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We have this narrative in the United States about mass incarceration as something that is per se bad nobody looks at the actual numbers of Who’s in prison compared to the number of violent crimes being committed? It turns out you have if you commit a crime in the United States There is a 3% chance that you will end up in prison. So most crime is going unpunished you have to You know prison is still the lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending You have to try very hard to get a district attorney to say okay. I’m actually going to take your court case To court. I’m not just going to plea black plea bargain you down But you believe belong in prison you have to have a very long record before he actually says okay I’m gonna pay attention now. So but if our prison population Was not racially disparate it is now about a third black Whereas blacks are about 13 percent of the population if there was not that disparity nobody would give a damn about mass incarceration and it’s the same thing with the fact that there is a Distribution of academic skills the Way out in the high end and we also have the gender issue the sex issue with males being overwhelmingly Represented at both the high and the low end of math skills compared to females, but but just to repeat I Think in the United States We would not be as troubled as we are by what you say are tragic cognitive Disparities but for the race issue and well I looked into the race issue a lot when I worked at Harvard Because we were I worked with a student there on developing efficient assessment tests both on the cognitive and the Temperamental side. So for example in a managerial domain You want people who are who have traits that are associated with high intrinsic conscientiousness? By the way, there’s no racial differences in conscientiousness and conscientious people are diligent and orderly and industrious and task-oriented and detail-oriented and fundamentally a conscientious person is someone who’s capable of formulating and keeping verbal contracts and It’s the next best predictor of success in managerial domains next to general cognitive ability it’s not a great predictor of entrepreneurial ability by the way and We look deeply into the racial literature at that point and I was trying to account for the fact of these persistent racial differences and one of the things I found for example, that was very strange was that the differences between the general cognitive performance of North American Native Americans and Caucasians was much smaller than the difference between Performance between the black population and the Caucasian population and that’s a that’s a tough nut to crack because if you had to find a population that was as historically oppressed in the United States as the black population The Native American population would certainly spring to mind. I think you could make a strong case for equivalents of outcast status, let’s say and certainly a strong case for Multigenerational pervasiveness and continuing Multigenerational pervasiveness, but it doesn’t manifest itself in the general cognitive ability Difference front and so that was disheartening to note that more recently We might point out that There are there’s plenty of evidence that environmental intermediation Can produce improvements in general cognitive ability The Flynn effect has demonstrated that and it’s quite clear that on average People in the United States score quite substantively higher on IQ tests than they did a hundred years ago And a lot of that is a consequence of improved nutritional status for example and the fact that information is at hand for pretty much everyone and it’s also the case that the racial gaps in general cognitive ability performance have been Decreasing over about a 30-year period and that they’re actually much smaller in childhood than they are in adulthood and that’s the one point of Optimism that someone very hard-headed might still maintain in relationship to the IQ literature Looking at it on the racial front is that at the age of five or so the difference between Caucasians and blacks for example is something more approximating five to five Points than they say ten to twelve points that seems more standard by adulthood and no one really knows why that is why that gap expands across time and it would be very useful to At least in principle to focus our sociological and psychological Investigations into determining why that is I suspect phenomena like fatherlessness play a role I also suspect that early literacy is relevant You know that in the typical middle-class family a kid of Forget race for a minute if you look at the typical middle-class family compared to the typical working-class family a typical middle-class kid by the age of three or four has been exposed to a veritable plethora of books and and Semantic information compared to a working-class kid all things being equal and The differences in exposure magnitude is absolutely remarkable even by the age of three And so there’s still some places we might look if we were really interested in Remediating the remaining differences in general cognitive ability so But well, we’ve tried that. I mean, this is the whole Perry preschool experiment and yeah, absolutely This has been noted the difference in the number of words that children hear From poor and middle-class backgrounds, and I would absolutely agree with that one question is is the failure to surround lower-class children with rich verbal environments is that a function of just ignorance about good child rearing or do you get somewhat of a circular loop where it is the lower-class children And it is the lower cognitive level of the parents that results in this type of Inadequate from our perspective, maybe there’s other strengths going on there. I don’t know. I’ve got a kind of an Appalachian white trash Couple living underneath me in my California apartment and I can tell you it’s an amazing Contrast there really are Class differences that are Hilariously stereotypical, but these guys live up to it to the tee. I mean every everybody in their environment has no teeth either because of of meth or they’re just beat each other up too much, but there’s Clearly I would not want to be the child of those parents and they’re not married. There’s both I mean, so the best predictor of the IQ of a child is the average IQ of the parents and So you definitely get a situation where Cognitive resources accumulate and this is particularly true in the modern world because modern high-status women are much more likely to mate they like like women in general they mate across and up dominance hierarchy so that as Women have become more educated the proclivity for educated women to only marry educated men and there’s an associated IQ Assortative mating phenomenon going on there that’s increased substantially in recent years