“8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personalities, abilities, and social behavior.”
Here I have what I think is a major disagreement with Murray. If he means the term “shared environment” in the narrow sense used by say twin studies, he is probably correct. But in the more literal, Webster-derived conception of “shared environment” I very much disagree. Culture is a truly major shaper of our personalities, abilities, and social behavior, and self-evidently so. For my taste the book did not contain nearly enough discussion of culture and in fact there is virtually no discussion of the concept or its power, as a look at the index will verify.
Now that I have taken a first pass through the book, I believe that this criticism is unfair and should be retracted. Murray uses the term “milieu” to cover what Tyler means by “culture,” and Murray says everything about “milieu” that Tyler would want him to say about culture.
What Murray means by “shared environment” is just about anything that can vary within a (cultural) milieu. Parenting, schooling, government taxes and transfers, etc. All of it runs up against a broader version of the Null Hypothesis. But Murray says very clearly and emphatically that the milieu matters a great deal.
I wish that Murray had written Human Diversity under a pseudonym. Perhaps “Thomas Piketty” or “John Rawls.” It deserves the sort of study and discussion that was afforded Capital in the 21st Century or A Theory of Justice.
Cowen is wrong to not recognize that milieu and culture are synonymous but he is very correct in highlighting the confusion with the labels “shared environment” and “non-shared environment”. These are holdovers from the intuitive assumption that “nurture” was important; the language didn’t change when the surprising empirical data undermined this assumption.
Shared == Nurture
Non-shared == Non-nurture
Culture is important but it acts indirectly through peer environments.
I think we should embrace and celebrate Charles Murray’s and E.O. Wilson’s struggles specifically because of the widespread perception that they are controversial . They have both been vindicated after decades of oppression and discrimination, ironically, in the name of social justice. Nature vs Nurture is the foundation of Kling’s Three Languages of Politics and the debate has been settled empirically for a long time now.
More succinctly, Cowen’s 8th point should be recorded as:
8. Nurture usually plays a minor role in explaining personalities, abilities, and social behavior.
Reworded!!! Stinkin’ autocorrect.
Plomin & others have pretty much arrived at about 50/50 for genetics & environment (nature/ nurture). The important distinction is within ‘environment/ nurture’ that it is NOT the home/ family to any significant degree, but the entirety of life experience/ society/ culture.
Exactly. I’m trying to read Robert Plomin’s “Blueprint” because it keeps coming up in comments. I didn’t get very far the first time through because he was restating information I already knew well and fully embraced. Plomin is interesting because he was responsible for most/all of the key adoption and twin research. He also avoided publishing about the nature vs. nurture implications that his data clearly showed, as he states:
So let’s give credit where credit is due, with Judith Rich Harris. Also, the story is so much better because she changed the world despite a long list of supposed “barriers” (uncredentialed, unaffiliated, female, mother, disabled). As Steve Pinker rightly observed in The Blank Slate:
The first few pages of the Preface in Pinker’s book starts with quotes from The Bell Curve and The Nurture Assumption. These few pages sum up the controversy and the significance of the new findings. Everyone should know these few pages. Everything else written in the subsequent pages and subsequent decades are details on the same theme.
It doesn’t really matter very much if it’s 50/50 nature/nurture, or 90/10, 10/90 or 1/99.
The only thing that matters in principle is if someone admits the nature component is different from zero, and that at least some statistical disparities between individuals and groups are natural; impersonal; unattributable to oppression, discrimination or other social conditions; and thus fundamentally irremediable via intervention (material, educational, or otherwise), reform, or political rearrangements.
If one accepts this, then, if we’re going to do anything to adjust those outcomes, we can’t justify it in terms of bad people doing bad things, but instead on the fact that some folks having bad luck makes life more unfair and unequal than we’d like.
The trouble is, the “bad people doing bad things is to blame” premise is essential in any society or legal system like ours, where fault must be claimed to justify that kind of action.
(You’ll know the revolution is utterly complete when the progressives openly transition to an explicit legal theory of no-fault strict liability of white males just for being white males, for any identity-group disparities. Just pure and perpetual “Racial Robin Hood”.
We’re not that far! Take a look at that table in the report in Cochrane’s Wokeademia post. Males were 56.5% of the applicant pool, but only 36.4% of the wokelist, er, I mean, ‘shortlist’. Whites were 53.7% of applicants, but only 13.6% of the wokelist – a reduction in representation of 75%)
It’s important to understand how acceptance of the possibility of “>0 Nature”, even in principle, threatens the whole edifice of modern anti-discrimination law and policy, as if a little pinhole will turn into a spreading crack that brings down the whole dam and the devastating floodwaters behind it.
That’s why it must be denied at all costs, anyone who doesn’t deny it punished, and anyone who doesn’t cooperate in that punishment and toeing the line in general, also punished. Everything hangs by that thread of zero, otherwise, disparities can’t speak for themselves as presumptively actionable, as a legal matter.
Let’s back up a little bit and examine a philosophical issue that is a huge and recurring problem in our time.
To us moderns, there is no other obvious way to proceed rationally with any important decision except based on good evidence, derived from empirically and scientifically-validated methods, study, and scholarship, and consistent with the current, confident consensus of recognized experts in that field of study. This is “rational decision making” and “evidence-based policy-making”.
What else are you going to do? Favor irrational decision-making? Evidence-indifferent policy-making?
The trouble is, the more important and influential the decision that is supposed to flow downstream from facts, forensics, studies, and Science, the greater the corrupting influence of politics and ideology that travels back upstream.
So that the convenient and needed (one might say, ‘not actually correct but politically correct’) facts and studies necessary to provide an alibi and cover story for an ideologically predetermined course of action are backward-calculated and generated on order. The closer any field of inquiry is to controversial political action, the more likely it has become corrupted in this manner: an unhealthy and untrustworthy source of advocacy fodder and, in general, authoritative bunk. I think this is compatible with Kling’s critique of contemporary Economics, even before it started going down the Road to Sociology.
The extension of the idea of ‘normative sociology’ and the amusing phrase lampooning all this is Policy-Based Evidence-Making, and see also Oren Cass’s article of that name in National Affairs from the Summer 2017 issue. One again, the line of division is explicable via my framework of “Real vs. Fake”.
Now, in the law, everybody knows about the problem of the “battle of experts” in trials, because you can always get a hired gun expert to testify for or against anything. The courts have tried to deal with this problem (e.g., Daubert, GE, and Kumho Tire), but none of that effort has fixed the fundamental problem, especially to the extent it sanctifies mere consensus and the bureaucratic review process, which merely rubber stamps truth and error alike, and propagates and sanctifies any social failure modes that already exist in the field. “Replication Crisis”, anyone? “Forensics Reliability Crisis”? Even after all that time and effort, the live argument in courts today is not about 0.001 differences in the estimates of the risks posed by Roundup or Baby Power, but whether these things are totally safe or totally hazardous, whether companies are liable for nothing, or liable for hundreds of million of dollars per case. Some ‘solution’ that turned out to be.
There is no substitute for judgment, but law judges aren’t competent to independently judge disputes regarding scientific claims, or to independently adjudicate arguments about those claims. And in time everyone watches what does and doesn’t get past Kafka’s gatekeepers and learns the magic words to say and credentials and papers to generate and wave at a judge sufficient to allow a judge to do whatever he wanted to do in the first place anyway. “I’ll allow it!”
Now, there is an ongoing legal debate (like the old one between Law and Equity) between who one might call the Legalists on the one hand, and the Orthoticists – those who insist on ideologically ‘proper basis, proper results’ – on the other.
For a Legalist (and it seems Attorney General Barr takes this position), the only question is whether the law does or doesn’t give the authority to a particular official to use a particular power. A judge shouldn’t try “mind-reading” to see if the official has pure and allowable, or (secretly) impure and disqualifying motives. Like ‘at will’ employment back in ancient history, you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, and no further inquiry is warranted. Additionally, a judge shouldn’t be able to invalidate a facially neutral and valid exercise of authorized power because one doesn’t like the outcome.
A Legalist would argue that if one doesn’t like a particular use of power, then if one is playing fair, one ought to try to change the law so that the option is off the table for anyone, not just part of a rigged game such that the power is secretly only deployable by people you like, for reasons and outcomes you like, which, when the bias and favoritism have some kind of ideological cover story, is the Orthotic (i.e. ‘Activist’) approach to law.
Now, the Legalist approach has it’s drawbacks, and it will allow some bad people to get away with some bad things in ways that are hard to stop.
However, one of its major, enormous advantages is that it doesn’t require upstream inputs to exercise available powers, and so doesn’t incentivize the corruption of as many people and institutions upstream as is necessary to manufacture the necessary inputs at the necessary levels of ‘confident consensus’. That process releases termites to eat away into the foundations unpinning the institutions of our whole society, a deforming cancer warping and twisting everything to serve the needs of the tumor.
And Legalism insulates and immunizes exercises of power from invalidation by means of merely demonstrating downstream disparities, i.e., Disparate Impact doctrine.
Under a Legalist legal regime, we would be free to debate the latest best guesses as to the relative contribution of nature vs nurture to human characteristics and capabilities without it unleashing a jihad, without the fate of the world hinging on the results, without the intimidation, humiliation, and terror of enforcement of orthodoxy and punishment of heretics.
But unfortunately we have (perhaps “tolerated the transition to” is more accurate) – an Orthotic legal regime, and thus the upstream corruption requires that everyone insist on absolutely 0% Nature for disparities that are politically leveragable, and absolutely 100% Nature for eccentricities triggering anti-discrimination consideration.
That’s why, under our intellectually corrupting, Orthotic regime, whether the fact of the matter is 50/50 or 90/10 or 10/90 is really irrelevant. Where it counts, it’s zero or bust.
This is the point/truth being emphasized by Hernnstein, Murray, Plomin, Rich-Harris, Pinker, Ridley, Wade, and Mitchell over the last 30 years. We need a sticky label.
Nurture-Only is False.
I think wokeness can easily accept nature > 0%. What it cannot accept is group differences caused by nature.
Within wokeness, everyone agrees that some people are smarter than others and that part of that is “nature”. Even more, lots of woke leaders think that they are smarter and deserve more because of their smarts. Most every college students believes she deserves a good job with good pay because she will have a degree.
To be blunt, everyone knows heredity exists. “DNA, man.”
But to think there are differences between groups and that these differences help explain disparities is by definition racism, sexism, etc. and they are moral evils. If they were true, Nature would be evil and that is simply not possible.
There is a truth embedded in this statement but I’m unsure if the “group” qualifier is required. Traditional progressives, the target of Pinker’s “Blank Slate”, believe that all genetic differences are skin deep and that gender/race differences are social constructs. Are the new Woke different than the traditional BlankSlaters?
Consider: “Baby I Was Born That Way” (“immutable characteristics”) is not compatible or consistent with “Blank Slate Social Construct”.
I believe that the “new Woke” believe there are some genetic differences that are more than skin deep. Sure, they say things like, “There is no such thing as IQ” or “IQ has no meaning” but they know deep in the fiber of their being that some people are smarter than others and that some of that is heredity (many also believe that they are on the smarter side). They know that some special ed kids are way different and it’s not because of upbringing or the racist, sexist society they grew up on.
What they don’t accept is twofold. One, they don’t accept any differences between groups. No group is on average smarter or stronger or more gay than any other group.
Two, there are few important characteristics that are inherited. Sure, there is height and skin color and a bit of smarts (and, well, maybe, major stuff in people with severe autism, schizophrenia, etc.) but there is no such thing as inborn temperament, at least no differences that can’t be eliminated with proper therapy, training, etc. When it comes to who you’re sexually attracted to, you are unchangeably “born that way” but when it comes to whether you are shy or assertive, optimistic or pessimistic, etc., it’s all a matter of training.
Your and Handle’s point about the “You are born that way” progressive position on sexual orientation is well taken. All of these models have weird edge cases and inconsistencies. A modified version of Kling’s TPL still seems closest to the truth for me.
I would love to see someone run a survey like this, administered to a large group containing many “woke”, many “anti-woke”, and many “don’t really care”.
Each line would have a characteristic and the numbers zero through ten, with the question, “For each characteristic, how much do you believe it is caused by genes/heredity? Circle the number closest to your understanding, with zero meaning ‘not at all caused by genes/heredity’ and ten meaning ‘completely caused by genes/heredity’.” Then 20 lines or more: height, weight, skin color, hair color at age 10 (to avoid dying and old age graying), sexual orientation, intelligence, athletic ability, conscientiousness, shyness, openness to new experience, and so on.
My guess is that you would find some agreement between groups on large gene contribution (hair color, skin color, sexual orientation), some agreement on low gene contribution (conscientiousness, shyness), and some disagreement between groups (intelligence, athletic ability?).
If I really wanted to do it right, I’d first do a preliminary survey and calculate the average results for each characteristic. Then, in the final survey, with a very large population, I would have two instruments, one where the questions go from the highest average results to the lowest and one where they are in the opposite order. If people had strong beliefs, that shouldn’t change their responses, but if they didn’t, I would expect the early answers to prime their later ones, e.g. if you had circled 10 for skin color and 9 for height, you would be more likely to continue circling numbers indicating that genes were important.
I feel like somebody must have done something like this.
Robert Plomin “Blueprint”, pg 6, Table 2. It describes a survey of 5K participants asking them to estimate %heritability of 14 traits (do a Google Books search). It is missing the political categories you want.
God, I hate getting old. I read it last summer and forgot this was in it. If something like it was redone for the U.S., I’d like to see it broken down by politics and age.
I wonder if younger people are more likely to believe in the importance of genetics. Certainly, “DNA” has a bigger cultural presence. Every TV viewer knows that the police can identify people from a DNA sample. When today’s old people were young, blank slatism was the cultural default.
Anyway, from the book and reordered:
Table 2 How much are these traits influenced by genetics? [%] The first column of results shows the average opinions of 5,000 young adults in the UK. The second column shows results from genetic research.
Eye colour 77 95
Height 67 80
Breast cancer 53 10
Schizophrenia 43 50
Autism 42 70
General Intelligence 41 50
Weight 40 70
Reading disability 38 60
Personality 38 40
Spatial ability 33 70
Remembering faces 31 60
Stomach ulcers 29 70
School achievement 29 60
Verbal ability 27 60
Irony alert: one of the basics of “post-modernism” was that there is no such thing as perfectly rational decision-making or evidence-based policy-making. That all the “social sciences” do not know any absolute truths and can never know any absolute truths.
In some people that leads to epistemic humility, “I’m pretty sure this is right but …”
I suppose in some sense wokeness is a reaction against post-modernism (at least honest post-modernism). It is an attempt to achieve certainty by imposing spiritual truth on reality.
Not a reaction, merely a shift in rhetoric when, ironically, there was a transposition of power relations, and the show was on the other foot. When out of power, call for tolerance and freedom of expression. When in power, crush heresy with merciless ruthlessness.
But the whole time they were clearly animated by the confident belief that they possessed the enlightened knowledge of the Moral Truth for human relations.
“merely a shift in rhetoric”
You may well be right. But this argument is wholly different from the ones you’ve been making. The ones you’ve been making point out the intellectual consistency in Wokeness, how it gives way like a giant dam when one point of fact is shown to be wrong.
This one says, “Intellectual consistency doesn’t matter. All that matters is power.” There is a faint whiff here of, “It’s all tribalism”–an argument you have excoriated.
TBH, I believe Charles Murray in 1994 released The Bell Curve to convince good white people to not care about leaving behind the inner city African-Americans. He made a lot of fair points and it is reasonable for complaints about the ineffectiveness of government aid to the poor but I felt the underlining theme was:
Low IQ people are meant to handle the stresses of the modern world and oh look at race IQs at who is going to more likely fail. And the US system is fair and just and look at the high IQ Asian-American successes.
But given the post-Obama election we have seen some of the modern global economy turn against the Rust Belt (and Southern) White Working Classes and I believe is having a harder time rationalizing this reality. To put it simple, the people left behind are no longer the inner city kids of Compton (or say the kids born in Imperial County) but the kids growing in West Virginia. And like it or not the Upper Middle Classes who were the Reagan and Bush Jr. base are turning into Obama Republicans. (Yes there are loads of contradictions and it probably explains why Warren is not winning the 2020 Primary.)
The most crazy part of the 2020 Primary, I almost becoming a Bloomberg supporter.
I think Murray’s Quillette podcast discussing his book Diversity puts your interpretation to rest. This belief is purely yours, not Murrays. He stresses the “one line” from The Bell Curve which states they are agnostic about the genetic contribution. This line is part of the key paragraph from The Bell Curve that Pinker and others quote:
There are no silent dog whistles containing secret racial messages in that paragraph. Robert Plomin’s adoption and twin data put hard numbers on “the mix” which average to 50:50 across the board. Judith Rich Harris drove home that none of the 50% environmental contribution is “nurture” in the personality measures. The consensus on nurture by both professional and populist opinion should be a strong reminder to us not to fully trust our intuitive nor conventional views.
I think we should focus on the fact that social justice activism is based on beliefs that have been empirically proven to be false.
It’s better when a religion only requires one to have faith in the unfalsifiable invisible than insisting that one believe in the falsifiable visible. Better to preserve uncertainty in the ineffable mystery of existence and nature of the divine, than to punish any heretic who is the first to stop clapping when The Party announces “two plus two equals five”.
Exactly. The social justice faithful have hitched their wagon to the falsifiable visible. Is it best to meet their illiberal tactics with an escalation of illiberal counter-tactics or to emphasize that which is already falsified. Use the force, Luke. Don’t give in to your dark nihilism. You (and those like you) are our only hope.
There’s more to it than that, and what I think is a crucial element as regards the necessary ingredients for an optimally pluralistic liberalism able to maintain genuine tolerance of different beliefs without dissolving them. Two traditions based on unfalsifiable invisibles and the inscrutable immaterial, however otherwise incompatible with regards to certain assertions and claims, can nevertheless adopt a modus vivendi and live and let live peaceful pragmatism of reciprocal respect and non-interference, using the domain of intractable supernatural uncertainty and as a kind of permissive slack for ‘innocent error’ an otherwise good person could make and, in the absence of threat, weighs more in favor of persuasion and conversion and doesn’t cry out for refutation by eradication and extermination.
An ideology of metaphysical constructs which nevertheless wears the skin suit of material, empirical Science, however, is based on claims about the falsifiable visible, universal truths without possibility of good faith dissension, as if it were “quod semper, ubique, et ab omnibus”. Error has no rights, and different beliefs are both wrong and Wrong, and must be stamped out for the good of all mankind. And even those falsifiable claims are in fact false, falsified, easily seen by anyone to be false, there is just no end to how vicious and destructive the efforts to further the cause will be, as the only ideologically correct way to respond to the failure to achieve the impossible is to double down, and double down again, and again and again, into the endless depths of mass insanity.
Related to the above is the Cowen-Hanson paper Are Disagreements Honest?
Short answer: “Nope.”
If we both follow the same rules of rational epistemology, Bayesian logic, and empirical eliminative materialism, and start with the same facts and observations, same standards of evidence, and engage in honest dialectic exchange with each other, then there’s no way to defend lingering differences as regards beliefs and conclusions. We must converge, else someone is making a mistake and/or being dishonest on some point.
That is, there is no remaining “room for debate”. No way to “Agree to disagree” in sincerity and in good faith. There’s no, “Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just, like, uh, your opinion, man.”
So if we disagree, and I’m confident I’m right, and I won’t accept your argument to the contrary, then you’re wrong, end of story.
And if one takes such a perspective and is fired up by fanatical revolutionary zeal giving no quarter to any articulable limiting principle, and you stand in their way, well, watch out.
It seems to me that an immediate implication of this is that to create the possibility of good faith, honest disagreement – which is an essential ingredient to tolerance that isn’t just expedient or pragmatic courtesy of humoring people you think are wrong – requires a claim explicitly relaxing the conditions and assumptions of the logic of the Cowen-Hanson paper.
If we’re going to treat beliefs about life and The Good like Truth in Math, then if I believe 2+2 = X, and you believe it’s Y != X, then we can both be wrong, but we can’t both be right, and also rightfully maintain our different, confident beliefs after attempting to resolve our differences.
But that’s exactly the kind of flexibility and uncertainly that pluralistic tolerance requires to justify itself, which means it needs an alternative attitude or conception about certain Truths than the math one. That is, the kind of Real tolerance that isn’t Fish’s boutique (i.e., Fake) multiculturalism.
And similar to boutique multiculturalism, there is also what I think is an obvious and apt legal analogy to meaningful vs trivial (i.e. Real vs Fake) Federalism or Subsidiarity. If a rule or right is potentially important or has significant impact on our lives, it would be important for everyone, everywhere, always, and thus centralized and ‘incorporated’. If not incorporated and centralized, then local variance can only be tolerated in the long run if it’s also fundamentally trivial in nature or effect. If there is one mathy universal Truth, then there can exist no single basis that justifies multiple, inconsistent, and importantly different approaches or courses of action.
But if we are to take federalism, subsidiarity, and tolerance for deep difference seriously, then we need poly-valent justifications as a philosophical necessity.
Even if true religious freedom is an impossibility (see Sullivan) and believers of all kinds and non-believers alike have to submit in some ways to contrary secular authority, we still require a way to think that people can believe believe different things about certain core ideological subjects, honestly and in good faith, and keep on believing them even after talking it all out, and that there is enough irremediable uncertainty about it all that they can both be ‘right’ in some way that doesn’t demand the sanding down of inconsistencies and incompatibilities.
The trouble is, you don’t want to to “so open minded that your brains fall out,” and succumb to nihilistic, objective-reality-denying postmodern relativism. One needs to find the right balance and swim through the narrow strait between the Scylla and Charybdis.
It seems to me there is only one way in principle to do this, which is (1) “Putting Pluralism First”, that is, making that goal logically prior to the Cowen-Hanson-Bayesian conditions in certain circumstances, and (2) explicitly compartmentalize epistemology in “Render unto Caesar” style, with amoral material questions getting the CHB universalist treatment, and morally, political, metaphysical questions of The Good getting a relaxed, particularist treatment such that the room for a justification for peaceful coexistence – via an intellectual regime in which “agreeing to disagree” is logically valid – is always plausible preserved.
“Environmental differences of this magnitude and pattern are implausible. Recall further that the B/W difference (in standardized units) is smallest at the lowest socioeconomic levels. Why, if the B/W difference is entirely environmental, should the advantage of the “white” environment compared to the “black” he greater among the better-off and better-educated blacks and whites? W e have not been ahle to think of a plausible reason. An appeal to the effects of racism to explain ethnic differences also requires explaining why environments poisoned by discrimination and racism for some other groups-against the Jews in some regions of America, for example-have higher scores than the national average.”
p.299 of The Bell Curve
I got more if you need them.
Murray states pretty clearly that he thinks the odds of “the gap” being 0% genetic are “implausible”. So whatever % he thinks is his best guess for mean and standard deviation, 0% is going to have to fall several SDs to the left of mean. That’s not really “agnostic”, its staking a position that he thinks environmentalists are wrong in a meaningful way and that the burden of proof is on them at this point.
You could of course put this to rest by asking Murray directly what his best guess of the % genetic is causal in the gap, and not let him squirm out of it with mere words. Have him put a number to it, and if he does and in minuscule I will admit I was wrong about him.
Charles Murray, “Human Diversity”
The FEELING that a stupid person is equal in “human worth or dignity” to a smart, accomplished person–say, a college professor–is lacking in a lot of people.
The words, yes; the feeling, no.
First, I want to acknowledge your dodging the question of fact I raised. Moving on.
Charles believes (to some degree) that all human beings are of equal “human worth or dignity” because of philosophical precepts that he holds (possibly religious).
That doesn’t mean he believes that:
1) Everyone (or every group) is equally X (smart, strong, etc).
2) That X isn’t valuable in achieving ends Y that we all seem to agree are “superior”.
3) That you can have a society full of people without X and still achieve Y.
I’ve questioned Murray’s total commitment to human moral equality based on other statements he has made that are a matter of public record.
For instance, his belief that people owe greater moral allegiance to those they share a nation with than those they don’t. That isn’t “equal”, its biased. It’s a complete contradiction of his statement you quote above.
In addition, he’s stated that in determining immigration we should consider the genetic potential of the person under question. Why would we do that if everyone is of equal human worth and dignity?
He has also expressed concern that we provide too much subsidy to those with low genetic potential, leading to heightened fertility rates. Make no mistake, eliminating current welfare and replacing it with the UBI means drastic cuts for those people at the bottom, as UBI will not make up for what they get today.
He has also stated that in poorer society (full of low IQ people) it may not even be possible to provide minimal levels of welfare to those with the least genetic potential.
I think Charles takes his believe in the equality of human worth and dignity very seriously, but I also think he knows that this is an expensive indulgence that isn’t quite 100% true and can only be afforded to a finite degree.
Which is the exact same position I take. I’m just more pessimistic than him about how expensive an indulgence it is, and when such a belief has to make way for pragmatic reality.
I’m not dodging your question, asdf. I can’t speak for Charles Murray other than quote what he has said explicitly. The quote I gave above ends with “The chapters to come make that clear.” I’m still in Part I: Gender Is a Social Construct.
What is clear to me is that you should stop assuming that Charles Murray shares your beliefs. Your best strategy at this point is to claim that Richard Herrnstein is a fellow traveler and that Charles Murray is being disingenuous with Herrnstein’s views since his death. Otherwise Richard Lynn is an academic that clearly shares your views.
I doubt the vast majority of people, including Charles Murray, share all of my beliefs. I would find it improbable that any two random people share all of the same believes, no matter who those people are or what their beliefs are.
In fact I’ve made it clear that I have strong differences in beliefs with Murray on a lot of things.
You’re the one claiming that Murray believes X, and I’m pointing out the ways in which Murray clearly doesn’t believe in X. In print, in interviews, etc.
Why you can’t admit that you and Murray (or some of your statements about Murray’s beliefs) aren’t in perfect sync is for your to figure out.
“Your best strategy”
I don’t have a strategy. I’m stating the facts as I see them.
You mean the same Charles Murray who supports a UBI for those very people you think he wants us to abandon?
Certainly, it’s wrong to say Charles Murray wants to “give up” on people. He wrote several books saying what a disaster it brewing at the bottom and why its important we make efforts to fix it.
Furthermore, Murray explicitly calls for INDIVIDUAL people in his class to take INDIVIDUAL actions on this matter. Not just say “I pay taxes for them programs” as a way out of their personal responsibility. That’s asking a lot more than writing a check.
It is fair to say that Murray wants us to “give up” on achieving certain (impossible) outcomes and perhaps defunding government programs aimed at doing so (because they are useless of even negative in his view). That’s fair, though its not the same thing as “giving up”.
As for the UBI, if your currently getting welfare (or even social security) your benefits are in fact much greater than what Murray would pay you under the UBI. A single mother of two will receive many tens of thousands of dollars in various assistances that Murray wants to eliminate in exchange for UBI.
So we are talking about something like a 50-75% drop in assistance for these people under UBI. Of course this is consistent with Murray’s view that such benefits should be cut (you can find direct quotes in The Bell Curve), but probably will mean lots of children suffering from material deprivation.
I don’t oppose this myself, but let’s be clear what a UBI means. If its revenue neutral, then its inevitable that current recipients (who we would generally consider “dependents”) will get less so that non recipients (prime age employed workers) can get more.
I’m not surprised that the post and previous comments make no reference to Hayek’ Epilogue to his Law, Legislation, and Liberty (it’s in the third volume published in 1979). It has been ignored even by his most enthusiastic disciples.
The epilogue’s title, “The Three Sources of Human Values”, refers to biology, culture, and reason as those three sources. It was written in early 1978 when Hayek was 79 years old, and prompted by the publication of G. E. Pugh’s The Biological Origins of Human Values (1977), a book that received little attention.
Perhaps it was Hayek’s last academic lecture and paper:
“In concluding this epilogue I am becoming increasingly aware that it ought not to be that [the task which our age is assigning to the rational construction of new institutions is far too big] but rather a new beginning. But I hardly dare hope that for me it can be so.” (p.176 of the original edition).
I wonder how much progress we have made in the past 40 years. My view is a lot on each of the three sources but not in putting them together.
Interesting. I can’t comment for others but I simply was unaware of Hayek’s commentary on sociobiology. I read the first few and last few pages from an online pdf of the epilogue named The Three Sources of Human Values. I find it a fascinating as it describes a young whipper snapper named Edward O. Wilson and his new-fangled science called social biology.
Maybe I’m misreading the epilogue but I think the whole point is to emphasize that the third source is what we now call “emergence” and it is as important as Pugh’s two sources of human values:
1. Innate (i.e. Nature) [Pugh]
2. Rational Design [Pugh]
3. Emergence [Hayek]
Perhaps de-emphasizing Emergence is a sin Pugh made but I think its hard to claim E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology dismisses it as his research on the eusocial behavior of insects was an important new example of Emergence (after Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and Charles Darwin’s Tangled Bank).
I don’t think Hayek’s fear of scientism displacing emergence was warranted. At least for myself, emergence is the unexplored frontier of the hard sciences. Deborah Gordon’s work on eusocial insects has barely advanced beyond Wilson’s work. Robert Plomin makes the mistake of equating genes with innate nature and ignores the emergent aspects of biology as described in Jamie A. Davies’ “Life Unfolding” (thanks again for the tip RogerSweeney). I’m not aware of a working model of emergence since James Lovelock’s Daisyworld in the 80’s.
Another quote that contradicts Cowen’s claim that Charles Murray de-emphasizes “culture”:
“Human Diversity” Ch3: Sex Differences in Neurocognitive Functioning
I am having trouble figuring out what distinguishes “culture” from “shared environment”… Perhaps someone like Judith Rich Harris would say peer effects matter, but where do the peers get their culture? Shared environment seems to have a lot of overlap with culture and peer effects. Yet shared culture apparently has little effect.
One way I suppose this can reconciled is that culture is a sort of emergent property. (I think I got this idea explicitly from you somewhere?) Everyone you interact with shapes you a tiny little bit, and everyone they interact with shapes them a tiny little bit. Any single person (even your father or mother) has only a tiny effect that cannot be measured, but in aggregate it matters. Is this the right way to think about it?
On the other hand, genetics seems to matter a lot in terms of shaping one’s culture: twins wear similar things, read similar books, share a sense of humor, etc. But those twin studies all involved kids growing up in America. If Scott Sumner had a twin that grew in Japan, would Japanese Scott Sumner have different tastes or still watch a lot of movies? (I would not be surprised if Japanese Scott Sumner ended up liking a lot of the same movies as American Scott Sumner.) If genetics can affect tastes, then differences in genes on average between two countries would affect their respective cultures, even if they were otherwise identical. Culture would seem to have some kind of genetic leash then.
In twin and adoption studies, “shared environment” basically means “home environment”.
In a very broad sense, all cultures are on a genetic leash. Humans evolved in groups and have a large suite of predispositions which make the existing human cultures possible. On the one hand, culture and social life is natural (contra Freud, Civilization and It’s Discontents) but on the other hand, only certain cultures, certain ways of living, are possible.
The question whether there are significant genetic differences between groups that in turn cause different cultures is an open one. But one fraught with political mines. So it is generally avoided.
By the way, has anyone proposed an explanation for the alleged inefficacy of shared environment? Shared and unshared environments appear to be the same kind of thing, and children are not more dramatically exposed to the latter than to the former. It seems strange that one would have so much more impact than the other.