Murray Facing Reality: the Outcome

OK. So the two truths in Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America are that Americans of different races, as groups, have different cognitive ability and they have different crime rates. But what does it all mean?

(Back to Murray Facing Reality: The Setup)

What it means is that liberal governance, based upon the idea that the only just society is a society in which everything in all walks of life should be racially balanced, is going to make things worse.

Let us leave aside the trivial meaning, when it comes to crime. The job of the police is to crack the heads of lower-class thugs whether they are 19th century Irish, 20th century Italians, or 21st century blacks. If you don't police the young thugs then you will get vigilantes and gangs stepping in to keep the peace. And we don't want that, right, liberals?

No, the bigger problem is that the policy of race norming in the workplace cannot work: forcing every corporation, at every level, to display the right proportion of races. In fact, it will make everyone angry, from whites and Asians diversified out of jobs for which they are best qualified to blacks boosted up into jobs beyond their cognitive comfort zone.

Let's look at the problem both at the average and at the extreme.

At the average you have the average black at at IQ of 91 and an average white at an IQ of 103. Now, as Murray says, studies show that IQ is a good predictor of performance. This means that if you hire an average black for a position he/she will perform worse than an average white.

Do you see the problem here? It is that the average white around the office will think that the average black is a fool and a dunce, because the average black in the office with an IQ of 91 will be performing a lot worse than the average white in the office with an IQ of 103.

Let's suppose that science tells us that for a particular job a corporation needs an employee with an IQ of 103 and it hires on that basis. OK, right away it means that the pool of blacks will be smaller than the pool of whites. If our employer is completely race blind and hires only on the basis of IQ that means that blacks will be "underrepresented" throughout the corporation at jobs that require an IQ level of 103.

I don't think that the bean-counters at race-enforcement central are going to like that.

Now let's talk about the extreme. Let's talk about a job that needs an IQ of about 135, such as "a full professorship at an elite university" or "a senior position in the IT industry." What is the talent pool of 25-29 year-olds in the whole United States, by race, for that job?

[You are talking] about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans.

In other words there are 57 whites nationwide that could do the job for every one black. So, if you were conducting a totally colorblind job search then you would hire a black once in every 50 job searches.

Imagine what the race-counters at race-enforcement central would say about that! 

Of course, in fact one third of the hirees would be Asian, because the average Asian has an IQ of 108 to the average white's IQ of 103 even though Asians are only about 6 percent of the population. So Asians would be way overrepresented in the top-dog jobs. Right now, as we all know, the race-counters at Ivy League colleges discriminate against Asians because otherwise they would be the majority of students!

Ok, now let's forget about the race-counters at race central. Let's think instead about ordinary people. Suppose we proceed on our current diversity and inclusion course and preferentially hire blacks for elite positions. What would that mean to the people boosted up into positions for which they do not have the cognitive chops?

Well, we know what it means at elite colleges, which search out blacks to study at their universities. Studies show that blacks -- and kids in general -- fail when they study at a university where the rest of the student body has much higher cognitive ability than they do. I think the gold standard on this finding is Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. They showed that black students -- er, students in general -- do much better when they go to a college with a student body that matches their test results than when they go to an elite college where the other students have significantly higher test results.

If we project this finding from the university to the workplace, then we are looking at blacks who are much more likely to fail at their jobs than their white counterparts -- because they have a significantly lower cognitive ability than the job requires.

And one thing more. If corporations hire unqualified people for their top jobs then the performance of these folks playing out of their league is going to lower the performance of the corporation as a whole and that is going to affect the lower-level employees -- not to mention the customers.

We are actually seeing this work out in real time at shops like The New York Times where "midwit" journalists such as Nikole Hannah-Jones -- of the "1619 Project" -- and Mara Gay -- troubled by American flags on Memorial Day weekend -- make fools of themselves by parroting the elite conventional wisdom without having the chops to perform on the elite stage.

And that is to say nothing of the ordinary middle-class whites that get shouldered out of the ordinary middle-class jobs for which they are qualified in order to satisfy the moral preenings of the educated ruling class.

There's another problem with race-conscious hiring, particularly in government: "aggressive affirmative action" at the city level means less competent police, prosecutors, health-care workers and K-12 public school teachers. It's the science.

The presence of incompetent or marginally competent people in those jobs is only occasionally important to members of America's upper middle class... The burden... is borne overwhelmingly by America's poorest and most vulnerable populations.

You may say that the poorest and most vulnerable populations can do something about that by voting the rascals out. You may say that our liberal friends are devoted above all else to government services that help the poorest and most vulnerable. I couldn't possibly comment. 

Let us give Charles Murray the last word.

The problem, he says, is that "affirmative action" morphed from "initiatives... to seek out qualified Blacks who were being overlooked" into "government-sponsored preferential treatment in determining who gets the educations and the jobs."

The solution, he says, is to "Eliminate all forms of government-sponsored treatment by race."

And the place to start is "to restore the American creed as the ideal shared by a consensus of the electorate." 

The Democrats need to treat racial preference policies "as pragmatic measures to deal with residual racism... and disassociate himself from the rhetoric of systemic racism."

The Republicans "must stop posturing as the guardians of true Americanism and instead say... that the people who love this country have always been on both sides of the political spectrum and still are today."

I said I'd give Charles Murray the last word. And I will, for today. But not tomorrow.