Steven Levitt on The Daily Show
For those interested, here’s a paper on kidney transplants in Iran. It’s the only country in the world without a waiting list for the organ. Iran is a strange country. The government often kills homosexuals, but if you want to get a sex-change operation the state will pay for it.
Here’s Steven Levitt on The Daily Show talking about his book. A couple commentators mentioned his views on race and IQ. I wasn’t a race realist when I first read Freakonomics, so whatever he said didn’t stick with me. Anyway, Levitt’s an economist, not a psychometrician. No way he’d be able to pick a fight on this stuff and still be able to sell his books. When writing about IQ on issues not relating to race he treats it as a given (a lot of academics are like this), so that indicates to me he stays out of the PC stuff out of prudence. I’m just glad to see someone famous taking on the earth worshiping nuts.
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7 Comments
Nov 3, 2009 10:06 pm |
Levitt has gotten in the HBD debate. He championed some infant IQ study that showed no racial IQ differences at around 12 months.
Sailer hilariously made an analogy to a dunking competition that also showed no racial differences at 12 months.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/10/levitt-weighs-in-on-james-d-watson.html
Nov 3, 2009 10:06 pm |
“No way he’d be able to pick a fight on this stuff and still be able to sell his books.”
I remember reading Tim Harford’s excellent book ‘The Undercover Economist’ and him trying to explain the lack of progress in an African country (I forget which). At some point I think he noted that there were no differences in basic ability so that didn’t explain some of the crazy things he was describing. I wonder if Harford’s book would have been published if he had referred to the Lynn/Vanhanen data?
Nov 6, 2009 12:16 am |
When I remember reading Freakonomics he said bad schools are bad because of bad students, and those students are bad because of who their parents are rather than what they do (so nature, not nurture). Seems to me like he’s a realist.
By the way, a commenter at GNXP speculated that you aren’t really an anthro grad student. I haven’t been reading your blog, but I think Razib’s right that the variance is large enough you can’t really expect to be able to tell from the blog of someone who read a lot of pop-sci.
Nov 6, 2009 11:27 am |
“When I remember reading Freakonomics he said bad schools are bad because of bad students, and those students are bad because of who their parents are rather than what they do (so nature, not nurture). Seems to me like he’s a realist.”
And yet on the abortion issue, he also said that it created less children who’d be born into bad environments- not the possibility of children with bad personalities who create bad environments.
Look, the book was largely a work of pop economics and is bound to have some contradictory and inane claims in regard to nature-nurture issues. Which it did, such as Levitt mentioning IQ is strongly genetic (albeit not specifying just how genetic it is) and, when discussing the failures of Head Start, didn’t mention in the least the possibility of it being due to the idea of IQ being mostly genetic.
That’s not why Head Start has been a failure, though. There’ve been quite a few studies showing gains from it sustained well after preschool and the like, and most gains being washed out due to the children being put into piss-poor schools. Not to mention it seems many whites who go on it see gains more often in comparison to blacks, going in line with the sort of concentrated poverty blacks are more likely to live in, and thus more likely to attend bad schools.
Just because Levitt thinks genetic inheritance matters more than parental environment on average (which isn’t a hereditarian position at all, really) doesn’t make him a hereditarian. I see this habit among many “HBD” enthusiasts of attributing any popular writers or whatever who are open to hereditary explanations to certain social phenomenon and the like *must* be hereditarians or secretly be really, really open to the idea.
And that all just falls back to how intellectualy dishonest the term HBD is, and how it’s just, overall, a really bad neologism.
Nov 6, 2009 11:32 am |
“By the way, a commenter at GNXP speculated that you aren’t really an anthro grad student. I haven’t been reading your blog, but I think Razib’s right that the variance is large enough you can’t really expect to be able to tell from the blog of someone who read a lot of pop-sci.”
Not pinning anything on Hoste here, but I genuinely wonder how most hereditarians/racialists can hold onto their beleifs so strongly if they read into anthropology enough, and see the sheer dynamicism and chaotic nature of human societies, cultures, history in general etc. Especially if they parrot racialist literature like Rushton and Lynn’s work, which is often flat-out worshipped amongst them.
But, Hoste has reffered to REB as the “bible of race realism”. And likes to tell people he knows about it.
Nov 7, 2009 11:20 pm |
I like Steve Levitt. More attention should be paid to this smart, gay Jew.
Nov 8, 2009 12:16 am |
‘I genuinely wonder how most hereditarians/racialists can hold onto their beleifs so strongly if they read into anthropology enough, and see the sheer dynamicism and chaotic nature of human societies, cultures, history in general etc’
Tell that to the Bushmen.
Plus you need to understand that racialism is about the importance of race, and does not neccessarily entail asserting that culture isn’t important or that it can’t evolve over time.
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