Richwine 'IQ and Immigration Policy'

[jamesc1]

We have always lived on borrowed money. We armed the world, and ourselves, during world war 2 on money created, shall we say, with creativity. We still owe for WW2 ships. Ronald Reagan and his idea on trickle down economy was just larger than what had come before. Every President since has done the same, only each a little bigger. G.W.Bush fought two wars with credit cards as he enriched the rich at record levels. Obama is just expanding by a moderate amount what he was given by G.W.B. Presidents spend money to serve their particular voters.

This idea that Obama is doing something totally different than has been done before is silly. He is spending money hand over fist as did Regan/Bush--one or two, doesn't matter.

The attacks on Obama are just the same as what the Democrats did to Nixon and Reagan-Watergate, Iran Contra. Here is the problem. While the Fat Cats, Republican and Democratic, destroy each other seeking power, we the people, take the screwing they give to each other with so much joy. Either way we get the gonernment we so richly deserve. We play the game by their rules and we are always going to lose. The Democratic power structure convinces us that the Republican President, whoever he is, is some kind of beast. We buy in and help destroy the guy. Next we get a Democratic President. Guess what? Now the Republicans tell us how the man is the devil and we finally go along and allow them to undermine that president. Result: nothing gets done and a weak president gets beaten or serves out his term and blows away in the wind.

The Demcrats bashed George Bush to death, with our help. Now Obama is being pounded to death and will have little or no authority left. And what do we get? Nothing....... But we buy their lies, repeat them, and reap what we sow.

I'll predict the future. Whoever the next president is, Democratic or Republican--doesn't matter which one, we will have congressional investigations into something he did or said. And you know what happens next? The American public buys in and we have another weak President. I have to say as a method of coming to power is obviously works, but, it plays hell with governing!!!!!!

Wasn't that something. A man, George W. Bush was elected President twice and the Republicans wouldn't even let the guy speak at their convention.

I can't imagine why a worthy man would consider running for President. He's doomed the moment he is elected. George Washington would be destroyed if he was alive and got elected. It almost seems we want them to fail. Problem: when they fail WE also fail. But what the hey, we're having fun aren't we. Aaah, yes, nothing like a good game of musical chairs. Now a Democrat, then a Republican, all devils, according to their political enemies. And they get richer and we get----screwed, and best of all we get to pay for it. Now aren't we all having fun. I wonder who the next president will be, and, how do we get the bastard.

[Don Dresden]

No apologies from Richwine, no doubt much to the chagrin of the thought police and censors of unpopular evidence.

May 20, 2013 12:00 PM
About That Dissertation
On being the media’s villain of the week
By Jason Richwine



Jason Richwine


On Tuesday, May 7, I had one of my most productive days as an employee of the Heritage Foundation. Our big report on the fiscal cost of amnesty had just been released, and I packed in 18 radio interviews to promote it.

I expected more of the same on Wednesday. Instead, I found myself unplugging my office phone to avoid pesky reporters, trying in vain to do any real work, and watching helplessly as a public-relations crisis sprang up around me. Two days later I would resign.

I’m telling this story not because I want or expect pity for my personal situation. Rather, it’s important for people to understand how hostile the political class can be toward scientific facts that make them uncomfortable. That discomfort is what caused a mainstream policy analyst to be rebranded overnight as a bigoted extremist.

Although my Ph.D. dissertation was about immigration, I was hired by the Heritage Foundation in 2010 to be a jack-of-all-trades quantitative analyst. I worked a little bit on immigration during my time at Heritage, but I developed a specialty in public finance — fair-value accounting for student loans, public-pension reform, teacher compensation, etc.

My frequent co-author Andrew Biggs and I have gotten some press for demonstrating over and over that generous pensions push public-sector compensation above fair-market levels. A teachers’ union in Texas even put us on its “Top Ten Most Wanted” list. But even as we attracted this attention, I could still see people’s eyes glaze over when I told them it was based on accumulated benefit obligations using fair-value discount rates.

Given all my wonkery, it felt especially strange to be suddenly characterized as an extremist. That happened on Wednesday morning, when the media first reported on my 2009 Harvard dissertation. Entitled “IQ and Immigration Policy,” the dissertation obviously deals with some sensitive topics. Media reports grabbed short quotes from the text and presented them as shocking. Some bad words started getting tossed around: eugenics, racism, pseudoscience, and, of course, extremism.

So what is actually in the dissertation? The dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on many different types of IQ tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive gap rather than to culture or language bias. It analyzes how this cognitive gap could affect socioeconomic assimilation, and it concludes by exploring how IQ selection might be incorporated, as one factor among many, into immigration policy.

I got into all of this because I found the science of mental ability to be fascinating. I wanted to learn more and think about what lessons it might hold for public policy. Doctoral students are told to pick a topic they’re sincerely interested in, since they’ll be stuck with whatever choice they make for three years or more.

I was not so naïve as to think my topic wouldn’t generate controversy. But individual quotes from my dissertation are much more understandable when placed in their full context. For example, this sentence on page 66 has been widely circulated: “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

I don’t think someone reading my full dissertation would find this statement objectionable, for two reasons. First, as Chapter 1 makes clear, the simple existence of ethnic differences in IQ is scientifically uncontroversial. (Skeptical readers should consult the American Psychological Association for confirmation.) Such differences are revealed by tabulations of test scores and calculations of arithmetic means. Their existence is no more debatable than the widely publicized ethnic differences in SAT scores. What the differences mean and what causes them are the interesting issues, which I discuss at length.

Second, the prediction that IQ differences will persist over generations does not rely on assumptions of genetic transmission, but rather on observational data from past immigrant waves. The IQ differences have been persistent — for whatever reason — and nothing is happening to the education or socialization of the current generation of Hispanics that gives reason to expect a break with past experience. Therefore, it is literally “difficult to argue against” continued differences in the next generation — unless hope trumps experience, but I doubt my dissertation committee would have found that argument compelling.

Why did I discuss differences between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites at all? Because the largest portion of the post-1965 immigration wave has come from Latin America. Studies of Hispanic IQ are naturally useful in estimating overall immigrant IQ and its intergenerational transmission.

That last point bears elaborating: There is absolutely no racial or ethnic agenda in my dissertation. Nothing in it suggests that any groups are “inferior” to any others, nor is there any call to base immigration policy on ethnicity. In fact, I argue for individual IQ selection as a way to identify bright people who do not have access to a university education in their home countries.

I realize that IQ selection rubs some people the wrong way, but it can hardly be called “extremist.” Canada and Australia intentionally favor highly educated immigrants. My proposal is based on the same principle they use (pick skilled immigrants), but it offers a much better chance for disadvantaged people to be selected.

If the dissertation were taken seriously, its real contribution would be to open a forthright debate about the assimilation challenge posed by the post-1965 immigration wave. Because regardless of what one believes IQ scores really measure, or what determines them, they are undeniably predictive of a wide variety of socioeconomic outcomes that people care about.

We’re still waiting for that assimilation debate to start. I am not aware of a single major news outlet that acted as if my results merited real discussion. The reporters scanned the text for damning pull-quotes, giddily pasted them into stories about “extremism” on the right, and presented my statements as self-evidently wrong. Liberal bloggers piled on with ignorant condemnations. Even some conservative supporters of the Schumer-Rubio amnesty eagerly joined the hatefest. At no time did the critics seem to wonder whether what I was saying might be true.

The reason for that is simple. The media were never interested in me or in the substance of my dissertation. They wanted only to use my work to embarrass the Heritage Foundation and, by extension, all opponents of amnesty. It’s a familiar formula for “gotcha” journalism: Uncover an “extremist” associated with a mainstream organization, then demand to know how the organization could possibly associate itself with him. Keep turning up the pressure, hour after hour, with “shocking” new revelations.

To see how the furor over my dissertation is so inextricably linked to today’s heated debate over immigration, consider that no less a mainstream-media institution than the New York Times reported on some of my dissertation’s ideas in 2009. The newspaper’s Idea of the Day blog discussed my proposal for IQ selection in neutral terms. No moral panic ensued. What’s different now is that immigration reform is at stake, and the whole conversation is hopelessly politicized.

I don’t apologize for any of my writing, but I deeply regret that it was used to hurt my friends and colleagues at Heritage. Seeing them struggle on account of me was the most painful aspect of the whole ordeal. I remember a particularly difficult moment when a Heritage spokesman went on Univision to defend the Heritage report. He explained, accurately, that I was just the number cruncher for the study. Here’s the question he was given by the host:

So you’re telling me that you used the numbers from a man who has written that Hispanics have a low IQ and will have a low IQ for generations. So what makes you think, unless you agree with that premise, what makes you think that his numbers are sufficiently good in order for, for them to be included in your study?

How can anyone respond to a question as absurd as that one?

Claims that my dissertation influenced the Heritage fiscal analysis are completely false. Anyone who reads the Heritage study will discover that the basic framework — adding up government benefits received by immigrants and comparing that sum to the total taxes they pay — was developed by the National Academy of Sciences in 1997. Robert Rector adapted that framework for his 2007 fiscal-cost study, and he chose the same framework again in 2013, when I helped him run the numbers.

In my judgment, the initial criticisms of the Heritage study were not enough to sink it, so the media latched on to my dissertation as a convenient distraction. Better to shoot the messengers than to deal seriously with what they are saying.

Some students at Harvard are now using the same strategy to denounce my dissertation findings. An open letter signed by 23 ethnic student groups contains this gem: “Even if such claims had merit, the Kennedy School cannot ethically stand by this dissertation whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under the guise of academic discourse.” It would be difficult to find a more explicit embrace of censorship.

A student petition is currently circulating that calls on the Harvard administration to reject all scholarship based on “doctrines” that the signers don’t like. The petition, which at last count had nearly 1,000 signatures, isn’t just shameful, it’s worrisome. Many of these students will come to positions of national leadership, yet they openly oppose intellectual freedom. Going forward, I wonder what other thoughts they will seek to ban.

The furor will soon pass. Mercifully, the media are starting to forget about me. But a certain amount of long-term damage to political discourse has been done. Every researcher who writes on public policy over the next few years will have a fresh and vivid memory of how easy it is to get in trouble with the media’s thought police, and how easy it is to become an instant pariah. Researchers will feel even more compelled to suppress unpopular evidence and arguments that should be part of an open discussion. This is certainly not the way science should be conducted, and it’s not the way our politics should be either.

[jamesc1]

First of all every person in the world does NOT have the right to come to the USA and live. If our population was in the neighborhood of 200 million we would have enough jobs and resources but that boat has already sailed. If it is politically dangerous to say our borders should be closed to all but legally arriving persons, so be it, too damn bad. We just don't have the ability to accept any and all.

As to being politically correct, both sides practice it, Republican and Democratic. It's about being more hero-more loyal-more religious, than the others, whoever the others are.

Average people just have to make themselves aware of how THEY--The professional power brokers--both Democratic and Republican, use us against each other to enhance their own agendas= power/money.

As long as we spend our money and time fighting the would be power brokers wars for them we will always be the losers.

There is a saying, "A Rich man's War and a Poor man's fight." Guess who gets to dig the fox hole and die in it??????

Judge Presidents by what they do for us, not what they are accused of.

[ham]

I don’t think someone reading my full dissertation would find this statement objectionable, for two reasons. First, as Chapter 1 makes clear, the simple existence of ethnic differences in IQ is scientifically uncontroversial. (Skeptical readers should consult the American Psychological Association for confirmation.) Such differences are revealed by tabulations of test scores and calculations of arithmetic means. Their existence is no more debatable than the widely publicized ethnic differences in SAT scores. What the differences mean and what causes them are the interesting issues, which I discuss at length.

Second, the prediction that IQ differences will persist over generations does not rely on assumptions of genetic transmission, but rather on observational data from past immigrant waves. The IQ differences have been persistent — for whatever reason — and nothing is happening to the education or socialization of the current generation of Hispanics that gives reason to expect a break with past experience. Therefore, it is literally “difficult to argue against” continued differences in the next generation — unless hope trumps experience, but I doubt my dissertation committee would have found that argument compelling.

Blah Blah Blah

The reason for that is simple. The media were never interested in me or in the substance of my dissertation. They wanted only to use my work to embarrass the Heritage Foundation and, by extension, all opponents of amnesty. It’s a familiar formula for “gotcha” journalism: Uncover an “extremist” associated with a mainstream organization, then demand to know how the organization could possibly associate itself with him. Keep turning up the pressure, hour after hour, with “shocking” new revelations.

You finally got it boy...Jack Fart, Art Bragg and all the other pansies, morons and hillbillies who read this have no real clue behind knee-jerk cr-p and journalistic appeals...for what, five seconds worth of attention span? Then they're back wondering what sort of discount will the burger joint offer...internet porn or some absurd cable TV tripe...welcome to the real world...

[jamesc1]

The bigger the storm the more people who will watch. That's what the reporters are after, attention, and ratings. Jerry Springer knew and knows where the money is. Who do we blame for all this. US!! WE ARE THE ONES WHO REWARD THE MUCK RAKERS AND SHOUTERS. Will we change? NO!

I.Q. has no meaning when discussing groups, only with individuals. There is no doubt differences between races. But we hire individuals. We befriend others as individuals. In all racial groups there are the morons, average, highly intelligent. Now here is the trick. We must be able to call a black fool a fool, a white one the same, amd the same with the brown. Racism is refusing to see the good and bad because we are afraid what THEY might say.

To me a racist is someone who approaches other people (Races) with a fixed agenda, pro or con. If you make the claim that all people are the same, you are a racist. If you say all people of a particular race are dumb, less, of no value, you are a racist.

To say a race has certain tendencies while at the same time recognizing that each is different is fine. That makes you a realist. I try to form my opinions of others according to their individual skills, not by their skin color, but that is not easy to do. Let's face it. We all carry baggage. I suppose people of good will, using common sense, keep trying and do their best to be fair and balanced. But these professional liberals and full time conservative activists make it hard to talk about anything. If you open your mouth and say something against one of the party lines, BOOM, here come the taunts and name calling.

We the people will either start taking the conversation away from the paid hacks and troublemakers or they will continue to divide and destroy. It's all about money and power, always has been, always will.

If the average I.Q. of a particular race is a bit less we must be able to say so, and not hide behind racism. Political correctness won't make anyone smarter or better. Of course as I have said we must recognize that the individual may be totally different than the average of his race. Each person is unique and represents himself alone, not an entire group. We find diamonds in the ground. We just have to sift through all that dirt.

[Winston Smith]

To me a racist is someone who approaches other people (Races) with a fixed agenda, pro or con.

Ironically, the leftist Cloward-Piven agenda is to get as many dumbasses as possible into the country, so they can overrun the social support systems (law enforcement, welfare, education, etc.) and ultimately destroy them. I'm sure the real objection to Richwine isn't that he's racist, but that he's exposing what they are doing.