Murray Facing Reality, Yes You Liberals

The point of Charles Murray's Facing Reality is quite simple. Whatever you fervently believe with every cell in your activist brain, liberals, human groups are different.

(The bigger meaning of Facing Reality)

That means that if you use government or secular religion to force group outcomes to be "representative" of society as a whole you are going to have to use force. A lot of force.

And even when you use force, it will probably not make much difference.

Charles Murray has spent his life showing liberals how their fervent beliefs are in fact virtue-signalling fantasies -- from way back before "virtue-signalling" became a thing. Let's recapitulate.

In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, 323 pages, published in 1984, Murray wrote that the Great Society was a wrong turn and failed, and that liberals should know it because they instrumented all the wonderful new programs so they could boast about their successes, so the numbers are all there for anyone that cares. But the liberals didn't want to write about the failures. So they didn't.

In The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 845 pages, published in 1994 and co-written with Richard Herrnstein, Murray argued that the future would belong to those with more "cognitive ability." I.e., black Americans would not do well in the job market of the future. Liberals said that Murray was a racist.

In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, 407 pages, published in 2012, Murray wrote that, considering only white Americans, the cognitively able were doing fine with great careers and merger marriages (of cognitive able men to cognitively able women), the middle 50 percent were doing so-so, and at the bottom the cognitively disabled men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.

Now in Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, 151 pages, published in 2021, Murray says told-ya so liberals. Groups that test with lower IQ have worse outcomes in life and work and crime. Period, full stop, science.

For me Facing Reality crystallized two notions that hadn't previously crystallized in my brain.

First, I have known for a while that humans do not give up their fervent beliefs when presented with "science" that demonstrates their ideas are wrong. Not at all. Instead humans go for one more Big Push, a Reign of Terror, a Great Purge, a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only when their brilliant ideas lie around them in graveyards from here to the horizon do people give up on their glorious vision of a better world. So this is it. This is our Great Purge. That is the meaning of "systemic racism" and Wokism and pushing Critical Race Theory into the nation's schools. Liberals instinctively know their ideas have failed. So the response is to destroy their political opponents. Humans always do things like that when things start going wrong. 

Second, "woke" corporations are a natural and physical response by corporations to the double-bind the Civil Rights era puts on them. The original Civil Rights Act in Title VII provided for affirmative action and the idea that the only way to show an absence of bias was by showing that a corporation's workforce "looked like America" from janitor to CEO. Thus, if a traditionally marginalized group is "underrepresented" at any level in a corporation then the corporation is just sitting there, like a rabbit before a coyote, easy prey for any lefty activist group hungry for a nice tasty lunch today. But, because of the distribution of cognitive ability in different groups it is physically impossible to achieve this. So all a corporation can do is salute and contribute to BLM and close the accounts of Republican candidates at their bank.

So, if gubmint programs can't achieve what they promise to do, because reality, what is the point of them? The point is that every government program is a war on some horrid monster, and the noble supporters can expect loot and plunder from here to eternity.

Thus, all politics is about ginning up a war on some frightful enemy and then sharing the loot out among the supporters. There are four ways to do this.

You can declare some small neighboring country an enemy and invade and conquer them, as Bismarck did to Denmark (!) in 1862. This is the best strategy, because it unites the whole country against an insignificant foe that can't really fight back.

You can declare that Japs and Nazis are the enemy and have a world war over it. This is obviously a high risk strategy: what if you lose? But still, you get to unite the whole country to fight the monsters: keep your fingers crossed.

You can declare some large minority to be an enemy and fight a culture war against them, as the left is doing right now against "white supremacists." The danger is that you might ignite a real civil war, as happened in the US culture war of the 1850s. But nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

You can declare a small minority to be the cause of all our problems, and unite the rest of the country against them, as Hitler did with the Jews. Not much fun for the small minority. Hey, I wonder if the current liberal use of blacks as a helpless victim small minority might not rebound in a "backlash."

See, I think that the real need for liberals to "face reality" is that there is a good chance that their present way of dividing the nation -- as all politics does -- might work against them. What if whites and Latinos and Asians all decide that low IQ blacks are a problem in the workforce, and a menace on the streets? You can say that the group differences between blacks and the rest mean that blacks are helpless victims. Or you can decide that since blacks commit about 50 percent of all murders that blacks are an existential problem. 

Suppose we experience the US politics of the last 50 years as a continuous effort of liberals to insist that blacks are "helpless victims" and to cancel anyone that disagrees, because raciss.

In the end life, the universe, and everything is a throw of the dice. That's what modern "science" says.

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.

Murray Facing Reality: The Setup

I had an aha moment in the first chapters of Charles Murray's short polemic Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America. Nothing remarkable really. As he says in the introduction:

American White, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

That was what The Bell Curve was all about back in the 1990s.

American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.

Sorry liberals. Those are Facts, backed up by Science. And you are the Party of Science, remember?

His book made me realize what "systemic racism" and wokism is all about.

It is about the fact that to our liberal friends it cannot be true that the whole liberal project is a steaming pile of ordure. 

America's problems cannot be because ruling-class liberals have been wrong and wrong again and that their vision to make America into a just and equal society will never work. No, it's all the fault of those racist sexist homophobic evil white supremacists and right-wing extremists.They are what holds us back. It must be, because liberals are the good guys.

The point is that, over fifty years since the civil rights acts, it is intolerable to our liberal friends that there are still large group differences in America, particularly between white and black. Their faith was and is that civil rights law would eliminate group differences, and inaugurate a new era of equality. Somebody, somewhere, somehow has sabotaged the holy quest, and they must be stopped.

The whole point of Murray's book is to tell liberals: No. Your vision was always fatally flawed, and the last 50 years has proved it. Humans are different, liberals, and the differences mean different outcomes, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away. The next big push... No Child Left Behind in 2001 or a campaign to root out systemic racism in 2021 will change things.

Remember "Big Push?" That's what the Brits called their failed offensives on the western front in World War I. 

So Murray says no to the next Big Push. "[M]ean differences between groups are a reality and will be with us indefinitely." But against that is the saving faith, not just for liberals but for conservatives who say:

"The differences must be temporary. If they aren't... but they must be."

Sorry Charlie. There are real differences between the races in America. And there always will be. And that means different outcomes. You know what happened with the Big Pushes of World War I? They killed off the flower of youthful Britain. And France and Germany too.

OK. Let's get down to race. Just a social construction, after all.

America is multiracial America. Murray dissects it in three different ways: overall, Big City America, and America Outside the Big Cities.

Murray	Colloq.	Total US	Big-City	Rest of US
Total Population		325m	127m	198m
European	White	60%	45%	71%
Latin	Hispanic	18%	25%	14%
African	Black	13%	17%	10%
Asian	Asian	6%	9%	3%

You can see that America is still majority white, overall and in the rest of America. But whites are a minority in Big City America.

Now Murray gets down to brass tacks. Specifically:

1. When Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latins take cognitive ability tests, their "mean" results are different.
2. Race differences between Africans and Europeans in cognitive ability have not changed since the 1980s.
3. The tests predict future outcomes.

Do you see the point here? It is that you cannot expect populations with different cognitive abilities to have similar performance.

And you can see why our liberal friends are foaming at the CRT mouth. If we have been spending hundreds of billions every year on "helping" the marginalized and the oppressed it cannot be -- it cannot be -- that in the case of Africans (blacks) the whole effort is a big fat zero. There must be "malevolence" preventing it, because, per Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

There must be a fault. And since it can't be the educated, evolved liberal elite, and it can't be the helpless victims of the marginalized. Well, you get the point.

The test scores between Africans and Europeans are about one standard deviation, between Latins and Europeans is about 0.7 of a standard deviation. And Asians test about 0.25 of a standard deviation better than Europeans.

That mans that Asians are going to outperform Europeans are going to outperform Latins are going to outperform Africans. Period.

The point is that if you, the ruling class, want to make the proportions of workers in jobs and professions "look like America" you are going to have to go beyond affirmative action and diversity. You are going to have to blacken the entire white America as systemic racists and send them to the back of the line.

And here are the latest IQ numbers:

	IQ
European	103
African	91
Latin	94
Asian	108

If you construct bell curves of the IQ distribution of each of the four race categories there is plenty of overlap. So there are plenty of bright Africans, and plenty of dumb Europeans. But...

Since the most prestigious, powerful and highest paying jobs are so concentrated among people on the right-hand side of the [bell curve], a variety of important social and economic consequences... are inevitable.

In other words, there is no way in hell that it is possible for average people to succeed at the demanding jobs leading great institutions, creating new businesses, and ruling the nation. And that is what our liberal friends cannot allow themselves to think, let alone to admit.

And it gets worse. But that is for next time.