Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins wrote,
we measure the consequence of extending compulsory schooling in England to ages 14, 15 and 16 in the years 1919-22, 1947 and 1972. From administrative data these increases in compulsory schooling added 0.43, 0.60 and 0.43 years of education to the affected cohorts. We estimate the effects of these increases in schooling for each cohort on measures of adult longevity, on dwelling values in 1999 (an index of lifetime incomes), and on the the social characteristics of the places where the affected cohorts died. Since we have access to all the vital registration records, and a nearly complete sample of the 1999 electoral register, we find with high precision that all the schooling extensions failed to increase adult longevity (as had been found previously for the 1947 and 1972 extensions), dwelling values, or the social status of the communities people die in. Compulsory schooling ages 14-16 had no effect, at the cohort level, on social outcomes in England.
Pointer from Jeffrey Miron.
We often talk about sending too many kids to college, but I suspect that we send too many kids to high school. Are people really getting much out of it?
I’d add to that high schools (and to a lessor extent middle school where middle schools aren’t an extension of elementary school) are where all the controversy in public education is. It’s where the curriculum starts to vary a great deal between students. It’s the age where kids start to act up. It’s where the school attendance zones seem to expand to include different neighborhoods. It’s where lots of the controversial ideological issues start to get taught. It’s the point past which you start to need specialized teachers rather than anybody. It’s the point where expense starts to explode.
If public school ended before high school a lot of the rancor around it would end.
I’d be partial to offering something like free trade school during teenage years to anyone who wanted it.
asdf,
You love to cite Gregory Clark to support your policy conclusions but he draws opposite conclusions than you from his work. He is an enthusiastic supporter of a robust Nordic style government sponsored social safety net. While he does conclude that such interventions don’t much improve the social mobility of the underclass, he also concludes they don’t harm the middle and upper classes the way you keep insisting they do. Furthermore, he concludes that since his work shows the good fortune of the upper class and bad fortune of the lower class is just an accident of birth, it does not provide a basis claiming anyone “deserves” anything in particular.
In a paper titled “Welfare Reform, 1834” (http://economics.mit.edu/files/2723) he analyses the welfare reform in England inspired by Malthusian fears of dysgenic effects of the more generous welfare system that existed before that “reform.” He finds “no evidence of any of the alleged social costs that prompted the harsh treatment of the poor after 1834.” He finds that those welfare payments did not harm the recipients or the upper class that financed them. The money quickly cycled through the economy in a way that benefitted everyone.
Compare this with your idea that his work forms a foundation for your conclusion that “the children of the dysgenic need to die” and consider the possibility that he understands his own work better than you do.
“Compare this with your idea that his work forms a foundation for your conclusion that “the children of the dysgenic need to die” and consider the possibility that he understands his own work better than you do.”
+1 I have often indicated on this blog that asdf takes the thinking of Murray and Clark and moves it into an unproductive and completely unnecessary direction. “the children of the dysgenic need to die” is just one glaring example of this.
I should note as well: asdf indicated previously that he is the child of a truck driver. Is there a more dysgenic occupation than this and should he be condemned to death by his own standards? I vote no.
I mean, seriously, were his parents able to afford his k-12 education or was it heavily subsidized by more affluent taxpayers?
“Is there a more dysgenic occupation than this”
Sure.
Hood rat. Petty thief. Druggie. Street Shitter.
You want to see dysgenic, just walk down the street in vast swaths of Baltimore.
My Dad woke up at 3am, worked twelve hours, and managed his own route. He did sales, inventory, budgeting, etc. It was his own little franchise business were he worked on commission.
Everything he earned came directly from sales – expense, which was enough for a middle class life except for the years he was sick. His medical expense was paid for by a commercial health plan whose premium came out of his own wages that he earned himself.
The people buying his product with food stamps would not have been capable of doing his job.
“should he be condemned to death by his own standards?”
I think it’s an individuals responsibility to survive. It’s the worlds responsibility to decide if what they can offer is enough to succeed at that goal.
If my own death could somehow be traded for some kind of utopian future where everyone was smart, healthy, and happy with every greater degrees of human accomplishment than I would give my own life. But that isn’t something on offer, is it.
“were his parents able to afford his k-12 education or was it heavily subsidized by more affluent taxpayers”
My parents property taxes likely exceeded my education expense based on what I know.
“My parents property taxes likely exceeded my education expense based on what I know.”
Uh…gonna go out on a limb here and say, no they didn’t. Cost/pupil in the U.S. is like $8-10k/year. No way a truck driver salary is going to cover this on top of everything else…sorry. What was the tax basis of your parent’s home and the approximate property tax rate/year? The folks from the wealthy neighboring suburb funded the difference. Case closed.
Go ahead and dismiss this as an ad hominem, but it just goes to show your endless hypocrisy on this blog.
I was able to find the tax records and per pupil spending when I was in school. Nope, we paid our share.
How much cushion you got?
A bit.
I used the much higher per pupil spending of my northeast area rather than the national average.
I didn’t adjust for the fact that Ed Realist says normal middle class kids like me cost the system 50% of the average. Nor did I try to use a lower number because my magnet school spent less than my local school district. Nor did I consider the fact that some of that spending number came from non-property tax based sources that my parents also paid into.
I will admit that the amount being spent today has risen a lot faster then inflation compared to when I was going to school. It would be much more of an uphill battle, but the NYC area has gotten kind of insane and I suspect all these teachers pensions will be going belly up.
“A bit.”
So relieved that you were able to find those old property tax bills so quickly! We all keep them lying around for ready access so many years after the fact. And, I’m sure the ones you found are itemized for the local school district vs. everything else (local government, county hospital, court system, sewage, etc.). I would never doubt you.
You can find property tax records on Zillow in two minutes. They only go back so far, but you can guess what they were for the years in question based on the underlying house value.
There is a report that comes up immediately when you Google it on my states education system which lists the spending per student per year in ten year snapshots. I took an average of the figure around when I graduated and the figure around when I started. It also seems from the same data that my school district was average for the state.
Ed Realist says this value is too high compared to my marginal cost to the system, but I’ll allow a conservative overestimation.
I am quite frankly blown away by how much faster per pupil spending in my state grew since I graduated. It’s way way above CPI. I kind of knew that in the abstract but it’s absolutely insane what the northeast is spending on schools, the math would work out different if I was born today. In fact I suspect a majority of people couldn’t self fund an education in the northeast in 2021. That’s a good argument for closing the public schools and refunding the money.
“You can find property tax records on Zillow in two minutes.”
Yes, thank you Captain Obvious. But is it itemized…no, and the education portion isn’t going to offset what was actually spent for your education. By the same token, you probably didn’t pay full fare for your college education either. Those wealthy folks have been subsidizing your silly beliefs since birth. I guess your parents were just average or below average yeoman farmers after all? How else to explain the slow uptake?
“I am quite frankly blown away by how much faster per pupil spending in my state grew since I graduated.”
Amen! Just wait for the bills after the diversity and inclusion officer arrives.
Just the other night asdf got into a silly argument about whether taxpayers or parents paid for public schools Hans. He claimed he paid his own way because there was a school tax line on his property tax bill. I got a good laugh out of that logic.
I don’t know how many kids he has in the school but if it’s not several that raises another relevant issue. That would make him a cuck or a race traitor or whatever the proper insult is in alt right jargon for someone who shirks his solemn duty to outbreed the lesser races.
Thirty years ago I was on our local school board for a term. I had a neighbor try to hassle me about how high the school tax bill was on his fancy house. I could have truthfully told him that I was the only board member to vote against the rich new teacher’s contract. But I didn’t. I gave him a concerned look and asked him how much the bill was. After he told me I told him exactly how many thousand dollars more than that we were spending to educate the two kids he had in the school and asked him what he thought the many taxpayers with no kids in the schools thought of that. He lost interest in the debate pretty quickly.
My current tax bill literally itemizes the portion for schools. I have never seen my parents tax bill.
The taxes we provide over our lifetime are definitely going to exceed the cost of providing education for our girls. Maybe that will change if you keep increasing the budget double the CPI every year, though even then I doubt it (we pay a lot of taxes). They are definitely far in excess of what we would pay at the Catholic school down the street, which is far less than our local school district.
“By the same token, you probably didn’t pay full fare for your college education either. ”
I got a full merit scholarship for my grades and SAT scores because they were above average for the college I attended. I payed off my room and board by playing poker professionally and some work study jobs.
“Those wealthy folks have been subsidizing your silly beliefs since birth.”
Nope.
“I guess your parents were just average or below average yeoman farmers after all?”
My Dad earned a well above median wage working what was essentially his own small business. Our difficulties mostly had to do with his health and were very up and down.
Looking at the skills he needed run his own route (sales, marketing, accounting, budgeting, entrepreneurship, union relations) many fall into the right side of the bell curve according to the research. Which makes sense, my Dad had a bachelors degree which he also obtained through a scholarship like I did.
asdf,
For someone as bright as you, I’m certainly surprised that you don’t understand how education funding works. It’s a progressive funding system…the wealthy yeomen farmers help to fund to education of the less wealthy yeomen farmers and it’s been this way for a century+.
In your world, we could call this system dysgenic and you can object to it all you want. But, to suggest that you didn’t benefit from it stretches credulity too far.
E.g. you don’t seem to realize that your merit scholarship was funded by wealthy folks that felt sorry for your financial condition.
Lastly, your unwillingness to concede this obvious point just hurts rather than helps you.
Greg,
“Thirty years ago I was on our local school board for a term.”
A one termer just like Trump? Did you get impeached as well? Thanks for your service :)!
Hans,
I originally got appointed by the board to serve until the next election to fill a seat that had been resigned after they interviewed 13 applicants for the position. I then stood for election the following year and won easily in a three way race to serve the remaining two years of the five year term ( so not even a full one termer).
Incumbents usually have a big advantage in school board races unless most voters are angry about the status quo. Few voters know much about the candidates other than whether or not they are incumbents but incumbents tend to know more of the small percentage of the population that votes in school board races. And a shocking number of candidates are complete idiots.
For the first two years I found it fascinating learning how the system worked but it’s a lot of work for no pay and a fielding a lot of complaints. I have a pretty thick skin so the last part didn’t bother me much but I found the third year boring and many of the more controversial issues we had been dealing with had been settled.
I decided not to run again. I had initially seen myself as some kind of bridge between the business community and the academic community (my wife was a teacher and active in the union in a different district). I realized nobody cared about that and declined to run again despite being egotistical enough to think I would have won.
Hans,
I know how education funding works. I can tally up a tax bill and tally up expenses and come to a reasonable view of whether I’m paying my fair share. You can choose to reject my math if you want, I suspect no evidence would change your mind.
I agree that in 2021 most northeast schools and other government activities are heavily funded by onerous taxes on the very highest earners, and thus it is not such a surprise they want the SALT cap lifted. At least when I was growing up awhile back, a middle class income was enough to fund a middle class education.
My merit scholarship came from my schools own self interest. They wanted to get people with better then average test scores to matriculate so they could rise up the US News and World Report rankings. It was quid pro quo, they got something and I got something.
Greg,
Gregory Clark’s work shows that the eugenic classes had significant differential surviving fertility above and beyond the lower classes throughout the 20th century and right up until the industrial era (I don’t know the exact point this reversed without going back to the source).
He also showed that:
1) This differential surviving fertility resulted in eugenic improvement of the populations in question.
2) This eugenic improvement was a necessary precursor to the modern industrial revolution and modern developed world.
Without all of those dysgenic children dying, IQs and other eugenic traits in Europe would not have been high enough to start the modern world. Everything you have today is built on the backs of dead poor children, and had the people of the past not let them die all of our lives would still be nasty, brutish, and short.
My statement, that “the children of the dysgenic need to die” is a simple and easily verifiable fact based on his research.
As to the paper, whether or not 9% of the population received a temporary payment averaging 10% of their typical meager yearly wage as a welfare between 1790 and 1834 versus 5-7% afterwards is not a major driver here. Nor does it represent the kind of massive fiscal burden on the state that modern welfare represents.
Nevertheless, by 1834 this eugenic improvement had already taken place within England. You can find that in Clark’s work.
—
A side note, I find it interesting that the paper conclusion that local parishes and landowners basically subverted the stated terms of welfare, and often didn’t make it a subsistence wage in order avoid the 100% marginal tax problem. The conclusion seems to be that this extremely modest welfare smoothed out some of the bad times and then collected it back as higher rents in good times. More of consumption smoothing than permanent ongoing wealth transfer.
—
Clark may indeed support a Nordic style social insurance program. Such a program seeks to accomplish many goals, not all of them compatible with maximizing long term growth. I’m not even fundamentally opposed to social insurance, though I’m more skeptical than ever these days.
However, if you asked Clark “do you support a Nordic style social welfare state to the point of fiscal crisis”, I think he might not support that.
Such a stance is necessitated by your “no poor children may die” stance. If you aren’t willing to provide unlimited material assistance, some poor children will die. Especially of medical needs. Since the potential cost of medical care is infinite, fiscal crisis is baked into the cake of your requirement.
Moreover, the Nordics themselves noticed this and reformed their welfare state to provide some limits.
I would note too that Clark opposes low IQ immigration, a conclusion he came to as a result of his research. The very Nordic countries you mention have themselves fallen victim to low IQ immigration that is tearing at their social fabric.
But of course low IQ people who can’t immigrate are subject to a wide variety of terrible fates back in their countries of origin, including at times the tragic deaths of their children which could have been avoided if they had immigrated to the west.
So if you’re going to extend your “no kids should die” stance to everyone around the world and not just first world children (discrimination!), then you have to let them immigrate.
If fertility in poor countries is higher, and they have a right to immigrate, then inevitably they must completely swamp western countries in the long run, leading to a collapse of their advance industrial societies.
Just where are a billion more Africans going to go? If they stay in Africa, they will be poor, miserable, and children will die. How heartless can you be Greg?
If your position is:
“We can afford a degree of social insurance in a modern western state so long as we restrict access and keep the level of expense in line with manageable budgets,” that is a reasonable position. It’s more or less my own.
It is also a position in which “we let poor children die”. In fact a lot of poor children all over the world. That outcome is inevitable. Either immediately because they are unable to support themselves and die, or slightly later in the timeline when we ourselves collapse being unable to support them in ever increasing numbers relative to our own.
asdf,
First of all, nothing in that long reply refutes anything I actually said.
Instead you revert to arguing against your usual straw men pretending that I am supporting the open borders immigration of “a billion more Africans” and insisting on unlimited spending to insure that “no poor children may die.” Those are pathetic straw men even by your standards. We can’t even prevent all rich children from dying and no one thinks spending can be unlimited.
What we are disagreeing about is NOT whether or not unlimited spending is possible. What we are disagreeing about is NOT whether or not unlimited immigration is desirable. What we are disagreeing about is NOT whether or not it is possible to prevent all child deaths in any population cohort.
What we ARE disagreeing about is whether or not the deaths of the black children of American citizens is “needed” (your word) and desirable because they are “dysgenic” (your word) OR NOT!
Your comment in question was on a November 24, 2020 post by Arnold titled “Data on the Black Family.” That would be data on AMERICAN black families. And the sentence in question came immediately after you complained about how many children George Floyd and Jacob Blake had.
“First of all, nothing in that long reply refutes anything I actually said.”
It’s a direct refutation, but whatever.
—
What we ARE disagreeing about is whether or not the deaths of the black children of American citizens is “needed”
—
“Your comment in question was on a November 24, 2020 ”
I mean I directly said exactly what I’m going to say below then, but I will repeat anyway.
Yes, I do think some of the violent criminals in the news having five or six children they are unable to support is not a good thing. If you extrapolate that trend, society will be far more violent and dissipate. In fact the punishment, often by death, of murders and other criminals played a role in declining violence rates in Europe during the period Clark studied. One of the astonishing things about the black underclass is it’s incredibly high criminality, even in relation to its low IQ. Low IQ whites don’t act as bad on the metric of violence, basically because for 1000 years we culled much of those traits out of ourselves on the chopping block.
I believe it is a mathematical fact that wealth comes from genetics, and that in the long run genetics is based on differential surviving fertility. I think it is factually incorrect to deny this, and that you do so.
I don’t think differential fertility patterns in the first world are bad enough to cause great concern, as despite such high profile instances fertility in the underclass is actually just above replacement.
I do not think the domestic black TFR of 1.8 represents in any way a substantial difficulty for America to absorb even over a fairly lengthy timeframe.
I am a little concerned about LOW fertility amongst the eugenic classes, especially how their fertility keeps trending down. If the eugenic classes could simply achieve replacement fertility there would be no (domestic) fertility crisis.
Even so, absent immigration eugenic TFR would have to fall much lower to be a problem on a medium timeline (at least in America, some western countries are worse). I mostly just feel bad that people aren’t having kids they seem to clearly want, and that diminishes both their lives and the lives that are never created.
I think the costs imposed by having to support the dysgenic class are a part of the story behind that low fertility, but not necessarily the primary problem (for now). I do think the dysgenic class providing political and cultural power to the left does play a role in the fertility shortfall among the eugenic class, as leftism is very clearly correlated with low fertility.
I do think the international fertility situation is far worse than the domestic fertility situation. I can imagine smart people having 2.1 kids. I can’t imagine them matching Nigerian fertility. Even optimistic views of future fertility patterns don’t leave a rosy picture of world IQ for future generations. At some point either our rate will move up, their rate will move down, or both until they are no longer gaining on us. Either that will happen voluntarily, or they will breed until they are so poor child mortality limits their TFR.
So can we be charitable and accept the above as a more recent and accurate expression of both of your views? No straw men. No overstatements.
Here it is…no need for reinterpretation and not a straw man.
asdf says:
November 25, 2020 at 6:07 pm
“It some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.”
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/data-on-the-black-family/
I think he has given a more “nuanced” presentation of his views in the post two above, which I think went up as you were writing yours so you didn’t see it.
It’s not a straw man to state the obvious that if the dysgenic have higher surviving fertility than the eugenic, then on a long enough timeline it is inevitable that the gene pool will become increasingly dysgenic with predictable outcomes.
This was the plot of the Hollywood movie “Idiocracy” for instance, it is hardly a controversial statement.
The only way for the dysgenic to have lower fertility is:
1) For the eugenic to have more kids then them
2) For the eugenics kids to survive more often the the dysgenics
I personally think increasing eugenic fertility is the way to go to achieve #1. While I suppose you could favor forced sterilization as a way to achieve #1, it doesn’t seem necessary and we never needed it before. Birth control and abortion seem sufficient in the first world.
Clark showed that #2 was true for a long swath of our history and that is what created modern western man. Specifically, it was true for the yeomen farmers, petite bourgeois, and other kulaks that he showed replaced the population through their differential surviving fertility.
Some dude is a little better at managing his farm, saving for the winter, not getting his head looped off because he murders his neighbor, and he has more surviving kids. Do this enough generations and you get a bunch of smart, efficient, gratification delaying, nonviolent individuals who are good at making the modern world.
First of all, here is the larger context from the comment in question:
>—“Blacks lack the IQ to succeed as middle class bourgeois. They try to emphasize those traits they excel it, unfortunately they are not traits that most people appreciate.
“George Floyd had five children…Jacob Blake had six children.”
It some point we will need to accept that the children of the dysgenic need to die before adulthood.”
So then Roger, the added “nuance” came AFTER a failed attempt to claim it was in reference to what might happen to “a billion more Africans” not American citizens. Calling that moving of the goalposts “nuance” is quite a euphemism.
>—-“It’s not a straw man to state the obvious that if the dysgenic have higher surviving fertility than the eugenic, then on a long enough timeline it is inevitable that the gene pool will become increasingly dysgenic with predictable outcomes.”(asdf)
That is the OPPOSITE of what Clark finds. He finds that the LONGER the timeline the MORE reversion to the mean of the total population. Again, you claim to base your views on Clark but you reverse his conclusions.
Does the population mean change over the same “LONGER timeline”?
“He finds that the LONGER the timeline the MORE reversion to the mean of the total population. ”
I’ve got his books on the bookshelf next to me. That is not what he says.
1) He poses that if the selection pressures are strong enough, the mean of a population can change over time.
Unfortunately for your ideology, “over time” is longer than after we left Africa and less than a couple of generations. Meaning that different groups can have different means.
2) If a subpopulation mostly breeds within itself, it will tend towards its own mean rather than some other group mean.
Put them together:
1) Group A mostly breed with other Group As over a time period.
As a result, Group A revert to the Group A mean rather than some broader population mean.
2) Group A are subject over a prolonged period to selection pressures which rewarded IQ or some other trait with differential surviving fertility.
The Group A mean they revert to increases.
>—“He poses that if the selection pressures are strong enough, the mean of a population can change over time.”
That is basic Darwin, not something Clark added, and is not in dispute.
>—“If a subpopulation mostly breeds within itself, it will tend towards its own mean rather than some other group mean.”
Yes, and if slave women are raped by slaveowners for many generations, you will see a mixing of genes that is evident in a quite spectacular variety of skin tones. Genes that are beneficial enough to be selected for will then spread readily on their own within that population after that initial mixing. Also basic Darwinism.
By the way, throughout the world and throughout history, the various ethnicities that have comprised the economic underclass have almost always committed the most crime and this has usually been attributed to their alleged racial inferiority by the upper classes at the time. That was certainly true of the Irish in many urban areas when they were the most recent large immigrant group arriving fleeing poverty. It was considered obvious that if they had good genetics they would have done better in Ireland in the first place and done better here when they arrived.
“Yes, and if slave women are raped by slaveowners for many generations, you will see a mixing of genes that is evident in a quite spectacular variety of skin tones. ”
One of the things that shows what bullshit systematic racism is comes from the fact that white DNA admixture actually correlates extremely well with IQ within mixed race individuals. If it was about the one drop rule that wouldn’t be, but if its about genetics then it would.
The Irish assimilated a long time ago and Ireland is an advanced and successful country, which is what you would expect if their difficulties were historical and not genetic. That they would work it out over time once the specific historical impediments were removed.
Blacks have not and African has not, and as I have discussed before several groups and countries have had it worse then blacks even up through the recent past and they have thrived regardless.
Fifty or a hundred years ago you could say a country or peoples fate was an accident of history. You can’t in 2021.
>—“The Irish assimilated a long time ago and Ireland is an advanced and successful country, which is what you would expect if their difficulties were historical and not genetic…Fifty or a hundred years ago you could say a country or peoples fate was an accident of history. You can’t in 2021.”
Finally, the long awaited end of history! So then, for all of human history many people have believed that all of preceding human history was surely long enough for existing hierarchies to have properly sorted people according to racial merit.
But NOW we know THIS moment in history is the proper point stop the game and and declare the final score. NOW is the time we have finally correctly figured out how to separate which results should be attributed to history and which to race.
Same as it ever was.
Yes, it’s different now.
The industrial revolution is long in the past, we haven’t had any major wars or instability in a long time, and the spector of communism was removed from the world three decades ago. I can very easily describe why a Russian serf in 1860 is held back, or why a Chinese person living under Mao is held back. But for a long time now the entire world has had an opportunity to experience peace, prosperity, and basically the same westernized liberal market societies.
The things which held people back have long faded, the only thing left holding them back is themselves.
The things which hold people back are fading in many places, but they have certainly not disappeared. Not even asymptotically approached zero.
If I were growing up in Iraq or Zimbabwe or, so many places, a lot would be holding me back.
We can make some generalizations but they are not nearly as well-supported as, “Tomorrow the sun will come up in the east.”
But what is holding back Iraq or Zimbabwe.
I would say what is holding them back are the people of Iraq and Zimbabwe.
We all know “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” or “Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own”.
Yes, high IQ people can’t succeed if they are outnumbered and surrounded by low IQ people. My goal is to make sure my nations demographics don’t end up resembling these failure countries.
asdf,
Well, I couldn’t ave parodied your end of history ideas any better than you did yourself there.
Congratulations on being able to do a reasonably accurate historical analysis of Russia in 1860. Now, for the first time, its’s easy to do accurate historical analysis on current events since all the information needed about ability and character is contained in group IQ scores in your world and all the necessary data are in.
Why then is it that some of the greatest crimes in history were committed in the 20th Century by high IQ Germans and Russians and Chinese?
By the way. Marginal Revolution has a link up today to the new Gregory Clark paper. Remember him? The guy whose work you claim is such a big part of the foundations of your philosophy?
This is how he concludes that paper:
“Personally I would argue that this should push us towards compressing differences in income and wealth that are the product of such inherited differences. The Nordic model of the good society looks a lot more attractive than the Texas one.” (Sorry Hans)
Apparently he does not think that the end of history means an end to evolution’s ability to select for the fittest. Nor does he think it calls for policy interventions to help people like you outbreed what you take to be the lesser races.
@asdf – I would say what is holding them back is the people of Iraq and Zimbabwe, acting within the cultures and institutions of Iraq and Zimbabwe. That leaves a lot of room for improvement. The fact that they won’t become as rich and peaceful as the United Sates with those cultures and institutions doesn’t prove that they can’t with different cultures and institutions. Of course, it doesn’t prove that they can either.
@ Greg G – asdf talks about “high IQ people” and “low IQ people”, “eugenic people” and “dysgenic people”. I think he means that literally. To the extent that some black people are “eugenic”, he wants them. To the extent that some white people are “dysgenic”, he doesn’t want them. In fact, the whole point of his citation of Gregory Clark is that “good” whites outbred “bad” whites.
He is not talking about “lesser races”. He is talking about “lesser people”.
Roger,
>—” I think he means that literally. To the extent that some black people are “eugenic”, he wants them. ”
Yeah, well the next time he names even one of the black ones he “wants” will be the first time I have seen that happen. He has many times defended judging people by their skin color and explicitly rejected the obligation to make an effort to judge people as individuals when group racial information is available.
I should also say I reject the idea that he embraces that the sum of human worth is adequately reflected by IQ tests.
Greg G has it correct. Our family judges people as individuals vs. focusing on group level differences based on skin tone. Somewhat oddly, both asdf and the woke movement would disagree with this approach …strange bedfellows for sure.
Roger,
“would say what is holding them back is the people of Iraq and Zimbabwe, acting within the cultures and institutions of Iraq and Zimbabwe. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.”
I think the cultures and institutions are determined by genetics. Poor institutions reflect poor genetics. Since the genes aren’t going to improve I don’t see the culture or institutions improving. I’m sure they will have their ups and downs, but it will oscillated around a level far below our own.
Probably the one big 20th century exception to this was communism, which held back a huge part of the world for a long time. But you could see for instance that all non-communist Chinese people were doing great, so you knew that once communism ended mainland Chinese would flourish, and that is what happened.
Greg,
“Why then is it that some of the greatest crimes in history were committed in the 20th Century by high IQ Germans and Russians and Chinese?”
High IQ are strong and the strong can take from the weak. Germany and Japan were late to the party and tried to nose their way in versus the Anglos and lost. I don’t see what they did in the 20th century as that different from what we did in the 19th century. Is Living Space in Ukraine all that different from Manifest Destiny in North America? We had smallpox to do most of our dirty work, but we did some killing too all the same.
What you can hang at their feet is that nosing their way in probably wasn’t as necessary as they thought it was, but you can consult your early 20th century history books for why they came to that conclusion. The spark of the whole thing in 1914 appears to have been something of an accident for all involved, and then it was crisis to crisis after that.
The kind of “crime” I’m talking about is when Jamal disses Jordan and he shoots off a few rounds from his 9mm into the party goers. This is a very different sort of thing then being smart enough to invent a Krupp artillery piece and coordinate its targeting with the air scout service.
—-
“Apparently he does not think that the end of history means an end to evolution’s ability to select for the fittest. Nor does he think it calls for policy interventions to help people like you outbreed what you take to be the lesser races.”
It is perfectly consistent to want a Nordic style social insurance system for the Nordics. That same Nordic style social system isn’t handling the influx of low IQ Muslims very well. Gregory Clark knows this:
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/gregory-clark-on-immigration-and-income-distribution/
Having a good social insurance system is one of those “nice things” that eugenic societies can afford to have. If you want a Nordic style social insurance system I recommend you embrace my immigration policy.
Greg and Roger,
I judge people on all of the relevant data I have, of which race is one of the data points that has non-trivial explanatory value.
That race is a variable with explanatory value is so empirically obvious that it may in fact be one of the areas in which the woke are closer to the truth than the color blind, even if they are mistaken about what or how much it explains.
asdf,
>—“That race is a variable with explanatory value is so empirically obvious that it may in fact be one of the areas in which the woke are closer to the truth than the color blind, even if they are mistaken about what or how much it explains.”
And with that you have come to a remarkable degree of agreement with Critical Race Theory as Hans first observed. You just disagree on which people should be criticized…and discriminated against based on nothing more than their skin color.
That’s such a remarkable confession that I’m going to not even pursue the bizarre false equivalence of equating the Holocaust with disease wiping out most native Americans as some kind of way to prove that IQ is linked to good character because at least it wasn’t some tawdry black street crime.
So Roger, does that additional explication of the “nuance” clear up this matter about whether or not he really is meaning lesser races yet?
@ asdf – It is unquestionably true that any culture must be supported by genetics. However, I think it is similarly true that genetics never determine one unique culture. The same genetics can support many, many cultures. I really enjoyed Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules–For Now. Going back many thousands of years, he describes a sort of irregular see-saw. Some times a civilization in east Eurasia is number one in terms of power and prosperity. Some times it is a civilization with roots in west Eurasia. (To be fair, sub-Saharan Africa never enters the picture and Morris doesn’t ask why, genetics?, climate?, lack of harbors?) Of course, the institutions and technology–the cultures–change radically over that period.
Race may be an explanatory variable the same way sex is an explanatory variable for height. But just as not all men are tall or most women short, not all whites are eugenic and not all blacks dysgenic. Saying no blacks can immigrate because many are dysgenic is like saying no men can be jockeys because most of them are tall.
Yes Greg, I believe someones skin color, and the genes underlying it, does impact them. That you don’t shows a level of ignorance that is actually quite astonishing.
I disagree that blacks skin color causes them to be the victims of “systematic racism” which explains their poor socioeconomic outcomes, and that as a result we owe them “insert X here” to remedy it.
“bizarre false equivalence of equating the Holocaust with disease wiping out most native Americans”
If you think I’m being too hard on Manifest Destiny you can take that position. I see it as purposeful mass genocide and displacement, even accounting for the assist from Smallpox. They don’t call it the Trail of Tears for nothing. I just don’t see that as out of line with historical experience before or after.
As to whether Manifest Destiny was “a good thing” didn’t Ayn Rand write a defense of it. I think that overall the world is better off that it happened.
I don’t feel similarly about Operation Barbarossa as it did not and was unlikely to achieve the same ends that colonization of North America did.
Both involved killing and sin, but one gave us America and the other was a disaster. That was something that one could have and thus should have seen before the fact, but again we can consult our history books to figure out how we got there.
I feel the great error of the 20th century was that people assumed their prosperity and safety was limited by the physical control of natural resources to a degree that was true historically but increasingly out of date in the 20th century. The Japs were free to buy our oil, they didn’t need the East Indies.
Roger,
“The same genetics can support many, many cultures.”
Yes, the Chinese had Mao for instance.
Genetics is potential. It is possible for you to fall short of your potential. It is not possible to achieve more than your potential.
I think that certain peoples have the genetic potential to be modern prosperous first world societies. Others don’t. Whether those with that potential will seize it is a maybe. As the 20th century has gone on, more and more people have had the opportunity to succeed. At this point I think its really just those without any potential that are still flailing.
“Saying no blacks can immigrate because many are dysgenic is like saying no men can be jockeys because most of them are tall.”
I guess the question is what you are trying to get out of immigration. I lived in Japan for awhile, and they find immigration of any kind, skilled or not, kind of bonkers. Even high skill immigration would “disrupt our society and culture.” So they don’t have any.
Or at least, you need to be really really skilled. Like founding a company or doing something else really special. They understand that +3SD individuals are a catch whenever you can get them. They just aren’t in a rush to import a bunch of +1SD individuals to do lower end “skilled” labor. That seems fine, they’ve got their reasons and they check out. Maybe they will loosen up a little with the baby bust, but its healthy to be skeptical on this. There are a lot of advantages to Japan being a homogenous culture.
So let’s say we are talking about African immigration. If you mean that we should accept people from the tiny tiny fraction that are highly highly skilled, I’m fine with that. That really isn’t enough people to change the demographics of America much. Nigerian Americans today are only 277k and highly successful. That’s a fraction of a % of Americas population. So my answer is…sure but who cares.
But as you start to go further down the skill ladder in greater and greater numbers, at what point does cultural fit matter enough to tip the scales.
I imagine it would be something like a points system where country of origin would be worth a certain number of points relative to other factors like skills, age, etc.
As to race being salient, let me give you some simple examples.
I have two individuals. Both are similar in lots of common socioeconomic ways and place of residence. One is black and one is white. Who is more likely to vote Democrat?
You see, race would be a super obvious causal variable in that equation.
Let me give you another practical example.
I recently moved away from Baltimore. Baltimore is a heavily black area. Post civil rights blacks started to migrate out of the city into the various County burbs. What happened to those places? They got completely trashed. Crime, decay, shitty schools, collapsing property values. Now, you can tell which areas ended up getting trashed by lower end blacks by looking at where the middle class blacks were living in the 1970s. At first its really small, they are this tiny nucleus in some middle class area. They are themselves not that objectionable. But the Cosby’s have brothers and cousins and friends who are also black who don’t act as well as the Cosby’s do. And the lower end blacks move where the middle class blacks already are for all sorts of understandable social reasons. And what you find over and over in Baltimore and similar metros is that there is this tipping point around 20% black where both blacks decide an area is black enough to move to and whites decide its black enough to flee. And then it goes from 20% to 80% like lightning.
So when I was choosing a place to live I was cognizant of this fact. Race was literally an explanatory variable in future living trends that I felt had predictive power that I could use to make a better life for me and my family.
Does this mean I treat the black guy down the street badly because he’s black. No, he seems like a nice guy and I like him (he’s even a Trump voter). But I am glad that the place I moved and the school district is serves has very few blacks as I’m no longer worried about my neighborhood becoming like some of those ghost neighborhoods I’ve seen in West Baltimore.
asdf,
>—“Yes Greg, I believe someones skin color, and the genes underlying it, does impact them. That you don’t….”
Oh but I DO! I believe it has many different “impacts” not the least of which is engaging the bigotry of people like you when you deal with them in situations where, if they had had white skin, and all the same other qualities, they wouldn’t have gotten that reaction.
>—“Genetics is potential…. It is not possible to achieve more than your potential.”
And right THERE you set yourself up as the God like, end of history, judge of everybody’s potential.
And you do it by twisting the work of Clark and Murray in order to come to the exact OPPOSITE conclusions they do about how much license their work gives for making judgments about the limits on the potential of individuals.
No one wants to tell you where to live. You should be able to live anywhere you can afford the place. The problem is so should everybody else even if you don’t like their skin color and that’s the part you can’t stomach.
Roger has it right. The same DNA can support an astonishing variety of group norms and behavior and the idea you can read and predict and judge people’s future behavior by history or DNA or skin color is the craziest kind of arrogant authoritarianism.
@asdf – I suspect that your last three paragraphs are believed by many people who would never say so out loud, and probably won’t even consciously admit to themselves that they think it. “I moved here because of the schools.”
@Greg G – No one can perfectly predict someone’s future behavior but it is not arrogant authoritarianism to try. Even to use race as a predictor. To repeat asdf’s example, if you know X is a black American, there is a very good chance he does not normally vote for Republicans. If I know Y’s father and mother were both alcoholics, I will have a heart-to-heart talk with my son if he tells me he’s thinking of marrying her. If Z has a history of being a “good student” in high school, I will be surprised if she is not a good student in college; in fact, if her father and mother were both good students in college, I will be surprised if she isn’t.
As the wisecrack goes, “The race is not always to the swift or the contest to the strong [Ecclesiastes 9:11]. But that’s the way to bet.”
>—“…people who would never say so out loud, and probably won’t even consciously admit to themselves that they think it. “I moved here because of the schools.”
I’m perfectly happy to say it out loud. I moved where I live now BECAUSE OF THE SCHOOLS. Was that loud enough? (Sorry Hans, I know you hate that.)
How do you know it wasn’t because of the racial makeup of the district I moved from? Well, for one thing it was an overwhelmingly white rural district I moved from and I’m white. It was just a really bad school district. I don’t want to shock you but some of the bad ones are very white.
Nobody needs to apologize for moving to the best school district they can for their kids. But notice how you have changed the subject from what we were discussing which was whether or not you can judge people’s character by their skin color.
Roger,
>—“No one can perfectly predict someone’s future behavior but it is not arrogant authoritarianism to try. Even to use race as a predictor.”
He doesn’t just want to use it as “a” predictor. He feels entitled to use it as the ONLY predictor he needs.
It was a long time ago but I remember him going on at length about what as outrage it was that sellers of housing weren’t allowed to discriminate on the basis of race and defending Jim Crow as a reasonable way for whites to have defended themselves from the depredations of blacks.
@ Greg G – …people who would never say so out loud, and probably won’t even consciously admit to themselves that they think it. “I moved here because of the schools.”
That was me commenting. I wasn’t trying to “change the subject” from “whether or not you can judge people’s character by their skin color.” I don’t think you can. I was saying that many people use that as one piece of information when deciding where to live.
I have no doubt that lots of people, including you, really do move because of the schools. But I am also fairly sure that a lot of people are going to where they think there will be few blacks. It’s probably impossible to untangle this, because if you look for districts where SAT scores are high or state exam scores are high or a high percentage go to college, those will almost always turn out to be districts with an under-representation of blacks.
When our family was deciding to move from the SF Bay Area to North Texas, we were primarily concerned about finding a community with good schools. Period, end of story. Never once during our search did we consider the racial composition of the community. It just wasn’t important or relevant. We don’t care about skin tone and believe it to be boring and needlessly divisive.
The volume of apologetics for silly racist sentiments on this thread is completely unnecessary and counterproductive. All of you expressing this nonsense have been permanently downgraded in our minds. And, please stop misrepresenting the courageous work of both Murray and Clark.
Greg and Hans,
Every city has prime real estate in short commutes that is severely underpriced except for “the schools.” And yes some of it even in decent enough safe neighborhoods that have bad luck on school zoning lines.
The “bad schools” in these cities are generally the minority schools, especially the black ones. When you didn’t save hundreds of thousands of dollars on an equivalent property so you could have “good schools” you did exactly what I’ve said for the exact same “racist” reasons. What’s bad about the schools? They have blacks in them.
I think its a blessing that you have not had to live in a heavily black area. The West Coast and Texas have quite few blacks. Until recently I spent most of my adult life living in one of the blackest states in one of the blackest cities in the country. When blacks are everywhere, their problems are all encompassing.
Baltimore used to be a world class city before the great migration. You can see literal RUINS of once great houses and buildings when you go through the black parts of town. Like a bomb went off in the place. The city has been losing population since the 1950s. Baltimore County, where all the white people once fled, shed 80,000 white people in the last twenty years despite inflow from the city.
So yeah, I think that lots and lots of other people came to the same conclusion I did and responded to a black tide by leaving. They left the city, and when the county could no longer keep them out of the county they left the county too. The ones that stay erect huge zoning and other barriers to try and keep the blacks out of their areas. As blacks fill up the area in-between DC and Baltimore, it too has people having huge battles over school zoning to try and make sure the other guy has to deal with the blacks and not them.
This is life. People vote with their feet. Revealed preference is one my side. No matter how much you try to outlaw or place a taboo on *noticing* people notice and take steps to protect themselves and their families.
“And you do it by twisting the work of Clark and Murray in order to come to the exact OPPOSITE conclusions they do about how much license their work gives for making judgments about the limits on the potential of individuals.”
I quote directly from Murray and Clark and I do not believe anything I’ve said contradicts their work in any way. Most of my policy recommendations can be taken straight out of their books.
At best, you could say there is a difference in tone, which appears to be your entire hang up. I talk about blacks with as much charity as blacks talk about me (probably more, blacks treat whites like absolute shit out in the open). But I’m not supposed to be so uppity with the protected class in your political coalition.
In my warped mind, I hear the following exchange:
Snah Reburg – I picked where I moved based on the schools. I would have liked to move to a diverse place but there were none with good schools.
fdsa – That’s because good schools with a high percentage of blacks are as rare as a Republican at Harvard. If you look for a place with good schools, you will almost always find places with few blacks.
Roger,
We don’t give a fuck about diversity…most overrated concept ever.
We moved where we moved for the schools and a better quality of life. The skin tone percentages of the town where we re-located was never googled nor considered. It doesn’t matter because it’s 100% about economic class.
Why is that so hard for you to understand?
Roger,
Let me square the circle. Because the areas that Hans has lived have a relatively low black %, he’s mostly sticked outside city centers, and he probably lives in UMC areas, so he can be fairly confident that if he buys a house and plans to stay there for twenty or thirty years that there isn’t going to be a dramatic shift in the neighborhood or school demographic mix.
Since I have lived in a highly black area, when I was considering where to buy a house and make a life the odds of rapid shifts in a neighborhood or schools demographic mix had to take a larger weight in my decision making process, since the risk of huge swings with big impacts on my quality of life was much higher.
Hans probably wasn’t going to see an UMC neighborhood he bought a house in Silicon Valley or North Texas go from 20% black to 80% black in a heartbeat (in fact both areas are far below 20% black overall), but that sort of thing happens all the time in the Baltimore area.
So while both Hans and I avoided heavily black areas, I have to be more cognizant of which areas were likely to *become* heavily black in the future, whereas that isn’t something Hans had to think about. Hans thinks that he didn’t consider a variable that wasn’t important to him makes him a good person. Because nothing says I’m a good person like a meaningless non-sacrifice.
In fairness, I have met whites that boneheadedly tried to live in black areas and “fix them” and it was a disaster all around for everyone. I think the hypocrites are morally superior to true believers.
asdf,
“Because nothing says I’m a good person like a meaningless non-sacrifice.”
I don’t give a fuck if anyone thinks I’m a good person. I have and will continue to state that I absolutely and unapologetically discriminate based on class. I don’t want any riffraff in my neighborhood or in my daughter’s school.
However, unlike you, I don’t feel the need to bring racist sensibilities into the mix. They have nothing to do with it.
Hint: I’d much rather have Clarence Thomas as a next door neighbor than the self-serving whiner son of a truck driver.
Got it. You discriminate and exclude, just not based on race because it costs you nothing to do so in your current context.
You agree that Hepburn should have married Sidney Poitiers character in Guess Whose Coming to Dinner, and would extend that good grace to the tiny sliver of blacks that could meet that standard.
I’m drowning in your charity and grace Hans.
@ Hans Gruber – I take you and Greg G at your word that you were not at all concerned about racial composition and were only concerned about the quality of the schools where you moved to. If I had meant to accuse you, I would have spelled your name forward and not said that the imaginary exchange was a product of “my warped mind”.
I was just trying to make the point that in today’s America, if one person looks for a place with “good schools” and another looks for a place with “few blacks”, there will be a lot of places that appear on both lists. If, on the other hand, one person looks for a place with “good schools” and another looks for as place with many blacks, there will be many fewer places that appear on both lists.
Thus, a person who totally honestly says he “wants to live in a diverse neighborhood” and also says, “my children’s education is my first concern” will almost never wind up in a diverse neighborhood. Unless diverse means white and Asian.
“I’m drowning in your charity and grace Hans.”
No pools in your neighborhood so that you could learn to swim? The wealthy black folks in my neighborhood with their oasis pools are laughing themselves silly at you.
Btw – I never claimed to be either graceful or charitable.
Roger you are working way too hard to confine this to a discussion about who wants to live in what school districts. You can call that being charitable if you want. I am calling it being naive.
Why don’t you ask asdf his views on the Jim Crow period back when America was great? It’s been quite a while since I brought up that topic, but the last time I did, he indicated that Jim Crow was just an entirely understandable system of self defense that oppressed white people used to defend themselves against the depredations of black people. Then you can decide how charitable to be with that idea.
I’m trying to find areas of agreement. This may not make much sense but …
I was probably one of the most queer-positive teachers at my high school. But I also listened respectfully to kids who were anti-gay. I wanted students to know that I took them seriously and that I wouldn’t just feed them the party line, that we could talk honestly with each other.
I think that evolution is one of the great ideas in science. It explains so much. It makes so much about living things make sense. But I really sympathize with ordinary creationists; the story evolution tells is amazingly hard to believe. (On the other hand, I detest the leaders of some creationist organizations who lie and misrepresent and quote out of context and take advantage of ordinary people.) In fact, most people who say they believe in evolution believe in a romanticized, vaguely spiritual version. Anyway, I try to treat creationists respectfully, take their objections seriously, admit mistakes that people make defending evolution (stop acting as if Miller-Urey demonstrated how life can come from non-life!), and show where we all agree.
Add this to the list of mantras.
Education fails more education.
Seems about right.
There isn’t any evidence to support the current 13 years of public school typical of USA states (k, 1-8, 4 high school). If all the indoctrination elements were chucked, the core skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic could be taught to a much higher standard in less years. But of course the political power of the teachers precludes any and all meaningful potential reform.
The Chinese seem to have struck the right balance with their nine years of compulsory education starting from age 6. https://www.chinaeducenter.com/en/cedu/cel.php
Over 20 percent of USA adults cannot read above the 5th grade level. https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp. Cutting school back to 9 years and producing literate graduates might be a good money saver for a fiscally strapped state. The next multi-hundred billion dollar bailout for the states should come with some strings attached too, particularly ion cleaning up the education quagmire along these lines.
Most Americans believe that, if only we do it right, “the core skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic could be taught to a much higher standard”, perhaps even “in less years”.
However, experience has been cruel to that faith. Lots of people just aren’t that smart or that motivated. Maybe some equivalent of Gordon Tullock’s spike would work 🙂
Yes, motivation can be a problem if kids are not getting support at home it is going to be difficult to catch up. It seems like grade 4 is a critical point. Maybe the spike for the teachers?
Nevertheless, I feel compelled to resist surrendering to the null hypothesis. Lately, it seems like we could get more with less. Canada has been of particular interest. More immigrants and better performance, yet, no equivalent to the USA Department of Education. Each province does its own thing. Chucking out the Department of Education might not produce huge improvements but there is little likelihood that it would hurt anything.
Interesting assessment of Canada where apparently the null hypothesis was rejected by a program of increased subsidiarity. https://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/canada-overview/
Canada has a points-based immigration system that preselects immigrants with higher IQs/human capital, so its better performance may not be indicative of any superiority of its education system. International tests such as PISA and TIMSS, which aren’t ideal but the best “big” data we have, show that American education does about as well as any other country for the respective ethnic groups. USA does the worst among OECD countries on average scores only because it has larger amounts of low IQ ethnicities than any other OECD country does (yet). Some like to bring up those XIX century high school exam papers that float around the internet as evidence for catastrophic decline in quality of education, but they are easily explained by the fact that at the time something like 95% of the population never made it to high school. People with -1SD IQs and below have never read at high school level, and won’t be reading at high school level no matter what schooling you apply to them. Unfortunately this cannot be admitted under the present dispensation because equality is, as Moldbug wrote back in 2007, “the political mortar of the postwar Western world”, and basic facts about human biology “can no more be admitted than the Soviets could admit that capitalism was the best thing for the working class after all”. It’s a shitty situation. Still, there is room for improvement. German vocational programs reportedly used to do quite well by the less academically gifted, for example.
International tests such as PISA and TIMSS, … show that American education does about as well as any other country for the respective ethnic groups.
That assertion no doubt shocks many people. A good presentation of the case, breaking out the ethnicities, is The New 2018 PISA School Test Scores: USA! USA!.
I think the problem of motivation goes a lot deeper than parental support. Young kids are information sponges, soaking up all sorts of information about their world. But after a while (yes, some time after third grade), they get choosier. Often, the things they are supposed to learn in school are things they have no intrinsic interest in. This gets considerably worse in middle school as, on the one hand, puberty hits and, on the other, school gets more “academic”.
“When am I going to use this?”, just about every young student asks. Which means, “Why should I learn this?” To the extent that there is ever a real answer, it is something along the lines of, “It’s education. Education is good. People with education make more money.” For those without “future orientation” and a strong ability to defer gratification, that’s weak motivation.
Is schooling about educating or is it about day care so that Mom can go to work?
A way to keep kids and locked up to protect property?
Or, is schooling an example of a bureaucratic function fulfilling its manifest destiny? “Life Long Learning” anyone?
I think we all agree it’s not about education. So, what propels it?
Embrace the power of “and”. It is about all of those. And, yes, that includes learning things. How much and how useful those things are is, however, an open question.
Right. ‘School’ is a bundled good. So, I’m thinking about the objective function; measures including but not limited to standardized test scores.
More money and time do not increase standardized test scores. Hence the Null Hypothesis.
Would some measures lead away from the Null Hypothesis?
Let me guess…a libertarian with no school age children?
Schooling is a bundled good that includes essential learning, socialization and daycare.
Is it perfect? No. What great alternatives you got on tap? Exactly.
Start apprenticeships early? At least you get useful skills and some work out of them.
There should be ways to use the absence of school over the past year for many to test the “null hypothesis.”
If scores on standardized tests fall dramatically, that might be some evidence against the null hypothesis. At a minimum, it would suggest some benefit to in-person class over zoom.
OTOH, if scores on standardized tests are unchanged, score another one for the null hypothesis.