What Ails Appalachia? Pt 3 (possibilities)

(Skip back to: Part 1, Part 2)

By the way, guys, I have not been able to write as much as I would like to, lately, so I am dropping the Wed. post and only going to be updating 4 times a week. Hopefully I’ll get more time soon.🙂

It is very easy to dismiss Appalachia’s problems by waving a hand and saying, “West Virginia has an average IQ of 98.”

(98.7, actually.)

But there are a hell of a lot of states that have average IQs lower than West Virginia, but are still doing better. For that matter, France has a lower average IQ, and France is still doing pretty well for itself.

So we’re going to discuss some alternative theories.

(And my apologies to WV for using it as a stand-in for the entirety of Greater Appalachia, which, as discussed a few days ago, includes parts of a great number of states, from southern Pennsylvania to eastern Texas. Unfortunately for me, only WV, Kentucky, and Tennessee fall entirely within Greater Appalachia, and since it is much easier to find data aggregated by state than by county or “cultural region,” I’ve been dependent on these states for much of my research.)

At any rate, it’s no secret that Appalachia is not doing all that well:

 

US Suicide Rates

 

The Death of Manufacturing

Having your local industries decimated by foreign competition and workforces laid off due to automation does bad things to your economy. These things look great on paper, where increasing efficiency and specialization result in higher profits for factory owners, but tend to work out very badly for the folks who have lost their jobs.

Indeed, the US has barely even begun thinking about how we plan on dealing with the effects of continued automation. Do 90% of people simply become irrelevant as robots take over their jobs? Neither “welfare for everyone” nor “everybody starves” seem like viable solutions. So far, most politicians have defaulted to platitudes about how “more education” will be the solution to all our woes, but how you turn a 45-year old low-IQ meat packer who just got replaced by a robot into a functional member of the “information economy” remains to be seen.

Of course, economic downturns happen; fads come and go; industries go in and out. The Rust Belt, according to Wikipedia, runs north of Greater Appalachia, through Pennsylvania, New York, northern Ohio, Detroit, etc. These areas have been struggling for decades, but many of them, like Pittsburgh, are starting to recover. Appalachia, by contrast, is still struggling.

This may just be a side effect of Appalachia being more rural; Pittsburgh is a large city with millions of people employed in a variety of industries. If one goes out, others can, hopefully, replace it. But in a rural area with only one or two large employers–sometimes literal “company towns” built near mines–if the main industry goes out, you may not get anything coming back in.

Appalachia has geography that makes it difficult to transport goods in and out as cheaply as you can transport them elsewhere, but then, so does Switzerland, and Switzerland seems to be doing pretty well. (Of course, Switzerland seems to have specialized in small, expensive, easy to transport luxury goods like watches, chocolate, and bank deposits, while Appalachia has specialized in cheap, heavy, unpleasant to produce goods like coal.)

But I am being over-generous: America killed its manufacturing.

We killed it because our upper classes look down their noses at manufacturing; such jobs are unpleasant and low-class, and therefore they cannot understand that for some people, these jobs are the only thing standing between them and poverty. Despite the occasional protest against outsourcing, our government–Republicans and Democrats–has forged ahead with its free-trade, send-everything-to-China-and-fire-the-Americans, import-Mexicans-and-fire-the-Americans, and then reap-the-profits agenda.

Too Much Regulation

Over-regulation begins with the best of intentions, then breaks your industries. Nobody wants to die in a fire or a cave-in, but you can’t regulate away all risk and still get anything done.

Every regulation, every record-keeping requirement, every mandated compliance, is a tax on efficiency–and thus on profits. Some regulation, of course, probably increases profits–for example, I am more likely to buy a medicine if I have some guarantee that it isn’t made with rat poison. But beyond that guarantee, increasing requirements that companies test all of their products for toxins imposes more costs than the companies recoup–at which point, companies tend to leave for more profitable climes.

Likewise, while health insurance sounds great, running it through employers is madness. Companies should devote their efforts to making products (or services,) not hiring expensive lawyers and accountants to work through the intricacies of health care law compliance and income withholding.

The few manufacturers left in Appalachia (and probably elsewhere in the country) have adopted a creative policy to avoid paying health insurance costs for their workers: fire everyone just before they qualify for insurance. By hiring only temp workers, outsourcing everything, and only letting employees bill 20 hours a week, manufacturers avoid complying with employee-related regulations.

Oh, sure, you might think you could just get two 20-hour a week jobs, but that requires being able to schedule two different jobs. When you have no idea whether you are going to be working every day or not until you show up for work at 7 AM, and you’ll get fired if you don’t show up, getting a second job simply isn’t an option.

I have been talking about over-regulation for over a decade, but it is the sort of issue that it is difficult to get people worked up over, much less make them understand if they haven’t lived it. Democrats just look aghast that anyone would suggest that more regulations won’t lead automatically to more goodness, and Republicans favor whichever policies lead to higher profits, without any concern for the needs of workers.

The late Andy Grove wrote insightfully on the subject: How America Can Create Jobs: (h/t Steve Sailer)

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs. …

As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S. China opened up. American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.

The 10X Factor

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975 (figure-B). Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers—factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony (SNE) (figure-C).

Companies don’t scale up in the US because dealing with the regulations is monstrous. Anyone who has worked in industry can tell you this; heck, even Kim Levine, author of Millionaire Mommy (don’t laugh at the title, it’s actually a pretty good book,) touches on the subject. Levine notes that early in the process of scaling up the manufacture of her microwavable pillows, she had dreams of owning her own little factory, but once she learned about all of the regulations she would have to comply with, she decided that would be a horrible nightmare.

I don’t have time to go into more detail on the subject, but here is a related post from Slate Star Codex:

I started the book with the question: what exactly do real estate developers do? …

As best I can tell, the developer’s job is coordination. This often means blatant lies. The usual process goes like this: the bank would be happy to lend you the money as long as you have guaranteed renters. The renters would be happy to sign up as long as you show them a design. The architect would be happy to design the building as long as you tell them what the government’s allowing. The government would be happy to give you your permit as long as you have a construction company lined up. And the construction company would be happy to sign on with you as long as you have the money from the bank in your pocket. Or some kind of complicated multi-step catch-22 like that. The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. The trick is to lie to the right people in the right order, so that by the time somebody checks to see whether they’ve been conned, you actually do have the signatures you told them that you had. The whole thing sounds very stressful.

The developer’s other job is dealing with regulations. The way Trump tells it, there are so many regulations on development in New York City in particular and America in general that erecting anything larger than a folding chair requires the full resources of a multibillion dollar company and half the law firms in Manhattan. Once the government grants approval it’s likely to add on new conditions when you’re halfway done building the skyscraper, insist on bizarre provisions that gain it nothing but completely ruin your chance of making a profit, or just stonewall you for the heck of it if you didn’t donate to the right people’s campaigns last year. Reading about the system makes me both grateful and astonished that any structures have ever been erected in the United States at all, and somewhat worried that if anything ever happens to Donald Trump and a few of his close friends, the country will lose the ability to legally construct artificial shelter and we will all have to go back to living in caves.

and an eloquent post from Free Northerner:

The current socio-economic system is designed by rootless, soulless, high-IQ, low-time preference, money-/status-grubbing homo economicus for benefit of those same homo economicus. It is a system for designed for intelligent sociopaths. Those who are rootless with high-IQ and low-time preference can succeed rather well in this system, but it destroys those who need rootedness or those who are who are low-IQ or high time preference.

Kevin says, “Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster.” But he’s wrong, there was a disaster, but no just one, multiple related disasters all occurring simultaneously. …

Every support the white working class (and for that matter the black working class) had vanished within less than a generation. There was a concerted effort to destroy these supports, and this effort succeeded. Through minimal fault of their own the white working class was left with nothing holding them up.

Personally, I lack good first-hand insight into working class cultural matters; I have no idea how much Hollywood mores have penetrated and changed people’s practical lives in rural Arkansas. I must defer, there, to people more knowledgeable than myself.

Death Rates

While death rates have been falling for the rest of the developed world and for America’s blacks and Hispanics, death rates have been rising over the past couple of decades for American whites–middle aged and younger white women, to be exact. They’re up pretty much everywhere, but Appalachia has been the hardest hit.

The first thing everyone seems to cite in response is meth. And indeed, it appears that there is a lot of meth in Appalachia (and a lot of other places):

But I don’t think this explains why death rates are headed up among women. Maybe I’m wrong, (I know rather little about drug use patterns,) but it doesn’t seem like women would be more likely to OD on meth than men. If anything, I get the impression that illegal drugs that fuck you up and kill you are more of a guy thing than a gal thing. Men are probably far more likely to die of alcohol-related causes like drunk driving and cirrhosis of the liver than women, for example, and you don’t even have to deal with criminals to get alcohol.

So, while I agree that drugs appear to be a rising problem, I don’t think they are the problem. (And even still, drug overdoses only beg the deeper question of why more people are using drugs.)

As I mentioned a few posts ago, SpottedToad ran the death rate data by county and came up with three significant correlations: poverty, obesity, and disability. (I don’t know if he looked at meth/drug use by county.)

I, for one, am not surprised to find out that disabled, overweight people are not in the best of health.

Here are SpottedToad’s graphs, showing the correlations he found–I recommend reading his entire post.

Obviously one possibility is that unemployed people feel stressed, binge on cheap crap, get sick, get SSDI, and then die.

But then why are death rates only going up for white women? Plenty of white men are unemployed; plenty of black men and women are poor, fat, and disabled.

Obviously there are a ton of possible confounders–perhaps poor people just happen to make bad life decisions that both make them poor and result in bad health, like smoking cigarettes. Perhaps poor people have worse access to health care, or perhaps being really sick makes people poor. Or maybe the high death rates just happen to be concentrated among people who happen to be fat for purely biological reasons–it appears that the British are among the fattest peoples in Europe, and the Scottish are fatter than the British average. (Before anyone gets their hackles up, I should also note that white Americans are slightly fatter than Scots.)

And as many people have noted, SSI/SSDI are welfare for people who wouldn’t otherwise qualify.

Environment

In Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Price (a peripatetic dentist who traveled the world in search of good teeth in the 1930s,) writes:

In my correspondence with an observing teacher in the hill country of western Pennsylvania, she reported that in her school a condition was frequent in the families, namely, that the children could not carry prescribed textbook work because of low mentality. This is often spoken of, though incorrectly, as delayed mentality. In one family of eight children only the first child was normal. The mental and physical injuries were increasingly severe. The eighth child had both hare-lip and a double cleft palate. The seventh child had cleft palate and the sixth was a near idiot. The second to fifth, inclusive, presented increasing degrees of disturbed mentality.

In my cabin-to-cabin studies of families living in the hill country of North Carolina, I found many cases of physical and mental injury. Among these cases arthritis and heart disease were very frequent, many individuals being bed ridden. A typical case is shown in the upper part of figure 148 [sorry, I can’t show you the picture, but it is not too important,] of a father and mother and their one child. The child is so badly injured that he is mentally an imbecile. They are living on very poor land where even the vegetable growth is scant and of poor quality. Their food consisted largely of corn bread, corn syrup, some fat pork, and strong coffee.

As the title of the book implies, Dr. Price’s thesis is that bad nutrition leads to physical degeneration. (Which, of course, it does.) He was working back when folks were just discovering vitamins and figuring out that diseases like curvy, pellagra, and beriberi were really nutritional deficiencies; figuring out the chemical compositions necessary for fertile soil; and before the widespread adoption of artificial fertilizers (possibly before their invention.) Dr. Price thought that American soils, particularly in areas that had been farmed for longer or had warmer, wetter weather, had lost much of their nutritional content:

My studies of this problem of reduced capacity of sols for maintaining animal life have included correspondence with the agricultural departments of all of the states of the union with regard to maintaining cattle. The reduction in capacity ranges from 20 to 90 per cent… I am advised that it would cost $50 an acre to replace the phosphorus alone that has been shipped off the land in large areas.

There is an important fact that we should consider; namely, the role that has been played by glaciers in grinding up and distributing rock formations. One glacier, the movement of which affected the surface soil of Ohio, covered only about half the state; namely, that area west of a line starting east of Cleveland and extending diagonally west across the state to Cincinnati. It is important for us to note that, in the areas extending south and east of this line, several expressions of degeneration are higher than in the areas north and west of this line. The infant mortality per thousand live births in 1939 is informative. In the counties north and west of that line, the death rate was from 40 49 per thousand live births; whereas, in the area south and east of that Line, the death rate was from 50 to 87.

It is of particular interest to us as dentists that studies show the percentage of teeth with caries to be much higher southeast of this line than northwest of it.

So I Googled around, and found this map of the last glaciation of Ohio:

Okay, I lied, it’s obviously a map of ACT scores. But it actually does look a lot like the glaciation map.

Australia’s soils, from what I understand, are particularly bad–because the continent’s rocks are so geologically old, the soil is extremely low in certain key nutrients, like iodine. Even with iodine supplementation, deficiencies are still occasionally a problem.

I don’t know anything about the soils of Appalachia, but I know the Appalachian mountains are pretty old. The WV Encyclopedia article about Agriculture says:

Many of the soils in the state are steeply sloping and tend to be shallow, acidic, and deficient in available phosphorus. As early as the late 19th century progressive farmers used rock phosphate, bone meal, and lime to increase crop yield and quality. Since the mid-20th century farmers have used soil tests and corrected mineral deficiencies. Most crop land and much of the pasture land are no longer severely deficient in essential nutrients. West Virginia has always been primarily a livestock producing state. Land on steep slopes is best suited to producing pasture and hay.

Nutritional deficiencies due to poor soil could have been a problem a century ago, just as Pellagra and hookworms were a problem, but they seem unlikely to be a big deal today, given both modern fertilizers and our habit of buying foods shipped in from California.

What about pollution?

According to In Appalachia, Coal Mining Costs $9-$76 Billion More Per Year Than It Pulls In:

Looking at statistics from 2005 (the latest for which mortality rates are available) the researchers found that though coal mining brought in about $8 billion to the state coffers of Appalachian states, the costs of the shorter life-spans associated with coal mining operations were nearly $17 billion to $84.5 billion.

Coal mining areas in Appalachia were found to have nearly 11,000 more deaths each year than other places in the nation, with 2,300 of those attributable to environmental factors such as air and water pollution.

The Nation reports that:

In 2010, an explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in southern West Virginia killed twenty-nine miners. Later that year, an explosion at a West Virginia chemical plant killed two workers and released toxic fumes into the surrounding areas. This past year, West Virginia led the nation in coal-mining deaths. …

One study found that residents of areas surrounding mountaintop-removal coal mines “had significantly higher mortality rates, total poverty rates and child poverty rates every year compared to other…counties.” Another study found that compared to residents of other areas in the state, residents of the state’s coal-mining regions were 70 percent more likely to suffer from kidney disease, over 60 percent more likely to develop obstructive lung diseases such as emphysema and 30 percent likelier to have high blood pressure.

In 2014, the Elk River Chemical spill left 300,000 residents of West Virginia without potable water. Five months later, another spill happened at the same site, the fourth in five years. (The chemicals involved are used int he processing/washing of coal.)

According to Plundering Appalachia:

Overloaded coal trucks are a perpetual menace on the narrow, winding roads of the Appalachian coalfields. From 2000 to 2004, there were more than seven hundred accidents involving coal trucks in Kentucky alone; fifty-three people died, and more than five hundred were injured. …

After the coal is washed, a slurry of impurities, coal dust, and chemical agents used in the process remains. This liquid waste, called “coal sludge” or “slurry,” is often injected into abandoned underground mines, a practice that can lead to groundwater contamination. … In public hearings, many coalfield residents have attributed their health problems to water wells polluted after the coal mining industry “disposes” its liquid waste by injecting coal slurry underground. The primary disposal practice for coal slurry is to store it in vast unlined lagoons or surface impoundments created near mountaintop-removal mines. Hundreds of these slurry impoundments are scattered across the Appalachian coalfields. Individual impoundments have been permitted to store billions of gallons of waste. … In 2000 a slurry impoundment operated by the Martin County Coal Company in Kentucky broke through into abandoned mineworks, out old mine portals, and into tributary streams of the Big Sandy River. More than 300 million gallons of coal slurry fouled the waterway for a hundred miles downriver.

So, living near a coal mine is probably bad for your health.

Concentration of Land

Wikipedia claims that land in Appalachia (or maybe it was just WV) is highly concentrated in just a few hands–one of those being the government, as much of Appalachia is national parks and forests and the like. Of course, this could be an effect rather than a cause of poverty.

Brain Drain

Appalachia may be “isolated” and “rural,” but it’s quite close to a great many cities and universities. Parts of West Virginia are close enough to DC that people apparently commute between them.

In the early 1900s, so many people left Appalachia for the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest that U.S. Route 23 and Interstate 75 became known as the “Hillbilly Highway.” (BTW, I don’t think Appalachians like being called “hillbillies.”)

Compared to Appalachian areas in Arkansas or Oklahoma, West Virginia and Kentucky are particularly close to the industrial regions and coastal universities. As a result, they may have lost a far larger number of their brightest and most determined citizens.

While the Appalachian states don’t have particularly low IQs, their IQ curve seems likely to be narrower than other states’. West Virginia, for example, is only about 3% black, 1% Hispanic, and 0.5% Asian. MA, by contrast, is 9% black, 11% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Blacks and Hispanics tend to score lower than average on IQ tests, and Asians tend to score higher, potentially giving MA more people scoring both above and below average, while WV may have more people scoring right around the middle of the distribution. With its brightest folks heading to universities outside the region, Appalachia may continue to struggle.

Personality

And finally, yes, maybe there is just something about the kinds of people who live in Appalachia that predispose them to certain ailments, like smoking or over-eating. Perhaps the kinds of people who end up working in coal mines are also the kinds of people who are predisposed to get cancer or use drugs. I don’t know enough people from the area to know either way.

 

To the people of Appalachia: I wish you health and happiness.

(Skip back to: Part 1, Part 2)

Presidential Poison

The Founding Fathers never intended for the President to be all that big a deal–each state was supposed to basically do its own thing and mind its own affairs, Congress was supposed to take care of the matters that required interstate coordination, and the President was just supposed to be there for those times when we really needed a single guy to do something, like present a coherent foreign policy to foreign sovereigns.

Since then, of course, the Presidency has increased both in power/scope and in the amount of attention people pay to it. People who can’t be bothered to vote for the mayor or city council that runs their cities somehow find time to watch endless news coverage of presidential debates, buy t-shirts and tote bags promoting their favorite candidates, and broadcast their presidential preferences all over every social media platform they have available to them.

I was reading this morning about cuts to the services disabled people receive in Oklahoma, and (as you might expect) more generally about economic malaise throughout Appalachia.

Whether Obama or the Democrats can do anything about joblessness in Greater Appalachia is a matter of some debate; whether they should is another. But people have gotten so fixated on their hatred of the President and the Democrats more broadly that they are willing to vote blindly for the Republicans, whether the Republicans actually accomplish their goals or not.

The inverse is also true in liberal areas, where people vote Democratic because they hate Republicans.

This fixation on hating the president instead of paying attention to and trying to improve one’s own community is a kind of poison. At best, it’s a worthless distraction; at worst, you give up your own self interest in order to symbolically defy someone living in another part of the country.

Just to give an example of such politics in action:

7% of Americans like Obamacare, but dislike the Affordable Care Act.

9% of Americans dislike Obamacare, but are fine with the Affordable Care Act.

And according to Reuters,

Reuters/Ipsos polling reveals a remarkably high level of approval for nearly all the provisions of the act, often in the 80 percent range, even though respondents oppose the legislation, commonly known as “Obamacare,” by 55 to 45.

Chances are, the average person has no idea what is actually in the bill; support or disapproval is based entirely on political identity–if you think abortion is bad, then you think “Obamacare” is also bad; if you think abortion is good, then you probably think Obamacare is also good.

Of course, this is an idiotic way to determine health care policy.

You know best your own business; second best, your friends’ and loved-ones’ businesses; worst, strangers’. We do the most good by serving our local communities–caring for our families, helping our friends, cleaning up our own streets and being decent to others. But instead we spend our energy watching TV and complaining about health care plans we don’t understand. We want to “fix” schools we’ve never set foot in, without the slightest idea what’s wrong with them. We invade other countries and expect them to thank us for the favor.

And who wins?

You? Me?

Probably not.

How many years of Republican voting have resulted in a preservation of anything Republicans hold dear? Job, society, religion?

Oh, yes, we got tax cuts for the rich.

 

Appalachia pt 2: Background

(Skip back to: Part 1 or forward to: Part 3)

Warning! Posting while drunk

Disclaimer: while I am probably 25% Appalachian by blood and lived there for a bit as a small child, I really know diddly squat about the region. But if my Appalachian contacts are to be believed, Appalachia is the awesomeist place ever and everywhere else is full of lame strivers. (Note: the majority of people I have talked to, no matter where they are from, like the culture they grew up in.)

So with that in mind, let’s take a look back at the history of Appalachia:

Once upon a time, lots of different groups lived in Britain (and Ireland):

and a great many of them moved to the US, where they spread out, creating broad cultural zones that may have persisted to this day, like Yankeedom and the Deep South. Folks from the borderlands between Scotland (many of whom had apparently first moved to Northern Ireland) skipped over the coastal flat region and headed for the mountains.

You might think that the border between Scotland and England would be a partially-Englishy place that would somewhat resemble the monoraialized English further south, like the guys who settled New England, with the highlanders from further north being the really wild folks, but it turns out that the border was apparently kind of a lawless place because if you committed a crime in Scotland you could just hop over to the English side to avoid prosecution, and vice versa. So I hear, anyway. So instead of being, like, half manorialized, the border was more like anti-manorialized.

According to Wikipedia,

The first trickle of Scotch-Irish settlers arrived in New England. Valued for their fighting prowess as well as for their Protestant dogma, they were invited by Cotton Mather and other leaders to come over to help settle and secure the frontier … The Scotch-Irish radiated westward across the Alleghenies, as well as into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.^[37] The typical migration involved small networks of related families who settled together, worshipped together, and intermarried, avoiding outsiders.^[38]

… Most Scotch-Irish headed for Pennsylvania, with its good lands, moderate climate, and liberal laws.[citation needed] … Without much cash, they moved to free lands on the frontier, becoming the typical western “squatters”, the frontier guard of the colony, and what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner described as “the cutting-edge of the frontier.”^[39]

… With large numbers of children who needed their own inexpensive farms, the Scotch-Irish avoided areas already settled by Germans and Quakers and moved south, down the Shenandoah Valley, and through the Blue Ridge Mountains into Virginia.^{[citation needed]} These migrants followed the Great Wagon Road from Lancaster, through Gettysburg, and down through Staunton, Virginia, to Big Lick (now Roanoke), Virginia. Here the pathway split, with the Wilderness Road taking settlers west into Tennessee and Kentucky, while the main road continued south into the Carolinas.^[41][42]

Gutierrez map of 1562 showing Appalachia

The name “Appalachia,” btw, is one of the oldest place names in the US, hailing from the name of an Indian tribe or something that made it onto a map way back in the 1500s.

Anyway, these folks moved to the mountains, probably because they were rough-and-tumble sorts who could survive out in the harsh wilderness where more wilting types fainted from the lack of square corners and nicely plowed fields and then got killed by Indians. Also according to Wikipedia:

Because the Scotch-Irish settled the frontier of Pennsylvania and western Virginia, they were in the midst of the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion that followed.^[43] The Scotch-Irish were frequently in conflict with the Indian tribes who lived on the other side of the frontier; indeed, they did most of the Indian fighting on the American frontier from New Hampshire to the Carolinas.^[44][45]

Mountains tend to remain wilderness areas long after flatlands are settled and conquered, you you had to be tough to survive in the mountains. So the Appalachians attracted and rewarded a particular sort of person who could survive in them.

*Davy, Davy Crocket. King of the wild frontier…*

If you want to know more about the recent history/culture of West Virginia, I recommend “When I was Young in the Mountains,” unless you don’t like picture books.

I get the impression that the Appalachians were basically left alone most of the time (except for getting invaded during the Civil War, which was pretty sucky since there weren’t even a lot of slaves in Appalachia and the folks there weren’t really in favor of secession, they just got dragged along by the rest of their states. [As I mentioned yesterday, Appalachia seceded from Virginia over the issue,] and the occasional issue like the Whiskey Rebellion.)

Being up in the mountains was probably bad for the development of agriculture, both because it is difficult to plow steep hillsides, (especially without having all of your dirt wash away come the next rainfall,) and also because it was harder to build railways and other transportation networks that could get the crops/produce/meat out of the mountains and down to other markets. Likewise, it was difficult to ship in manufactured goods like factory woven cotton cloth for people to purchase; as a result, the Appalachians were probably rather cut-off from the rest of the expanding economy of the 1800s. I have searched for comparative GDP numbers for the 1800s, but unfortunately found nothing.

Railway lines only really expanded into the area after coal mining became a big deal.

It’s pretty much impossible to talk about the history of Appalachia without talking about coal. Apparently people knew about the coal way back in the 1700s, but it only became a big deal after the Civil War. The massive expansion of the mining industry attracted newly freed blacks from the Deep South and immigrants (mostly Irish but probably also Italians, eastern Europeans, etc.) from the coastal cities. There aren’t a lot of black folks currently in Appalachia, so it looks like they didn’t stick around, but the Irish did.

Coal mining was dangerous, exhausting, terrible work. If you didn’t die in a cave-in or an explosion, there was always miner’s lung. In return for powering the US, miners were paid crap–usually company scrip, only usable in company stores, so that even if they got a raise, the company would just increase the cost of goods at the store. And then there’s the pollution.

Eventually this led to strikes and attempts at unionization, to which the mine owners responded with violence, murdering strikers and assassinating their leaders, which culminated with an “army” of armed miners marching on the mines and Federal troops being called in to put down the “revolt.”

(This is better than the way the British treated their Scottish coal miners, who were literally enslaved for nearly two centuries, but still pretty shitty.)

These were the days when the Democrats were the party of Southern laborers, the Republicans were the party of Northern industrialists, an anarchist shot the President and the Russians executed their Czar.

Anyway, conditions in and around the coal mines gradually improved, until mining became a reasonable way to support a family rather than a death trap. (And if mining wasn’t to your liking, there were garment factories, tobacco farms in the South and steel mills in the North.) It was a time of relative economic well-being–unfortunately, it’s also when mechanization kicked in, and most of the miners became redundant. NAFTA and trade with China killed manufacturing, and the shift away from smoking left tobacco growers with a bunch of plants they could no longer sell.

This has been not good for the local economies.

See that X at the very bottom center of the IQ vs. GDP graph? That’s West Virginia. (The X on the far left is Mississippi.) Kentucky isn’t doing much better, though Tennessee, the third state that falls almost entirely within “Greater Appalachia,” isn’t doing too badly.

While it is true that the graph is practically random noise, West Virginia seems to me to be doing worse than it ought to be. There seems to be a basic sort of “floor” below which few of the states fall–were Appalachia on this floor, per cap GDP would be about 4k higher.

There’s a certain irony to all of this. Like Appalachia, Saudi Arabia contains a vast wealth of fossil fuel. To the best of my knowledge, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Oil States have attempted to use their vast wealth to uplift their people and are trying to develop modern, functioning economies that will be able to keep chugging even once the oil dries up. Sure, the Saudi princes get to live like, well, princes, but every one else in Saudi Arabia is probably a lot more comfortable than folks were a few generations back when the primary occupation was nomadic goat herding. (Don’t cite me on that I don’t actually know what the primary occupation in Saudi Arabia was a few generations ago.)

In Appalachia, by contrast, the locals have seen relatively little of the coal wealth (and that after a good deal of violent struggle,) and many areas are still not seeing long-term economic development.

To be fair, the US has tried to uplift the region, eg, LBJ’s War on Poverty, and been fairly successful in some areas. TVA cut flooding, rural electrification brought people lightbulbs, and pretty much everyone these days has a flush toilet and shoes. But many regions of Appalachia are still suffering–and some are doing much worse than they were a generation ago.

We’ll examine possible causes tomorrow.

(Skip back to: Part 1 or forward to: Part 3)

Related articles:

E-WV: Agriculture, How the Coal Industry Impoverishes West Virginia, Rolling Stones: Where the Tea Party Rules, Corporate Responsibility in Appalachia: Coal mining costs more per year than it pulls in, Plundering Appalachia, Friends of Coal: A History of Coal in West Virginia, WV History: The Mine Wars

 

What Ails Appalachia?

Blue Ridge Mountains, Appalachia

Jayman’s map of the American Nations

(Skip to: Part 2, Part 3.)

Appalachia is a lovely geographic region of low mountains stretching from southern NY state to northeastern Mississippi; as a cultural region, “Greater Appalachia” includes all of West Virginia and Kentucky; almost all of Tennessee and Indiana; large chunks of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, and Virginia; small parts of nearby states like Alabama and Pennsylvania; and a few counties in the northwest Florida (not on the map.) (The lack of correspondence between state boundaries and Appalachia’s boundaries makes most state-level aggregated data useless and forces me to use county level data whenever possible.)

While generally considered part of “the South,” Appalachia is culturally and ethnically distinct from the “Deep South,” generally opposed secession (West Virginia seceded from Virginia following Virginia’s secession from the Union in order to return to the Union,) and never had an economy based on large, slave-owning plantations.

Per capita GDP by county (wikipedia)

Appalachia is also one of the US’s persistent areas of concentrated poverty (the others are the highly black regions of the Deep South and their migrant diaspora in northern inner-cities; the Mexican region along the Texas border; and Indian reservations.) Almost 100% of the nation’s poorest counties are located in these areas; indeed, the Southern states + New Mexico as a whole are significantly poorer than the Northern ones.

First a note, though, on poverty:

There is obviously a great difference between the “poverty” of someone who chooses a low-income lifestyle in a rural part of the country because they enjoy it and are happy trading off money for pleasure, and someone who struggles to stay employed at crappy, demeaning jobs, cannot make rent, and is miserable. Farming tends not to pay as well as finance, but I don’t think anyone would be better off if all of the farmers parked their tractors and took up finance. Farmers seem pretty happy with their lives and contribute to the nation’s well-being by producing food. By contrast, I’ve yet to talk to anyone employed in fast food who enjoyed their job or wanted to stay in the industry; if they could trade for a job in finance, they’d probably take it.

Unfortunately, Appalachia (and parts of the Deep South) appear to be the most depressed states in the country. (No data for KY and NC, but I bet they match their neighbors.) Given that depression rates tend to be higher for whites than for blacks, I suspect the effect is concentrated among Southern whites, but I wouldn’t be surprised if black people in Mississippi are depressed, too.

Of course, depression itself may just be genetic, and the Scandinavian ancestors of the northern mid-west may have gifted their descendants with a uniquely chipper outlook on life, except that Scandinavians have pretty high suicide rates.

US Suicide Rates

(Note also that Appalachia has higher suicide rates than the black regions of the Deep South, the Hispanic El Norte, and white regions in NY.)

This high suicide rate may have something to do with, as Steve Sailer has taken to calling it, “The White Death.” As Gelman has noted, death rates have been increasing for middle aged white women, in contrast to virtually everyone else.

The white death rate is highest in Mississippi, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nevada, and South Carolina, with the greatest increases in death rates in West Virginia and Mississippi.

I have assembled a list of articles and a few quotes discussing the increasing white death rates:

The White Death, Death Rates Up among 25-34 year old Whites, Too, Why are White Women Dying Young? Death Rate Still Rising for Middle Aged White Women, Why are White Death Rates Rising? The White Death:

“When I looked into the dataset that Case and Deaton used (https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/correlates-of-middle-aged-white-mortality/ ) and mixed it with Census Data, it appeared that there were three main predictors of county-level death rates for middle aged whites:
1) Median income
2) Obesity
3) SSI-Disability …”  — Spotted Toad

White Death Deaton vs. Gelman, Why are White Women Dying Young?  The White Death and the Black Death:

“I hang out in WV fracking country from time to time. The local community college had a 1 year program to learn how to become a “tool handler” (or something). Get your certificate, and go straight to work making $50k / year – good money is a crummy economy. The program was under-subscribed because the majority of the applicants failed the drug test.” — Jim Don Bob

NY Times: How the Epidemic of Drug Overdose Deaths Ripples Across America, Why are so many Middle Aged Whites Dying? Why did Middle Aged White Death Rates increase from 1998 through 2013? Why is Pennsylvania Outpacing Virginia and Ohio?

“… SSDI (“disability”) culture has been deeply entrenched in West Virginia for decades, particularly in the southern coal counties where work-related injuries have historically been common…” — Chip Smith

But we will get back to death rates later. For now, given high rates of poverty, depression, suicide, and rising death rates, I’m willing to say that Appalachia sounds like it is in distress. Yes, it’s probably a drugs and obesity problem; the question is why?

The generally accepted explanation in HBD circles for Appalachian poverty is IQ–“West Virginia has an average IQ of 98”–and the personalities of its Scotch-Irish founding population. I find this inadequate. For starters, West Virginia’s average IQ of 98.7 is slightly higher than the national average. And yet West Virginia is the second poorest state in the country, with a per capita GDP of only $30,389 (in 2012 dollars.) (Only Mississippi is poorer, and Mississippi has the lowest IQ in the country.)

If IQ were the whole story, West Virginians would be making about $42,784 a year, the national average.

For that matter, Canada’s IQ is 97, Norway, Austria, Denmark, and France has IQs of 98, and Poland and Hungary are up at 99. Their respective per cap GDPs (in 2014 $s, unfortunately): $44,057, 64,856, 46,223, 44,916, 38,848, 24,745, 24,721 (but Poland and Hungary are former Soviet countries whose economies are believed to have been retarded by years of Communism.)

So IQ does not explain Appalachian poverty. But it is getting late, so I will have to continue this tomorrow.

(Head on over to: Part 2, Part 3.)

Does advertising’s desire for young consumers drive ignorance?

The “rural purge” in American TV was the cancellation, between 1969 and 1972, of “everything with a tree in it.” Wikipedia lists 26 shows that were purged, everything from Lassie to Gunsmoke to Red Skelton. Some of these shows were probably declining anyway and would have been cancelled sooner or later, but most, like Hee Haw (#16 in the ratings), or Red Skelton (#7) were doing quite well.

According to Wikipedia, CBS’s original plans called for Gunsmoke–a TV and radio success since 1952–to be canceled at the end of the 1970-71 season, but Gunsmoke kept defying them by doing things like coming in #5 and #4 in the Nielsen Ratings; it didn’t get canceled until the end of the 1974/5 season, when it came in #28.

The entire cast was stunned by the cancellation, as they were unaware that CBS was considering it. According to Arness, “We didn’t do a final, wrap-up show. We finished the 20th year, we all expected to go on for another season, or two or three. The (network) never told anybody they were thinking of canceling.” The cast and crew read the news in the trade papers.^[26]

Gunsmoke was replaced with Rhoda and Phyllis. Rhoda did well for two seasons; then it cratered. By season 5, it had sunk to #43 and was cancelled. Phyllis made it for an impressive two whole seasons, ending at #40.

If ratings didn’t drive the purge, then what did?

Advertisers.

Advertisers wanted TV shows that appealed to young people with money to spend and tastes to shape, not old people whose tastes and incomes were already fixed. (The same dynamic that lead tobacco companies to try to market cigarettes to children.) Everything that appealed to the wrong demographics–old people, rural people, poor people–got the axe. They were replaced with “relevant”show like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the Brady Bunch Comedy Hour, which everyone agreed was awful.

Amusingly, Congress–which tends to be full of old people–was upset about all of its favorite shows getting cancelled and replaced with programs aimed at 20-something single women and hippies. According to Wik:

The backlash from the purge prompted CBS to commission, perhaps somewhat facetiously, a rural family drama for its Fall 1972 schedule, but the network scheduled it in what it thought would be a death slot against popular series The Flip Wilson Show and The Mod Squad, allegedly hoping the show would underperform and head to a quick cancellation. Instead, The Waltons went on to run for nine seasons, reaching as high as second in the Nielsens and finishing in the top 30 for seven of its nine years on air.

Dude lives in a trash can.

Mary Tyler Moore only lasted for 7 seasons.

I suspect something similar happened in the late 80s/early 90s as the grittiness of our degraded cities, reflected in shows like Taxi, Sesame Street, and Welcome Back Kotter, began to distress watchers instead of inspire them, and networks began focusing on suburban comedies like The Cosby Show and Full House, but I have yet to find any articles on the subject. (This trend may have reversed again once Giulliani cleaned up NYC, resulting in shows like Seinfeld and Friends.)

 

“If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brains.” — Variously misattributed

While I wouldn’t describe younger me as a total idiot, there are certainly a great many things that I know now that I didn’t know back when Joe Camel ads were a thing or when I attended candle lit vigils for Darfur. That’s part of growing up and getting older: hopefully you learn something.

What happens when most TV programming for 40 or 50 years is intended to appeal primarily to people who don’t yet know much about the world?

It took quite a bit of rumination to come up with something better than “obviously they have trouble telling when the wool is being pulled over their eyes,” and “small children tend not to notice the pattern of kids’ TV shows making the black character the smartest one.” (I’d make a list except I don’t care that much, but I’ll note that even LazyTown, an Icelandic TV show, does it.)

So the non-obvious effect: People massively over-estimate the percent of the country that agrees with liberal values, and then are shocked by reality.

Basically, TV–a few cable stations excepted–functions like a great big liberal bubble.

For example:

42% of Americans are young-Earth creationists

27% of Americans–20% of Democrats and 44% of Republicans–favor deporting illegal immigrants. 39% of Americans favor amending the Constitution to end birthright citizenship; 41% believe immigrants are, on net, a burden.

17% believe the Bundy-led militia takeover of a building in Oregon was just.

40% of Americans oppose gay marriage.

60% of Republican primary voters think the US should should ban Muslims from entering the US; 45% of Democrats agree, so long as you don’t mention that it was Trump’s idea.

7/10 Republican presidential candidates favor getting into WWIII with Russia.

44% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 don’t know which country America gained its independence from. (Also, while 85% of men know the answer, only 69% of women managed the same feat.)

57% of Americans see the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride, rather than racism; 43% oppose removing the Confederate flag from government buildings.

31% of Americans believe it is immoral to be transgender; 59% believe trans people should use the bathroom that corresponds to their birth gender.

If your perception of “normal” is based on the sitcoms you see on TV, chances are good that virtually all of these stats are surprising, because they don’t feature many young Earth creationists who fly the Confederate flag and want to start WWIII with Russia.

But given the structure of our electoral system–Republicans pick a candidate; Democrats pick a candidate; everyone gets together and we vote for the Republican or the Democrat–there’s a very good chance that about half the time, the president will actually agree with a variety of the positions listed above (except he’s pretty much guaranteed to know who we fought in the Revolution.) If you think that’s an absolutely horrible outcome, I recommend either advocating for massively changing the structure of the electoral system, or investigating some form of Neocameralism.

One of the more amusing experiences of the past few months has been watching people–both Democrats and Republicans–express outrage, shock, and confusion at Donald Trump’s success. Who could have predicted that “kick out illegal immigrants” might attract more voters than “Let’s all die in a war with Russia”? (Clearly not anyone paid to understand which issues appeal to voters.)

“It’s time we punched the Russians in the nose.”–Presidential candidate Gov. John Kasich

“Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it,” blurted Christie: … Yes, we would shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if in fact they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling … we have in the Oval Office … right now.”

Carly Fiorina would impose a no-fly zone and not even talk to Putin until we’ve conducted “military exercises in the Baltic States”

Lindsey Graham, …opined that he “would shoot [Putin’s] planes down, I would literally shoot his planes down”.

Ben Carson said of his call for a no-fly zone and Russian planes: “You shoot them down, absolutely” then added “Whatever happens next, we deal with it”.

There are a lot of people who would describe Trump as “literally Hitler” (which seems a little unfair to a guy whose daughter is Orthodox Jewish,) for wanting to deport illegal immigrants, temporarily halt Muslim immigration, and create some kind of Muslim registry, at least until we have fewer incidents like the San Bernardino Christmas Party shooting.

But on the scale of human suffering, I guarantee that a war with Russia would be far, far worse, and yet no one is protesting against that possibility, screaming that those candidates are going to start WWIII, nor even mildly concerned that the “mainstream” Republican candidates are so completely off their rockers, they make Trump look like a pacifist. (Here the Rand Paul supporters would like to point out that their candidate is also sane.)

Perhaps political commentators have become accustomed to Republicans starting wars and the threat of nuclear armageddon. Killing foreigners is a normal part of the Republican agenda–but trying to keep them out of the country? That’s completely novel. (Or at least, we haven’t done it since the 20s.)

Or perhaps people are mad because Trump is vocally anti-liberal and garners much of his support from people who hate liberals, and liberals had not realized just how many people really hate them.

Liberals must not get out very much.

I didn’t actually intend this to turn into a Trump post, but the subject is popular thee days. Had I written this in 2004, I’d have discussed the two young women I had just spoken with who swore up and down that George Bush couldn’t win reelection because “no one likes him.”

(As always, this blog makes no official political endorsements.)

Quick thoughts on the “replication crisis” and calls to make the field more mathematically rigorous

If you aren’t familiar with the “replication crisis,” in social psychology, start here, here, and here.

I consider the courses I took in college on quantitative and qualitative methods the most important of my undergraduate years. I learned thereby a great many important things about how not to conduct an experiment and how to think about experimental methodology (not to mention statistics.)

If I were putting together a list of “general education” requirements I wanted all students to to take in order to declare them well-educated and ready to go out into the world, it’d be a course on Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. (Much like current “gen ed” and “distribution requirements,” the level of mathematical ability required would likely vary by field, though no one should be obtaining a college degree without some degree of numerical competence.)

But the real problem with the social science fields is not lack of rigorous statistical background, but overwhelming ideological conformity, enforced by the elders of the fields–advisers, hiring committees, textbook writers, journal editors, etc., who all believe in the same ideology and so have come to see their field as “proving” their ideology.

Ideology drives both the publication biases and the wishful thinking that underlie this crisis. For example, everyone in “Women’s studies” is a feminist who believes that “science” proves that women are oppressed because everyone they know has done studies “proving” it. You’re not going to find a lot of Women’s Studies professors aiming for tenure on the basis of their successful publication of a bunch of studies that failed to find any evidence of bias against women. Findings like that => no publication => no tenure. And besides, feminist professors see it as their moral duty to prove that discrimination exists, not to waste their time on studies that just happened not to be good enough to find the effect.

In the Social Sciences more generally, we get this “post modern” mish-mash of everything from Marxists to Freudians to folks who like Foucault and Said, where the goal is to mush up long-winded descriptions of otherwise simple phenomena into endless Chomsky Sentences.

(Just reading the Wikipedia pages on a variety of Social Science oriented topics reveals how very little real research or knowledge is generated in these fields, and how much is based on individual theorists’ personal views. It is often obvious that virtually anyone not long steeped in the academic literature of these fields would not come up with these theories, but with something far more mundane and sensible. Economists, for all their political bias, at least provide a counterpoint to many of these theories.)

Obviously different fields study different aspects of phenomena, but entire fields should not become reduced to trying to prove one political ideology or another. If they are, they should label themselves explicitly, rather than make a pretense of neutrality.

When ideology rather than correctness become the standard for publication (not to mention hiring and tenure,) the natural result is incorrectness.

More statistical knowledge is not, by itself, going to resolve the problem. The fields must first recognize that they have an ideological bias problem, and then work to remedy it by letting in and publishing work by researchers outside the social science ideological mainstream. It is very easy to think your ideas sound rigorous when you are only debating with people who already agree with you; it is much more difficult to defend your views against people who disagree, or come from very different intellectual backgrounds.

They could start with–hahahaha–letting in a Republican.

Native Americans and Neanderthal DNA

Since “Do Native Americans have Neanderthal DNA?” (or something similar) is the most popular search that leads people to my blog, I have begun to suspect that a clarification is in order.

Native Americans (Indians) are not Neanderthals. They are not half or quarter or otherwise significantly Neanderthal. If they were, they would have very noticeable fertility problems in mixed-race relationships.

They may have slightly higher than average Neanderthal admixture than other groups, but that is extremely speculative I don’t know of any scientists who have said so. We’re talking here about quite small amounts, like 0.5%, most of which appears to code for things like immune response and possibly some adaptations for handling long, cold winters. None of this appears to code for physical traits like skull shape, which have been under different selective pressures over the past 40,000 years.

As much as I would love to discover a group with significant Neanderthal DNA, that’s just not something we’ve found in anyone alive today.

Sorry, guys.

Anthropology Friday: Aboriginal Folklore

Today I have an excerpt from Aborigine Myths and Legends, by William Ramsay Smith, c. 1930. (As usual, I am dispensing with block quotes for the sake of readability. I have added pictures.)

Waddies made by the Aranda people (wikipedia)

What some Aboriginal carvings mean

At Manly, about six miles from Sydney, there are to be seen aboriginal carvings cut into the flat surface of the rock. Among them there is a figure of a male aboriginal with both arms outstretched and holding in one hand a waddy. Another human and a form represents a shark. In another group, there are four male figures, with a boomerang above the head of one and a fish between the legs of another. And, again, there are two figures, almost oval in shape, and one of the ovals has small circles cut out around the edge. All these, as well as the carvings, have a meaning. Each of the objects, whether an animal, bird, reptile, or fish, represents the totem of a tribe.

 

 

Aboriginal engraving, Manly, Australia, courtesy of Lonely Planet

Tribe Totems.–As in the case of the Manly figure, where a fish is placed between the legs of a person, he fish is the totem of the tribe living in that locality. Before a tribe can occupy a hunting-ground it must select a totem—a fish, animal, bird, or reptile–anything, in fact, that has an existence. It may be sun, moon, wind, lightning, or thunder. Thus, in some instance, one may see a figure representing the sun or a half-moon. Sometimes one notices figures of a kangaroo and an emu, or two other forms. The kangaroo might be the totem of the tribe of the chief, and the emu might be the totem of his wife’s tribe.

This totemism plays an important part in the social life of the aboriginals. If, for example, a person has committed an offense, or has broken tribal law, he becomes a fugitive. He may travel to some distant part of the country. … He creeps along stealthily, listening intently for any sound, peering through the dense foliage in every bay or cove to see whether his path is clear, noticing every footprint on the way, reading every mark on the tree-trunks and on the surface of rocks, and scanning every mark to see whether there is hope of protection and friendship. To be seen would mean death to him. By and by the keen eye of the fugitive catches sight of the figure of his mother’s totem. Casting aside all fear, he walks boldly along the beaten track that leads to the camp, and presents himself to the chief. He produces a string of kangaroo teeth, made in bead fashion, and a bunch of emu feathers… . This is a sign that he belongs to the Kangaroo totem tribe, and that his mother belongs to the Emu totem tribe. He is received into either of these tribes, and becomes one with them, and participates in all their privileges.

Nulla-nulla created by and for sale from Jagalingu.

At Manly one may notice two figures: a wallaby footprint and a kangaroo, a man figure and a weapon–it may be a boomerang or a nulla-nulla. This means that the Wallaby totem tribe occupied that country, and the Kangaroo totem tribe came and did battle with the Wallaby totem tribe and drove them away and took possession. … From the different figures carved on the surface of one rock one may infer that tribes of different totems shown in the figures occupied that locality.

There are other figures hewn in the rock. The oval with the small circles, referred to above, may represent the sun in its course; in other words, it may show that the aboriginals had knowledge of the earth’s motion. There are old men in each tribe who study the heavens at night; and at certain times of the year every night at intervals they will give a call, “The earth has already turned.” [Footnote: The aboriginals appear to have believed that the earth went round, because there is a saying which means, “The earth has turned itself about.”] This may be done with the idea of teaching the younger generation something about astronomy.

[EvX comments: while interesting, the earth-centric model of the universe is so immediately obvious and the heliocentric so difficult to prove that I am skeptical of such claims.]

Is Capitalism the only Reason to Care about Intelligence? (pt 3)

Finishing up with our discussion, (in response to a reader’s question):

1. Why are people snobs about intelligence?
2. Is math ability better than verbal?
3. Do people only care about intelligence in the context of making money?

Now, this is the point in the conversation where somebody tends to say something like, “My cousin / little sister /uncle is retarded, but they are still a beautiful, wonderful person and I love them as much as everyone else, and therefore it is mean to say that smart people are higher status than dumb people.”

It is good that you love your family. You should love your family. I am sure your relatives are lovely people, and you enjoy their company, and would be worse off without them.

But by the same token, I am grateful for the fact that I have never had polio, smallpox, or Ebola. I am thankful that I did not die in childbirth (my own or my childrens’.) I am thankful for life-saving surgeries, medications, and mass-vaccination campaigns that have massively reduced the quantity of human suffering, and I happily praise the doctors and scientists who made all of this possible.

That is why doctors and scientists are higher status than dumb people, and why math-smart people (who tend to end up in science) believe that they should have more status than verbal-smart people.

But on to #3--what is this “intelligence” and “money” connection? (And why does our questioner think it is so bad?)

The obvious answer is no, people don’t only care about intelligence in the context of making money. People also care about enjoying music and reading good books and having fun with their friends, having pleasant conversations and not dying of cancer.

But people are practical creatures, and their first priority is making sure that they and their children will eat tomorrow.

In a purely meritocratic society, more intelligent people will tend to end up in professions that require more intellect and more years of training, which will in turn allow them to demand higher wages. (So will people with rare physical talents, like athleticism and musical ability.) Unintelligent people, by contrast, will end up in the jobs that require the least thought and least training, where they will soon be replaced by robots.

The incentive to pay your doctor more than your trash collector is obvious.

The truly bright and creative, of course, will go beyond merely being employed and actually start companies, invent products/processes, and generally reshape the world around them, all of which results in making even more money.

The truly dull, by contrast, even when they can get jobs, tend to be impulsive and bad at planning, which results in the loss of what little money they have.

We do not live in a purely meritocratic society. No one does. We make efforts to that end, though, which is why public schools exist and employers are officially not supposed to consider things like race and gender when hiring people. Which means that our society is pretty close to meritocratic.

And in fact, the correlation between IQ and wealth/income is remarkably robust:

 

Thanks to Pumpkin Person

Thanks to Tino Sanandaji

Thanks to Tino Sanandajii

Thanks to The BCA Blog

It even holds internationally:

Thanks to La Griffe du Lion

Source Wikipedia Dark Red < Red < Tans < Light Blue < Dark Blue < Purple

There are a few outliers–the gulf oil states are far richer than their IQs would predict, due to oil; China is poorer than its IQ predicts, which may be due to the lingering effects of communism or due to some quirk in the nature of Chinese intelligence (either way, I expect a very China-dominant future)–but otherwise, IQ predicts average per cap GDP quite well.

Here people tend to bring up a few common objections:

1. I know a guy who is smart but poor, and a guy who is dumb but rich! Two anecdotes are totally sufficient to completely disprove a general trend calculated from millions of data points.

Yes, obviously some really smart people have no desire to go into high-paying fields, and devote their lives to art, music, volunteering with the poor, raising children, or just chilling with their friends. Some smart people have health problems, are unfairly discriminated against, live in areas with few jobs, or are otherwise unable to reach their potentials. Some dumb people luck into wealth or a high-paying job.

It would be a strange world indeed if IQ were absolute destiny.

But the existence of outliers does not negate the overall trends–smarter people tend to get jobs in higher-paying fields and manage their money more effectively; dumb people tend to get jobs in lower-paying fields and manage their money ineffectively.

2. Maybe everyone is equally smart, but just expresses it in different ways. (Corollary form: IQ is just a measure of how good you are at taking IQ tests.)

Either we mean something when we say “intelligence,” or we do not. If we want to define “intelligence” so that everyone is equally smart, then yes, everyone is equally smart. If we want to know if some people are better than others at doing math, then we find that some people are better than others at doing math. Are some people better than others at reading? Yes. Are some people better than others at football? Yes.

If you transported me tomorrow to a hunter-gatherer community, and they gave me a test of the skills necessary for survival there, I’d flunk (and die.) They’d conclude that I was an idiot who couldn’t gather her way out of a paper bag.

Very well, then.

But neither of us lives in a hunter-gatherer society, nor do we particularly care about the skills necessary to survive in one. If I want to know the kinds of intelligence that are necessary for success in industrial societies–the kind of success that may have led to the existence of industrial societies–then you’re looking at normal old “intelligence” as people conventionally use the term, measured by IQ scores, the SAT, vague impressions, or report cards.

3. “You’ve got causality backwards–people with money send their kids to expensive prep schools, which results in them learning more, which results in higher IQ scores. These “smart” kids then use family connections/prestige to land good jobs, resulting in higher wealth.”

Luckily for us, we have adoption studies.

Thanks to Jayman

Quoting Jayman:

As this shows, the heritability of IQ and of behavioral traits is consistently high, reaching into the 0.8-0.9+ range. This means, out of a group of people, at least 80-90% of the overall differences between them (known as the “variance” in statistical parlance) can be attributed to genetic differences between them. This chart shows that this becomes most evident in adulthood, when genes have been given a chance to fully express themselves. I have summed this up in a neat set of rules:

Heredity: 70-80%

Shared environment: 0%

Something else [random chance]: 30-20%

In other words, adopted kids end up with the IQ scores you’d predict from looking at their biological parents, not their legal parents. Baring extremes of poverty or abuse, the way your parents raise you–including the quality of the schools you attend–has very little long-term effect on IQ.

On a related note, massively increased school expenditures since the ’80s has done very little to test scores:

Thanks to The BCA Blog

Jayman continues:

IQ doesn’t lend itself to much environmental manipulation – indeed, interventions that attempt to boost IQ have all met with failure. As well, IQ remains predictive even when measured in youth. It is predictive even when one controls for things like socioeconomic status (say during childhood). Indeed, the best control for this, looking at different siblings within a family, finds that IQ is predictive of real world outcomes between siblings – the sibling with the higher IQ tends to do better.

These are in addition to the fact that there are visible physiological correlates with IQ, such as head and brain size, as well various anatomical features of the brain, such as cortical thickness (Pietschnig et al, 2014, Shaw et al, 2006, Menary et al, 2013, Karama, Deary, et al, 2011). Indeed, a recent research team found that they were able to accurately gauge IQ from brain MRI imagery alone (correlation of 0.72 between prediction based on imagery and test-measured IQ – Wang et al, 2015 – see also Steve Hsu, Information Processing: IQ prediction from structural MRI).

4. Your map is racist.

That’s the million dollar objection, isn’t it?

Everybody wants to know why some groups or countries out perform other groups or countries, but no one likes to be told that they–or a group that they belong to–are less intelligent than others. No one wants to be in the red; everyone wants to blame their troubles on someone else.

Thus a great deal of debate; some people want to prove that the wealth and poverty of nations depends on IQ, and some people want to prove that it does not. No matter your personal opinions on the matter, it’s pretty hard to have a discussions about IQ without the debate resurfacing.

Incidentally:

SAT scores by race and parents’ income (Thanks to Jayman and The Unsilenced Silence)

Now, I fully believe that rich people enroll their kids expensive test-prep classes, which result in small increases in SAT scores over students who’ve never seen the test before (an effect that wears off once classes are over.) It may also be that people from countries where schools barely exist look at a test and have no idea what you want them to do with it, regardless of intelligence. But if parental income were the entire story, rich whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians ought to all get similar SAT scores, (with the exception of verbal scores for ESL-students,) and poor whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians ought to all get similar, lower scores. Instead, the children of wealthy Black parents have worse SAT scores than the children of poor whites and Asians. (Except Asian verbal scores, which are pretty bad at the low end–probably an ESL-artifact.)

Regardless, a certain kind of intelligence appears to be useful for building certain kinds of societies.

Conclusion:

Yes, there are lots of reasons to value intelligence, like making art and enjoying a good book. And there are many lifestyles that people enjoy that do not require making lots of money, nor do they have much to do with capitalism. But there exists, nonetheless, a fairly reliable correlation–at the group level–between average IQ and income/wealth/development level. Most people don’t care about this because they want to exploit each other and destroy the environment, but because they want to be well-fed, healthy, and happy.

Is Capitalism the only reason to care about Intelligence? pt 2

Continuing with yesterday’s discussion (in response to a reader’s question):

1. Why are people snobs about intelligence?
2. Is math ability better than verbal?
3. Do people only care about intelligence in the context of making money?

1. People are snobs. Not all of them, obviously–just a lot of them.

So we’re going to have to back this up a step and ask why are people snobs, period.

Paying attention to social status–both one’s own and others’–is probably instinctual. We process social status in our prefrontal cortexes–the part of our brain generally involved in complex thought, imagination, long-term planning, personality, not being a psychopath, etc. Our brains respond positively to images of high-status items–activating reward-feedback loop that make us feel good–and negatively to images of low-status items–activating feedback loops that make us feel bad.

The mental effect is stronger when we perform high-status actions in front of others:

…researchers asked a person if the following statement was an accurate description of themselves: “I wouldn’t hesitate to go out of my way to help someone in trouble.” Some of the participants answered the question without anyone else seeing their response. Others knowingly revealed their answer to two strangers who were watching in a room next to them via video feed. The result? When the test subjects revealed an affirmative answer to an audience, their [medial prefrontal cortexes] lit up more strongly than when they kept their answers to themselves. Furthermore, when the participants revealed their positive answers not to strangers, but to those they personally held in high regard, their MPFCs and reward striatums activated even more strongly. This confirms something you’ve assuredly noticed in your own life: while we generally care about the opinions of others, we particularly care about the opinions of people who really matter to us.

(Note what constitutes a high-status activity.)

But this alone does not prove that paying attention to social status is instinctual. After all, I can also point to the part of your brain that processes written words (the Visual Word Form Area,) and yet I don’t assert that literacy is an instinct. For that matter, anything we think about has to be processed in our brains somewhere, whether instinct or not.

Better evidence comes from anthropology and zoology. According to Wikipedia, “All societies have a form of social status,” even hunter-gatherers. If something shows up in every single human society, that’s a pretty good sign that it is probably instinctual–and if it isn’t, it is so useful a thing that no society exists without it.

Even animals have social status–“Social status hierarchies have been documented in a wide range of animals: apes,^[7] baboons,^[8] wolves,^[9] cows/bulls,^[10] hens,^[11] even fish,^[12] and ants.^[13]” We may also add horses, many monkey species, elephants, killer whales, reindeer, and probably just about all animals that live in large groups.

Among animals, social status is generally determined by a combination of physical dominance, age,  relationship, and intelligence. Killer whale pods, for example, are led by the eldest female in the family; leadership in elephant herds is passed down from a deceased matriarch to her eldest daughter, even if the matriarch has surviving sisters. Male lions assert dominance by being larger and stronger than other lions.

In all of these cases, the social structure exists because it benefits the group, even if it harms some of the individuals in it. If having no social structure were beneficial for wolves, then wolf packs without alpha wolves would out-compete packs with alphas. This is the essence of natural selection.

Among humans, social status comes in two main forms, which I will call “earned” and “background.”

“Earned” social status stems from things you do, like rescuing people from burning buildings, inventing quantum physics, or stealing wallets. High status activities are generally things that benefit others, and low-status activities are generally those that harm others. This is why teachers are praised and thieves are put in prison.

Earned social status is a good thing, because it reward people for being helpful.

“Background” social status is basically stuff you were born into or have no effect over, like your race, gender, the part of the country you grew up in, your accent, name, family reputation, health/disability, etc.

Americans generally believe that you should not judge people based on background social status, but they do it, anyway.

Interestingly, high-status people are not generally violent. (Just compare crime rates by neighborhood SES.) Outside of military conquest, violence is the domain of the low-class and those afraid they are slipping in social class, not the high class. Compare Andrea Merkel to the average German far-right protester. Obviously the protester would win in a fist-fight, but Merkel is still in charge. High class people go out of their way to donate to charity, do volunteer work, and talk about how much they love refugees. In the traditional societies of the Pacific Northwest, they held potlatches at which they distributed accumulated wealth to their neighbors; in our society, the wealthy donate millions to education. Ideally, in a well-functioning system, status is the thanks rich people get for doing things that benefit the community instead of spending their billions on gold-plated toilets.

You may recall from “Slate Star Codex finds Aristocracy, doesn’t notice,” the quoted descriptions of social status among birds in “Contra Simler on Prestige,” (from Kevin Simler’s Social Status: Down The Rabbit Hole):

The Arabian babbler … spends most of its life in small groups of three to 20 members. These groups lay their eggs in a communal nest and defend a small territory of trees and shrubs that provide much-needed safety from predators.

When it’s living as part of a group, a babbler does fairly well for itself. But babblers who get kicked out of a group have much bleaker prospects. These “non-territorials” are typically badgered away from other territories and forced out into the open, where they often fall prey to hawks, falcons, and other raptors. So it really pays to be part of a group. … Within a group, babblers assort themselves into a linear and fairly rigid dominance hierarchy, i.e., a pecking order. When push comes to shove, adult males always dominate adult females — but mostly males compete with males and females with females. Very occasionally, an intense “all-out” fight will erupt between two babblers of adjacent rank, typically the two highest-ranked males or the two highest-ranked females. …

Most of the time, however, babblers get along pretty well with each other. In fact, they spend a lot of effort actively helping one another and taking risks for the benefit of the group. They’ll often donate food to other group members, for example, or to the communal nestlings. They’ll also attack foreign babblers and predators who have intruded on the group’s territory, assuming personal risk in an effort to keep others safe. One particularly helpful activity is “guard duty,” in which one babbler stands sentinel at the top of a tree, watching for predators while the rest of the group scrounges for food. The babbler on guard duty not only foregoes food, but also assumes a greater risk of being preyed upon, e.g., by a hawk or falcon. …

Unlike chickens, who compete to secure more food and better roosting sites for themselves, babblers compete to give food away and to take the worst roosting sites. Each tries to be more helpful than the next. And because it’s a competition, higher-ranked (more dominant) babblers typically win, i.e., by using their dominance to interfere with the helpful activities of lower-ranked babblers. This competition is fiercest between babblers of adjacent rank. So the alpha male, for example, is especially eager to be more helpful than the beta male, but doesn’t compete nearly as much with the gamma male. Similar dynamics occur within the female ranks.

And from Jim’s Blog, “A Lost Military Technology“:

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, wealthy private individuals substantially supported the military, with a particular wealthy men buying stuff for a particular regiment or particular fort.

Noblemen paid high prices for military commands, and these posts were no sinecure.  You got the obligation to substantially supply the logistics for your men, the duty to obey stupid orders that would very likely lead to your death, the duty to lead your men from in front while wearing a costume designed to make you particularly conspicuous, and the duty to engage in honorable personal combat, man to man, with your opposite number who was also leading his troops from in front.

A vestige of this tradition remains in that every English prince has been sent to war and has placed himself very much in harm’s way.

It seems obvious to me that a soldier being led by a member of the ruling class who is soaking up the bullets from in front is a lot more likely to be loyal and brave than a soldier sent into battle by distant rulers safely in Washington who despise him as a sexist homophobic racist murderer, that a soldier who sees his commander, a member of the ruling classes, fighting right in front of him, is reflexively likely to fight.

(Note, however, that magnanimity is not the same as niceness. The only people who are nice to everyone are store clerks and waitresses, and they’re only nice because they have to be or they’ll get fired.)

Most people are generally aware of each others’ social statuses, using contextual clues like clothing and accents to make quick, rough estimates. These contextual clues are generally completely neutral–they just happen to correlate with other behaviors.

For example, there is nothing objectively good or bad for society about wearing your pants belted beneath your buttocks, aside from it being an awkward way to wear your pants. But the style correlates with other behaviors, like crime, drug use, and aggression, low paternal investment, and unemployment, all of which are detrimental to society, and so the mere sight of underwear spilling out of a man’s pants automatically assigns him low status. There is nothing causal in this relationship–being a criminal does not make you bad at buckling your pants, nor does wearing your pants around your knees somehow inspire you to do drugs. But these things correlate, and humans are very good at learning patterns.

“The New Age Traveler” can be yours for a mere $26,000!

Likewise, there is nothing objectively better about operas than Disney movies, no real difference between a cup of coffee brewed in the microwave and one from Starbucks; a Harley Davidson and a Vespa are both motorcycles; and you can carry stuff around in just about any bag or backpack, but only the hoity-toity can afford something as objectively hideous as a $26,000 Louis Vutton backpack.

All of these things are fairly arbitrary and culturally dependent–the way you belt your pants can’t convey social status in a society where people don’t wear pants; your taste in movies couldn’t matter before movies were invented. Among hunter-gatherers, social status is based on things like one’s skills at hunting, and if I showed up to the next PTA meeting wearing a tophat and monocle, I wouldn’t get any status points at all.

We tend to aggregate the different social status markers into three broad classes (middle, upper, and lower.) As Scott Alexander says in his post about Siderea’s essay on class in America, which divides the US into 10% Underclass, 65% Working Class, 23.5% Gentry Class, and 1.5% Elite:

Siderea notes that Church’s analysis independently reached about the same conclusion as Paul Fussell’s famous guide. I’m not entirely sure how you’d judge this (everybody’s going to include lower, middle, and upper classes), but eyeballing Fussell it does look a lot like Church, so let’s grant this.

It also doesn’t sound too different from Marx. Elites sound like capitalists, Gentry like bourgeoisie, Labor like the proletariat, and the Underclass like the lumpenproletariat. Or maybe I’m making up patterns where they don’t exist; why should the class system of 21st century America be the same as that of 19th century industrial Europe?

There’s one more discussion of class I remember being influenced by, and that’s Unqualified Reservations’ Castes of the United States. Another one that you should read but that I’ll summarize in case you don’t:

1. Dalits are the underclass, … 2. Vaisyas are standard middle-class people … 3. Brahmins are very educated people … 4. Optimates are very rich WASPs … now they’re either extinct or endangered, having been pretty much absorbed into the Brahmins. …

Michael Church’s system (henceforth MC) and the Unqualified Reservation system (henceforth UR) are similar in some ways. MC’s Underclass matches Dalits, MC’s Labor matches Vaisyas, MC’s Gentry matches Brahmins, and MC’s Elite matches Optimates. This is a promising start. It’s a fourth independent pair of eyes that’s found the same thing as all the others. (commenters bring up Joel Kotkin and Archdruid Report as similar convergent perspectives).

I suspect the tendency to try to describe society as consisting of three broad classes (with the admission that other, perhaps tiny classes that don’t exactly fit into the others might exist) is actually just an artifact of being a three-biased society that likes to group things in threes (the Trinity, three-beat joke structure, three bears, Three Musketeers, three notes in a chord, etc.) This three-bias isn’t a human universal (or so I have read) but has probably been handed down to us from the Indo-Europeans, (“Many Indo-European societies know a threefold division of priests, a warrior class, and a class of peasants or husbandmen. Georges Dumézil has suggested such a division for Proto-Indo-European society,”) so we’re so used to it that we don’t even notice ourselves doing it.

(For more information on our culture’s three-bias and different number biases in other cultures, see Alan Dundes’s Interpreting Folklore, though I should note that I read it back in highschool and so my memory of it is fuzzy.)

(Also, everyone is probably at least subconsciously cribbing Marx, who was probably cribbing from some earlier guy who cribbed from another earlier guy, who set out with the intention of demonstrating that society–divided into nobles, serfs, and villagers–reflected the Trinity, just like those Medieval maps that show the world divided into three parts or the conception of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.)

At any rate, I am skeptical of any system that lumps 65% of people into one social class and 0.5% of people into a different social class as being potentially too-finely grained at one end of the scale and not enough at the other. Determining the exact number of social classes in American society may ultimately be futile–perhaps there really are three (or four) highly distinct groups, or perhaps social classes transition smoothly from one to the next with no sharp divisions.

I lean toward the latter theory, with broad social classes as merely a convenient shorthand for extremely broad generalizations about society. If you look any closer, you tend to find that people do draw finer-grained distinctions between themselves and others than “65% Working Class” would imply. For example, a friend who works in agriculture in Greater Appalachia once referred dismissively to other people they had to deal with as “red necks.” I might not be able to tell what differentiates them, but clearly my friend could. Similarly, I am informed that there are different sorts of homelessness, from true street living to surviving in shelters, and that lifetime homeless people are a different breed altogether. I might call them all “homeless,” but to the homeless, these distinctions are important.

Is social class evil?

This question was suggested by a different friend.

I suspect that social class is basically, for the most part, neutral-to-useful. I base this on the fact that most people do not work very hard to erase markers of class distinction, but instead actively embrace particular class markers. (Besides, you can’t get rid of it, anyway.)

It is not all that hard to learn the norms and values of a different social class and strategically employ them. Black people frequently switch between speaking African American Vernacular English at home and standard English at work; I can discuss religion with Christian conservatives and malevolent AI risk with nerds; you can purchase a Harley Davidson t-shirt as easily as a French beret and scarf.

(I am reminded here of an experiment in which researchers were looking to document cab drivers refusing to pick up black passengers; they found that when the black passengers were dressed nicely, drivers would pick them up, but when they wore “ghetto” clothes, the cabs wouldn’t. Cabbies: responding more to perceived class than race.)

And yet, people don’t–for the most part–mass adopt the social markers of the upper class just to fool them. They love their motorcycle t-shirts, their pumpkin lattes, even their regional accents. Class markers are an important part of peoples’ cultural / tribal identities.

But what about class conflicts?

Because every class has its own norms and values, every class is, to some degree, disagreeing with the other classes. People for whom frugality and thrift are virtues will naturally think that people who drink overpriced coffee are lacking in moral character. People for whom anti-racism is the highest virtue will naturally think that Trump voters are despicable racists. A Southern Baptist sees atheists as morally depraved fetus murderers; nerds and jocks are famously opposed to each other; and people who believe that you should graduate from college, become established in your career, get married, and then have 0-1.5 children disapprove of people who drop out of highschool, have a bunch of children with a bunch of different people, and go on welfare.

A moderate sense of pride in one’s own culture is probably good and healthy, but spending too much energy hating other groups is probably negative–you may end up needlessly hurting people whose cooperation you would have benefited from, reducing everyone’s well-being.

(A good chunk of our political system’s dysfunctions are probably due to some social classes believing that other social classes despise them and are voting against their interests, and so counter-voting to screw over the first social class. I know at least one person who switched allegiance from Hillary to Trump almost entirely to stick it to liberals they think look down on them for classist reasons.)

Ultimately, though, social class is with us whether we like it or not. Even if a full generation of orphan children were raised with no knowledge of their origins and completely equal treatment by society at large, each would end up marrying/associating with people who have personalities similar to themselves (and remember that genetics plays a large role in personality.) Just as current social classes in America are ethnically different, (Southern whites are drawn from different European populations than Northern whites, for example,) so would the society resulting from our orphanage experiment differentiate into genetically and personalityish-similar groups.

Why do Americans generally proclaim their opposition to judging others based on background status, and then act classist, anyway? There are two main reasons.

1. As already discussed, different classes have real disagreements with each other. Even if I think I shouldn’t judge others, I can’t put aside my moral disgust at certain behaviors just because they happen to correlate with different classes.
2. It sounds good to say nice, magnanimous things that make you sound more socially sensitive and aware than others, like, “I wouldn’t hesitate to go out of my way to help someone in trouble.” So people like to say these things whether they really mean them or not.

In reality, people are far less magnanimous than they like to claim they are in front of their friends. People like to say that we should help the homeless and save the whales and feed all of the starving children in Africa, but few people actually go out of their way to do such things.

There is a reason Mother Teresa is considered a saint, not an archetype.

In real life, not only does magnanimity has a cost, (which the rich can better afford,) but if you don’t live up to your claims, people will notice. If you talk a good talk about loving others but actually mistreat them, people will decide that you’re a hypocrite. On the internet, you can post memes for free without havng to back them up with real action, causing discussions to descend into competitive-virtue signalling in which no one wants to be the first person to admit that they actually are occasionally self-interested. (Cory Doctorow has a relevant discussion about how “reputations economies”–especially internet-based ones–can go horribly wrong.)

Unfortunately, people often confuse background and achieved status.

American society officially has no hereditary social classes–no nobility, no professions limited legally to certain ethnicities, no serfs, no Dalits, no castes, etc. Officially, if you can do the job, you are supposed to get it.

Most of us believe, at least abstractly, that you shouldn’t judge or discriminate against others for background status factors they have no control over, like where they were born, the accent thy speak with, or their skin tone. If I have two resumes, one from someone named Lakeesha, and the other from someone named Ian William Esquire III, I am supposed to consider each on their merits, rather than the connotations their names invoke.

But because “status” is complicated, people often go beyond advocating against “background” status and also advocate that we shouldn’t accord social status for any reasons. That is, full social equality.

This is not possible and would be deeply immoral in practice.

When you need heart surgery, you really hope that the guy cutting you open is a top-notch heart surgeon. When you’re flying in an airplane, you hope that both the pilot and the guys who built the plane are highly skilled. Chefs must be good at cooking and authors good at writing.

These are all forms of earned status, and they are good.

Smart people are valuable to society because they do nice things like save you from heart attacks or invent cell-phones. This is not “winning at capitalism;” this is benefiting everyone around them. In this context, I’m happy to let smart people have high status.

In a hunter-gatherer society, smart people are the ones who know the most about where animals live and how to track them, how to get water during a drought, and where that 1-inch stem they spotted last season that means a tasty underground tuber is located. Among nomads, smart people are the ones with the biggest mental maps of the territory, the folks who know the safest and quickest routes from good summer pasture to good winter pasture, how to save an animal from dying and how to heal a sick person. Among pre-literate people, smart people composed epic poems that entertained their neighbors for many winters’ nights, and among literate ones, the smart people became scribes and accountants. Even the communists valued smart people, when they weren’t chopping their heads off for being bourgeois scum.

So even if we say, abstractly, “I value all people, no matter how smart they are,” the smart people do more of the stuff that benefits society than the dumb people, which means they end up with higher social status.

So, yes, high IQ is a high social status marker, and low IQ is a low social status marker, and thus at least some people will be snobs about signaling their IQ and their disdain for dumb people.

BUT.

I am speaking here very abstractly. There are plenty of “high status” people who are not benefiting society at all. Plenty of people who use their status to destroy society while simultaneously enriching themselves. And yes, someone can come into a community, strip out all of its resources and leave behind pollution and unemployment, and happily call it “capitalism” and enjoy high status as a result.

I would be very happy if we could stop engaging in competitive holiness spirals and stop lionizing people who became wealthy by destroying communities. I don’t want capitalism at the expense of having a pleasant place to live in.

Part 3 tomorrow.