Comments on Charles Murray’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:
* In writing for the WSJ, Murray must skirt around ‘IQ’, which is a major contributing factor for the decline of the ‘middle’. Murray knows this, too – he wrote a whole book about it: The Bell Curve.
In our hyper-competitive, winner-take-all post-2008 economy, wealth inequality has become tantamount to IQ inequality, as I explain: http://tinyurl.com/jn5qj9g . This is because recent factors such as automation technology and globalization have amplified the consequences of individual cognitive differences, with smart people tending to rise to the top due to being more ‘fit’ in the Darwinian sense in this ‘new economy’ we find ourselves in.
Educational attainment is a good proxy for IQ, and as you can see smarter people are faring better:
https://innovationandgrowth.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/wages12.png
http://multiplier-effect.org/files/2014/06/Fig4B_Wages-by-Education_Age-Fixed.png
Some of this is also due to credentialism, too, which I also http://tinyurl.com/hyq6elw discusss. But even that alone cannot
explain why drop-outs from prestigious, selective schools do better than drop-outs from no-name schools, suggesting that IQ again plays a role. Having an IQ that is high enough to get admitted into a prestigious school is good enough , as in the case of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and other high-IQ individuals who either dropped-out or became rich in industries entirely unrelated to their degrees.
We can’t have an honest, productive debate if not being offended is more important than the pursuit of the truth.
* Automation is inevitable and it will gradually eliminate a larger and larger proportion of the work that humans did or are doing now. At some point only those on the far right of the bell curve will succeed in getting desirable jobs. And this will be true not just with respect to IQ but also artistic ability, athletic ability, sexual attractiveness, and other traits or combinations of traits. Already about 90% of the work that lawyers, CPAs, actuaries and the like do can be done better by AI (think Turbo Tax and the various law applications on the internet). AI can also read medical images and stained slides better than radiologists and pathologists. Machinery is currently being built to replace human workers in various types of stoop labor. Anybody who watches the television show, “How It’s Made”, quickly notices humans doing assembly line tasks that a machine could and undoubtedly soon will do better than any human. Even a lot of programming is automated these days. Nobody writes the enormous code packages surrounding real applications. This is done automatically by various programming tools. In the end only a very small fraction of humans will be needed to do essential and/or rewarding work.
For most of the developed world’s history the primary means of organizing society has been through a rewards system that connected labor and participation in other social activities. Now, under the onslaught of industrialization, that system is breaking down. The positive result is that soon most of humanity will be freed of the need to work unless they desire to. The negative impact is that social control and order are breaking down. Dealing with these issues is one of the major challenges facing the developed world. A way must be found to equitably distribute the wealth flowing from an automated economy while still being able to use that wealth to encourage socially useful behaviors and discourage socially destructive ones. The current system is already broken.
It’s ironic that Marx was ultimately right about one thing: Capital – automation – has accumulated to the point that ultimately most of us will be impoverished and only a very small proportion — much, much less than 1%! — will have any real wealth. He was just a century-and-a-half late and failed utterly to appreciate the mechanisms and results. But Marx was terribly wrong to assume that this would automatically lead to a golden age of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. Whatever we wind up with it won’t be this simple and getting there is going to require a lot of out-of-the-box thinking, hard work, and suffering.
* Thilo Sarrazin: Ultimately, globalization means that equal work gets equal pay in free-market countries, because they are able to allot the necessary public resources to education and infrastructure. To put that in economic terms: labor’s marginal cost and its marginal product tend to align everywhere there is a free economy.[3] Just as marginal capital compensation acts as a world-wide interest rate, labor-compensation also tends to level out. It makes complete sense that in Germany the real wages of young people today are no higher than in 1990. The same situation prevails in, for example, the US and Italy. Real wages will not start to climb again until wages in countries like China, India and Thailand have reached Western levels.
* Yes, it’s interesting how the WSJ, Financial Times & The Economist types are all suddenly realizing they may have been pushing it with the rest of us. Martin Wolf at the FT had his piece entitled “The economic losers are in revolt against the elites” late last month and laid out many of things people have been screaming at them for decades. Now, all of a sudden, they can catch a bit of what we’re saying. They’re still calling everyone else “losers” but I guess we’re making some progress. Maybe Donald Trump, the Front National and the others are teaching these globalists some manners? Maybe.
* Murray purposely chose to live in semi-rural Maryland near Frederick to give his children (and himself) a break from the attitudes of the wealthy DC suburbs.
Of course, Murray works with and, presumably, is friends with people who live in the “Super Zip Codes” as he calls them, but given him credit for wanting to show his kids that not everyone is a high-IQ overachiever.
From an interview:
“We moved out to Burkittsville in large measure because Catherine and I wanted our children to be exposed to lots of kids. And they were.
Our (two) kids went to school in Brunswick, and my daughter’s best friend in high school was the daughter of a guy who drove a bakery truck. Which is exactly right. When you’re doing overnights at each other’s houses, you’re having a real good time, but you’re also getting a sense of what life is like in different parts of society. That’s great for everybody.”
* Regardless of how much certain people want to get their knickers in a bunch, humans are a biological species, and there is always selection going on. For our hunter gatherer ancestors a guy who was lazy or weak or incompetent at the hunt (or warfare) would have a much tougher time finding a good mate and having surviving offspring. (If he didn’t end up being chased out or get spear in his back.) Since the neolithic there’s obviously been–especially in areas with temperate zone agriculture–strong selection for those who could work hard, organize, plan ahead (winter) and generally keep their ducks in a row. And selection against the stupid, shiftless, sickly, etc. This selection has in fact *made us* the people who can do modern industrial society–cue “Farewell to Alms”.
The basic nature of being a sexually reproducing species is that everyone dies and is replaced by new individuals who are a remix. In nature, those “remixed” individuals will be the children of those who were on average more “fit” (along with luck). And that selection for “fitness” is something a society must have–not even to improve, but just to *stay* healthy. I carry some–let’s say 50–mutations from my parents genes. Most of those will be negative. I seem to be reasonably “fit” (as do my kids). But down the road somewhere–grandchild, great-grandchild, great-great grandchild …–there’s going to be someone born where the combination of mutations makes them decidedly less “fit” and for the society to stay healthy they need to not be passing those mutations on.
If you want to have a society that does whatever it does well–in our case modern industrial society. Then the people who do what that society requires–work diligently, reason, plan ahead, organize, write email, interpret graphs, show up on time, figure out what needs to be done, etc. etc.–well are fit and need to reproduce. And those that can not do what the society needs doing–i.e. who are not “fit”–must not reproduce, or not reproduce as much.
This is just basic biology. It’s really “just math”. Folks can disagree politically–many do. But they are just wrong. If you wipe out selection for the traits that your society needs … your society will be less capable and decline. You can’t wish that away.
None of this means anyone has to starve in the streets. You can couple having “eugenic” selection with all sorts of Christian humanitarian rah-rah, including a generous welfare state. The obvious solution: you culturally and economically encourage the highly fit to have children. (I.e. encourage smart well-educated women to have lots of kids–the exact reverse of what we do now.) And couple that with having the “unfit”–demonstrated by those who can’t hack it in society and ask for public support–stop having children in return for welfare support.
But if you’re in Darwinian denial–a blank slater–and force the productive to subsidize the continued reproduction of those who are failures at doing precisely the tasks that your society requires … well then you’re just committing societal suicide. Selection for fitness is *required* by any society just to stay in place against mutational load, much less improve.
* Murray has done much excellent work over the years. He is miles past any other beltway think-tanker, both in terms of the quality of his work, and his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. Fair enough if you think he doesn’t challenge it enough. I’d like him to challenge it more, too–especially on immigration. I also find his libertarianism to be shallow, but thankfully it does not undermine his approach to data.
But to say he is just like all the others is factually inaccurate. If your point is that all differences of degree are irrelevant when trying to foment revolution, I still disagree. Murray’s work can be useful in correcting current mistakes and, if things come to it, not repeating the same mistakes. Even if he’s not right about everything.
I don’t see why Murray’s disdain for Trump means he must hate the little guy. Trump is himself a newcomer to the fight for the little guy. Murray has been talking about how to help the left half of the Bell Curve for more than 20 years.
* Here’s Murray on immigrants in his essay:
“There’s irony in that. Much of the passion of Trumpism is directed against the threat to America’s national identity from an influx of immigrants. But the immigrants I actually encounter, of all ethnicities, typically come across as classically American—cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious.”
As if American workers (low wage and STEM) stuck with crammed down wages or displaced from the workforce altogether by immigration are philosophically ruminating about “America’s national identity” when they are sweating bullets to pay their bills. All they really want is a decent job that pays a living wage.
Make no mistake, that national identity shtick is Murray’s backdoor propaganda meme for the Cronies that want cheap immigrant labor.
* Now and then, I revisit the idea that 1849 was the turning point (and corruption, eventually) of the “original” America. At least psychologically, if not functionally. Gold was discovered in California, and it was sort of like a light bulb went on. Certainly, before 1849, many people saw America as a land of economic opportunity, but after 1849 there seemed to be almost a casino mentality with regards to what the US had to offer it’s people – it’s rank and file people – and that notion has never really died.
On the other hand, while paleoconservatives rightfully lament the disconnection modern America has with it’s “Anglo-Protestant” origins, there are some things to keep in mind: First, an almost entirely WASP Supreme Court started ruining this country in the early 1950′s, and continued to do so throughout the 1960′s and 70′s. I say “started in the 1950′s,” but that impulse can actually be traced back to the Puritans.
Second, many (though certainly not all) modern immigrants from white Britain are people I wish would’ve stayed home. I’ve met some nice folks from the UK who I respect greatly, but some are leftists who despise the original US venomously, and see it as little more than a casino where they seek personal financial gain.
* He does not claim that high IQ is necessary for menial jobs. Rather he claims that those menial jobs, which do not require high IQ, are in decline because of automation, outsourcing, and immigration.
The result of the pattern that Murray identifies is that high IQ people, who have prospects in careers which are less prone to competition from automation and immigrants, will have increasing prospects for prosperity while low IQ people will have decreasing prospects. Throw in the fact that high IQ people are having fewer children while low IQ people are having more and the result could be economic fragmentation and disaster in the future.
* Let’s tackle these one at a time:
1) sloth: If you read Coming Apart, Murray’s elite are not, in general, trust fund recipients as you have insinuated. They are rather people who are at the top of professions, business, the media, the entertainment industry, STEM academia, and so on. These people have vices, no doubt, but sloth is not usually one of them.
2) obesity: Highly class dependent. It is simply incorrect to say that the elite have embraced obesity.
3) out of wedlock births: The data in Coming Apart show that this phenomenon is almost entirely absent from the elite.
4) drug use: Again, misconceptions aside, the ‘idle rich’ do not comprise a large part of Murray’s elite. When there is drug use among the elite, it tends to be a different beast than among the lower classes. Elite drugs include powder cocaine and marijuana, and alcohol in some cases. Lower class drugs are meth, heroin, crack, painkillers, and alcohol. The only possible overlap is in alcohol.
* Murray, after getting clobbered for his Black Darkness in The Bell Curve, has never mentioned the thang again.
” egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.” Dunno what Huntington said but if he said that those aforementioned terms were what we are about…that is very minimal/reductionist.
This country was founded for White Men and only later for White women, if you want to talk about the suffrage. But is was for Whites. Race has always been with us in spades. The later immigration debates of early 20th century were all about keeping the US White, and even southern Europeans were not considered white enough.
Jews were kept out, etc. etc. The egalitarianism is true enough within limits…what with no aristocracy, etc. Liberty yes, per English liberty, and Individualism per our traits going all the way back to Germania, Greece and Rome….. At least some were free, if not all….until recently.
So Murray is staying away from Race. So is this thread. Trump is 100% about race, whether it is trade issues with Chinkdom, etc, mexicans, and so far, soft-peddling on blackness. Wait till he gets in…the Black Lives Matter animals will find themselves cut loose and stomped down.
Back to Huntington…I read his Civilizations Clash book a few years ago. It was all about race and ethnicity as well. That is the basis of the whole book. He said that we have several civilizations in the world that will never embrace one-another. To keep the peace, minimal interaction, no immigration, no race mixing, no land-grabbing as in Israel, etc.
Race, race, race. since I did not read the rest of the article, maybe he had something to say…..but I doubt it.
We are down to about 62% whites in the country. More darkies being born than whites. Disaster looms, and Trump sees it. Dunno whether H. and M. see it, but I would argue that they do see it clearly but just write with euphemisms.
* “…the immigrants I actually encounter, of all ethnicities, typically come across as classically American—cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious.”
See, what Murray is implying is that immigrants are cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious and Americans categorically are not. The solution to the problem is not less immigration, it is having the weak, stupid Americans wallowing in learned helplessness pull themselves up by their bootstraps and act more like immigrants. As if good jobs would suddenly be created to accommodate them.
And if they can’t? Tough beans. Murray and his Elite pals will still be living very large and they’ll have the immigrants to do their dirty work for them.
I’m not discounting the effects of chicken and egg social pathology. But from Murray’s PoV, the working class’s predicament is only a function of its collective lack of intelligence and intrinsic pathology enabled by government largess.
The root causes of their problems are not massive immigration, outsourcing and banksterism. Their problem is that they have not adapted to the massive immigration, outsourcing and banksterism by being more like what Murray and his pals want them to be. Cheap compliant labor.
Murray issues contempt for Trump because Murray is paid to be a mouthpiece for the Cronies who do not want that apple cart upset.
Make no mistake. Scratch the surface of avuncular but supposedly objective Social Scientist Charles Murray and you’ll find an apologist tool for the “I got mine” Elites.
* Screwing around doesn’t lead to negative life outcomes. Out-of-wedlock births do. So the latter matters for the fortunes of individuals and classes of individuals while the former doesn’t. One is a vice in this context and the other isn’t.
And again, with regard to the supposedly rampant drug use you are confusing a segment of the ‘elite’ for that class in general (again, taking Murray’s definition of the elite). The cocaine cowboys of Wall Street and Hollywood and Rush Limbaugh are only one small part of the elite.
Most of Murray’s elite are working away at the upper levels of the media, academia, start-ups, corporations, think tanks, government agencies, and so on. He talks a lot about the “super zips” (zip codes) where the elite are concentrated – Northern Virginia, Potomac / Bethesda / Chevy Chase Maryland, Suburban Connecticut and Northern New Jersey, the suburban parts of the Bay Area, the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, etc. Are these really hotbeds of drug abuse?
* IQ won’t matter, hard work won’t matter. What will matter will be good looks, charisma and extroversion – because those are human traits which other humans value. The outsize social power wielded by charismatic and sexy people today will be magnified 100x after machines have rendered all other sources of professional status obsolete.
Females might become more valued, since women are better looking, socially more appealing and extroverted than men. You already see this with SWPL ads which show daughters in disproportionate numbers.
The corollary, of course, is that small bands of men will organize into bands to take through force what they couldn’t gain through pure charisma and attractiveness. Black America writ large.
* What are some of those fields where schmoozing, charisma and appearance are limited in their professional value? Is working in a hedge fund one of them?
I imagine it would be any field where results matter, results are dependent on ability and not on chance, and results are easy to compare between individuals.
Surgery is a field which could go that way, as soon as a good method for comparing outcomes is established.
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