p>White families DID receive welfare - massive welfare - in the form of GI benefits, preferential hiring, lower mortgage rates to buy homes in covenanted (read: all white) neighborhoods in the suburbs, and education - largely closed off to Black men and especially Black women who had been essential to the war effort. And I can speak personally because my father and my family benefited from these welfare programs for decades.</p>