At 3/22/13 07:23 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:
nor the fact that poor whites perform better academically than rich blacks.
You're gonna have to give a source for this. Even if the data supports this, it's irrelevant to your argument. There is no real correlation between genetics and test scores, whereas there is a shitload of correlation between poverty and test scores. That's why we have trailer trash as well as ghetto trash, as well as stupid peasants and so on. Black people, on average, are more poor, and that's why their scores are lower on average. But poor people exist in every population and across every "racial" demographic.
Poor people are forced, through circumstance, to learn less academic stuff, but what you find instead is that they become gifted at the things they do learn. Scientists have studied people who would fail most IQ tests, but become extremely good at math just through their job experience. Bookies calculating detailed horse race statistics in their heads, for example.
Some scientists argue that athletic ability is a form of intelligence because it requires a large deal of mental focus to coordinate your movements in a precise and efficient manner. So if you spent your entire life playing basketball or dancing ballet, that's where your intelligence would be trained and focused. It's all about social influence. Genetics are irrelevant.
Of course if they had a better environment they would be more intelligent, but you're only looking at the causal relationship one way: maybe they have a shitty environment in the first place due to their low IQs. How could a low-IQ create a wealthy country in the first place?
I'd love to see an article linking wealth and heredity of intelligence.
Americans aren't that dumb when you control for race. Non-asian minorities drag it down a bit; white Americans score around eighth for PISA reading scores, whereas Americans overall score around 20th.
First, some useful document numbers for getting your own copy of the government reports on the data and information about the tests used:
TIMSS -- NCES 2005-005 -- International comparison of math and science, norm based, scored from 0-1000 with mean defined at 500 and SD at 100.
PISA -- NCES 2005-003 -- International comparison of math, science, reading, and problem solving, norm based, scored from 0-1000 with mean defined at 500 and SD at 100.
NAES Trends -- NCES 2005-464 -- National comparison of trends in reading, science and math, standards based, scored from 0-500. All age groups use the same scale, so 250 for a 9 year old is good, while for a 17 year old, it is very deficient. Furthermore, some test questions are retained between years to calibrate the tests, so there is no major difference in difficulty between years.
Education in the US shows a very strong correlation between income and student scores when measured at all levels. Schools in districts with wealthier families tend to have higher budgets due to greater property tax revenues and much better scores than poorer districts. According to scores from the 2003 TIMSS, students from schools where fewer than 10% of students were eligible for reduced price lunches (A metric for poverty) were typically world-class, beating almost every country in science, and every non-East Asian country in mathematics. The schools where 90% of students were eligible tended to rate among the worst European and best Third World countries. Schools in between tended to have scores in between. The other tests show very similar results, although America's overall scores are lower in PISA. The high educational spending per capita and not pushing the US far past the East Asian countries seems to imply that a point of diminishing returns is quickly reached. That is, increasing funding in the worst off school districts will have more of an effect than across-the-board funding increases. You'd have to demonstrate that the lack of funding in areas afflicted with high poverty rates and low tax income is a red herring, but that race is the real issue here.
Erm...no. Those places have always been absolutely poor, with the exception of Zimbabwe, which was by african historical standards fantastically wealthy when it was known as Rhodesia and run by white people. Of course, when the blacks took over and it became Zimbabwe, it took a dramatic turn for the worse.
There's no question that the country went to hell in a hand basket after the British were effectively kicked out, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they're black:
"Now, the authors' conclusions won't be new to those who follow Zimbabwe closely. After all, several others, including New York Times Johannesburg correspondent Lydia Polgreen (on a reporting trip to Johannesburg) as well as separately, the researchers Ian Scoones and Blasio Mavedzenge have come to similar conclusions in the aftermath of fast track land reform in the country. These journalists and researchers all assert that it is unfair to condemn the fast-track land redistribution in Zimbabwe given that agricultural production has increased substantially over the course of the past decade. A few weeks ago, The Guardian's Jonathan Steele argues that Mugabe-phobia has obscured the good news from Zimbabwe and that the outside world has been reluctant to give credit where credit is due despite evidence of success in rural areas throughout the country."
I'm not so naive as to think these land reforms were overall a good thing for the country, but I'm also not so naive as to blame one single factor:
"As a reaction to the fast-track land reform the United States government put the Zimbabwean government on a credit freeze in 2001 through the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001 (specifically Section 4C titled Multilateral Financing Restriction), which collapsed the trade surplus in 2002. Where there was a trade surplus of $322 million in 2001, in 2002 the credit freeze led to a trade deficit of $18 million, to grow rapidly in subsequent years." [source]
"Tabeth Gorovo (centre in the photo), sitting proudly in her round Shona kitchen on her six hectares in Mashonaland East in Zimbabwe, seems an unexpected subject of European and British sanctions. She is not named on any list, but she is sanctioned. All EU and UK aid to Zimbabwe is channelled through international NGOs (non-government organisations), and both the EU and the UK make it a condition that none of their aid can go to the 175,000 land reform families like TabethâEUTMs.
...
Finally, in 2000 the liberation war veterans took [their land] back - by force, as it had been taken from their parents. The land occupations and violence by the ZANU-PF ruling party of Robert Mugabe led to international sanctions. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has stated that the sanctions are only against individuals "involved in human rights abuses or undermining democracy or the rule of law." But apparently that includes Tabeth Gorovo and all the land reform families.
...
Of course the land reform farmers would do better with a more benign government and with some of the inputs and marketing support provided by the NGOs with aid money. Yet they are prospering. Many of these new farmers are hiring labour, and the former white farms now support three times as many people as they did before 2000, so land reform is reducing poverty. Indeed, this could be a model for rural development in Africa based on small commercial farmers." [source]
Eek! It was the evil white people who did it instead!
