Tyler Cowen blogs:

IQ and the Wealth of Nations

How many more times will someone suggest this book in the comments section of this blog? I like this book and I think it offers a real contribution. Nonetheless I feel no need to suggest it in the comments sections of other peoples’ blogs.

I do not treat this book as foundational because of personal experience. I’ve spent much time in one rural Mexican village, San Agustin Oapan, and spent much time chatting with the people there. They are extremely smart, have an excellent sense of humor, and are never boring. And that’s in their second language, Spanish.

I’m also sure they if you gave them an IQ test, they would do miserably. In fact I can’t think of any written test — no matter how simple — they could pass. They simply don’t have experience with that kind of exercise.

When it comes to understanding the properties of different corn varieties, catching fish in the river, mending torn amate paper, sketching a landscape from memory, or gossiping about the neighbors, they are awesome.

Some of us like to think that intelligence is mostly one-dimensional, but at best this is true only within well-defined peer groups of broadly similar people. If you gave Juan Camilo a test on predicting rainfall he would crush me like a bug.

OK, maybe I hang out with a select group within the village. But still, there you have it. Terrible IQ scores (if they could even take the test), real smarts.

So why should I think this book is the key to understanding economic underdevelopment?

Crossposted at Isteve.com.

Theodore Dalrymple writes about the legacy of Tony Blair:

But often the government’s reach is less innocuous. For example, in the name of national security, the government under Mr. Blair’s leadership sought to make passport applicants provide 200 pieces of information about themselves, including bank-account details, and undergo interrogation for half an hour. If an applicant refused to allow the information to circulate through other government departments, he would not get a passport, with no appeal. The government also cooked up a plan to require passport holders to inform the police if they changed their address.

A justification presented for these Orwellian arrangements was the revelation that a would-be terrorist, Dhiren Barot, had managed to obtain nine British passports before his arrest because he did not want an accumulation of stamps from suspect countries in any of them. At the same time, it came to light that the Passport Office issues 10,000 passports a year to fraudulent applicants–hardly surprising, since its staff consists largely of immigrants, legal and illegal.[Emphasis added] [Delusions of Honesty | Tony Blair's domestic legacy: corruption and the erosion of liberty. , City Journal, Summer 2007 ]

I was struck by that fact of the Passport Office staff being largely immigrant. No doubt it’s so that if, say a Saudi terrorist comes in for a passport that says he’s a “Briton” they can speak to him in his own language–and then issue him the passport.

However, “largely” is just a guess–perhaps the frontline staff Dr. Dalrymple sees when he goes to get his passport are more heavily immigrant, because they have to deal with a clientèle of UK citizens who can’t speak English, and the terrorists mentioned above.

The British Government does have official affirmative action goals, intended to make the passport office less white, and thus less British.

You can see a PDF here. As of 2006, the Identity And Passport Service had 14.3 percent minority employees, down from 15.2 in 2005. Their official goal was only 8.6, so they’re doing well, by their standards.

Arthur Ashe, who won the U.S. Open tennis tournament in 1968, was a representative figure of the hopeful side of the 1960s: a gentlemanly black who succeeded in a country club sport and engaged in much mild social activism, such as teaming up with a similar symbol of the nicer Sixties, Harry Belafonte, to bring pressure on apartheid South Africa.

It was a decade when black athletes were breaking through in a number of nontraditional sports besides tennis, with Pete Brown and Charlie Sifford winning PGA golf tournaments and Wendell Scott winning a NASCAR race in 1963.

It was widely assumed at the time by all respectable people that Ashe was a harbinger, that men’s tennis would continue to become more integrated, that black men would eventually make up 1/8th (but no more) of all professional tennis champions, but that didn’t really happen. MaliVai Washington made it to the Wimbledon final in 1996, but there wasn’t much follow-up.

Four decades after Ashe, the top African-American male tennis player is James Blake, who is ranked #9 in the world, and is the second best American after Andy Roddick. Blake dropped out of Harvard to play professionally, had some success, but then broke his neck a few years ago crashing into a net-post. He’s made a heartwarming recovery.

As you might guess, Blake’s mother is white.

African-American women have done better in tennis, but the pattern with African-American males who, unlike Blake, don’t have a non-black parent seems to have become that they will either dominate a sport (basketball and football) or not play it seriously. This would have come as a shock to Civil Rights-era white liberals, but there doesn’t seem to be a stable midpoint anymore where African-American men will long accept being a minority in an integrated sport.

This wasn’t true in the past. For example, in golf, five different blacks won 23 PGA tournaments from 1964-1986 (an average of one per year, or a little over 2% of all tournaments), and these first couple of generations of black touring pros continued to be a small but solid presence on the Senior (Champions) Tour for years more. Since 1986, though, Tiger Woods is the only African-American to make even a splash on the PGA tour, and he’s more a representative of this new mulatto elite that makes up an increasing share of African-American participation in white-dominated fields than of the general African-American community.

I was looking through a book of quotations and turning to the page marked immigration, I found this one:

We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to prevent the United States from being used as the dumping ground for the known criminals and professional paupers of Europe.

Where’s that from? It’s from the Democratic Party Platform of 1892. Why was the Democratic Party opposed to this, since even in 1892 they saw themselves as the party of the common man? Well, in 1892, they saw themselves as the party of the common American man.