I read the book years ago “to find out what all the fuss was about” and I was surprised to find that the book was only about white America for the most part.
After thinking about it, my opinion was that Murray should have left out the one chapter about race (because that discussion consumed all the oxygen and also) because the thing I was very surprised by, and which seemed like a big deal, and which potentially was something that could be changed via policy, and thus probably deserved most of the oxygen, was the story where:
the invisible migration of the twentieth century has done much more than let the most intellectually able succeed more easily. It has also segregated them and socialized them.
The story I remember from the book was that colleges entrance processes had become a sieve that retained high IQ whites while letting low IQ whites pass through and fall away.
Then there are low-IQ societies where an underclass lives with nearly no opportunity to see role models doing similar things in substantially more clever ways.
My memory is that the book focused quite a bit on how this is not how college used to work in the 1930s or so, and that it was at least partly consciously set up through the adoption of standardized testing like the SAT and ACT as a filter to use government subsidies to pull people out of their communities and get them into college in the period from 1950 to 1980 or so.
Prior to this, the primary determinant of college entry was parental SES and wealth, as the “economic winners with mediocre children” tried to pass on their social position to their children via every possible hack they could cleverly think to try.
(At a local personal level, I admire this cleverness, put in service first to their own children, where it properly belongs, but I worry that they had no theory of a larger society, and how that might be structured for the common good, and I fear that their local virtue was tragically and naively magnified into the larger structure of society to create a systematic class benefit that is not healthy for the whole of society, or even for the “so-called winners” of the dynamic...)
My memory of Murray’s book is that he pointed out that if you go back to the 1940s, and look at the IQ distribution of the average carpenter, you’d find a genius here or there, and these were often the carpenters who the other carpenters looked up to, and learned carpentry tricks from…
...but now, since nearly all people have taken the SAT or ACT in high school, the smart “potential carpenters” all get snatched up and taken away from the community that raised them. This levels out the carpentry IQ distribution, by putting a ceiling on it, basically.
If you think about US immigration policy, “causing brain drain from other countries” is a built in part of the design. (Hence student visas for example.)
If this is helpful for the US, then it seems reasonable that it would be harmful to the other countries...
...but international policy is plausibly is a domain where altruism should have less sway, unless mechanisms to ensure reciprocity exist…
...and once you have mechanistically ensured reciprocity are you even actually in different legal countries anymore? It is almost a tautology then, that “altruism ‘should’ be less of a factor for an agent in a domain where reciprocal altruism can’t be enforced”.
So while I can see how “brain drain vs other countries” makes some sense as a semi-properly-selfish foreign policy (until treaties equalize things perhaps) it also makes sense to me that enacting a policy of subsidized brain drain on “normal america” by “the parts of america in small urban bubbles proximate to competitive universities” seems like… sociologically bad?
So it could be that domestic brain drain is maybe kind of evil? Also, if it is evil then the beneficiaries might have some incentives to try to deny is happening by denying that IQ is even real?
Then it becomes interesting to notice that domestic neighborhood level brain drain could potentially be stopped by changing laws.
I think Murray never called for this because there wasn’t strong data to back it up, but following the logic to the maximally likely model of the world, then thinking about how to get “more of what most people in America” (probably) want based on that model (like a live player would)…
...the thing I found myself believing at the end of the book is that The Invisible Migration Should Be Stopped.
The natural way to do this doesn’t even seem that complicated, and it might even work, and all it seems like you’d have to do is: (1) make it illegal for universities to use IQ tests (so they can go back to being a way for abnormally successful rich parents to try to transmit their personal success to their mediocre children who have regressed to the mean) but (2) make it legal for businesses to use IQ tests directly, and maybe even (3) tax businesses for hogging up all the smart people, if they try to brain drain into their own firm?
If smart people were intentionally “spread around” (instead of “bunched up”), I think a lot fewer of them would be walking around worried about everything… I think they would feel less pinched and scared, and less “strongly competed with on all sides”.
Also, they might demand a more geographically even distribution of high quality government services?
And hopefully, over time, they would be less generally insane, because maybe the insanity comes from being forced to into brutal “stackedranking” competition with so many other geniuses, so that their oligarchic survival depends on inventing fake (and thus arbitrarily controllable) reasons to fire co-workers?
Then… if this worked… maybe they would be more able to relax and focus on teaching and play?
And I think this would be good for the more normal people who (if the smarties were more spread out) would have better role models for the propagation of a more adaptively functional culture throughout society.
Relevantly, as a tendency-demonstrating exceptional case, presumably caused by unusual local factors:
I, weirdly, live in a poor, dangerous[1] neighborhood where I volunteer as a coach for the local high school’s robotics club. If I wasn’t around there would be no engineers teaching or coaching at the highschool.
Nice! I admire your willingness and capacity to help others who are local to you <3
[1] I was robbed at gunpoint last weekend.
You have my sympathy. I hope you are personally OK. Also, I hope, for the sake of that whole neighborhood, that the criminal is swiftly captured and justly punished. I fear there is little I can do to help you or your neighborhood from my own distant location, but if you think of something, please let me know.
(3) tax businesses for hogging up all the smart people, if they try to brain drain into their own firm?
Due to tax incidence, that’s the same as taxing smart people for getting together. I don’t like that for two reasons. First, people should be free to get together. Second, the freedom of smart people to get together could be responsible for large economic gains, so we should be careful about messing with it.
You have my sympathy. I hope you are personally OK. Also, I hope, for the sake of that whole neighborhood, that the criminal is swiftly captured and justly punished. I fear there is little I can do to help you or your neighborhood from my own distant location, but if you think of something, please let me know.
I’m totally unharmed. I didn’t even lose my phone. There is absolutely nothing you can do but appreciate the offer and the well wishes.
I read the book years ago “to find out what all the fuss was about” and I was surprised to find that the book was only about white America for the most part.
After thinking about it, my opinion was that Murray should have left out the one chapter about race (because that discussion consumed all the oxygen and also) because the thing I was very surprised by, and which seemed like a big deal, and which potentially was something that could be changed via policy, and thus probably deserved most of the oxygen, was the story where:
The story I remember from the book was that colleges entrance processes had become a sieve that retained high IQ whites while letting low IQ whites pass through and fall away.
Then there are low-IQ societies where an underclass lives with nearly no opportunity to see role models doing similar things in substantially more clever ways.
My memory is that the book focused quite a bit on how this is not how college used to work in the 1930s or so, and that it was at least partly consciously set up through the adoption of standardized testing like the SAT and ACT as a filter to use government subsidies to pull people out of their communities and get them into college in the period from 1950 to 1980 or so.
Prior to this, the primary determinant of college entry was parental SES and wealth, as the “economic winners with mediocre children” tried to pass on their social position to their children via every possible hack they could cleverly think to try.
(At a local personal level, I admire this cleverness, put in service first to their own children, where it properly belongs, but I worry that they had no theory of a larger society, and how that might be structured for the common good, and I fear that their local virtue was tragically and naively magnified into the larger structure of society to create a systematic class benefit that is not healthy for the whole of society, or even for the “so-called winners” of the dynamic...)
My memory of Murray’s book is that he pointed out that if you go back to the 1940s, and look at the IQ distribution of the average carpenter, you’d find a genius here or there, and these were often the carpenters who the other carpenters looked up to, and learned carpentry tricks from…
...but now, since nearly all people have taken the SAT or ACT in high school, the smart “potential carpenters” all get snatched up and taken away from the community that raised them. This levels out the carpentry IQ distribution, by putting a ceiling on it, basically.
If you think about US immigration policy, “causing brain drain from other countries” is a built in part of the design. (Hence student visas for example.)
If this is helpful for the US, then it seems reasonable that it would be harmful to the other countries...
...but international policy is plausibly is a domain where altruism should have less sway, unless mechanisms to ensure reciprocity exist…
...and once you have mechanistically ensured reciprocity are you even actually in different legal countries anymore? It is almost a tautology then, that “altruism ‘should’ be less of a factor for an agent in a domain where reciprocal altruism can’t be enforced”.
So while I can see how “brain drain vs other countries” makes some sense as a semi-properly-selfish foreign policy (until treaties equalize things perhaps) it also makes sense to me that enacting a policy of subsidized brain drain on “normal america” by “the parts of america in small urban bubbles proximate to competitive universities” seems like… sociologically bad?
So it could be that domestic brain drain is maybe kind of evil? Also, if it is evil then the beneficiaries might have some incentives to try to deny is happening by denying that IQ is even real?
Then it becomes interesting to notice that domestic neighborhood level brain drain could potentially be stopped by changing laws.
I think Murray never called for this because there wasn’t strong data to back it up, but following the logic to the maximally likely model of the world, then thinking about how to get “more of what most people in America” (probably) want based on that model (like a live player would)…
...the thing I found myself believing at the end of the book is that The Invisible Migration Should Be Stopped.
The natural way to do this doesn’t even seem that complicated, and it might even work, and all it seems like you’d have to do is:
(1) make it illegal for universities to use IQ tests (so they can go back to being a way for abnormally successful rich parents to try to transmit their personal success to their mediocre children who have regressed to the mean) but
(2) make it legal for businesses to use IQ tests directly, and maybe even
(3) tax businesses for hogging up all the smart people, if they try to brain drain into their own firm?
If smart people were intentionally “spread around” (instead of “bunched up”), I think a lot fewer of them would be walking around worried about everything… I think they would feel less pinched and scared, and less “strongly competed with on all sides”.
Also, they might demand a more geographically even distribution of high quality government services?
And hopefully, over time, they would be less generally insane, because maybe the insanity comes from being forced to into brutal “stacked ranking” competition with so many other geniuses, so that their oligarchic survival depends on inventing fake (and thus arbitrarily controllable) reasons to fire co-workers?
Then… if this worked… maybe they would be more able to relax and focus on teaching and play?
And I think this would be good for the more normal people who (if the smarties were more spread out) would have better role models for the propagation of a more adaptively functional culture throughout society.
Relevantly, as a tendency-demonstrating exceptional case, presumably caused by unusual local factors:
Nice! I admire your willingness and capacity to help others who are local to you <3
You have my sympathy. I hope you are personally OK. Also, I hope, for the sake of that whole neighborhood, that the criminal is swiftly captured and justly punished. I fear there is little I can do to help you or your neighborhood from my own distant location, but if you think of something, please let me know.
Due to tax incidence, that’s the same as taxing smart people for getting together. I don’t like that for two reasons. First, people should be free to get together. Second, the freedom of smart people to get together could be responsible for large economic gains, so we should be careful about messing with it.
See also: “The Problem Isn’t the ‘Merit,’ It’s the ‘Ocracy’” (The Scholar’s Stage).
I’m totally unharmed. I didn’t even lose my phone. There is absolutely nothing you can do but appreciate the offer and the well wishes.
I’m glad you are unharmed and that my well wishes were welcome :-)