1/ Rough Draft Excerpts From an Article I'm Writing on Race and IQ.

DAY #19

Here's the link to a page containing supporting sources for tweets in this thread:

https://raceandiq.home.blog/blog-feed/ 

2/ DAY #19 SUMMARY

Tweets 4-26: Rebutting the Environmentalist Claim That Income Disparities Between Blacks and Whites Explains the IQ Gap

3/ “Environmentalists” believe average differences between races in exposure to certain variables like poverty, nutrition, education, parenting, and health care explain the race IQ gaps.

4/ Ironically, the most common environmental explanation for the black-white IQ gap is among the easiest to almost immediately empirically bludgeon: That the gap is due to income disparities between blacks and whites.

5/ If income disparities explained the gaps, we'd expect to see the children of the wealthiest blacks obtaining the same IQ results on average as similarly-situated whites & Asians. But we don't -- the wealthiest black kids aren't even close to their white & Asian counterparts.

6/ In fact, the black-white gap is the *widest* among the wealthiest.

“Across 48 studies... 96% found that the Black-White IQ gap rises with SES.”

7/ Environmentalists have argued that as black children become less exposed to environmental deficits, like poverty, their IQ scores should improve and the gap between black and white should narrow.

But actually the magnitude of these gaps is greatest at higher income levels.

8/ The fact that achieving higher socioeconomic status appears to lead to less cognitive improvement among blacks than whites, suggests a lower built-in IQ ceiling for blacks than for whites. In other words, support for a genetic hypothesis, not an environmental one.

9/ But the failure of income to explain the black-white IQ discrepancy becomes even starker and more illuminating once you compare poor whites to wealthy blacks: The children of the POOREST whites have about the same IQ as the children of the WEALTHIEST blacks.

10/ In other words, white children experiencing the biggest environmental deficits outperform black children with the fewest of these deficits -- something for which an environmental hypothesis cannot account.

11/ Here's a different dataset graphing the IQs of black children and parental socioeconomic status.

The upper line graphs the amount of the black-white IQ difference in standard deviations.

You can see that the size of the gap is greater at higher SES levels.

12/ The same pattern holds true for SAT scores –- the children of the very poorest whites perform the same or better than the children of the wealthiest blacks.

(Remember that the SAT is substantially g-loaded and its scores are reasonably reliable proxies for IQ.)

13/ Here's a graph which includes children of Asian-Americans.

I should note that the race SAT gaps have not changed much since the 1990s, except for a widening between Asians and all other groups, especially at low-income levels.

14/ A 2005 journal article: The richest “blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 10 points below the average score of [the poorest] white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.”

15/ Data released by the College Board in 2008 showed white children from families earning less than $20,000/year scoring higher on the SAT, on average, than black children from families earning up to $200,000/year, and about the same as those earning above $200,000/year.

16/ Think about the hugely significant difference in exposure to almost all environmental variables (e.g., schooling, health care, pre-natal care, learning resources) between a child in a family making less than $20,000/year and a child in a family making $200,000/year.

17/ And yet the average most-impoverished white child has higher SATs than the average most-advantaged black child.

To say that this piece of information severely damages the environmental hypothesis would be an understatement.

18/ Even after matching black and white children for geography, neighborhoods, schools, and other socioeconomic indicators, black children from the best areas and schools (and with the highest average scores) still average lower than white children with the lowest SES indicators.

19/ Controlling for socioeconomic status only reduces the average black–white IQ gap by about 3 points. But even this control for SES in not entirely environmental: The parents’ socioeconomic level in part reflects their genetic differences in intelligence.

20/ You can see from the graph the income gains blacks have experienced on whites over the past 30 years. (The graph stops at 2014. The ratio has further decreased since then.) And yet the IQ and achievement gaps haven't moved meaningfully during that time.

21/ It should therefore be fairly obvious from the data that the academic achievement gap is “an artifact of IQ distribution” and not income inequality between whites and blacks.

22/ And if poverty explained IQ gaps, then wouldn't the average IQs of Koreans and Chinese in the 1970s have been considerably LOWER than those of US blacks? (Per capita income of $150/year versus $8,000/year.)

Instead they were about 20 points HIGHER than US black IQ.

23/ At no point in the modern era have the average income and other environmental factors affecting IQ been as strong in China, for example, as they have in Western Europe and yet the average of that region has always been higher -– evidence of a genetic role in the gap.

24/ A similar point could be made about Ashkenazi Jews (the group with the highest IQ in the world), who despite centuries of discrimination and poverty, almost immediately began outpacing other groups in achievement once they were given the opportunity.

25/ Let's extend it even further, to other countries around the world, and you'll see that even though US blacks have a higher standard of living than other countries –- often *much* higher –- they still badly trail them in average IQ.

26/ In all of those nations, the environmental variables that might affect IQ are worse, sometimes much worse. If the environmental thesis were predictive, we'd expect to see lower average IQs in all of those countries than what we see for US blacks. Instead, they're higher.

27/ In my next thread, I'll rebut several other variables environmentalists argue influence the race IQ gaps, including education and nutrition.

Here's the link to a page containing supporting sources for tweets in this thread: https://raceandiq.home.blog/blog-feed/