Here is a concise explanation of why object to Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and so on. Following Lindsay and Pluckrose, I will use the shorthand “Theory” to describe these ideas or mindsets.
1. Humans have two bases for hierarchies: prestige and dominance. In a prestige hierarchy, such as the international rankings of chess players or tennis players, people lower down appreciate and admire people higher up. In a dominance hierarchy, such as a violent gang, people lower down fear and resent people higher up.
2. Prestige is positive and dominance is negative. Participating in a prestige hierarchy tends to involve skill development, greater prosperity, and peaceful cooperation. Participating in a dominance hierarchy tends to involve violence, coercion, and repression.
3. When we examine a cultural institution, we may see elements of both prestige and dominance. For example, we may wear a mask during the current pandemic because we appreciate and admire those who recommend doing so. Or we may wear a mask mainly because we fear law enforcement or social pressure. Another ambiguous example is a corporate hierarchy. You may think of the CEO as a leader who enjoys the trust and respect of employees, investors, and consumers. Or you may think of the CEO as an autocrat exercising power over those constituents. In truth, there is some of both.
Government is an interesting example of an ambiguous case. If the way to become head of state is to use force, and the head of state rules by decree, then intuitively this is a dominance hierarchy. If the way to become head of state is to inspire followers, and the way to inspire followers is to have good ideas for policy, then intuitively this is a prestige hierarchy.
4. The idea of Theory is to expose the dominance that lies behind existing institutions that supposedly operate as prestige hierarchies. For example, STEM fields appear to be a prestige hierarchy, but Theory looks at the disparities in STEM positions by race and gender and sees a dominance hierarchy.
5. Today, Theory has taken this idea to extremes. It does not see our existing institutions as having any basis in prestige. Instead, it interprets all cultural institutions as serving a dominance hierarchy. In this view, the sole purpose of the SAT score is to perpetuate the oppression of blacks, so SAT scores should be eliminated. The sole purpose of police is to oppress blacks, so the police should be de-funded. The sole purpose of the use of the scientific method is to oppress indigenous people, so that the status of the scientific method should be lowered and instead other ways of knowing should be accorded more respect.
[UPDATE: This comment documents these examples.]
6. In going to these extremes, Theory is wrong. Many cultural institutions really do promote prestige and minimize dominance. They are good institutions. Where they fail to live up to our highest ideals, they can and should be reformed, not eliminated. We can improve the policies to recruit and train police, but not if we de-fund the police.
7. Even worse, Theory is dangerous. Because it thinks only in terms of dominance, its adherents seek to dominate. When the “Woke” encounter people who do not share their outlook, they use coercion, including mob intimidation, “canceling,” and brainwashing “training.” The movement has none of the tolerance for dissent that is the essence of a liberal society.
Not surprisingly, “Theory” has not attacked the dominance system its adherents have the most influence in: the schools. Instead, they use the power of the schools to try to move society in their preferred direction.
crt is bullshit
Thanks, Arnold. In 1959, during my second year at a Law School in Argentina, I took a course on Political Law (I understand that in the U.S. law schools there is not such a course which is different from Constitutional Law, Public Law, Administrative Law). I was required to read and discuss G. H. D. Cole “A History of Socialist Thought” (in Spanish, at that time only the first two volumes were available; the complete work consists of 7 volumes). I had a very good “social-democrat” professor (he was young and much later a member of Argentina’s Supreme Court) and in our discussions, I learned much more about socialist paradises as advanced by the Utopian Socialists of the 19th century than by Marx and Engels because we could question the underlying assumptions of each paradise’s beauties.
I haven’t read about Critical Race Theory and I don’t plan to do it for the same reasons that long ago I decided not to waste time with Marx and Engels. I always prefer to ask for an alternative to the status quo. Your points 1-3 is a summary of what you take from your reading about how CRT theorists approach the analysis of the status quo and alternatives, your points 4-5 the summary of their assessment of the status quo, and your points 6-7 your arguments against the assessment (point 6) and one main implication (7). From what I know CRT theorists have yet to outline their paradise, and they prefer to focus first on criticizing the status quo and then on promoting principles. They don’t want to propose a Utopia for discussion and I think they don’t it because it’d require to make explicit their questionable assumptions about human behavior.
In the past 60 years, I have seen too many critiques of the status quo and too many promotions of principles in the several countries in which I lived and worked. Some are the work of intellectuals with no pretension of being involved in politics. Most, however, are the work of radical politicians that rely on the idea that the status quo reflects the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed and it should be changed for a paradise that is around the corner, based on great moral principles. I see all politicians as motivated by grabbing power –and many by grabbing absolute power– and their views and promises as tools for getting what they want. I’m interested in understanding politics, not in re-examining principles.
Like their communist forebears, the fundamental issue is an inability to understand that “prestige” (having and exercising useful talents in a way that produces value) is neither:
1) Uniformly distributed at the individual of group level (substitute race vs class and the theory is exactly the same)
2) Isn’t something that happens without proper incentive
The first is certainly important and it the first order reason we are all given why communism fails, but I think the second is the bigger problem.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is literally what Sully and Deboer are writing about with “Left Bell Curvism”. There is a lot of handwaving about how that attitude didn’t work out the first time but will totally work out in the West today.
“Smart people will do fine under any system.” Sure they will. I read a paper about how the communists in China are more often then not the old landed elite. IQ will allow you to win whatever the game is. The question is, “what is the game?” “What does the game incentivize smart people to produce? Our system incentivizes them to produce useful things others want to buy voluntarily. Those who aren’t skilled at doing that would prefer it incentivized writing about anti-racism (Kendi, DeAnglo, etc certainly are following their incentives and doing just fine).
My friend works for XYZ making the robots that run their warehouses. While he enjoys exercising his talents, let’s get real. He does it for the money! They pay him a lot of money, top 1% easily. He does it because that gets him a nice house in a good neighborhood with all those evil zoning restrictions and his wife won’t have to work. And he wanted an extension built for his in-law and he wanted to have an expensive wedding and he goes on vacations and he does lots of other stuff that ordinary people on a UBI wouldn’t be able to afford. If they didn’t pay him (or if the government took so much of his check as to be meaningless), he wouldn’t work as hard or in the same way.
Are the “essential workers” really doing work of equal value to him? It seems to be his robots do more work than they do. He’s constantly working to make his workers in-essential. That is the whole point! This pandemic isn’t going to reveal how useful everyones contribution is. It’s going to accelerate the drive to find technical work arounds to having to interact with “essential” workers.
The fundamental issue is that most people can’t win a prestige game (they aren’t born with enough talent), that’s why they try to knock that game down. Nobody wants to play by rules were they lose. You can soften the material impact of losing, but you can never eliminate it (people still need material incentives) nor can a UBI solve the problem of feeling useless (especially if an accurate reflection of ones real value).
Can you cite anyone stating any of the following?
the sole purpose of the SAT score is to perpetuate the oppression of blacks, so SAT scores should be eliminated.
The sole purpose of police is to oppress blacks, so the police should be de-funded.
The sole purpose of the use of the scientific method is to oppress indigenous people
“Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies.”
(https://www.aaihs.org/why-the-academic-achievement-gap-is-a-racist-idea/)
“The police are not a neutral body, and the institution is inherently biased. In the U.S. slave patrols and night watches were the beginning of a racially directed system of law enforcement designed to secure capital for white settlers…
(https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and-commentary/6-reasons-why-its-time-to-defund-police)
“How does one decolonize and reclaim the meanings of research and researcher, particularly in the context of Western research? Indigenous communities have long experienced oppression by Western researchers.”
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747016117733296)
Yeah, these are some incendiary arguments about the same topics, but they don’t ever get very close making the point Arnold does, that the sole purpose of X is…
The police link, by world thought leader, the Quaker activist AFSC, comes the closest, by claiming that policing has its roots in early slave patrols. Kendi refers to tests as a weapon, then proceeds to explain something significantly different. All three note substantial passive racism in their observations.
Sorry, these don’t get you there.
Wow, tough crowd. I googled for at least three minutes, and came up with three quotes that frankly boggled my mind and went a long way, in my opinion, to meet your challenge.
I’ll try again; total googling time: eight minutes.
“The SAT remains a tool for ensuring white supremacy that is essentially partial and unfair—just as its designers always meant it to be.”
(Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/06/standardized-testing-tool-white-supremacy)
I really think, Tom, that article clears the “sole purpose” bar.
“American policing has never been a neutral institution. The first U.S. city police department was a slave patrol, and modern police forces have directed oppression and violence at Black people…
For too long, the focus on police reform has been dominated by reforms that try to reduce the harms of policing rather than rethink the overall role of police in society… activists across the country are coming together to demand what many have known has been the solution all along: defund the police.”
(Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer, https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/defunding-the-police-will-actually-make-us-safer/)
Again, Tom, I think this article states specifically that the police were created to oppress black people and should be defunded rather than changed or reformed.
“Prior to their contact with European settlers, North American indigenous people had socioeconomic, spiritual, and linguistic structures that supported an indigenous worldview, that is, a perceptual understanding of the world based on holistic, cyclical, sacred, and spiritual connections. However, European contact influenced indigenous people’s worldviews, and Western European perspectives on science and reason have since ruled supreme. The Western scientific paradigm focuses on problems with solutions and dismisses any metaphysical explanations for reality…
Collectively they experience some of the nation’s most severe and extreme health disparities with respect to type 2 diabetes, unintentional injuries, cardiovascular disease, suicide and suicidal ideation, homicide, and certain forms of cancer…
Many Native American scholars and Tribes attribute the etiologies of these disparities to the sequelae of colonization that denied Tribal nations the right to continue their precontact life ways and indigenous science systems.”
(Research Ethics and Indigenous Communities, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828983/)
Western science (the scientific method) was used in tandem with colonialism to destroy native cultures; that’s what I get out of the excerpt, anyway.
I think the perhaps “sole” is the wrong word, and if you substitute “salient,” Arnold’s statements are correct. There probably aren’t many people on the left arguing that the sole purpose of the police is to maintain white supremacy, but there are plenty who argue that the fact that police (supposedly) do so is reason enough to abolish them. That this might result in chaos or gangsterism or some other undesirable outcome is not part of the discussion.
The racism present in institution X is substantial enough to produce outcome Y. Therefore, action Z is justified to alter/radically re-imagine institution X such that outcome Y is substantially (totally?) mediated.
*The presence of outcome Y is sufficient to justify the charge of racism in institution X, and thus action Z.*
If you looked at differing outcome Ys by race that are so large and persistent and were denied using biological explanations it’s difficult to see how you could ever get around this logic.
It doesn’t matter if it’s ‘sole’. If it might as well be ‘sole’, then, as the woman said, “What different does it make?”
All that matters is the question of whether certain statistical disparities between groups are natural facts and should be accepted by mature, well-adjusted adults as just the way things are without feeling the need to blame anybody for it, or whether they are *always* artificial and man-made, thus systemically unjust, arising out of circumstances in which one group benefits at another’s expense.
The former position is true and will get you canceled, while the latter position is false and will get you juicy book deals and speaking fees.
But worse, claiming that the latter is true, while the truth of the former continues to operate and stubbornly produce those disparities, means that social resentment and tension is incessant and perpetual. There can be no healing or reconciliation, and the night does not end.
It gets even worst than that. Because if you believe the false claim, and you believe you are a member of the class victimized by that unjust discrimination, then all you will see forever and ever is a long and unbroken chain of failures to correct it, such that all innocent explanations are implausible and the only remaining explanation is a combination of a continuing conspiracy to continue that discrimination while lying about it, and institutions which were born with a design so bad that they *cannot* be salvaged – that in anything approaching their form and organization, they will always produce unjust disparities, no matter what.
For a long time, non-progressives have asked, “What do you want from us? Is there anything people or society can do that falls short of achieving equal group outcomes, which you would consider to be acceptably just?” Kendi provides the answer, “No. Nothing.”
To be clear, if that latter claim were true, the above conclusion *would be perfectly correct*. There is nothing wrong and no steps that lack validity with regards to the whole chain of logic, which correctly leads to the most extreme and radical conclusions, of which, thankfully, we haven’t yet even had a taste. Though we probably will. Soon.
But all that logic flows out of a false prior. It’s all fruit of a poisoned tree, of the poisoned taproot. If you move to something coming out of a different, healthy taproot, you are abandoning the whole tree. If you accept that taproot, it makes no different to argue the merits of the view from one twig or another: it’s all poison, any way you slice it.
So, instead of ‘sole’, what about if it was only the ‘main’ purpose? What about a minor, secondary purpose? What if it was *once* an important purpose of the former manifestation of an institution, or even motivated its very creation, but all of that is water under the bridge and it now doesn’t motivate and of the successors who reject that purpose? What if it was completely unintentional and undesired, but nevertheless a foreseeable consequence of which one is aware and which one tolerates?
If the prescription is always the same, then it is impossible to infer which among the varying diagnoses is correct, and impossible to defend oneself against an accusation of the most culpable variety. It is thus practically pointless to distinguish among them, since they are all equivalent in effect, and the burden of proof is identical and low in every case. If it is not intentional discrimination, it must be implicit and unconscious bias. It if it not bias, it must be systemic and institutional. Any theory which puts the cart before the horse, as CRT does with its forgone interpretation, is unfalsifiable.
The most innocent case might as well be the same as the most guilty. It is a case of strict liability: the very fact that a system produces certain disparate outcomes means that it is *fundamentally irredeemable* by means of better motives or intentions or superior mental states.
It’s kind of like degrees of culpability and mens rea in the criminal law. For homicide, there is first-degree murder: premeditated, intentional, knowing, and conscious. Then felony-murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter (constructive or criminally negligent).
Now, imagine the sentence for all these crimes is the same: the death penalty. If you fail to adequately secure an object to the back of your truck and you hit a bump in the road, the object goes flying, and lands on a pedestrian, and kills him, you are going to face the same penalty as if you planned and executed that individual’s assassination in cold blood.
In that case, all a prosecutor has to prove is the victim is dead and that this wasn’t entirely the victim’s fault. After that, res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself, the burden of proof shifts, and the defendant only gets a chance to rebut that particular claim, to show that it was, in fact, a proximate cause of the victim’s actions. Otherwise, he’s out of luck.
The problem with CRT is that it leads to a reductionist view of the world in which everything is explained by race. CRT takes a small “t” truth – there is bigotry in the world – and turns it into a big “T,” all-encompassing Truth.
But there are lots of truths in the world, and the truths on which we choose to focus make all the difference. If I choose to concentrate on my oppression – all the times that anyone treated me less than fairly or kindly – and define my life by such slights, I give up my agency. I give up trying to make life better for myself and my loved ones. But if I focus on the truth that my actions can make things better, I’m far more likely to have a fulfilling life.
Merit and hard work don’t always pay off, but they pay off far more often and far better than do anger, resentment, and waiting for others to fix the world before even trying to improve myself and my life.
It’s not even a small T truth. It’s just the inevitable result of The Bell Curve and genetics.
In responding to Kendi’s criticism of Trumps decision to stop funding critical race theory training in the federal government, Steve Sailer noted the following:
—
Here’s the result of excluding “The Bell Curve” from the Overton Window of mentionable opinions on race: the old centrists become the new racist right; and anti-white dogmatists like Ibram X. Kendi come to be the dominant center of the consensus.
—
You can’t give an inch here. What X%, objectively, do you think there is to saying that white racism (of whatever kind) is causing black outcomes relative to whites? Saying that its a small t “truth” probably implies in most peoples mind a higher X% then the facts would dictate, and if some high X% becomes your rightmost estimate on the matter good luck with where we will end up.
I think that you have taken a small “t” truth about IQ and have run with it to extremes.
So, like, what X% of the black white gap is due to discrimination? How small t a truth is that?
If the number is anything other then “trivial” then its “big enough to provide a moral obligation for ever escalating costly action.”
[I think that you have taken a small “t” truth about IQ and have run with it to extremes.]
I think that you are uncomfortable with the small “t” truth and respond to anyone who logically discusses it by accusing them of running “with it to extremes.”
Hmm, that seems to be rather extreme of you.
Hear, hear!
What Theory seems to be missing is that huge swath of human interaction where hierarchy just doesn’t seem a major factor. When I get together with my buds for a beer, there’s no hierarchy there, just cooperation.
How about the relationship between us and the bartender? There’s a bit of a dominance relationship, I guess, in that s/he has to treat us well or we’ll go to the bar next door. But we also have to be reasonable patrons or we’ll get tossed out. The primary nature of the relationship is cooperation: I want a beer, the bartender wants some cash.
For what it’s worth, I ran across this just now in Philip Tetlock’s 2003 Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions and I couldn’t help thinking of the Woke, “the SVPM [sacred value protection model] model posits that when people discover that members of their community have compromised sacred values, they experience an aversive arousal state–moral outrage–that has cognitive, affective, and behavioral components: harsh trait attributions to norm violators, anger and contempt, and enthusiastic support for norm and meta-norm enforcement (punishing both violators and those who shirk their fair share of the burdensome task of punishing violators for the public good).”
Theory provides a justification for thinking others are violating the sacred and thus a justification for “an aversive arousal state.”
The article concludes, “Research on sacred values … posits people to be intuitive theologians … Intuitive theologians are suspicious, and unapologetically so, of the classic Enlightenment values of open-minded inquiry and free markets. Opportunity costs be damned, some trade-offs should never be proposed [no statues for slave-owning sinners], some statistical truths never used, and some lines of causal/counter-factual inquiry never pursued.”
“Generally speaking, what is most horrible, terrible, and repulsive now is not even the horrors and disgraces that the students of the Prolekult write, but the fact that I must first read through them and then argue with people as to whether they are good or bad. The absolute worst thing, though, is that I must prove to others that, for example, it is a thousand times better to die from hunger than to teach iambic verse and trochees to some idiot so that he can sing the praises of the Revolution, in which his colleagues rob, beat, rape, ruin churches, whip with belts taken from the backs of officers, and marry priests to horses!“
-Ivan Bunin
From Arthur Koestler’s “Bricks to Babel”:
Marxism, like orthodox Freudianism, is a closed system. A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself.
another one I’d add –
8. Theory destroys Human Capital Development. In a prestige hierarchy in Chess is in part an outcome of the skill + time it takes to become a better Chess player. The resulting hierarchy reinforces the return in that investment. In Theory, by smashing the hierarchy, you’re also smashing the incentive. Worse, by tarring folks who do engage in the hiearchy as “selling out” (as well as a variety of more color slurs), Theory often actively creates a dis-incentive.
I’d add a ninth:
We actually need these institutions. Institutions are the sources of our food, water, shelter, clothes, electricity, medicines, etc. 95% of us cannot survive without them. Tearing them down would almost certainly end in misery. We need them to be effective, which means staffing them with people who can perform their roles well.
I think one possible lesson is that if you have a critical mass of useless people, especially if they can be rallied around some Schnelling point like race or class or religion or sexuality or whatever, they really will choose to tear it all down and accept a higher position in a hierarchy with a lower standard of living. They might not admit, even to themselves, that is what they are doing. But the end effect is the same time and again.
“There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0dL7riclpU
The more sophisticated progressives deny that claim and respond as follows, in analogy to men’s and women’s sports leagues:
Let’s say there was a society of 2,000 people with 1,000 Abes and 1,000 Bobs, and that there were only 10 ‘top spots’ in a tournament. Even if, for the sake of argument, we assume that all 10 spots would got to Abes, then, yes, the Abes are strongly incentivized to develop their human capital and motivated to compete and put forth their best efforts in the tournament. But notice, the Bobs *are not*. They know that no matter how hard any Bob works, a Bob will never make it into the top 10, which will always be full of Abes.
So all the Bobs will just check out and *give up* – if there is not point to investing all that time and effort into developing their own human capital, then they won’t. So they won’t only lag Abes proportionally to the disparity in potential, they’ll lag even more, since they are under-developing that potential.
Now, consider an intervention which imposes equal representation quotas on those top 10 spots. Now there will be 5 top Abes and 5 top Bobs. Will the Abes stop working hard? Maybe a little because of reduced expected value of the benefit, but in general, no. Very few Abes think, “If I work really hard I have the potential to get to positions 6-10, but not to 1-5,” and such precision is impossible in a word full of fuzzy uncertainty. So almost any Abe that thought he had a shot at the top before, still thinks so, and still busts his butt to win an Abe-reserved slot in the tournament.
Meanwhile, the Bobs experience a revolution. Knowing they are guaranteed 5 Bob-reserves slots means they have the same incentives as the Abes. Previously the Abes may have thought they were competing with “everybody”, but that’s not really true. They were only really competing against each other, and now they still are, just for fewer slots. We’re juts making what is actually true also officially true. But now the Bobs only have to worry about other Bobs, and so are also motivated to compete hard and perform as well as any Bob can. Abes compete with Abes for Abe-slots, Bobs compete with Bobs for Bob-slots. The best still rise to the top, and every group gets ‘equity’ by having their representative champions ‘included’ in that ‘diverse’ set of top slots.
So, in general, overall human capital development has probably *increased* in the post-intervention scenario. The only question is whether that increase is offset by problems in and near the top-slot level. Abes 1-5 are the same people, but Abes 6-10 are out of luck and, by assumption, would have superior performance in those slots to Bobs 1-5, which is a cost of the intervention. But how big is that cost, really, when compared of the benefit of getting all the Bobs to work hard? To the extent they are considered equals who are expected to work together and perform at a high level, the top Abes and Bobs may also be mismatched, which causes social sorting and negative feelings, but probably no more than existed before.
Now, there may be some instances in which one is trying hard to squeeze the absolute best possible performance out of the best possible humans, because there are circumstances in which the positive-sum achievements of those top people is so much more socially beneficial than those of their near-rivals that it’s worth it to have a genuine meritocracy.
But, let’s be honest, most of the spots people care about don’t require that kind of extraordinary superhuman ability or genius, and are just rat races or red queen races above 90th percentile talent, which is adequate for most other tournaments.
So, maybe there are only a few Bobs who can barely make the 90th percentile, and plenty of Abes between 91-99, but the extra talent of those Abes is just wasted in the top slots by the law of diminishing marginal returns.
Now, consider running this hypothetical in reverse. You start with quotas, and then you move to meritocracy. This improves the lives of a tiny number of Abes, with most of their extra potential talent not useful to society, but instead used to win wasteful competitions with other. But it is absolutely devastating to the Bobs, who lose not just every competition, but their spirit, as their whole community gives up in hopeless despair and bitter resentment.
Nice story. But affirmative action, which is what you’re describing, works a bit differently in practice. Economist, Thomas Sowell, studied its impact in five countries: India (with the oldest such program), Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and the U.S. His book, “Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study,” documents the results of his research. He found the following similar outcomes across all five nations:
1. The programs, initially targeted at a single group, were quickly expanded to include other groups. In some countries, including India and the U.S., most of the population is now covered under the programs.
2. The people in targeted classes who are most likely to be helped are those who need the least help. That is, they are those who are wealthier and better educated, and better able to make use of and understand the policies’ provisions.
3. The programs can lead to placing protected minorities into situations in which they are likely to fail.
4. Any success achieved by people covered by the policies is seen by others as “tainted.” That is, the others believe that the success was achieved only because of the programs.
5. People not in the favored group(s) tend to believe that the programs provide bigger advantages than they actually do.
6. The programs create hostilities, and sometimes deadly violence, between covered and uncovered classes.
7. Ending the programs has become politically impossible.
An interesting experiment would be to reserve half the spots on NBA teams to whites. Presently, less than 20% of players are white and almost all the stars are black. Would we eventually get a generation of white stars or a steady stream of bench warmers?
I don’t follow basketball enough to know, but from reading about it, my impression is that there are some unfortunate dynamics of racial interaction in the various developmental pipelines channeling talented youth into various competitive athletic activities that cause at least a little representational deviation from some Platonic Ideal version of meritocracy in some sports.
One factor is biological – blacks tend to mature faster (see, e.g.) than whites or Asians, with puberty onset and associated changes in hormone levels and physical characteristics occurring 6 months to a year earlier on average. That may not sound like much, but it can be a big deal at the high school ages, especially if there is intense competition and selective pressure for top ability within a narrow age cohort.
Not entirely unrelated is a social reason: people don’t want their kids to get bullied or picked on, to feel like an excluded outsider, to get injured accidentally or intentionally.
One way to figure out the relative contribution of these factors is to compare the representation in certain team sports with that of individual events with close athletic skills or profiles.
So, there are some physical actions like short sprints which require explosive energy for short periods of time, and the mean for people with West African heritage seems to be more than a standard deviation higher than other groups, so they dominate both those positions in team sports (centers in football), and individual events (100 meter dash).
On the other hand, soccer requires a lot of running and endurance, combination of jogging and sprinting for long periods. If you saw a big difference in representation between similar track-and-field events and the composition of soccer teams, it *might*, though not necessarily, hint at some social issue with the pipeline for soccer players.
Off-the-charts height, wingspan and athleticism are the prerequisites for elite basketball…
More here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sports_Gene
Date of birth also turns out to be a huge determinant of sports achievement. This is the racehorse effect.
Youth hockey in Canada was a classic example, if I can recall it correctly. Basically, you had to be a certain age by some cutoff date (4yo by September 1, along those lines). If you were born August 31, you’re the youngest kid in your age bracket. Born September 2 (“Sorry bud, next year, eh?”) and you’re the oldest.
Turns out, this is a big deal when you’re in U5 hockey. One kid is barely 4, the other is nearly 5. The old kid is better, tends to get more ice time, and gets more attention from the coaches. So it turns out the elite Canadian hockey players tend to have birthdays right after the cutoff date.
(Whether the older kids ought to get more attention and ice time is an interesting question for the parents. I’m just relaying what seems to happen.)
Canadian hockey was an interesting but extreme example since it’s a highly organized sport. Less organized sports like pick up hoops probably have a milder form of this effect.
That’s a really good description. Interesting thoughts.
The consensus of my youth, Straussian or not, was that blacks would be given 10% of the high status slots at large institutions with plenty of fat anyway, especially if peak performance wasn’t a big issue and their co-workers could pick up the slack for any drop in performance without too much trouble. This was much more clear east of the Mississippi and in the Paper Belt of the Accella corridor where much of the work is government or otherwise bullshit anyway.
Exceptions were made for start ups, STEM, Silicon Valley, high end science, and other areas were you couldn’t afford any slack in performance. It helped that much of this was taking place in parts of the countries with few blacks, like the West Coast.
Sometimes you got something touchy like under qualified black doctors…but not every doctor becomes a surgeon. You can find places for a not that talented 10% in the profession.
There were problems. For one, Hispanics immigrated in such numbers that the “give blacks 10% and who cares if they can’t perform at a high level” started to break down because you can’t do that with 30-40% of your workforce, but that’s what it will take to integrate Hispanics on the same terms.
The other problem returns to STEM started to increase everyone wanted a piece of the pie, so why should that be an exception.
I’d love to see an organizational leader publicly admit “we’re second tier, we don’t need the best people.”
OTOH, we implicitly do it when setting salaries. I could (God help anyone who does this) hire all rock star programmers if I paid $1 million/year. No one does and that guarantees you’re not going to get the best of the best every hire.
A case that hits closer to home:
1) I’m not and never will be a part of the top 1% of commenters here on the ASK blog. I’m a silly MAGA conservative who likes guns and chewing Copenhagen.
2) should ASK carve-out a special preferential commenting slot for the non-1%? Why? What value could it possibly provide to the rest of the community of readers?
3) In terms of status, why am I not bothered by not being part of the 1%? Hint: I’m able to earn a decent wage in a job that I enjoy…earned success > status. Has the value of earned success been entirely lost in the debate?
This is a nice framing. Thanks!
No so much “theory” as a fantasy. Scientific theory is indistinguishable from a fact. This is a delusional fabrication which conceived as a oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Racial dimension makes CRT very dangerous in multiethnic society. This is a racialist warfare.
This is an excellent lens through which to view the situation. Just a couple of points I would make to add on:
1. To be charitable to the CRT adherents for a second, I suppose one could argue that Western civilization was, for some time anyway, one big dominance hierarchy as it related to indigenous peoples in the places it colonized, because they were largely excluded from any prestige hierarchies and instead were treated as a caste. This of course has ceased to be the case, but we are left with the legacy of a prestige deficit for different ethnic groups, and CRT is essentially an intellectual con job aimed at providing reparations for this deficit via redistribution of prestige (and other more concrete resources, of course, too).
2. The prestige deficit is not narrowing on its own, thanks to factors I think Charles Murray has well articulated in both Losing Ground and The Bell Curve. This is of course strengthening the appeal of CRT.
3. In order to redistribute such things, one must be in a dominant position, so…yeah, this movement can’t help but be authoritarian or even gangsterish.
4. I do not think this is the only useful lens here, though. For example, in the same way that white working class voters in rural areas rallied around Donald Trump after he promised he could do something to improve their declining economic prospects, I think a lot of black folks who have never heard of Ibram Kendi or Ta-Nahisi Coates or Charles Mills nevertheless are regurgitating some watered down version of their rhetoric about systemic racism and white supremacy because it provides a potential solution for their own dimming economic prospects, as well as psychological relief for their own status anxieties by offering up a nebulous scapegoat as a reason for persistent and/or widening black/white SAT score gaps and the like.
This essay is deserving of the blog tagline, “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”. Kling clearly and firmly disagrees with Critical Race Theory, but he expresses his disagreement carefully, clearly, and calmly without anger or vilifying opponents. Kling’s rebuttals aren’t unique, but most people who hold them wouldn’t express them so carefully without anger.
I’d request to hear Kling’s charitable but firm disagreements with those on the right: Specifically, with the book, “Trumponomics”, by Trump Administration free market libertarian economists. Or with Kling’s former co-blogger, David Henderson’s praise of the Trump Administration’s deregulation efforts: https://www.hoover.org/research/trumps-deregulatory-successes
One more …
9. Globalization + Social Media + Atomized civil society = fewer, taller hierarchies In the past, managing the corner store was the peak of its own hierarchy and your role in your church, neighborhood, PTA, etc. were all other outlets.
One reason this particular critique is so off is that Critical Race Theory argues a structural racism that can very well be independent of a racist purpose.
This theory is easy enough to knock down, but this doesn’t work hard enough to do that.
Minimum wages laws were initially touted during the Progressive Era as a means of locking the “unfit” (which included blacks) out of the job market. The laws did, and still do have a disparate racial impact, though no one today supports them for that reason. The laws fit your description of structural racism.
I believe that many other Progressive and paternalistic policies fit your description as well. Even though most are “equal opportunity destroyers,” they probably do have a disparate impact on minorities. Any law that increases the cost of hiring a worker (e.g., employer mandates), that restricts market entry (e.g., occupational licensing), that penalizes marriage (e.g., tax and welfare laws), or reduces low-cost housing (rent controls) hurt all poor people but most hurt those who, in addition, have to deal with discrimination.
Unfortunately, removing these structurally racist laws is off the table, and any mention of reform is immediately labeled “racist.”
In any hierarchy, however arranged, most people are doomed to staying on the lower levels. That always stings. It especially stings for people who are closest and who can almost reach the bar, but not quite.
There is plenty of genuine admiration for brutal might in a dominance hierarchy, since the ability to dominate and crush rivals is its own source of prestige and respect and can even give rise to cults of personality worship when followers perceive they have a stake in the Big Man’s successes as group champion, “His wins are our wins, his domination is our domination.”
Likewise, even in a perfectly meritocratic prestige hierarchy, there is plenty of resentment, bitterness, and envy. These feelings are facts of life and volcanic passions. They are the stuff of human gunpowder that is highly provokable and exploitable, and thus every society needs an institution and related social technologies which can keep them in check. Or they will run amok. We are not keeping them in check, thus we find them running amok.
One might think that when positions in the hierarchy are allocated in a non-meritocratic manner, that it is then that the situation gives rise to strong feelings and valid complaints about ‘injustice’, which is true enough, especially for the talented but excluded meritorious. But in a way, it’s worse when one ‘solves’ that problem by making the system *actually* meritocratic.
In a system which is explicitly non-meritocratic, the losers can always salvage their self-esteem by rationalizing that the reason for their circumstances is someone else’s fault, the unfairness of the system. In other words, they are a ‘victim’ of that “systemic unfairness”, and they can walk around not just with an excuse, but with a very culturally valuable currency, the “socially acceptable excuse”. “I could have been a contender! But …”
This is especially valuable when other people not only accept this excuse but sincerely believe that personal circumstances and appearances are often wildly uncorrelated with inherent merit and value, that there are plenty of uncut ‘diamonds in the rough’, and who are thus highly motivated to uncover and select for innate worthiness (such as possession of superior reproductive material) in the midst of these misleading signals.
But what if you don’t have a socially acceptable excuse? What if you don’t even have an excuse which if acceptable to *yourself* in a big of ego-soothing self-delusion? Not only are no not esteemed, you are not self-esteemed. You are not a contender, you are “a bum, a nobody”. Not just a loser in outcome, but a loser in potential, a loser with nobody to blame which, in meritocracy, means you *deserve* to be a loser, and everybody else *also* thinks you are nothing but a real, hopeless loser. They don’t want you for anything except to stay away from them. You are manure in the rough, and one can’t polish manure.
This is psychologically *unbearable* for a lot of people. A person will be willing to turn the world upside down to undermine the basis for and legitimacy of the old prestige hierarchy, and to replace it with a new basis, no matter how crazy and ruinous in consequences, so long as it is one in which he can calculate he has a better shot at the top spots.
The problem is “giftedness privilege”.
Consider: the sole purpose of the SAT *is* to perpetuate the domination of the more gifted over the less gifted. Not the mere test, but the whole social institution of “The SAT” in which scores matter a lot to one’s life outcomes, precisely because they signal worthiness to earn better life outcomes.
One may say that the score *should* matter a lot, that it’s meritocratic, fair, and just for it to matter a lot, that all the alternatives are worse and create bigger problems. And that to the extent it’s valid to refer to high scorers effectively ‘dominating’ lower scorers, it’s only to the extent that some kind of that domination is inevitable in human affairs, and the least worst option is to allow people with higher potential for excellence to demonstrate that potential, earn the right to lead and influence, and to reap the rewards of the good things in life by producing things their fellows find most valuable.
And that’s what meritocracists *do* say. But the trouble is, it’s not enough. The almost-meritocrats are not consoled, quite the contrary.
What does meritocracy say to the losers? What does it *do* for the losers? Mere redistribution of income from the winners has proven to be a stubbornly ineffective balm to sooth their bruised egos, and after all, there is much more to life’s satisfactions besides money and stuff, especially if you can only get what all the other losers get, and have nothing special to show off.
Without those social technologies references above, meritocracy and individualist liberalism produce an inherently unstable social situation which cannot be cured by lots of “social democracy” redistribution.
Where there are no cures, there are pain-killers, and this pain can be killed in several ways. But the easiest and most destructive of these opiums for the masses is “lies about victimhood”. Loads and loads of high-octane whoppers about other people being to blame. “I could have been a contender, but it was you Charlie, it was you.”
These lies work to kill pain so long as (1) no one is permitted to rebut them without getting cancelled, and (2) the kind of almost-meritocrats taking the pain-killers and doing the canceling get opportunities for grift and advancement in the process.
But the thing we’ve learned about opioid pain-killers: if you overdose, you die.
Real pain killers become a problem when you take too much for too long, but it’s hard not to. Once you are used to a little it takes more to get the same effect. Hence why lots of opiod addicts originally had some work related pain they wanted a little relief from, but then got hooked.
Our society is set for exponential growth or death. No steady state, it’s un-American. . If Kendi and DiAngelo can get rich doing this…why not me? And if I can’t land a corporate sinecure, maybe I can loot a Target. Or the simple rush of bashing someones head in on the street.
At some point you have to mow the grass or you get buried.
You’re accepting the belief that free markets result in winners and losers. That’s far from the truth. In a free market, winners make everyone else a winner. I’m not as rich as Bill Gates, but I benefit by using Microsoft products nearly every day. I’m not as rich as Steve Jobs was, but I benefit by using his iPhone. I’m not as rich as Thomas Edison was, but I benefit by using the descendants of the light bulbs and of the power generation and distribution systems that he invented.
I’m not a genius nor am I fabulously wealthy, but I’m a winner because I live in a (mostly) free market society that allows me to benefit from the genius and wealth of others.
The smarter and richer the people around me are, the better off I’m likely to be. Or as Adam Smith put it:
“As a rich man is likely to be a better customer to the industrious people in his neighborhood, than a poor, so is likewise a rich nation.”
People in the worst ghettos of First world have lives materially better then nearly any other time and place by an order of magnitude. This has proven insufficient to satisfy them, and I don’t think your explanation is going to change that.
This explanation is straight out of Player Piano, it doesn’t change the fact that it feels an awful lot like a luxury Indian reservation.
Economics often has positive-sum results; everybody wins. Social hierarchies are zero-sum – nobody goes up in the rankings unless somebody goes down, and the men in the highest rankings have their choice of (most of) the women. Just because you have an iPhone doesn’t mean the ladies won’t swipe left.
Jim Crow was a political problem that could be ended only through political means. Because of its success, the Civil Rights movement became the paradigm for further African American progress.
But politics is not a good path to economic advancement. Perhaps this is because, as you say, there are a fixed number of political leadership positions, whereas there are an infinite number of slots for people in a free market who can produce goods and services that others want to buy.
In any case, as Thomas Sowell observed, ethnic groups that attempted to rise through political means were typically much less economically successful than those that largely stayed out of politics. Irish Americans, for example, who were politically active, advanced more slowly than did Jewish and Chinese Americans, who, because of bigotry, were largely excluded from public office.
Government can do little more than redistribute the economic pie; a process limited by the size of the pie. But as someone once said, the market isn’t a pie, it’s a bakery. And there’s no limit to the number of pies a bakery can produce. Anyone can get ahead in America by identifying and supplying others’ needs and wants. Since these are unlimited, there are no limits to the number of people can improve their lives by going into business. No limits, that is, as long as government doesn’t restrict competition with minimum wage laws, occupational licensing, housing restrictions, and so, endlessly, on.
Black “leaders” would not remain leaders if African Americans shifted their focus from government to the market. The leaders, then, need a permanent black underclass dependent upon government entitlements – rather than on their own initiative – for survival. The surest path to such entitlements is white guilt. But the white people who were responsible for slavery and Jim Crow are dead. How do you keep white guilt alive when the only legal, systemic discrimination most people have experienced is Affirmative Action?
They’ve chosen to zero in on the (declining) number of black people killed by white police officers and blame all police officers and all white people for the deaths. So far, their technique is working extremely well.
“advanced more slowly than did Jewish and Chinese Americans”
Are you insane? Have you ever looked at how much money Jews spend on politics?
https://twitter.com/steve_sailer/status/1105896288522952704
And that is just direct political spending. Most effort is on shaping culture.
“Anyone can get ahead in America by identifying and supplying others’ needs and wants.”
Not if you lack the genetic talent to fulfill those needs and wants. Are talentless underclass able to provide a service I would value at a price that sustains a first world living standard?
“Since these are unlimited, there are no limits to the number of people can improve their lives by going into business.”
Of course they are limited. There is a limit to the number of services I would pay for. At a certain point I would choose leisure over the pathetic attempts to provide value that the underclass might try to provide.
“How do you keep white guilt alive when the only legal, systemic discrimination most people have experienced is Affirmative Action?”
You’re living it buddy? Taken any lessons. I’ll give you a hint, countries with darker demographic profiles don’t have less affirmative action than us.
“So far, their technique is working extremely well.”
They learned something from capitalism…
No, I’m not insane. I’ve actually read a history book. You should try it. Believe it or not, American history did not start in 2018. For the first 150 years of the country’s existence, Jews were largely excluded from political office, so they had to find other ways to get ahead.
Let me give you a hint, “buddy.” Even people with low IQs can run a hot dog stand.
Hot Dog stand liscences literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They are bid up to the point where economic profit goes to zero just like your textbook says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzWDXhXkEQQ
Not in Texas.
@asdf
But do you understand the economics of banana stands? My client is looking to sell.
https://youtu.be/pSS7iJUsYCY
One banana to a split.
From https://english.uchicago.edu/:
Using Kling’s language, this is all dominance no prestige.
I like this framing of your objections. I think this post has done the most to bring me along to your view.
If Theory didn’t go to extremes, would you be onboard with it? If instead of going to extremes, it just pointed out the presence of dominance hierarchies (in addition) to the prestige hierarchies. And tried to analyze the impact of both.
Or do you see many of these institutions as prestige only?
I think that CRT is pernicious even if not taken to extremes. The problem is that its default assumption is that any differences between identifiable groups are due to either evil (i.e., racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.) people or evil institutions.
How many of the differences are due to the benefits of being in the majority as would be the case in any society? How many are due to cultural differences? How many are due to demographic differences (e.g., the “average” black American is about 10 years younger than the “average” white person)? How many of the differences are due to geographic distribution (e.g., the cost of living, and therefore the wages, are much lower in Texas than in New York)?
CRT doesn’t take any of those variables into account. Typically, when such variables are brought up, they’re explained away as being artifacts of racism.