If it was still the nineteenth century, you could compare European Jews in big urban centers to those who lived in shtetls, who would be more rural but might be more (culturally/genetically/etc) Jewish.
It's interesting that people in China are selling self-help books about the secret to Jewish success. Have they invented a euphemism equivalent to "tiger mom?" In the west it seems like most people who talk about Jewish achievement spend very little time exploring possible cultural differences and are most interested in providing support for hereditarian theories of intelligence.
Occurs to me that disparate impact and other explanations (cultural or genetic) aren’t exclusionary. Everyone always looks for the “REASON” as if the one fact will Single handedly explain all things.
Literally everything could be true at the same time (or not true).
I guess Jewish success is not uniquely interesting compared to other examples of minority overperformance, and once you factor in selective migration and urbanisation the factor that's unique to Jewish people (or to any other successful minority) is likely very small. But if the goal is to make a more equal society, understanding why some groups of people do better than others is definitely interesting.
"The main implications are that average immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to the population of that source country."
I wonder if this is true of immigrants more generally (that is to say, globally and not just in the US). Immigration systems always have some degree of selectivity baked in just based on the difficulties of moving to a new country.
> It’s fun to sit around reading about the historic empires that were ruled over by your own racial or religious or ethnic group, and to think “Wow, I am the heir to greatness!”
The idea is so foreign to me. I do not feel any kinship or relation to anyone who I've never met. It would mean nothing to me to find out that I was descended from any group or particular person (other than maybe genetic health stuff). Obviously, I'm in the minority on this and I've always been really interested in knowing why I'm so different on this dimension.
What about selective conversion to Christianity and Islam? Orthodox Judaism is a religion which requires men to read Hebrew, pray three times a day, understand some Jewish law etc. There has been huge pressure to convert to Christianity and Islam. Might less intelligent Jews preferentially convert from a religion where they feel they are less at home to one (Christianity) where they just need to do what the priest says... Should be stronger effect in Europe than in Muslim countries and least in Muslim countries where Arabic is not the spoken language.
I don't think that selective immigration counters disparate impact/systemic racism in a particularly interesting way. If the disparate impact/systemic racism hypothesis was stated as "there is no way for one ethnic group to earn higher average incomes than another other than by constructing systems of advantage and oppression" then sure, the fact that it's also possible to end up with a group with high average incomes by only letting rich people from that group enter the country is an argument against. But it's an argument on a technicality, and has very little to say about group advantage and disadvantage among people who aren't recent immigrants. And absent any sort of cultural/genetic/endogenous group prestige explanation for the group's success, it would suggest that regression to the oppression-adjusted mean should happen pretty much immediately, regardless of cultural assimilation or intermarriage.
On the other hand, if it's possible for some distinctive cultural groups to be persistently higher-achieving on some domains than others, it suggests that even persistent inequality among non-immigrants might be due to stuff like social structure, cultural norms, values, etc. That would suggest that people who want to improve the quality of life in their communities might benefit from trying to encourage people to imitate practices of other cultural groups that they admire. And it suggests that there would be some benefit to having schools try to impose cultural norms onto students.
I think the better argument for why Jews are _not_ evidence that culture or genetic engineering can produce sustained success is selective exit from Judaism. For 2000 years, Judaism has imposed uniquely strong educational requirements on practitioners, and has exposed practitioners to oppression. This made Judaism costly for people who weren't great learners and who didn't expect to be in a literate profession or trade, but made Judaism valuable for people who were, since it connected them to a network of literate professionals. The result is that even though Jewish migration to the US wasn't highly selected (your own numbers suggest that Jews should be less selected than almost any other ethnic group), the Jewish population in Europe was disproportionately urban and professional due to who continued to be Jewish. The book "The Chosen Few" makes this argument really well. This is slightly different from selective "attribution" of Judaism, because it's an argument that people are really more likely to stay Jewish, regardless of their parent's ethnicity or religion, if they're professionals, educated, and/or literate. This could still have created a uniquely productive culture or selected for genetics connected to intelligence, but to know that we'll have to look at the educational achievements of people without an exit path--maybe third-generation Israelis.
This is a fascinating topic, and it's not going away whatever Noah or Scott say. But I think Noah needs to do more work on the generic side "4) Genetic superpowers" is a weird way to talk about genes. The gene hypothesis is that genes matter, not that some people have "superpowers". Noah is very concerned to talk about people who are heavily invested in genetic explanations. But perhaps we're just observing something and drawing a conclusion. I think Noah is heavily invested in non-genetic explanations - regardless of what they might be. You don't like this one? Here's another non-genetic explanation, the answers got to be somewhere else.
Selective immigration certainly has its effects, across all immigrant groups. Having said that, what if it were shown that the second and third generation Jewish Americans have above-average SAT scores? In a world in which life outcomes correlate well with SAT scores -- even *within* the Systemically And Systematically Privileged Groups That Perpetuate Oppression -- wouldn't it be quite interesting for society to further investigate why this is the case? (or at least a tiny bit more interesting than churning out the umpteenth Jewish conspiracy theory to "explain" the statistical difference in Jewish outcomes?)
The SAT results of the second and third generations strongly hint at some form of heritability being involved, given that they patently cannot be explained by selective immigration. Genetic heritability? Cultural heritability? I'm aware that the Standard Model in US academia considers the genetic heritability of intelligence to be conceptually impossible - and am thus aware of how much I'm discrediting my own intelligence by admitting I believe it to be possible - but whatever mode of heritability has whichever amount of influence, gaining further insights into the whole thing would be interesting and beneficial.
As you remarked, China is already vested in studying the cultural angle. Either they are wasting their time, or they aren't. What would you say?
"But note that in his post, Scott spends quite a bit of time arguing against the idea that selective immigration is responsible for Jewish achievement. Why?"
The point is to argue against disparate impact broadly - including with groups where selective immigration isn't an applicable explanation. Group outcomes can differ due to group differences beyond selective immigration.
The highest expression of Jewish observance is immersion in Torah. In other words, literacy and scholarship are highly valorized in Jewish culture. Over many generations this surely has had a powerful effect on the Jewish people, including, one would think, genetic selection.
Regarding the Russian census, that would actually probably provide pretty good data. In the Soviet Union, you had a национальность, a "nationality" -- Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, &c. And interestingly, wherever you were born, if you were Jewish, you'd be put down as еврейский, "Jewish". This was a matter of legal status, so it's unlikely there would be any selection effects there.
If it was still the nineteenth century, you could compare European Jews in big urban centers to those who lived in shtetls, who would be more rural but might be more (culturally/genetically/etc) Jewish.
It's interesting that people in China are selling self-help books about the secret to Jewish success. Have they invented a euphemism equivalent to "tiger mom?" In the west it seems like most people who talk about Jewish achievement spend very little time exploring possible cultural differences and are most interested in providing support for hereditarian theories of intelligence.
Occurs to me that disparate impact and other explanations (cultural or genetic) aren’t exclusionary. Everyone always looks for the “REASON” as if the one fact will Single handedly explain all things.
Literally everything could be true at the same time (or not true).
I guess Jewish success is not uniquely interesting compared to other examples of minority overperformance, and once you factor in selective migration and urbanisation the factor that's unique to Jewish people (or to any other successful minority) is likely very small. But if the goal is to make a more equal society, understanding why some groups of people do better than others is definitely interesting.
"The main implications are that average immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to the population of that source country."
I wonder if this is true of immigrants more generally (that is to say, globally and not just in the US). Immigration systems always have some degree of selectivity baked in just based on the difficulties of moving to a new country.
> It’s fun to sit around reading about the historic empires that were ruled over by your own racial or religious or ethnic group, and to think “Wow, I am the heir to greatness!”
The idea is so foreign to me. I do not feel any kinship or relation to anyone who I've never met. It would mean nothing to me to find out that I was descended from any group or particular person (other than maybe genetic health stuff). Obviously, I'm in the minority on this and I've always been really interested in knowing why I'm so different on this dimension.
This article is a Jewish achievement. QED. :)
it's crazy how quickly folks do this...
... "she's jewish? she must be super-smart!"
... i swear i heard this just last week (on twitter). lol.
What about selective conversion to Christianity and Islam? Orthodox Judaism is a religion which requires men to read Hebrew, pray three times a day, understand some Jewish law etc. There has been huge pressure to convert to Christianity and Islam. Might less intelligent Jews preferentially convert from a religion where they feel they are less at home to one (Christianity) where they just need to do what the priest says... Should be stronger effect in Europe than in Muslim countries and least in Muslim countries where Arabic is not the spoken language.
You obviously hate to admit that intelligence is genetic.. and Jews are a very powerful proof of that.
I don't think that selective immigration counters disparate impact/systemic racism in a particularly interesting way. If the disparate impact/systemic racism hypothesis was stated as "there is no way for one ethnic group to earn higher average incomes than another other than by constructing systems of advantage and oppression" then sure, the fact that it's also possible to end up with a group with high average incomes by only letting rich people from that group enter the country is an argument against. But it's an argument on a technicality, and has very little to say about group advantage and disadvantage among people who aren't recent immigrants. And absent any sort of cultural/genetic/endogenous group prestige explanation for the group's success, it would suggest that regression to the oppression-adjusted mean should happen pretty much immediately, regardless of cultural assimilation or intermarriage.
On the other hand, if it's possible for some distinctive cultural groups to be persistently higher-achieving on some domains than others, it suggests that even persistent inequality among non-immigrants might be due to stuff like social structure, cultural norms, values, etc. That would suggest that people who want to improve the quality of life in their communities might benefit from trying to encourage people to imitate practices of other cultural groups that they admire. And it suggests that there would be some benefit to having schools try to impose cultural norms onto students.
I think the better argument for why Jews are _not_ evidence that culture or genetic engineering can produce sustained success is selective exit from Judaism. For 2000 years, Judaism has imposed uniquely strong educational requirements on practitioners, and has exposed practitioners to oppression. This made Judaism costly for people who weren't great learners and who didn't expect to be in a literate profession or trade, but made Judaism valuable for people who were, since it connected them to a network of literate professionals. The result is that even though Jewish migration to the US wasn't highly selected (your own numbers suggest that Jews should be less selected than almost any other ethnic group), the Jewish population in Europe was disproportionately urban and professional due to who continued to be Jewish. The book "The Chosen Few" makes this argument really well. This is slightly different from selective "attribution" of Judaism, because it's an argument that people are really more likely to stay Jewish, regardless of their parent's ethnicity or religion, if they're professionals, educated, and/or literate. This could still have created a uniquely productive culture or selected for genetics connected to intelligence, but to know that we'll have to look at the educational achievements of people without an exit path--maybe third-generation Israelis.
This is a fascinating topic, and it's not going away whatever Noah or Scott say. But I think Noah needs to do more work on the generic side "4) Genetic superpowers" is a weird way to talk about genes. The gene hypothesis is that genes matter, not that some people have "superpowers". Noah is very concerned to talk about people who are heavily invested in genetic explanations. But perhaps we're just observing something and drawing a conclusion. I think Noah is heavily invested in non-genetic explanations - regardless of what they might be. You don't like this one? Here's another non-genetic explanation, the answers got to be somewhere else.
Selective immigration certainly has its effects, across all immigrant groups. Having said that, what if it were shown that the second and third generation Jewish Americans have above-average SAT scores? In a world in which life outcomes correlate well with SAT scores -- even *within* the Systemically And Systematically Privileged Groups That Perpetuate Oppression -- wouldn't it be quite interesting for society to further investigate why this is the case? (or at least a tiny bit more interesting than churning out the umpteenth Jewish conspiracy theory to "explain" the statistical difference in Jewish outcomes?)
The SAT results of the second and third generations strongly hint at some form of heritability being involved, given that they patently cannot be explained by selective immigration. Genetic heritability? Cultural heritability? I'm aware that the Standard Model in US academia considers the genetic heritability of intelligence to be conceptually impossible - and am thus aware of how much I'm discrediting my own intelligence by admitting I believe it to be possible - but whatever mode of heritability has whichever amount of influence, gaining further insights into the whole thing would be interesting and beneficial.
As you remarked, China is already vested in studying the cultural angle. Either they are wasting their time, or they aren't. What would you say?
"But note that in his post, Scott spends quite a bit of time arguing against the idea that selective immigration is responsible for Jewish achievement. Why?"
The point is to argue against disparate impact broadly - including with groups where selective immigration isn't an applicable explanation. Group outcomes can differ due to group differences beyond selective immigration.
The highest expression of Jewish observance is immersion in Torah. In other words, literacy and scholarship are highly valorized in Jewish culture. Over many generations this surely has had a powerful effect on the Jewish people, including, one would think, genetic selection.
Regarding the Russian census, that would actually probably provide pretty good data. In the Soviet Union, you had a национальность, a "nationality" -- Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, &c. And interestingly, wherever you were born, if you were Jewish, you'd be put down as еврейский, "Jewish". This was a matter of legal status, so it's unlikely there would be any selection effects there.
Interesting that replying to a Scott Alexander article gets you so many creepy HBD apologists in your replies. I wonder what that's about.