TomB:

I normally don’t participate in comment-threads, since responding to one item might obligate me to respond to additional ones as well. But TomB is a frequent and thoughtful commenter here and he raises an important issue, so I’ll make a special exception in this particular case.

I really was being quite sincere in my statement that I saw almost none of these huge and ignored scandals as having anything to do with the traditional Left/Right ideological fault lines. And that would certainly include the three or four at the end that I’m hoping the media might now finally decide to notice. I think the only major exception would be the “Communist Spies” with which I opened my article, whose non-coverage obviously did and does have a clear ideological skew.

If TomB or anyone else claims that most of my other scandals do have liberal roots, he really should list them and explain why they clearly fall into the Left agenda, which escapes me. For example, according to Sibel Edmonds senior American government officials were selling our nuclear weapons secrets for cash to foreign spies, and this hardly seems part of the ACLU playbook (indeed Edmonds won some sort of ACLU award for her whistleblowing). The corrupt officials involved were apparently Democrats working under Clinton, but they were later protected by their friends, who were Republicans working under Bush.

Admittedly, about 95% of the American media skews liberal, so denouncing the American media as incompetent or corrupt necessarily means you’re mostly denouncing liberals. But FoxNews contributes its own share and anyway I just don’t see an ideological factor at work.

I’m certainly not denying there may be other media scandals with a clear ideological tinge. For example, in the past I’ve expressed my skepticism over Global Warming, and if that’s indeed a hoax promoted by the media, ideology would certainly play a role. But since I’m not at all convinced of the true facts one way or the other, I really can’t use that example: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/two-cheers-for-heresy-on-global-warming/

I’d be the first to admit that liberalism is wrong about all sorts of things and has promoted many harmful policies over the decades (though I’d probably say the same about modern conservatism). But I just don’t see much connection with the topics in my American Pravda article.

Glaivester: Greg Cochran may be brilliant, but he is also quite arrogant, so anyone who disagrees with him on anything is in for a lot of grief from him.

Well, you appear to be correct. After he produced his lengthy post attacking my critique of his Gay Germ theory, I showed up and published a couple of comments in response, but he now seems to have censored/banned me, perhaps because I was defending myself a bit too well. Here are my two published comments:

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/#comment-11890

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/#comment-11894

His response to the second was:
===
Chlamydia often causes sterility. There are parts of the world – Africa’s ‘sterility belt’, where tens of percent of women were sterile or had drastically lowered fertility, before antibiotics became widely available.

According to your argument, that can’t have happened. But it did.

Enough already. Your style of argumentation is not productive.
===

To which I responded:
===
Aren’t sterile women in those African societies usually forced into prostitution? Hasn’t there been quite a bit of speculation in ev-bio circles that the sterility inflicted by the disease therefore greatly increases the effectiveness of its vector transmission to additional hosts? Now *that* is an ev-bio disease hypothesis that makes perfectly good sense to me.
===

After three tries last night, my comment still hasn’t appeared, so I suppose our dialogue is at an end. Obviously, it’s his blogsite and he can do whatever he wants with it, but I doubt if such behavior enhances his scientific credibility. Stephen Jay Gould would be proud.

(I generally avoid involving myself in TAC comment-threads, but I’ll copy my response from the Westhunter debate)

Of *course*, I’m aware of all those Hamilton inclusive-fitness issues, and quite possibly have been for much longer than gcochran, given my strong interest in the topic stretches back to the late 1970s. And I also agree that E.O. Wilson is almost certainly mistaken on the Gay Uncle Hypothesis, but since the Gay Germ Hypothesis seems just as ridiculous, I don’t think the harsh insults to Wilson’s intelligence were warranted.

Consider the Gay Germ model. I don’t think that anyone has ever suggested that the germ actually transmits itself via the sexual behavior in question, so that behavior is seemingly a inessential byproduct to the germ life-cycle. If the behavior doesn’t matter to the germ, but obviously matters very, very much to the genes of the host, there would be powerful selective pressure upon the germ to drop that particular extended phenotypic expression, after which the host would declare a permanent truce in the evolutionary arms race. After all, the human body is filled with a multitude of free-riding germs, so who cares about a few more?

GCochran correctly points out the *massive* selective pressure against gay behavior. So if the germ didn’t really need it for anything, why keep it?

This is *extremely* different from the case of nearly all infectious diseases, in which the harm inflicted upon the host is directly related to the massive multiplication or propagation of the germ. If gays ran around biting straights and thereby turning them gay, then I’d agree that a germ was probably responsible.

Abe Kohen:

The regular volume of comments usually precludes my direct participation, but given your detailed examination of the issue, I’ll make a special exception in your case.

Your list of likely Jewish names in the 2013 Harvard PBKs generally seem very reasonable to me, though there will always a small number of borderline cases. But since only the full 2012 PBKs had been finalized, I stopped with that year, and focused on the 1966-2012 lists, ignoring the partial 2013 results.

Small samples inevitably lead to the problem of statistical fluctuations, and this is obviously true for the “Junior 24 PBKs.” In fact, checking my own estimates for 2000-2012, I found a huge dispersion of annual results, with the number of likely Jewish names ranging between 0 and 9, but averaging about 4.6. So it’s very possible that the 2013 figure is just an outlier due to the academic quality of the particular students for that year.

The total PBKs for a given year generally run 160-170, so the annual fluctuations are much smaller, but still present. During 2000-2012 my estimates of the number of likely Jewish names ranged between 17 and 35, or 10% to 20%. For these reasons, I only reported my results aggregated by decade, thereby minimizing these fluctuations.

You might want to examine some of the annual lists on the Harvard website, and see how well your estimates of likely Jewish names might match my own, as reported in Appendix G. I doubt the match would be exact, but I do suspect it would be reasonably close.

Incidentally, as I also discussed in that appendix, the presence of large numbers of International students in recent decades renders the PBK figures somewhat unreliable as an estimate of the distribution of American performance. The overwhelming majority of International students come from countries with very small or even non-existent Jewish populations, and it’s very possible that a disproportionate number of the Harvard PBKs with Asian or non-Jewish white names may be such Internationals, thereby distorting the implied American ethnic ratios. That’s one reason I confined my mention of the PBK estimates to just a footnote.

Chuck: I checked the GSS data and was unable to replicate Inductivist’s results.

I looked at your blog posting and I think you have severe reading comprehension difficulties. The GSS calculation performed referred to AMERICAN-BORN Mex-Ams, as was heavily emphasized both in the original Inductivist posting and my own article. I just now went back to the GSS system, and by an amazing coincidence replicated his findings precisely. The GSS variables to use are: WORDSUM, YEAR, ETHNIC=MEXICO, BORN=YES. Without attempting any Wordsum-to-IQ conversions, the raw figures I got were:

Avg Wordsum for American-Born Mex-Ams: 1970s=4.17, 1980s=4.04, 1990s=5.11, 2000s=5.58

Avg Wordsum for Whites: 1970s=6.12, 1980s=6.14, 1990s=6.33, 2000s=6.41

Avg Wordsum Mex-Am/White Delta: 1970s=1.95, 1980s=2.10, 1990s=1.22, 2000s=0.83

The Mex-Am sample for the 1970s is tiny—just 12—so let’s focus on the 1980s forward. We see that between the 1980s and the 2000s, the Wordsum-IQ gap between American-Born Mex-Ams and whites has dropped from 2.10 to 0.83 or about 61%. I loosely described this as “almost two-thirds”

As for the NLYS-97 Mex-Am IQ calculation, the results were provided to me by a somewhat prominent rightwing blogger who is strongly anti-immigration and highly-skilled in quantitative matters. Unfortunately, he asked me not to reveal his identity. But now that he’s read my article and found it quite impressive, I’ve asked him whether I can reveal the source of my result.

gcochran: this analysis reminds me of your…idea that there are still a number of POWs left in Indochina.

Well, I realize that “gcochran” is an individual of totally unparalleled genius in all matters throughout the universe. But perhaps people should consider the overwhelming evidence compiled by one of America’s foremost Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnam War journalists, who later served as a top editor of the New York Times. Incidentally, his detailed claims have been backed by two other New York Times Pulitzer Prize winners as well as a couple of former Republican Congressmen with an Intelligence background, and were privately confirmed to me by various other reasonably credible individuals.

Read and decide for yourselves:

Was Rambo Right?

McCain and the POW Cover-Up

The parasites grow fearful for their continued access to the host…

Paul Gottfried: I’m also not sure that their anti-abortion enthusiasm is as great as Michael suggests. Pat Robertson touted Giuliani as a presidential candidate on his television program, despite Giuliani enthusiastic advocacy of a pro-choice position throughout his career.

Actually, the evidence may be much stronger than that. I remember a few years ago Robertson happened to get a little careless on TV and said he personally supported the forced-abortion policies of the Chinese government, which made sense because China was over-crowded. Now it seems to me this tends to raise all sorts of doubts whether Robertson (and perhaps some of his other ranking Evangelical colleagues) really do believe that abortion violates Divine Law.

Unless I’m mistaken, Protestant clergymen never used to care much about abortion until a few decades ago, unlike Catholics, who always condemned it (along with birth control). I’m not exactly sure what changed, but I doubt it was the text of the Protestant Bible…

Well, the U.S.Gov keeps changing its story and changing its story and changing its story.

Meanwhile, that free-lance mercenary (a.k.a. “U.S. Diplomatic Staffer”) was caught with all those guns, ammunition, and other extremely suspicious possessions. And several Pak officials have allegedly confirmed that the two locals he shot dead (who never drew their guns) were indeed ISI agents, tailing him because of suspicions regarding his extremely nefarious activities.

Seems to me, if a Pak mercenary in DC suspected of terrorist activity shot dead the two FBI agents assigned to tail him, the American government would be a little peeved. But, hey, what do I know…

“That does raise the obvious question of how the U.S. would have reacted had it been a Pakistani gunnng down two Black Americans in Washington, D.C. under similar circumstances and the Pakistani “diplomat” was operating under a visa similar to the one carried by the American sharpshooter in Pakistan.”

Or perhaps gunning down two FBI agents in DC, with a Pakistani backup-team then striking down a pedestrian as well…

gcochran:

Ha, ha! I guess that Lynn’s IQ numbers must then just be totally wrong, or at least the studies done in Europe and based on the largest sample-sizes.

And frankly, I’m not totally sure whether the history of the last few hundred years in Ireland is such a shining example of the tip-top peaks of world civilization…

gcochran:

Or the Irish in Ireland. One of the largest studies in Lynn’s IQ book found that the 1970s Irish IQ was precisely the same—87!

I wonder why the British never thought of using that same trick against the IRA…

Well, I certainly have mixed feelings on the war issues involved, being pretty close to “Patrick” in my overall evaluation. But we should keep in mind that aside from New Mexico, most of the vast territory involved was basically almost empty semi-desert. I think that the entire Spanish-speaking population of California at that point was something like 8,000, and even that of Texas was just 15,000-20,000. Perhaps the analogy with Alaska might be closer than most people realize.

Well, perhaps. But I find this detailed Iranian election analysis much more persuasive:

http://www.counterpunch.org/amin06222009.html

And Flynt Leverett, who was top NSC staffer specializing in Iran, comes to a similar conclusion:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23745.html

Q: Tom Maheras, how could you have made such a dreadful mistake?

Maheras: Look, I walked away with $137 million…What mistake??!!

This brings to mind the late Sam Francis’s notion of “Anarcho-Tyranny”, but extended to the international category.

We go around the world attacking lots of countries for no logical reason and endlessly meddling in things that don’t concern us…

Meanwhile, gangs of pirates begin hijacking huge oil-tankers sailing down rom the Persian Gulf, and nobody does anything about it…

“Anschluss”…or “Ribbentrop-Molotov”?…

Incidentally, somewhere among all his endless lengthy comments on this thread, I noticed that my energetic critic “NB” denounced me for incompetence or perhaps fraud for failing to have included a 2013 Texas NMS semifinalist list that he himself easily located via Google. He pointed out that his Weyl Analyis of the Jewish names on that list produced much higher results than those for 2010 Texas list which I had included, and darkly hinted at bad faith on my part.

Naturally, I followed his link, and noted that the news article was released in mid-September, towards the end of my main round of data gathering; if the item had taken a few extra weeks to rise in the Google rankings, I might have missed it. I doubted very much that averaging the 2013 Texas results with those of the 2010 Texas list would significantly alter my national estimates based on some 43 such lists, but I planned to add it as an Addendum to my Quantitative Appendix E, for completeness.

However, once I began inspecting the 2013 list, I noticed that it contained only 600 names, while Texas lists have over 1300. I also noticed that Houston and all other major cities outside the Dallas-Ft. Worth area were missing. Since this list ran in the Dallas Morning News, which described it as containing “local semifinalists,” it was obviously not a complete Texas list and useless for my purposes. During my extensive research, I had found and discarded dozens of similar non-statewide lists.

I would be the first to admit that my NMS estimates might easily be off by small amounts here and there. Surname analysis is hardly precise and in examining over 23,000 names, I might also have easily overlooked a “Bernstein” here or a “Kim” there. Furthermore, a sampling technique such as Weyl Analysis is subject to large statistical fluctuations. In my paper I repeatedly emphasized that all all intermediate results should be treated with considerable caution and might contained significant error. However, since the overall anomaly I detected was in the 1,000% range, errors of 10% or 20% in the individual subcomponents seemed unlikely to completely eliminate it.

Making estimation errors of 5% or 10% are unavoidable in this process. However, in his angry and desperate pursuit of any possible means of undermining the credibility of my research, “NB” apparently failed to notice the difference between a Texas NMS list containing 1300+ names and a “Texas” NMS list containing just 600. Given that he apparently devoted quite a bit of time to performing Weyl Analysis on that latter list and denounced me based on his findings, this would seem a major lapse on his part: the difference between 600 and 1300 is far greater than a 5% error.

This simply underscores his ideologically-driven incompetence, which had been apparent to me from the first. He also claims to have performed Weyl Analysis upon several Harvard class rosters that are not publicly available, and thereby concluded that the standard figures provided by Hillel and Karabel are wildly incorrect. This is certainly possible, but given his factor-of-two numerical mistaken for Texas, I’d be quite cautious in accepting those claims.

Yes, that’s exactly correct, and a point I’d privately made to a few people.

Each NMS semifinalist list contains roughly 16,000 American whites and Asians, while the figure for each Harvard class is under 1200, representing an enormous factor of 13x difference in raw selectivity, which might surely impact all surname distributions.

I’d also pointed out in my article that over the last couple of decades the likely Jewish names on the Olympiad and STS lists—which are vastly more selective than NMS—have seemed disproportionately of immigrant (usually East European) background, based on first name and spelling of surname relative to the fraction of all American Jews. It seems quite plausible that such immigrant Jews might have surname distributions very different from that of the general Jewish population, and would be also disproportionately admitted to Harvard. This would also tend to invalidate Weyl Analysis.

Let’s consider the alternate hypothesis advanced by my critics. They seem to accept the Hillel claims that until about 20 years ago, Jews were 20-25% of Harvard students, but they argue that the figure these days is just 10-11%. Thus, they claim that the number of Jews at Harvard has declined by 50-60% over the last two decades, without Hillel or anyone else noticing. Indeed, even while this huge decline was occurring Harvard Hillel had been claiming that the number of Jews was actually rising.

I find this alleged scenario a little unlikely absent strong evidence. Just consider the media firestorm at Princeton over a far lesser decline in Jewish numbers.

Rob Schacter:

Well, I don’t really know much about the LSAT or the law school admissions process, but those estimates—presumably obtained by “direct inspection”—don’t surprise me. As I mentioned in my article, psychmetricians agree that Jewish ability peaks in the Verbal subcomponent, being weaker in Math and generally mediocrate in Spatial. Combining that with the strong Jewish historical and cultural affinity for law and argumentation, you’d expect top law schools to be disproportinately Jewish. Since the East Asian profile follows an inverse pattern (high in Spatial, low in Verbal), you’d similarly expect their law numbers to be small relative to their general ability, with cultural factors reinforcing this. If anything, I would have guessed that the Jewish enrollment at top law schools was far higher than 20%.

It would be interesting to try to track down the comparable figures for other elite grad programs such as med schools, whose students would have a different profile. I’d strongly suspect that the Jewish/Asian ratios would be substantially shifted from the law case.

The main reason I focused on elite undergrad enrollments is that they constitute a single choke-point in the system, being the targets of the overwhelming majority of top students, regardless of particular interests. But after college, all the choices diverge, and you’d need to somehow separately examine and somehow aggregate professional schools—law, med, business, engineering—as well as all the different academic programs, and students who just go straight into business or something else. There just doesn’t seem any practical way of doing that sort of analysis.

But if someone did manage to locate the graduation rosters of the various top professional schools and estimate their Jewish/NJW/Asian/Hispanic/black distributions, I’d bet they’d show some intriguing patterns based on type.

More confusion I’m afraid…

If you’ll carefully reread my 30,000 word article, you’ll notice that I only applied Weyl Analysis at one single point, namely to the aggregated 40-odd NMS semifinalist lists that I had managed to locate for 25 states. The combined total of 23,000 names was sufficiently large to allow Weyl Analysis sampling to produce meaningful results, and my sole use of the technique was to validate the direct inspection methodology that I had applied to all those states and also used everywhere else in my paper. Weyl Analysis sampling produces erroneous results when applied all but very large datasets, and you yourself discovered this when you noticed it over-predicted the results for about half the individual states (though you failed to notice it under-predicted the results for the other half). One would think that such matters would be covered in an elementary statistics course.

Meanwhile, all my Jewish enrollment data was drawn from the most utterly reputable sources available, including leading scholars such as Karabel, Oren, and Synnott, sources that everyone has always accepted without question. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever previously questioned these statistics. However, you are certainly welcome to do so yourself. For idiosyncratic reasons, you seem to be focusing your criticism on the most solidly established portions of my article.

If you had actually bothered reading Karabel’s book or my citations from it, you’ll discover that he dramatically closed his 700pp study by emphasizing Harvard’s very high 2000 Jewish enrollment of 21%, which had actually surpassed the once-dominant white Protestants. The figure he cited was from Hillel. If you believe Karabel’s claim is totally erroneous, you should certainly bring that important fact to his attention.

Certainly some of the other claims I made were vastly more controversial, notably the detailed accounts of corrupt admissions practices at Wesleyan, Harvard, and various other universities, in which I named names and provided specific dollar amounts, notably including payments to Harvard totalling $2.5 million. Under certain circumstances, such charges could surely be regarded as libelous. However, I was simply quoting the published accounts of Pulitzer Prize-winning former WSJ reporter Daniel Golden and NYT National Education Correspondent (and now College Admissions Editor) Jacques Steinberg. Since I wasn’t present at the events they describe, I can’t personally vouch for their accuracy, but anyone who disputes my article should take the matter up with Golden and Steinberg, not myself.

I think I once wrote an article in which I mentioned North Dakota. But I’ve never been to North Dakota, and can’t really be sure it exists, just because “everyone says so.”

Overall, I suggest you get in touch with Karabel, Oren, Synnott, Golden, and Steinberg, as well as the top officials at Hillel, and resolve your disagreements with them.

Okay, let me summarize a few things:

(1) Universities do not release their student rosters, which presumably is prohibited by various Federal privacy laws. I suspect that if I went around bribing college clerks to obtain them, I’d go to prison.

(2) For 90 years, Hillel has been America’s major Jewish student organization and currently has branches at over 500 campuses. For decades, they have been compiling and releasing Jewish enrollment statistics, which are then also published annually by various Jewish magazines (whence I obtained them). These enrollment statistics are a major factor used to produce lists of the “top colleges for Jews” provided by various Jewish organizations. Each year, over 50,000 Jewish freshmen enter college, and probably a substantial fraction of those students have made their enrollment choices partly based on those rankings. Thus, over the last decade, Hillel’s published figures have determined the flow of many billions of dollars in student tuition. Yet you seem to be claiming that the Hillel data is totally erroneous, and possibly even fraudulent. Those are very, very serious charges to be making.

(3) Berkeley Sociology Professor Jerome Karabel is one of America’s leading scholars on university admissions issues, and has published the definitive history of Jewish enrollment in the Ivy League, which received an award from the American Sociological Association as well as almost universally glowing reviews everywhere in the media. If you examine my Appendix D, you’ll notice that a large fraction of my Jewish enrollment data is drawn from Karabel, and if you consult the particular page references, you’ll find that Karabel heavily relied upon Hillel. Another major one of my major sources was Dan A. Oren’s Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (1985), and Oren also relies quite heavily upon Hillel data.

You seem to be suggesting that Karabel never made any effort to establish the accuracy of his Hillel data during the ten years of exhaustive research spent producing his book. Those are also very, very serious charges to be making.

(4) I should mention that when I cited the Hillel figures in my own article, I pointed out that they were probably estimates, and might be somewhat inaccurate, emphasizing that such possible inaccuracy was one of the major sources of potential error in my own results. Neither Karabel, Oren, nor any of the other academic scholars who have used this same data seems to have been nearly as cautious: they generally provided the figures without comment.

(5) Suppose I write an article in a small opinion magazine and cite a New York Times article as source for some particular statistics. If you suggest that the New York Times is wrong about those facts, you should obviously take that matter up with the Gray Lady not me. If you are right and both Hillel and Prof. Karabel are totally wrong, the resulting scandal will be enormous and should certainly reach the front pages of all the major newspapers, at which point I will be glad to admit my error in trusting unreliable sources. Good luck with your future efforts in that regard.

(6) Taken together, the five items above may also directly relate to one of my findings. I believe you’ve claimed somewhere that you’re a Jewish recent graduate of Harvard or something like that. In my article, I made a strong circumstantial case that Harvard seems to have begun admitting large numbers of intellectually undistinguished Jewish students in recent years. Hmm…

Yes, indeed. Karabel’s magisterial book—with 700 pages and 3000 endnotes—was exceptionally thorough and persuasive, and represented the single most heavily cited source in the footnotes to my own Meritocracy article.

I should mention that the Jewish enrollment data that constitutes the quantitative backbone to Karabel’s analysis was almost entirely based on exactly the same Hillel data that I myself also used but that Gelman and others now suggest may be wildly inaccurate.

I’ll feel quite sorry for Prof. Karabel if those charges turn out to be correct, forcing him to return all the scholarly awards he received for his magnum opus, whose underlying research absorbed ten full years of his life.

Prof. Gelman:

I’d only come across your blog when you referenced my original article. With regard to your current 3,500 word critique, my operating assumption had been that you were a highly respectable scholar, who became a bit careless and was momentarily hoodwicked by a couple of agitated ideologues like Mertz and Baytch. But now I wonder…

I had claimed that across the combined NMS lists, the Jewish estimates produced by the sampling technique of Weyl Analysis almost exactly matched those produced by direct inspection, thereby validating the latter approach. You devoted a major section of your column to debunking this claim by pointing out that Weyl Analysis actually produced a substantially higher Jewish estimate than my direct inspection for the 8 states you listed. However, you neglected to note that Weyl Analysis also produced a substantially *lower* estimate for the other 17 states I used. This is exactly what one would expect of any sampling technique, and is fully consistent with my claim that the overall averages converged across the very large sample of 25 states. Your blogsite does describe you as an award-winning Ivy League statistics professor, does it not?

America’s national elites in academics, finance, media, and politics are today drawn overwhelmingly from Harvard (which rejects some 95% of all applicants) and the rest of the Ivy League. These universities publicly claim that they admit applicants less on objective academic merit than on broad “holistic” factors, which are known only to them. This policy is partly to ensure that their student body is fully “diverse” and reasonably reflects America’s overall population.

According to Hillel, whose estimates are accepted everywhere, Ivy League undergraduates are 23% Jewish, implying that they are some 3,000% more likely to be enrolled than non-Jewish whites of a similar age. You challenge the Hillel figures, suggesting that they are probably incorrect. However, Jews constitute roughly 1.8% of the national college-age population, and unless the true enrollment figure were that low, Jews would be considerably overrepresented. Given the extremely large gap between 23% and 1.8%, I tend to doubt Hillel’s numbers are off by nearly a factor of 13.

The least troubling possible explanation for the 3,000% overrepresentation of Jewish students is that Jewish academic performance is so enormously greater than that of white Gentiles, they are admitted by the Ivies at correspondingly greater rates, even though the Ivies publicly discount academic performance as an overriding factor in admissions. The best means of testing this “Jewish out-performance” hypothesis is to estimate the number of Jewish students ranked as NMS semifinalists. But unless an unreasonably large fraction of top-performing Jewish students actually have completely non-Jewish names, this approach fails. I would suggest that the burden of proof is upon those who argue that Jewish students are actually 3,000% more likely to be high-performing than their non-Jewish classmates.

Let us consider the following thought-experiment. The number of college-age Mormons in America is roughly the same as the number of college-age Jews. Suppose an astonishing fraction of all top Ivy League officials were either Mormons or married to Mormons, while a leading Mormon campus organization reported that young Mormons were 3,000% more likely to be enrolled in the Ivy League than young non-Mormons. To avoid dark suspicions, one would surely attempt to locate some solid evidence that Mormon students were 3,000% more likely to be top-achievers than non-Mormons, or perhaps were 3,000% more likely to apply to the Ivy League.

Tally-ho!

Meritocracy: The Yale Debate and Surname Analysis, February 1, 2013
http://www.ronunz.org/2013/02/01/unz-on-meritocracy-yale-events-and-surname-analysis/

Meritocracy: Response to Prof. Gelman on Jewish Elite Overrepresentation, February 13, 2012
http://www.ronunz.org/2013/02/13/unz-on-meritocracy-response-to-prof-gelman-on-jewish-elite-overrepresentation/

Keith M. Ellis: you need to be certain that those surnames are pretty much proportionately represented in your population under study as they are in the reference population.

I’m not sure this is too serious a problem, at least in the cases under discussion. For example, when I was analyzing NMS semifinalist lists, I just used “Nguyen” as the proxy for Vietnamese and “Kim” as the proxy for Koreans, since they’re such high percentages of each of those groups (about 28% and 18% respectively), overwhelmingly more relatively common than any Anglo-Saxon name. I’d really be surprised if they’d differ too widely in characteristics from the ethnic general population, but I suppose someone could check this by comparing e.g. mean age.

For most other groups, including Jews, a large number of names need to be used to produce any sort of reasonable sample, which makes the process much less efficient. Also, since the Census doesn’t count Jews, their total numbers are uncertain/ambiguous to at least 10-15%, inducing similar errors in multiplicative factors to use for surname sampling.

Incidentally, Weyl compared the results for “old Chinese” surnames to the ones of post-WWII immigrants, and found that the latter performing 2-3x better academically, which is pretty reasonable since the former immigrant flows had been far less selective.

I think I saw a newstory somewhere a few months back that Gregory Clark had just unveiled this “revolutionary new technique” for ethnic analysis, which is a little silly since Weyl’s very detailed research has been around for almost 50 years…

Actually, I forgot to mention one necessary simplifying assumption: that performance is equal across different surnames of a given ethnicity. This may not actually be correct, and Weyl noted that certain particular Anglo-Saxon names were massively over-represented in high-performance results compared to other, more common ones. But it would be difficult to determine this secondary factor for relatively small ethnicities due to sampling size problems.

Actually, your correspondent might want to consult the books by Nathaniel Weyl, who pioneered exactly this surname analysis technique— The Creative Elite in America (1966) and The Geography of American Achievement (1989). Both have been long out of print, but are inexpensively available on Amazon.com.

The very simple idea is to focus solely upon uniquely distinctive ethnic names, then estimating the total ethnic representation by the relevant ratios, easily available from Census data. Thus, Nguyen, Tran, Kim, and Park would be used, while all the Lees would be ignored completely, because of the obvious ambiguity. Almost all ethnic groups have at least a smattering of such extremely distinctive surnames, and once you determine them and their ratios, it doesn’t really matter whether they constitute just 5% of the total or 40%.

Obviously, such statistical methods are only reliable for large sample sizes, and may not be effective if you’re examining e.g. just a single medical school class. But if you were looking at 20 years of such classes, or all the American med school classes in 2012, they might work reasonably well.

In my own research, such Weyl Analysis could only be applied to the NMS semifinalist lists, whose numbers were sufficiently large, and I employed it as a validation-check upon my more subjective estimates of Jewish surnames for that dataset. I was very pleased to find that the match was quite close. For example, my estimate of Jewish NMS semifinalists based on direct inspection was 5.95%, while the estimates based on Weyl Analysis were 5.92% and 6.03%, depending upon the particular subset of distinctive surnames selected. This tended to increase my confidential in the direct inspection methods I also applied to the far smaller lists of Olympiad winners and such.

Those Q and NV Chinese scores are simply astonishing—112 and almost 110. However, the numbers are tiny, so maybe they tend to be from elite professional immigrant backgrounds, like businessmen or engineers.

I’ll admit I’m also a little surprised that all the students with any non-white ancestry amount to only about 13% of the total. To hear all the WNs complain on blogsites, you’d think they’d be over 30% of the younger age cohorts.

Brezhnev then says, “Comrades, Comrades, let’s draw the curtains, turn on the gramophone and pretend we’re moving!”

Ha, ha, ha.

As such, if its IQ comes out to be appreciable lower than 95 (my own estimate is 90-92) then it would be a further blow against Ron Unz’s theory of the East Asian Exception (to the Flynn Effect).

Well, maybe. But do the Southeast Asians such as the Vietnamese really tend to cluster with the East Asian peoples? Perhaps, perhaps not. Genetically, they supposedly have a good deal of overlap with Southern Han, but they lack 2000 years of heavy economic pressure, which might be a factor. So I’m not sure their performance would necessarily impact the hypothesis one way or the other. I’d certainly never argue it applies to Malays or Filipinos, though for all I know it might.

Thanks for the generous comments, and you raise excellent points.

Actually, prior to my getting sidetracked on my Race/IQ article, I was spending a great deal of time researching my old analysis, rereading all the source material I’d originally used—most of which I hadn’t looked at in decades—and reviewing a great deal of the newer Asian demographic research which had appeared since the late 1970s. Unfortunately, by the end of that investigation I found my theory much less persuasive than I had at the beginning.

First, I’d imagined that the extreme malthusian conditions of rural China so vividly described in the source accounts had been present for most of the last 2000 years. But that’s not at all clear. The last couple of centuries had been especially difficult times for the Chinese, and it might be incorrect to extrapolate that back to the more distant past. Indeed, there’s even a scholarly dispute about whether serfdom—a totally different system of land-tenure—may have remained widespread as recently as the Ming Dynasty. So the time horizon of my selection model may be much shorter than I realized.

Even more seriously, I discovered that Japan’s land tenure system had always been strict primogeniture, nothing remotely like China’s fenjia. So the my model wouldn’t apply to Japan, and the Japanese seem about as smart as the Chinese. (I haven’t yet investigated the rural population pressure in traditional Korea, or its inheritance system.)

Despite these very serious problems, I’m still inclined to try publishing the piece, partly because it was recently cited in the academic literature, and the existing version is such an embarrassment. But I’ll obviously emphasize the major flaws, and let people decide for themselves. After all, the severe selective pressure in rural China wasn’t solely focused on intelligence but probably upon a whole basket of traits, and the Chinese and Japanese differ in all sorts of other ways.

And I agree that Clark’s evolutionary model for England suffers from similar problems, namely that he’s produced an interesting theory explaining why the English are smarter and longer-time oriented than all the other Europeans. Except they aren’t.

Exactly—‘fenjia’ was a key element in my analysis. I think that downward mobility is often more important than upward mobility in these evolutionary situations.

When you read some of the source material about rural China or even some of the journal articles by mainstream sociologists, the selective pressure comes across as so thick you could cut it with a nice. And we’re talking about something between 500 years and 2000 years. It really astonished me that Gregory Clark got it all totally backwards.

Actually, I forgot to add one more point.

The maximum IQ reached by rich Latin peoples barely nudges 100; typically it is in the high 90’s. Greece is around 95.

While I don’t necessarily discount this estimate, I think it’s important to be cautious. For example, back in the 1920s, the South Italians had about the lowest IQs in America, down around 80, and the Greeks were only at 83. But today the Wordsum-IQ of Italian-Americans is right at the white average, a bit higher than German-Americans and far above Dutch-Americans, while Greek-Americans are even higher. Now I personally suspect these results are strongly distorted by the relative urbanization of these groups, but it does raise questions about the likely European IQs of Greek or South Italian infants fortunate enough to be adopted into German or Dutch families—would they really tend to have IQs that much below than their foster siblings?

My own guess—and it’s purely a guess—is that under identical social environments, the gap between Southern Europeans and the Swiss or Germans would at most be 3-5 points, though I’m not necessarily suggesting your position is radically different.

Anyhow, I wish we could do tests on North Koreans.

I agree that the NKs would be a perfect test, and I strongly suspect they’d do amazingly well relative to their income, chronic malnutrition, and massive deadly famines. After all, I’d guess that by most economic measures, they’re currently poorer than Nigerians or Guatemalans, but they’ve developed nuclear weapons and very long-range missiles, so they can’t be THAT stupid.

“It’s just hard to believe they had IQs much below 100, and China was one of the absolutely poorest parts of the world back then.” This is very interesting anecdotal evidence. Could you provide a name or two?

Sure. William Hinton’s Fanshen provides 600pp of detailed description of one post-WWII rural Chinese village, the Crooks published a book on another covering the same era, as did Martin Yang. The obvious possible origins of high Chinese intelligence popped into my head the moment I read this material back in the late 1970s, and I’m hoping to finally publish my analysis in the near future. The (embarrassingly crude) 1980 version of my unpublished paper is up on my website at http://www.ronunz.org/?p=2833.

One of America’s greatest early sociologists, A.E. Ross, published an excellent 1911 book The Changing Chinese, which analyzed Chinese society, and he certainly thought the Chinese seemed just as smart as Europeans, though obviously technologically backward and ignorant.

The population of the entire Greek world in 4th century BCE was about 8mn-10mn

That’s true, but I was thinking more of Athens during its Golden Age, when I think the total citizen population was something like 100,000, but the intellectual output seemed to outmatch that of most major modern European countries.

“the European Scientific and Industrial Revolutions…” Not sure as it basically assumes the divisions between classes are discrete as opposed to forming one bell curve.

Remember, under my “urbanization IQ model,” the genetic potential IQ of those peasants and the intellectual elites might be part of a single Bell Curve, but the expressed IQ of the former might be reduced by 10-15 points. So you could easily have 110 IQ elites and 80-85 IQ peasants being part of the same genetic continuum. I’m not saying my model is necessarily correct, but it would allow for such things.

The urban-rural ratio was essentially 50/50 according to the 2010 Census.

Well, I was using the figures from Google Public Data, which claims China was still 56% rural in 2009; I suspect there’s a lot of fuzziness in this sort of estimate. And I probably should have used the PPP-adjusted GDP, just like I carefully did in my original article, which Google says was $6,800 in 2009. So the rural 56% of the population was probably around $2000 rather than $1000. And I never claimed that China was malnourished or desperately poor and backward these days.

However, let’s step back a moment. China’s PISA scores, including the impoverished rural majority, are pretty close to those of the richest, most advanced European countries such as Germany and Switzerland, and ahead of Britain, France, or Norway. I find that simply astonishing, the sort of empirical fact that really requires a special explanation. Remember, Rumania is still twice as rich as China, but its scores aren’t exactly leading the world.

Now if it were just this one PISA result, coming from today’s middle-income China, perhaps you’d have a point. But don’t forget that virtually ALL of Lynn’s other Chinese IQ samples, going back to 1984, were very similar. In 1984, China’s average GDP was around $700, and the (Shanghai) IQ sample came out at 107.4. Can you imagine any European population scoring above 107 while being as poor and underdeveloped as China was thirty years ago?

There are lots of other East Asian datapoints along similar lines. The Hong Kong Chinese were terribly poor in 1968, but they scored 103.4; the Taiwanese scored 101 in 1956; the Japanese scored 102 in 1951. There just seems an extremely sharp IQ divide between impoverished or rural populations which are East Asian and those which are not.

There’s also a very similar pattern in America. Back in the 1920s, all the various impoverished Eastern and Southern European immigrant children tended to have IQs around 80-85, and most of the psychometricians thought the scores were probably innate and wouldn’t change much. But during *exactly* the same period, the Chinese-American and Japanese-American children mostly tended to score at or above their white mainstream classmates’ 100. I think there’s overwhelming evidence that *something* interesting is going on with EAs, though I can’t really say whether it’s biological or cultural.

Here’s another interesting detail. If you’ve ever read any of the first-hand accounts of life in desperately poor rural Chinese villages back in the 1930s or earlier, you’d find that the level of “business complexity” regarding land usage and such seemed *enormously* complex, almost like—I’m obviously exaggerating—what you find in corporate LBOs these days. And the people involved in those transactions weren’t Harvard MBAs, but dirt-poor typical peasants, who probably died of starvation if they made a serious mistake. It’s just hard to believe they had IQs much below 100, and China was one of the absolutely poorest parts of the world back then. So, yes, I really wouldn’t be too surprised if the Chinese in 1700 also had a mean IQ of 95-100, probably vastly above most Europeans. After all, the European Scientific and Industrial Revolutions were probably driven by a tiny elite fraction of the population, and not really dependent upon most peasants having testable IQs above 80-85 or whatever.

As an analogy, consider Classical Greece or just Athens. The intellectual output from such a minuscule population-base was astonishing, so high I wouldn’t be surprised if the mean Athenian citizen IQ was something crazy like 120. But none of that output depended upon the slaves who plowed the fields or worked in the silver mines, so perhaps their IQ would have tested at more like 80-90. In pre-industrial societies, advances were probably much more dependent upon the intelligence of the elites and the average ability of the total population.

Very thorough analysis…

Incidentally, I clicked on the link to your discussion of the Pomeranz book, and agreed wholeheartedly. I just happened to read it a few weeks ago and also think it’s one of the most impressively detailed and persuasive “Big Think” books I’ve ever read, totally in a different league from Landes and others in the same general subject.

Yes, that’s a perfectly valid point about the numbers being from just a few of China’s brighter provinces. I’ll admit I hadn’t closely read the details of your entire posting before I jumped the gun and added my enthusiastic comment.

Fantastic post! If the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal were even remotely competent, they’d be racing each other right now to turn your data into an immediate front-page story, and maybe even give you full credit for it.

One of the astonishing things that really jumps out from this data is that although Europe still has 5-10 times China’s per capita GDP, China’s average PISA scores are higher than that of almost any European country. In fact, even if we use your analysis from May, and look at only the native-born European PISA results, China’s still ahead of everyone in Europe except Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. And I think a substantial fraction of Chinese probably still have an income of less than $1000 per year.

I don’t know if you ever saw my “China’s Rise, America’s Fall” article from a few months ago, but I don’t think this data will persuade me to retract my analysis: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinas-rise-americas-fall/

Thanks—that’s very interesting about the China results, and it does probably tend to support the view that China might have a moderate socioeconomic Flynn Effect, given the huge difference in per capita income with South Korea.

And I’m sorry about your comment being spammed. Frankly, I don’t really have anything to do with operating the TAC website, and although I’ve always suggested they be very open to all comments, they claim lots of them are so nasty they’d scare off all the regular TAC readers. But I’ll see if I can somehow locate and retrieve your fine comment, though it may have been vaporized.

As I just pointed out on that Epigone blogsite, you might want to separate your “Irish” category by Catholic vs. Protestant. A sharp-eyed commenter somewhere noticed that the “Irish” ethnicity seems to lump together the Irish-Irish (who are urban and have very high Wordsum-IQ) with the Scots-Irish (who are heavily rural and have very low Wordsum-IQ). When I did that stratification, I didn’t bother with AGE or BORN, but I doubt that would impact the Irish too much, and my Irish Wordsum-IQ came out right near the top, very close to the Russian category.

To my mind, that’s another bit of evidence for my Urban/Rural Hypothesis, since the Irish in Europe had a very low IQ when they were overwhelmingly rural, while in America, they’re very heavily urban and have an extremely high Wordsum-IQ.