Heather Lynn McDonald is an American political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author. Her new book, When Race Trump's Merit, is now available. In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Heather discuss what constitutes merit, and why IQ tests are better than other cognitive tests at predicting who s going to perform well in complex jobs. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr., Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. -Jon Sorrentino, MD, PhD, MA, CSE, D.E.O.D. (Certified Psychologist, Author, Psychologist and Author, Author and Consultant, and Author of the book When Race, Trump s Merit) . , and is a podcast that focuses on the intersection of race, class, identity, and culture in the 21st century, and how they can work together to improve the lives of all of us, not just in the workplace, and in the public spaces, including the public schools, and at home, and the public places, and their public spaces. , and how to be more like each other in the real world, in order to be kinder, not less so than they can be a better, more like us, and more like them, and so on and more so, better than they have a more of a chance to understand each other, in the next day, more so so, a better of it, more of that, a more so than the other, a less of a day, a greater chance to be better than that, etc., etc., a better thing, a kinder of a better place, etc. ... This episode is a mashup of two interviews with Heather Lynn McDonald, who wrote a book called, "When Race, When Identity Trumps Merit?"
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone. Heather Lynn McDonald is an American political commentator, essayist, attorney, and author.
00:01:15.420Her new book, Mid-April Release, When Race Trump's Merit, is now available.
00:01:21.760Heather, it's a pleasure to be able to talk to you today.
00:01:24.940I thought I might open our conversation about your new book, When Race Trump's Merit, with a technical description of what constitutes merit.
00:01:34.180And you may know some of this, but I doubt very much whether the people who are watching and listening know.
00:01:40.140So imagine that you're tasked as a psychologist with ethically proceeding to develop hiring criteria for a given job.
00:01:53.620So what you have to do is you have to perform what's called a job analysis.
00:01:59.520And what that means is a decomposition of the requirements of the job into a list of skills and functions.
00:02:10.080And then you have to look for predictors then on the hiring side that will increase the probability that the person you hire will be able to carry out that list of skills and functions.
00:02:26.820Now, it turns out that as jobs increase in complexity, and so a complex job is one where the demands of the job change quite rapidly.
00:02:38.840So there are jobs like factory line worker is a good example, where once you've learned the routine, all you do is repeat it.
00:02:48.120And then there are other jobs where the requirements of the job switch from situation to situation and day to day.
00:02:54.640And so managerial jobs are complex, sales jobs are complex, jobs in the medical field are complex, scientific jobs are complex.
00:03:04.520And then it turns out that if the ability to deal with complexity is one of the hallmarks of merit,
00:03:10.820then the best predictor of that ability is a test of general cognitive ability.
00:03:16.940And essentially, an age-corrected test of general cognitive ability is an IQ test.
00:03:24.040And the reason that IQ tests are good predictors of performance in complex jobs is because IQ tests assess the ability to learn.
00:03:35.420And they're actually very, very good at that.
00:03:37.960And the problem with throwing out the cognitive test literature, let's say, because it does produce disparate racial impact,
00:03:49.460is that there aren't any more well-validated measures of anything at all in the social sciences or in medicine than tests of general cognitive ability.
00:04:00.060And the people who derive the statistics that made tests of general cognitive ability possible are the same people who derive the statistics upon which all social and medical science is predicated.
00:04:12.260And also, by the way, a fair bit of physical science as well, because physicists use equations that are derived from the statistical literature.
00:04:23.780And, you know, you hear that social scientists have physics envy, but much of the approach conceptually that physicists have used, particularly in the last century,
00:04:34.980were actually derived from the social sciences rather than the reverse.
00:04:38.500So merit, there's actually a technical definition of merit, and merit is the rank ordering of people in relationship to their ability to perform the tasks of a given job.
00:04:50.700There's a commonality of merit across complex jobs, and the tests of general cognitive ability are a measure of that central tendency to adapt to complex situations.
00:05:01.500And so, insofar as there are jobs, and insofar as people differ in their ability to perform those jobs, there is merit, and merit in that sense can be assessed.
00:05:14.020There's merit in relationship to those jobs.
00:05:16.240Merit can be assessed most accurately by tests of general cognitive ability.
00:05:21.200And then that instantly gets us into the equity nightmare.
00:05:24.300So, anyways, that's the technical definition of merit for those of you who are watching and listening, in case you're interested.
00:05:33.220Now, Heather has just written a book called When Race Trumps Merit, and I thought it could have been titled somewhat more broadly,
00:05:41.420When Group Identity Trumps Merit, because it's not a problem that's only focused on race, although that's definitely a punchier title.
00:05:49.580So, why is it that you decided to focus on this particular topic, and what do you think your book brings to the table?
00:06:00.540We'll walk through your book step by step, but we might as well open with that.
00:06:07.160This was a book written out of a combination of sorrow and rage.
00:06:11.220Sorrow at the fact that the institutions that I love, classical music, art, philosophy, literature, were being torn down by a false narrative,
00:06:22.260saying that if a tradition has a demographic history that is predominantly white, that is the European tradition.
00:06:32.920So, classical music, because the great Western composers, Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Beethoven, Smetna, were all white.
00:06:44.840Therefore, we should look upon that tradition with contempt and suspicion.
00:06:49.920And rage, because the arguments that are being made are so completely false.
00:07:00.720And yet, every single leader of a tradition that brings us beauty, sublimity, wit, has turned on his own tradition and joined in the anti-racism crusade.
00:07:16.700So, this book provides the data that explains why there is disparate impact when you apply those colorblind, neutral standards of merit.
00:07:30.260There is a vast academic skills gap that means that any neutral, completely non-discriminatory standard of academic skills or the cognitive abilities that you described will have a disparate impact.
00:12:05.000Because even by the critical standards of the left, if capitalism is motivated by the greed that the left purports motivates it,
00:12:14.640there was every reason, nonetheless, there was every reason for the people who were developing these tests to concentrate on nothing but race and sex-blind merit,
00:12:24.560if for no other reason than to maximize their own profit.
00:12:28.940And so, because it meant that if you developed a test that could find talent that had been hidden by racial or sex prejudice,
00:12:38.680you could arbitrage that and make a fortune, which is what you do if you can hire extremely qualified people at a lower-than-market rate because they've been prejudiced against.
00:12:48.720So, in fact, all the tension that might have pushed the tests in a biased direction was actually extant even by the leftist's own hypothesis in exactly the opposite direction.
00:13:01.340And that is, in fact, how it turned out in reality because the use of cognitive tests did allow us as a society to discover talent that had been hidden from view beforehand.
00:13:13.160And that was well established by the socialists, for example, in the UK in the 1930s.
00:13:20.480You know, that was certainly the case with the development of the SAT, of trying to break up the hegemony of the New England WASP elites in the transit between Andover and Yale.
00:13:40.360And as I say, they would either be arguing that there was covert racism in the development of these tests, leaving aside the economic capitalist interest in finding talented workers,
00:13:52.900or it's even more nihilistic than that, and they actually do not believe in ideas of merit or of accomplishment or excellence,
00:14:04.540and that any test that purports to find cognitive ability is, per se, invalid.
00:14:16.840And in that case, then we should all be going to a lottery.
00:14:21.280You know, if they really believed that these tests were illegitimate, and you have college presidents themselves preposterously blaming their own institutions for racism.
00:14:35.180You know, whenever a Yale University president, Peter Salovey, or Princeton's Christopher Eisgruber gets up there and beats his chest and say,
00:14:44.960woe is me, Yale and Princeton are so systemically racist, which is merely a case of virtue signaling to get attention from the New York Times,
00:14:56.400he's implicitly accusing his own faculty of racism, and so if he really believed that, then they should go to randomized admissions.
00:15:07.900If it's not possible to distinguish between somebody who is more cognitively suited for a high-stakes, high-demands academic environment or a workplace environment,
00:15:22.600and there's really any kind of test like that is per se invalid, let's just admit by lottery.
00:15:29.960And they will never do that because, in fact, they do know that these tests are valid.
00:15:36.720There's nothing that predicts first-year grades in college better than the SAT.
00:15:42.660Those grades in themselves predict, by and large, how students behave.
00:15:46.460So it is a utterly hypocritical narrative that wants to demean these tests because they have racially disparate impacts at the same time that these schools are ruthlessly trying within groups to rank by cognitive ability.
00:16:07.600Right. Well, you'd also have to scrap the within-school grading structure as well and assign grades on a random basis because if you open up the admission process randomly,
00:16:25.560and I think you could make a case for that, I'm not saying you should,
00:16:28.940but you could make a case for that for early-stage university education because you could say,
00:16:33.720well, let's let everybody in, and those who can float will float, and those who can sink will sink.
00:16:39.920And now that has the advantage of a kind of radical equality of opportunity.
00:16:45.120It has the disadvantage of extreme inefficiency in that many, many people will fail,
00:16:51.920and that will be very expensive for them and for the institution.
00:16:55.380If you have grading criteria with regard to success within the class,
00:17:01.020you're going to get a rank ordering of achievement inevitably if there are any criteria that are being applied at all.
00:17:08.360And the probability that those criteria, if they're valid indicators of competence,
00:17:13.760the probability that they'll be correlated with general cognitive ability is about 0.6.
00:17:20.020And then you could even go a step further and you could say, well, let's just scrap the idea of merit altogether.
00:17:25.920And what that would mean is that you would no longer have choice in your selection of service person, right?
00:17:35.540You'd have to accept whatever lawyer came your way.
00:17:38.500You'd have to accept whatever lawyer came your way, whatever physician.
00:17:42.600It would be a lottery of matching between professional and customer as well.
00:17:50.220And you'd also have to scrap disparate pay.
00:17:54.200Because so in order to remove this so-called systemic bias, you can't only do that on the selection side.
00:18:01.360Well, because actually, because the selection side never quits.
00:18:05.020You're selected on some basis with regards to your ability to go to university.
00:18:10.560Then when you're in university, you're selected on your basis to do the work.
00:18:14.060And then when you graduate from university, you're selected on your ability to do the job.
00:18:18.720And that might be merely to satisfy your customers.
00:18:21.100But if among salesmen, for example, if you look at what predicts how satisfied customers of salesmen are with the salesman,
00:18:32.080especially if they're selling something complex, one of the things you immediately find is that a very good predictor of sales success happens to be general cognitive ability.
00:18:41.360And so the fundamental problem is that general cognitive ability is so pervasive as a merit index that there's no getting rid of it without eradicating the idea of choice and difference at every single level of every interaction in human society.
00:18:58.740And if you don't think that would be a nightmare, then you've never had a bad plumber.
00:19:04.660I'm going to play devil's advocate, and you're absolutely right.
00:19:07.940And it would be a very useful test to ask the levelers on the left that are trying to tear down every sublime institution of Western civilization in the name of fighting disparate impact.
00:19:22.380Are they willing to go that far and have randomized, not just college admissions, not just law school and medical school admissions, but randomized choice of professionals and consultants?
00:19:34.900Let me just say, though, in one sense, if you are a radical egalitarian, that would be, in one sense, an ideal situation.
00:19:44.720Because what we have now is we, you and I, Jordan, are people of education and relative prosperity.
00:19:56.720And we can choose our doctors and our engineers and our architects and our lawyers from pretty much the top of the pool.
00:20:07.960But if we went, but the pool is the same.
00:20:12.360So somewhere in that pool of doctors are people who really were at the bottom of their medical school class, squeaked out, with or without the assistance of racial preferences.
00:20:23.980Same with plumbers, same with lawyers.
00:20:28.160And so there is presumably a scale of medical competence, and the wealthy presumably get the best doctors.
00:20:40.160Now, that's complicated by the fact that if you are in an inner city, a large inner city, you're probably using that city's teaching hospital, which may be Columbia or Harvard.
00:20:54.300In which case, when you go to the emergency room, you are getting the top doctors, not the worst.
00:21:01.560But if you're relying on a clinic on 126th Street, East 126th Street in East Harlem, you may not be getting the doctors that we assume as our birthright we should be able to contract with.
00:21:20.480I mean, the demands of equity might, in fact, say, why should poor people get less good medical care and be able to hire less good medical professionals?
00:21:35.620But this is getting a little far afield and into sort of, you know, Rawlsian definitions of what you would choose in your prior position.
00:21:48.740Part of the problem, and this is an intractable problem, is that, and it is really a painful thing to encounter.
00:21:54.960I mean, one of the things that the authors of The Bell Curve pointed out, Richard Herrnstein, one of the authors, was that in the typical Ivy League environment,
00:22:04.840the typical Ivy League inhabitant never meets anybody in the lower half of the cognitive ability distribution.
00:22:14.160And so if you happen to teach at Harvard, your less able students are people who have an IQ of 115.
00:22:25.020And that puts them at the 85th percentile in the general population.
00:22:28.960You never have a student who has an IQ of 100, and you certainly never have a student who has an IQ of 85, which is 10% of the population.
00:22:36.840And one of the things Herrnstein pointed out is that what that means is that the typical elite, the typical inhabitant of an elite institution has no idea what the full range of human cognitive ability actually constitutes.
00:22:51.040Now, I was a clinician for a very long time, and I had many clients who were inhabitants of the lower end of the cognitive distribution.
00:22:59.740So I had one client, for example, with whom I spent 29 hours teaching him how to fold a piece of paper with sufficient accuracy to put it into an envelope with sufficient precision
00:23:15.860so that it could be put through an automatic letter sorting machine.
00:23:21.960Now, if you bend and mutilate the envelope to any degree, it'll jam the machine, and so you have to be very precise.
00:23:28.280And this problem was complicated by the fact that there were photos stapled to this letter and in a somewhat random manner
00:23:38.760so that with each folding exercise, you had to take into account the position of the photo, which also couldn't be folded over.
00:23:48.220And it was virtually impossible for this man to learn how to do that.
00:23:52.320And you actually have no idea how complex a task that is until you watch someone who just can't do it.
00:23:59.640And it's part of the reason that the equity problem and the systemic racism problem is so deep and pervasive
00:24:07.260is that it's actually extraordinarily painful to apprehend the full range of human and cognitive ability
00:24:13.960because there are people for whom the easiest task mathematically is no more difficult than falling off a bed.
00:24:22.940And so that might be someone with an IQ of 160 who's specialized in physics.
00:24:26.960And there are others for whom the probability that they will ever learn to make change facilely is zero.
00:24:37.060And that's a difference in quantifiable ability so great that it becomes qualitative.
00:24:44.100And it is one of the most painful facts of human existence that that unbelievably wide range of generic ability makes itself manifest.
00:24:54.660And it does so in a rather arbitrary fashion as well.
00:24:57.780It's that, you know, it isn't obvious that the typical extremely bright four-year-old has done anything in particular to deserve being that bright.
00:25:06.060It just happens to be the case that that's the manner in which they're gifted.
00:25:10.160And that brings with it a tremendous advantage.
00:25:12.220It's far better, by the way, economically, to be born at the 95th percentile for general cognitive ability
00:25:19.260in terms of your likely economic outcome at the age of 40.
00:25:23.620It's better to be born at the 95th percentile mark for cognitive ability than the 95th percentile mark for familial wealth.
00:25:31.580So there isn't a form of wealth that's more profound than that natural general cognitive ability.
00:25:38.820And there's an immense diversity in capacity that's built in there at the beginning.
00:25:46.220And it's no wonder people recoil against that.
00:25:49.040It's if you run into that as a clinician or a researcher, it's it's brute force of nature phenomenon like the claws and the teeth of a predator.
00:25:59.140It's it's it's it's it's a it's a terrifying reality.
00:26:02.920And it's very difficult to mediate against.
00:26:06.200I mean, you know, you know, the American military, for example, determined after about 100 years of general cognitive ability testing that.
00:26:15.360People with an IQ of less than 83 and so that's about 12 percent of the population cannot under any circumstances or with any training protocol conceivable be trained to do anything of any utility whatsoever at any level of military organization.
00:26:34.280And so it's illegal in the United States to induct someone with an IQ less than 83.
00:26:39.700And if you know that that's 12 percent of the population, that's an absolutely terrifying statistic because it means that the very enterprise that is most hell bent on finding personnel, that would be the military, concluded that despite their own necessity for finding personnel, they have to put 12 percent of the population per purpose permanently out of reach.
00:27:06.640Well, you speak about the complete bubble that surrounds people teaching in Ivy League universities and their cluelessness about the range of cognitive ability and how people live outside of Cambridge or New Haven.
00:27:24.480And it reminds me, when you read the founders' rhetoric and 18th century political theorists, and it's not an egalitarian viewpoint at all, contrary to our current narrative about that.
00:27:41.860And a certainty that, of course, the people should not be given too much power.
00:27:49.160They don't necessarily—shouldn't have the vote.
00:27:53.020And the concern about the mob, I think back in the 18th century, there was much more exposure.
00:28:00.560You don't have institutions that were completely sealed off to the less cognitive elite.
00:28:07.920And so there was maybe a little more realism about what the vast range of human experience was.
00:28:16.080But I would say, Jordan, I know that your instinct is always to de-emphasize a race aspect.
00:28:24.260I can just tell you from the United States perspective that I think a lot of—practically all of this discourse is driven by race.
00:28:35.420I do not think if there were reliable and seemingly continuous significant gaps, standard deviation gaps, in the average IQ between blacks and whites, that there would be a lot of upset about cognitive testing.
00:28:59.760I feel the same about our prison population.
00:29:02.600We have this narrative in the United States about mass incarceration as something that is per se bad.
00:29:10.680Nobody looks at the actual numbers of who's in prison compared to the number of violent crimes being committed.
00:29:17.420It turns out you have—if you commit a crime in the United States, there is a 3% chance that you will end up in prison.
00:29:27.480You have to—you know, prison is still the lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending.
00:29:34.140You have to try very hard to get a district attorney to say, okay, I'm actually going to take your case to court.
00:29:43.200I'm not just going to plea bargain you down, but you belong in prison.
00:29:49.140You have to have a very long record before he actually says, okay, I'm going to pay attention now.
00:29:53.060So, but if our prison population was not racially disparate—it is now about a third black, whereas blacks are about 13% of the population—if there was not that disparity, nobody would give a damn about mass incarceration.
00:30:12.920And it's the same thing with the fact that there is a distribution of academic skills, the way out in the high end, and we also have the gender issue, the sex issue, with males being overwhelmingly represented at both the high and the low end of mass skills compared to females.
00:30:36.740But just to repeat, I think in the United States, we would not be as troubled as we are by what you say are tragic cognitive disparities, but for the race issue.
00:30:56.140Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:31:01.940Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:31:06.740From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:31:13.660Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:31:21.600With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:31:32.660Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:31:41.520No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:31:47.920Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:31:53.960Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.
00:32:05.480Well, I looked into the race issue a lot when I worked at Harvard because I worked with a student there on developing efficient assessment tests, both on the cognitive and the temperamental side.
00:32:19.820So, for example, in a managerial domain, you want people who have traits that are associated with high intrinsic conscientiousness.
00:32:29.460And by the way, there's no racial differences in conscientiousness.
00:32:32.940And conscientious people are diligent and orderly and industrious and task-oriented and detail-oriented.
00:32:38.600And fundamentally, a conscientious person is someone who's capable of formulating and keeping verbal contracts.
00:32:45.360And it's the next best predictor of success in managerial domains next to general cognitive ability.
00:32:51.440It's not a great predictor of entrepreneurial ability, by the way.
00:32:54.500And we looked deeply into the racial literature at that point.
00:32:58.880And I was trying to account for the fact of these persistent racial differences.
00:33:03.720And one of the things I found, for example, that was very strange was that the differences between the general cognitive performance of North American Native Americans and Caucasians was much smaller than the difference between performance between the black population and the Caucasian population.
00:33:26.560And that's a tough nut to crack because if you had to find a population that was as historically oppressed in the United States as the black population, the Native American population would certainly spring to mind.
00:33:42.400I think you could make a strong case for equivalence of outcast status, let's say, and certainly a strong case for multigenerational pervasiveness and continuing multigenerational pervasiveness.
00:33:55.400But it doesn't manifest itself in the general cognitive ability difference front.
00:34:01.020And so that was disheartening to note that.
00:34:03.740More recently, we might point out that there's plenty of evidence that environmental intermediation can produce improvements in general cognitive ability.
00:34:18.180The Flynn effect has demonstrated that, and it's quite clear that people in the United States score quite substantively higher on IQ tests than they did 100 years ago.
00:34:29.400And a lot of that is a consequence of improved nutritional status, for example, and the fact that information is at hand for pretty much everyone.
00:34:35.900And it's also the case that the racial gaps in general cognitive ability performance have been decreasing over about a 30-year period and that they're actually much smaller in childhood than they are in adulthood.
00:34:49.020And that's the one point of optimism that someone very hard-headed might still maintain in relationship to the IQ literature looking at it on the racial front is that at the age of five or so, the difference between Caucasians and blacks, for example, is something more approximating five points than the, say, 10 to 12 points that seems more standard by adulthood.
00:35:15.340And no one really knows why that gap expands across time, and it would be very useful to focus our sociological and psychological investigations into determining why that is.
00:35:29.900I suspect phenomena like fatherlessness play a role.
00:35:34.620I also suspect that early literacy is relevant.
00:35:37.660You know that in the typical middle-class family, a kid of, forget race for a minute,
00:35:43.920if you look at the typical middle-class family compared to the typical working-class family,
00:35:48.420a typical middle-class kid by the age of three or four has been exposed to a veritable plethora of books and semantic information compared to a working-class kid, all things being equal.
00:36:04.400And the differences in exposure magnitude is absolutely remarkable, even by the age of three.
00:36:10.160And so there's still some places we might look if we were really interested in remediating the remaining differences in general cognitive ability.
00:36:26.220And absolutely, this has been noted, the difference in the number of words that children hear from poor and middle-class backgrounds.
00:36:33.160And I would absolutely agree with that.
00:36:36.580One question is, is the failure to surround lower-class children with rich verbal environments, is that a function of just ignorance about good child-rearing?
00:36:51.400Or do you get somewhat of a circular loop where it is the lower cognitive level of the parents that results in this type of inadequate, from our perspective?
00:37:08.400Maybe there's other strengths going on there.
00:37:11.480I've got a kind of an Appalachian white trash couple living underneath me in my California apartment, and I can tell you it's an amazing contrast.
00:37:24.060There really are class differences that are hilariously stereotypical, but these guys live up to it to the T.
00:37:31.840I mean, everybody in their environment has no teeth, either because of meth, or they just beat each other up too much.
00:37:40.540But there's clearly, I would not want to be the child of those parents, and they're not married.
00:37:47.280I mean, the best predictor of the IQ of a child is the average IQ of the parents.
00:37:54.460And so you definitely get a situation where cognitive resources accumulate.
00:38:01.120And this is particularly true in the modern world, because modern high-status women are much more likely to mate, like women in general.
00:38:14.380They mate across and up dominance hierarchies so that as women have become more educated, the proclivity for educated women to only marry educated men.
00:38:23.760And there's an associated IQ, assortative mating phenomenon going on there.
00:38:31.140That's increased substantially in recent years.
00:38:34.000And so it is definitely the case that environments that are set up by people who have lower cognitive function are less likely to be literacy-producing environments.
00:38:44.540But there may be also additional effects where, you know, that could be ameliorated to some degree.
00:38:52.540Because if your parents, if the parents of a given child are both lower than average in IQ, their child will on average be slightly smarter than them.
00:39:05.280And so there's a phenomenon called regression to the mean.
00:39:08.080And so if you have parents who both have IQs of 145, they don't produce a child with an IQ of 160.
00:39:16.320They produce a child with an IQ of 130.
00:39:18.840And if you have two parents with IQs of 85, they produce a child with an IQ of, say, 90 or 95 on average.
00:39:27.040And so those children could benefit from a richer, semantic environment.
00:39:32.740But the problem with that on the educational front is that, you know, maybe part of the reason the IQ differences are pervasive racially is because there are real differences in literacy culture.
00:39:43.720But a lot of those might be manifesting themselves as early as two years old.
00:39:48.360You know, because in the literate family, kids at two are already sitting and reading often.
00:39:54.260They're not, they're just looking through books, but they have a hundred books in their room and they might spend an hour a day leafing through them.
00:40:03.380And if you want to instantiate that kind of proto-literate behavior in children that early, you have to adopt a pretty radically invasive neocolonial attitude towards the lower class family.
00:40:15.900And that is something that in and of itself is problematic.
00:40:19.180You know, you want, what do you want, every working class family to be mother, father, and well-meaning social worker?
00:40:27.900I mean, that's a dismal, that's a dismal deal for everyone concerned.
00:40:33.560But it's very hard to intervene that early.
00:40:35.980We had these early preschool experiments that were extremely intensive and they did produce a narrowing of the cognitive skills gap, but those differences disappeared by 12 or 16 years later, as you suggest.
00:40:58.240I would say, possibly, it's a misplaced obsession of the elites to be so concerned about pulling everybody up to a higher average level of cognitive capacity.
00:41:14.380What really is concern to our society at this point is the breakdown of bourgeois values.
00:41:19.260And you say there's no differences in conscientiousness among groups.
00:41:24.380But that's really, I think, you know, our race problems would go away if we could extirpate the dysfunctional underclass culture.
00:41:35.160And that is something that is tearing down blacks' potential to succeed by embracing this oppositional culture that says that academic effort and achievement is acting white.
00:41:56.040It glorifies criminality, glorifies conspicuous consumption, misogyny, maximal procreation, you know, having as many children as you can by different baby mamas.
00:42:10.820If we could get, I would say, if we could get, I would say, an intervention that was maybe focused less on the cognitive matters and more on simply deferring gratification, self-control, the types of issues that Edward Banfield wrote about in The Unheavenly City,
00:42:31.360that that that would be the most important thing to focus on, because I'm not sure that efforts to change the cognitive skills gap will be that successful over time.
00:42:43.200But really, all we ask is people to respect the law and to restrain their impulses.
00:42:51.680And as you pointed out, the data for, let's say, the Head Start enterprise does indicate very clearly that these wide-scale attempts to increase general cognitive ability did not succeed.
00:43:07.060What you saw with Head Start was that the children who went through Head Start were more likely to be in the proper grade for their age,
00:43:16.380and they were more likely to graduate from high school, and they were less likely to become pregnant in teenagehood.
00:43:22.240But that hope for expanding boost of cognitive ability as a consequence of early childhood intervention did,
00:43:30.780it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Head Start experience, but was obliterated as a general rule by grade six.
00:52:11.080And so by lifting the responsibility off the shoulders of people and replacing that with,
00:52:16.920let's say, state support, you're actually demolishing,
00:52:20.960you're certainly demolishing the women because they have no men to rely on,
00:52:24.140but you're demolishing the men too because they have no necessity to require them to mature.
00:52:29.720And that's actually a catastrophe, not a freedom.
00:52:33.080I think, yes, that there is a misunderstanding in Western countries today that define poverty exclusively by the income of a household or government benefits.
00:52:49.900And the government believes that just as a government check can substitute for a father and that social workers can substitute for a father,
00:53:02.280Whereas in fact, what really is the key is whether the household is passing on social capital and those traits that make one able to seize opportunities that still are available in Western societies.
00:53:22.980There's a critique from the right that is trying to adopt some lefty economic criticism that might say that,
00:53:34.080well, because of big business or globalization, the economic situation for the working classes is irredeemably grim.
00:53:47.620And that, I'm not going to dispute that, but I still would say that there are opportunities for people who are willing to hustle, to discipline themselves, to not be addicted.
00:54:01.780You know, the problem of drugs in the United States is absolutely horrific.
00:54:06.780We are a society that seems to be so spiritually bereft that people turn to drugs at much higher rates than elsewhere.
00:54:16.980But if you are straight and are reliable and show up every day and do not scream at your boss, but have the ability to withstrain your impulses, you will be able to have a decent life.
00:54:32.840And those are the issues that are most essential.
00:54:37.440Not whether you've got parents with money or what your race is.
00:54:45.000And those are disparaged in society today.
00:54:49.600You know, there's the book by my former editor at City Journal, The Dream and the Nightmare, that pointed out that the 60s countercultural revolution of, you know, tuning out, getting high,
00:55:02.660and disparaging what your parents worked hard for, that that was something that the wealthy could dabble in and then come out ahead.
00:55:14.900But when you have that corrosive idea that normalcy is somehow racist or acting white, and that you give license to people that are going to thumb their noses at the law,
00:55:30.620that are going to shoplift, rob, turnstile jump with impunity, and get more involved in drugs, they're not—they don't have the safety nets.
00:55:43.100And so that was really a catastrophic development in our culture that the elites survived.
00:55:52.120Heather, you open your book with a discussion of the cultural revolution, and it is in part this revolution of the 1960s that you described.
00:56:01.980And you also described the values that the radicals in the 1960s, the rich radicals, let's say, were rebelling against as bourgeois.
00:56:11.060And I would say, from a psychological perspective, it's actually reversed, is that what constitute bourgeois values are actually functional values.
00:56:22.140And the reason that they're functional is because they work if you iterate them for a long period of time in a social environment.
00:56:31.040And so conscientiousness is a good example of that, because in many ways, bourgeois values are values that promote conscientiousness.
00:56:38.900They're pushed very hard in Asian societies, for example, and those would be virtues of discipline and dutifulness and dedication and industriousness and the ability to maintain—to formulate and maintain contracts.
00:56:55.380And that is a very good predictor of long-term success.
00:56:58.420And so those values aren't precisely bourgeois.
00:57:02.760And the bourgeois tend to be productive, and so they have those values.
00:57:06.000But the idea, the thing is, by claiming those virtues as bourgeois, you fall prey to the Marxist worldview that claims that those are merely secondary derivations of something that's arbitrary and class-based, when in fact they're not.
00:57:25.080And it also helps us understand how we might better define wealth.
00:57:30.700Because on the one hand, you could say, well, if you just provided people with enough of a basic income, they would be wealthy.
00:57:37.740But on the other hand, you could respond to that and say, no, if you're not being raised in a familial environment that engenders within you the virtues that will make you successful in a social context over the long run,
00:57:52.380you're poor, no matter how much money you have, no matter how much money you have, all that money is going to do for you is pave the highway to hell.
00:58:00.200And of course, that happens to lots of people who are incoherent on the value front, who have a windfall, is that money is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, because it just speeds their inevitable demise.
00:58:10.860I saw that happen in my clinical practice all the time when I had incoherent clients who were badly socialized, let's say, much to their own chagrin,
00:58:21.140who would receive their unemployment check or their welfare check, and their psychopathic friends would instantly descend,
00:58:28.340and they'd be out of commission entirely for the three days it took them to spend every cent they had on alcohol and cocaine,
00:58:35.340and then they'd be face down in the gutter and wake back up, and, well, then they were back in therapy.
00:58:40.860But money wasn't going to help that in the least.
00:58:44.000We, on the conservative side, or even on the classic liberal side, we have to very carefully beware that we don't fall into the trap of assuming that,
00:58:54.080of assuming the reflexive leftist stance that the reason people are poor is because they don't have money.
00:59:10.660I think it's the left that defines poverty exclusively in terms of economic levels and ignores cultural factors completely.
00:59:19.920And if you talk about culture, you're viewed as blaming the victim.
00:59:23.820And those values are now criticized as white values, conscientiousness, caring about getting things right, accuracy.
00:59:36.380Those, since the 1990s and the reign of the charlatan corporate diversity consultant, used to go around to AT&T and Levee Strauss and say that if you focus on promptness and punctuality,
00:59:52.520well, that's just not valuing differences and you need to be retrained so that you don't impose your white structure on your employees.
01:00:03.820So that's been going on for a long time.
01:00:06.000And I don't think it's the right that is deficient in that.
01:00:10.080But to get back to your question of the way that the term bourgeois sounds, I would welcome alternatives.
01:00:18.020I certainly am not using it in an economic context necessarily of capitalism.
01:00:25.820But it may be that it is a counterproductive word to use because to the left, it does sound like you are simply wanting to prop up this illegitimate system of private enterprise and profit.
01:00:43.680But so when I use bourgeois, I simply mean habits of self-control, of conscientiousness, of respect for authority that used to be middle-class values.
01:00:58.700Well, you're basically just laying out a case for the pragmatic utility of trait conscientiousness.
01:01:05.620And it is the second best predictor of long-term lifetime economic success.
01:01:09.720And as I said, there is no evidence whatsoever that there are intrinsic ethnic differences in conscientiousness.
01:01:15.880And there's certainly no evidence that...
01:02:25.720So the children of first-generation Asian immigrants are likely to do far better academically in the United States than the children of Americans who aren't immigrants.
01:02:41.300But that advantage disappears in three generations as the children become more and more American in their conscientiousness virtues.
01:02:49.580And the Asian advantage in economic success, which is pronounced not only among the...
01:02:59.780Well, pronounced throughout the Asian immigrant population, does seem to be a consequence of the inculcation of conscientiousness-oriented values.
01:03:08.620So that does seem to be a very positive field of open possibility in relationship to remediating racial differences in outcome.
01:03:18.260Now, we don't know how to do that because it's not all that obvious how you instill conscientious virtues.
01:03:23.760I mean, the Asians do it in the confines of their own private family.
01:03:27.720And how to duplicate that, say, on the educational front isn't obvious.
01:03:34.120So we're stuck on that front to some degree as well.