Wednesday, May 29, 2013




Unwise and wrong to mention low average Hispanic IQ?

Ruben Navarrette (writing below) is a somewhat conservative Hispanic journalist but there are some truths he can't stand.  He is almost certainly right  in saying that Republicans should avoid the issue of Hispanic IQ but he then goes on to say that Richwine's research is "discredited".  It is anything but.  It was endorsed by three eminent experts in the field.  Ruben appears to have mistaken Leftist disapproval for scientific evidence!  Dumb, Ruben, dumb

Dear Heritage Foundation, you're not helping.

I assume you agree with the proposition that -- demographics being what they are -- it would be a good thing to thaw out the frosty relationship between Latinos and Republicans. Yet, your incompetence and insensitivity during the Jason Richwine debacle have brought in a new cold front.

What's the point of building bridges between Latinos and the Republican Party if one of the nation's leading conservative think tanks is going to blow them up?

Frankly, I couldn't care less if Latinos never cast another vote for a Republican candidate.

Here's what I do care about -- that Latino voters see casting such a vote as a viable option. I want Latinos to have choices and be courted by both parties. Otherwise, they will be politically irrelevant, written off by one party and taken for granted by another. Competition keeps people on their toes.

That's the collateral damage of L'Affaire Richwine. Here's the background: Jason Richwine is a former senior policy analyst at Heritage and the co-author of a roundly discredited study that said the Senate immigration reform bill would cost taxpayers roughly $6.3 trillion over the next half-century. It was recently revealed that Richwine -- in his 2009 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government -- made the goofy argument that Hispanic immigrants and their descendants were forever destined to be less intelligent than whites. He wrote:

"Immigrants living in the U.S. today do not have the same level of cognitive ability as natives. ... No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against."

Source

The poor performance on IQ tests by blacks and Hispanics is exactly what one would predict given their substandard achievements.  The test  performance of blacks and Hispanics validates the tests.  The test results  predict that these groups will have poor educational, vocational and financial success.  And they do!  The tests provide correct predictions.  If blacks and Hispanics did just as well in education and in the workforce as whites do, THEN the tests would be "discredited"

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Illegal aliens coming to the US (will not) vote republican, and republicans should be smart enough to know that. The reason is quite simple. Like America's blacks, illegals will give their political support to the party that makes the most govt. handouts available to them. And that's the Democrats.

The republican party would be better off spending their time trying to keep republicans and conservatives in their tent. Pandering will cause them to lose everyone.

Anonymous said...

"It was endorsed by three eminent experts in the field."

Who? Larry, Moe and Curly?

Anonymous said...

I think it's more to do with (sub)culture and social influence than potential genetic IQ.

Anonymous said...

seems like the premise of the movie "Idiocracy" is coming true.

jonjayray said...

The three experts:

Richwine's dissertation committee at Harvard included George Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy. The Cuban-born scholar received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia. He is an award-winning labor economist, a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the author of countless books, including a widely used labor economics textbook now in its sixth edition.

Richard J. Zeckhauser, the Frank P. Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at JFK, also signed off on Richwine's dissertation. Zeckhauser earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He belongs to the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences).

The final member of Richwine's "racist" thesis committee is Christopher Jencks, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard's JFK School. He is a renowned left-wing academic who has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He edited the liberal New Republic magazine in the 1960s and has written several scholarly books tackling poverty, economic inequality, affirmative action, welfare reform and, yes, racial differences ("The Black-White Test Score Gap").

Anonymous said...

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, 1984