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Why Baltimore is in such bad shape
David J. writes:
The post about Baltimore and its mayoralty reminded me of my reaction to a photograph of Mayor Sheila Dixon from a few years ago. While looking at her picture, notwithstanding her liberal politics, I became hugely sympathetic to her position and realized that she and other big-city mayors were indeed in unenviable situations. Dixon and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake govern a two-thirds black, disproportionately underclass population, which poses drastically different problems than those faced by, say, the mayor of SWPL-enriched Portland, Oregon .
According to the mathematical blogger La Griffe du Lion, Baltimore’s black public school students have a mean IQ of 76, suggesting that their parents are even less intelligent due to the statistical phenomenon of regression towards the mean (i.e., children from the lower half of a racial IQ distribution should generally revert towards the race’s mean IQ). Even more surprising, white inner-city public school students in Baltimore have a mean IQ of only 86. Clearly, white flight followed by black middle class departure over the past few decades has left the city with a population almost entirely bereft of human capital.
What can Rawlings-Blake do with a population so lacking in ability? Any efforts at economic revitalization will present inherent difficulties because of the intellectual deficiencies of locals. Of course, crime reduction should be an absolute priority, as Delegate Patrick McDonough demands. However, such policies will probably require nearly draconian measures like a strictly enforced teenage curfew and the successful “Broken Windows” effort of New York’s Rudy Giuliani. Will city residents, who are mostly black and often related to criminals, go along with such policies? Remember that New York City has enough mainstream whites to vote for law-and-order Republican mayors, which stands in sharp contrast to Baltimore’s demographic condition. Will anything short of Giuliani’s law enforcement strategy actually work? It would be probably political death for a politician like Rawlings-Blake. Recall that former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty fell into disrepute with many black voters for his tough approach to improving the public school system and lost his re-election attempt. Further compounding the issue, the infamous “Stop Snitchin’” campaign, which inveighs against cooperation with police, was based in Baltimore. How can we expect a mayor or any other government official to govern the ungovernable, educate the uneducable, and capitalize on non-existing human capital?
Unfortunately, large-city American mayors find themselves in intractably losing positions and burdened by unrealistic expectations. It is a sad reality and my sympathy, to a degree, goes out to them. The sympathy must be qualified and measured because these selfsame urban mayors, to my great disappointment, often involve themselves in malfeasance (Kwame Kilpatrick, Marion Berry, and even the aforesaid Sheila Dixon). Perhaps people really do get the government they deserve.
LA replies:
Of course you don’t have an immediate solution, but how refreshing, almost revolutionary, it is to see the intractable problems of a largely black U.S. city discussed realistically as you have done here. Very simply, Baltimore’s population (1) lacks the intellectual ability to function at the normal level of Western society, and (2) is too anti-police to accept the measures that are needed to restore public safety. Imagine if Baltimore’s problems were openly discussed in these real terms by our society’s leaders and the media, instead of in the fantastical terms (e.g., “there’s no limit what people can accomplish if they set their mind to it”) that are the lingua franca of American politics.
Your comment reminds me of a Patrick Buchanan column in the late 1980s in the New York Post where he said that the reason for New York City’s problems was the quality of the people living there. I was thrilled when I read that non-liberal truth.
- end of initial entry -
James P. writes:
What David J. does not take into account is that the mayors and administrators of cities full of blacks lacking in ability are themselves lacking in ability. The most intelligent philosopher-king in the world would be hard-pressed to govern such creatures as inhabit Baltimore. But former city council president Sheila Dixon, and the current city council president, apparently no more than a high-school graduate, do not have much greater intelligence or ability than their constituents. It is hard to sympathize with corrupt, stupid people who are inevitably misgoverning a corrupt, stupid populace.
Apropos of the leadership of Baltimore, this article from 2003 amused me:
Sheila Dixon Democrat Age: 49 Dixon has been City Council president since 1999, and has been an international trade specialist for the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development for even longer. Accomplishments include changing the council’s committee structure and moving the council to a year-round meeting schedule. She has a powerful ally in Mayor Martin O’Malley.
Got that? After four years as President of the City Council, her chief accomplishments were changing the committee structure and schedule of the City Council! Not solving Baltimore’s problems or making the city better, but tinkering with bureaucratic structure and process.
Irv P. writes:
Reading the post about the IQs of Baltimorians brought to mind the following anecdote from my past.
Around 2000, at an all-black public school in New York City where I was working, a new principal arrived from private industry. I heard she had been a V.P. at a major bank. She was black and, from the encounters that we had, seemed obviously intelligent and qualified. In short, I respected her and had hopes for her administration. She brought with her a lot of new ideas about a broad range of things. At the time I was the chairman of something called the School Leadership Team, an innovation brought to the city by then Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew. Because of my position and the meetings we attended together, where I was in charge, she came to me at times with questions she had about her new surroundings.
After she had been at the school for three or four months, she came into the gym to find me and ask a broad question.
Ms. B.: “So what do you think of the things that I have initiated so far”?
I.P.: “They’re all good ideas, Ms. B., but you don’t have the horses.”
Ms. B.: “I don’t know what that means. What do you mean by horses”?
I.P. “It’s a coach’s expression, Ms. B. When a coach has good players, he wins. Good players make good coaches. If a coach doesn’t have quality players, all the strategy in the world won’t work because he just doesn’t have the talent (horses). You don’t have the horses here. Everything you are trying to do is shooting too high. They can’t do it! You are ignoring reality.”
She took a long hard look at me, turned, and left, and never spoke to me again. That wasn’t really for a long time though, because three months later she resigned and went back to banking. I guess she was a quick learner.
She was one of those people who, because they are exceptionally talented, didn’t understand at first that everyone can’t “shoot for the stars.” Maybe star shooting is at the core of the liberal dementia. Yes, utopian thinking is the mental illness they suffer from!
James N. writes:
What a wonderful comment by David J.! Since my visit to the National Zoo on African-American Family Day last year I have felt on the verge of a change in understanding about the black U.S. population, and although I have had sufficient facts, it has taken the intifada and comments such as this to bring me along.
WE HAVE A VERY BIG PROBLEM.
It was right and just to free the slaves. The major pre-1860 objection was, “OK, suppose we do that? What then?”
Well, as we know, the “What then?” was legal segregation, social discrimination, policing, and extrajudicial punishment.
This, in its time, came to be seen as unfair and eventually as unjust as well. Certainly, manifest injustices were visited daily on the “talented tenth” who could not rise in accordance with their abilities.
So, came the 1954-1965 transformation. Again, the objectors said, “OK, make those changes. What then?”
This time was different. This time, we decided to pretend that abolishing legal separation and remediating differences with education, money, and affirmation would create a better situation than pre-1954.
We have learned, at terrible cost, that this was incorrect. The task at hand now is to answer the eternal question arising our of the presence of this population among us, now shorn of their talented tenth (who have moved into the white world) and concentrated in ungovernable cities, angry, restless, and hopeless: “OK, you did that. What now?”
Bravo, David J.
Stan S. writes:
Today on VFR David J. writes:
According to the mathematical blogger La Griffe du Lion, Baltimore’s black public school students have a mean IQ of 76, suggesting that their parents are even less intelligent due to the statistical phenomenon of regression towards the mean (i.e., children from the lower half of a racial IQ distribution should generally revert towards the race’s mean IQ).
Not being a statistician I’m entirely open to correction, but to me the logic in the above statement makes no sense. As I understand it, regression to the mean has nothing to do with biology: it follows from the intuitive observation that when you measure something once and get a result that is either very high or very low (whatever that might mean in a given context), the odds are that a second measurement would yield something nearer the average. This applies to measurements that have a fair amount of uncertainty, so that multiple measurements may give different results.
Now if black public school students in Baltimore have measured IQs that are far below the average in a given population (whether the population is taken to be inner-city blacks, or all blacks, or all the inhabitants of Baltimore, or all Americans), then on the basis of statistical regression to the mean we should expect that their parents will have, or rather would be measured to have, higher IQs, not lower IQs.
If my reasoning is not clear, consider that from the point of view of pure statistics it’s unimportant whom we call “the parents” and who “the children.” If we renamed “children” into “parents” and “parents” into “children” every statistical deduction would be the same. Therefore, for the same reason that the child of a low-scoring parent is likely to score better, the parent of a low-scoring child is also likely to score, not worse, but better.
Ben S. writes:
David J. has completely misapplied the concept of regression to the mean, which depends upon the assumption that when an individual trait (such as IQ) deviates from the mean, this is in part due to observed influences (such as parental IQ), and in part due to unobserved influences (environmental perturbations, chance, etc.). In this case, if the regression to the mean was complete, all black children would have IQs of 85 and the IQ would have 0 percent heritability within race. Conversely, no regression to the mean would mean that the IQ of each child was the exact average of their parents” IQs, so that the heritability of IQ would be 100 percent. Let us say that the heritability is 80 percent. Then given a black child with an IQ of 76, we presume that 80 percent of the 9-point deficit is inherited, and thus the expected IQ of the parents is 85—(9*80 percent) = 77.8. Thus we see that regression to the mean operates forwards and backwards in time. To put this in common sense terms: Does one expect the parents of an Olympic silver medalist to have won gold medals? Does one expect the parents of a child with IQ 175 to have had 190 IQs? Obviously not.
Clark Coleman writes:
David J. wrote:
According to the mathematical blogger La Griffe du Lion, Baltimore’s black public school students have a mean IQ of 76, suggesting that their parents are even less intelligent due to the statistical phenomenon of regression towards the mean (i.e., children from the lower half of a racial IQ distribution should generally revert towards the race’s mean IQ).
Regression to the mean does not explain the Baltimore data. In fact, it would tend to produce results in the other direction from the Baltimore data, as La Griffe du Lion discusses. Rather, the entire phenomenon is due to the combination of black flight and white flight from Baltimore to the suburbs. The smarter blacks got out of Baltimore, as did the smarter whites.
Dave T. writes:
The solution to the problem is to manage the human capital of the country by encouraging the reproduction and/or immigration of those who would significantly improve the overall human capital of the country while simultaneously discouraging the reproduction and/or immigration of those who would significantly decrease the same as humanely as possible (e.g. dole out benefits to qualified participants who volunteer to leave the country and/or sterilize themselves, make a high priority of deporting resident aliens who significantly decrease the overall human capital of the country). Of course, none of this possible so long as our society is wedded to the left’s putatively egalitarian values.
James N. writes:
James P.’s comment is similar to many made by traditionally-aligned conservatives when they begin to become aware. He expresses an angry reaction—” It is hard to sympathize with corrupt, stupid people who are inevitably misgoverning a corrupt, stupid populace.”—and, indeed, it is. And sympathy would be entirely inappropriate if it were wielded to engender undeserved guilt by whites, or to excuse misbehavior and worse by blacks.
But that’s not quite the situation we have. To separate from the Muslims—an entirely alien people who never should have been permitted to immigrate here in the first place—is one thing. But these people—the students with an average IQ of 76, the inept teachers, the corrupt officials—they have been living among us for 403 years. To be angry at them upon discovering the reality of them for the first time is a bit much. Angry at the white liberals who destroyed their separate communities, yes. Angry at the lies, the theft, the destruction of the schools—sure.
As you have repeatedly chastised the “usual suspects” for not offering a solution to our 30-year old Islam problem, you also should ask James P. (and others), “OK, OK. The IQ of 76, the helplessness, the inability to self-govern, the affirmative action scam—good eyes, it’s all real. Now what?”
As I see it, we have had three stages in our relationship with the blacks, since 1609—slavery, legal separation, and “integration/freedom.” If, as Paul Kersey says, “freedom failed,” what then is to be done?
LA replies:
From time to time I have suggested the main features of such a solution, though of course (as with all my major ideas and proposals) they lie beyond the end of modern liberal America:
VFR’s solution to the race problem in America
The problem of racial differences, again
The common sense solution to America’s race problem
Jonathan S. writes:
I know little of the history of South Africa, but I’d not be surprised to learn that the policy of Apartheid there arose from the effort to deal with problems—and the realities underlying them—similar to those now facing the United States.
David J. writes:
I hope my comprehension of La Griffe du Lion’s data is right. If not, I then stand corrected. If you will, please post my response.
Let’s say that black Baltimoreans in 1960 had a mean IQ of 85 and, after decades of black middle class flight, the mean fell to some value substantially lower than 85 in the remaining population. So, the city’s black remnant disproportionately represents the left half of the original IQ distribution. The children of this population should therefore possess a mean IQ that has reverted towards the original population’s higher mean of 85 (other things being equal). Why has the youths’ mean only climbed to 76 instead of a value closer to 85? Per La Griffe du Lion, the children’s mean stands at 76 because the general mean (adults plus children) of the remnant is actually lower than 76 as the adults are even less intelligent than their offspring. Is not this the conclusion of La Griffe himself in the passage below or have I embarrassingly misunderstood? I have emboldened the meaningful parts.
Whereas suburban mean IQs (86 for blacks, 99 for whites) conform more or less to national norms, city IQs are dreadfully low. With a mean IQ of 76, inner-city blacks fall about 0.6 SD below the African American average nationally. More than a third have death-penalty immunity on grounds of mental retardation….To compound matters, we almost certainly have overstated urban IQs. City residents constitute a low-IQ group extracted from a more cognitively representative population. Their kids, whose test scores we analyzed, should have regressed toward their racial means, i.e., toward higher IQs. That is, inner city kids are smarter than their parents. Accordingly, our estimates of inner-city IQs are best regarded as upper bounds to adult values.
May 25
Karl J. writes:
To James N.’s comment, “OK, you did that. What now?” I say: “Amen, brother!”
However, I must take exception to his characterization of the past 50-plus years as “integration/freedom.” I suspect that this equivocation is precisely what is going in the mind of white liberals: the fear that, since “integration/freedom” has obviously failed, the only alternative is “racism”—and that is emotionally intolerable for them.
The problem with the past 50 years is that the ideal of equal rights was abandoned almost as soon as it became politically feasible. Black agitation for civil rights morphed into the struggle for “Black Power,” and white liberals aimed to produce equality, not of rights, but of results. The result has been “Affirmative Action” in its various forms: which is to say, racial separatism combined with coercive egalitarianism.
Why and how all this happened is a long, sad, twisted story. The upshot, though, is that equal rights is the road not taken. It is, however, still an option—for anyone ready, willing, and able to think outside the box of “liberalism” vs. “racism.”
LA replies:
If you believe that, if you believe that the liberalism we have now is only “actually existing liberalism” and that we have not yet tried “true liberalism,” then you are a right-liberal who hasn’t had second thoughts. As I wrote in my article, “How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable,” the only way that invidious discrimination against blacks could have been removed without resulting in the anti-white, racial-socialist system we have now, would have been for the civil rights legislation and the accompanying ideological goals to have been much far less reaching than they actually were. The white majority needed to say something like the following:
“We are removing certain unfair treatment of blacks, but this does not mean that we are aiming at a system of total non-discrimination and racial equality. America is a white-majority country with a white, Anglo-European based majority culture and a strong belief in individual rights. If that culture is to survive, along with its belief in individual rights, equality of rights cannot be our supreme principle, since that will inexorably lead to a demand for group equality of outcome and for the destruction of the majority culture which stands in the way of such group equality. Therefore equality can be safely promoted only insofar as it does not threaten the basic cultural character of the country. Our highest principle is not equality. Our highest principle is the good, particularly the good of the United States. If equality is made the highest principle, it will inevitably destroy the majority culture and lead to racial socialism, thus fatally harming the United States.”
James N. writes:
To add to what you said: Karl J. says we haven’t had “integration/freedom,” I suspect, because he still believes against all evidence that integration/freedom could work to ameliorate the racial conditions that existed pre-1954.
Instead of things being better, they are worse, in fact, much worse. Karl J. believes that if equal rights had been granted things would be better.
He does not recognize that the granting of equal rights in the expectation of equal outcomes as a result is the CAUSE of our current difficulties. The racial socialism that you speak of is a byproduct of the granting of equal rights, combined with the wish for equal outcomes.
LA replies:
Of course. No one concerned about the lowly state of blacks in America wanted ONLY procedural equality for black individuals. They wanted the condition of black America to be raised and to be equalized with that of whites. But since procedural equality for individuals could not possibly achieve that objective, given the actual racial differences in intelligence and other civilizational abilities, the demand for procedural equality for individuals had to evolve into a demand for coercively achieved group equality of outcome, such as we actually have now. Therefore the only way to remove the worst discrimination against blacks without ending up with racial socialism would have been to eschew the idea that non-discrimination and procedural equality would henceforth be America’s highest principle.
Josh W. writes:
David J. wrote,
“Let’s say that black Baltimoreans in 1960 had a mean IQ of 85 and, after decades of black middle class flight, the mean fell to some value substantially lower than 85 in the remaining population. So, the city’s black remnant disproportionately represents the left half of the original IQ distribution. The children of this population should therefore possess a mean IQ that has reverted towards the original population’s higher mean of 85 (other things being equal). Why has the youths’ mean only climbed to 76 instead of a value closer to 85? Per La Griffe du Lion, the children’s mean stands at 76 because the general mean (adults plus children) of the remnant is actually lower than 76 as the adults are even less intelligent than their offspring. Is not this the conclusion of La Griffe himself in the passage below or have I embarrassingly misunderstood? I have emboldened the meaningful parts.”
This is incorrect. Mean reversion is a phenomenon pertaining to individual observations of a (partially) random variable. Consider the wikipedia entry on regression to the mean.
I want to highlight something that is not stated explicitly in the example of the students (see “Conceptual Background”) taking the true/false test. It is possible, although unlikely, for someone to guess randomly on all the questions and answer 100 percent of them correctly. It is also possible for someone to be so well versed in the material on the test that he answers all of them correctly. Now consider a test of this sort that is extremely difficult—so difficult that had the questions been open-ended, the highest score achieved from an extremely large ensemble of test-takers is 99 percent. If the individual who achieved that 99 percent were to take the T/F variation of the test, he would have a 50 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to the question that he didn’t know the answer to.
Now, let’s suppose we had an ensemble of 100 individuals all with identical levels of knowledge (they all know 99 percent of the material). If we administer the T/F test, roughly half of them will get 100 percent of the answers correct, and the remaining ones will get 99 percent (because about half of them will get the “hard” question right, and the remaining ones will get it wrong). This is due to randomness, i.e., guessing correctly on the question they didn’t know the answer to. Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that 50 of those test takers got all the answers correct—meaning that the average score of those test takers is 100 percent. If we re-administer the test without telling them the correct answer to the unknown question, the chance of them having the same average score (100 percent) is 0.5^50 (that is, the likelihood of each individual test taker answering correctly raised to the power of the number of observations). This is roughly 0.000000000000001. In terms of magnitude, this is similar to the ratio of one millimeter to the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Since ANY other ensemble of guesses (meaning at least one incorrect guess from any individual test taker) will result in an average score lower than their original (100 percent), we say that their scores will regress to the mean. However, you would still find that roughly half of the test takers got all of the answers correct—but that group of roughly half would very, very nearly certainly be a different group than those who got all the answers correct the first time (although it would almost certainly include some members of the original group)!
Nik S. writes:
Imagine that there were a hundred million blacks living in India right now, and a hundred-plus million blacks in China. Imagine how messed up those places would be right now.
These are the demographic challenges facing the United States, and they are challenges no other nation has faced in the history of the known universe.
So, whatever solutions may come, they most likely won’t be old ones.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 24, 2012 09:48 AM | Send
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