"If you compare Ashkenazi Jews with other white ethnic groups in America, they seem less special. They don't top the charts in IQ, wealth, or any other "interesting" metric I can think of."
Wait which American white ethnic groups do you mean have comparable IQ, wealth, and other interesting metrics, as Jews?
Very interesting, thank you. If you have the statistics on WASP IQ and wealth on hand I would be grateful to get a link! I agree that it is kinda misleading to compare "Ashkenazi jews" to "non Ashkenazi white people" because the latter group is a vast and highly diverse group. Someone in these comments said something like all Ashkenazis share mitochondrial DNA with 4 women, or something to that effect, so it is almost like looking at a specific family tree rather than a race.
It's interesting that in the graph in the original post the ethnicity that does the best are Belarusians. I wonder what the average american-belarusian IQ is.
> as it would point out the intrinsic supremacy of one group over another, with no recourse given to individuals in either group to change this perceived disparity.
I think there are very few individuals in the world who can change any group disparity. A couple of kings and Bill Gates, maybe. For most of us, that's not a productive goal. It's probably more helpful to focus on how I can change individual (not group) circumstances, whether in my own life or lives of those around me.
I'm also not sure about the "intrinsic supremacy" part. If nation A defeats nation B in a war, we don't say it's because of intrinsic supremacy of the nation A. Same if athlete A defeats athlete B.
I do agree that such a piece would feel iffy. But I also feel it's often worth it to investigate and understand why something is iffy.
It's perhaps surprising that an alternative solution, that Jews are disproportionately successful because of the blessing of השם, is not mentioned in your post, and is mentioned in Noah's only to note that he will not be considering it.
Surely he means neither of these, but simply that the Holocaust proves that being the chosen people doesn't mean that you'll be materially successful or happy.
There are plenty of hints in the Hebrew Bible, and in history since then, that terms of the blessing are something like "you will be so improbably prosperous, given your resources, that your neighbors will constantly be tempted to kill, enslave, and oppress you."
It's a fairly common theme in the patriarchal narrative: see Gen 26:12-14; Gen 31:1-2; and mostly notably Ex 1:7-14.
Jahweh is expressly identified as a warrior in the Song of the Sea (aka the Song of Moses): Ex 1:3. Some believe this song to be very ancient. If correct, one might infer the warrior aspect to be original.
I think that's basically a conversation-ending theory. If one accept that as a theory, what more is there to say or talk about? So like, its technically valid, but can be ignored, the same way "we're all in a simulation" can be ignored
From the perspective of "truth-seeking" (in contrast to "entertainment-seeking") - conversation-ending is a great feature of theory, isn't it? Anyway, I would reserve this term to theories which are self-defiance (such as absolute solipsism etc).
And by the way, Scott - I don't know if you're aware - but the way you explicitly distinguish Ashkenazi from other Jews here would be considered highly racist in Israel. Probably similarly to how discussing the possibility that blacks have lower IQ than whites may be perceived in the USA.
Well, it ends the conversation before we reach any kind of understanding that would allow us to make predictions. One says "God did it" and shrugs, while other people say "no wait, I think physical reality might follow certain rules and equations..." and end up with greater predictive power later on.
The nature vs nurture argument (and more specifically, the IQ vs culture argument) has been going on for the past fifty or so years. Both sides have been unable to convince the extremists on other side of the rightness of their interpretation. With the advent of PCR techniques, The IQers have been able to point to specific alleles which are significantly correlated with IQ, and have said, "Aha! See intelligence is a heritable characteristic!" The Culturists point out that IQ tests are pretty one dimensional when it comes to measuring the full range of human talents and behavioral repertoires, and that the tests can (a) be culturally biased, and (b) different testers and testing regimes can significantly improve or depress the results of the testees. Most researchers now agree that it intelligence is heritable but that also can be affected by environment and cultural situation. Of course, there are the extremists on either side of this question that are still fighting the old wars. What has been achieved? Little really. If you're extremist on either side of this question, you will not be convinced by the evidence that other side marshals. If you're in the middle, you'll shrug your shoulders.
However, I will leave you with on tidbit. Lewis Terman did a long-term study of the life-outcomes of people who tested 3 sigma above the IQ mean (i.e. geniuses) — n was ~1200 if I recall correctly. The study continued to run after his death. The study showed that geniuses were not very exceptional achievers. Most of Terman's "Termites" ended up with middle-class to upper middle class incomes. A lot were very successful in professional careers, such as Drs and Lawyers. But a lot didn't achieve much of anything of note. No Nobel prizes. No great works of literature or art. A few millionaires, but none of them became super wealthy. Of course, most of the "Termites" were WASPs. I'm not sure what a similar study on the life outcomes of Ashkenazi Jews with +3 sigma IQs would show.
I think the Jewish people have always been disproportionately successful. That’s why there’s always been conspiracy theories about them. It’s just that the intellectual system changed in the 1800s. Measuring and rewarding academic achievement more fairly. Perhaps believing you are a unique and special people is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I think the simple fact that Jewish people were often the only visible ethnic minority around has for more explanatory power than Jews being economically successful for why there are so many antisemetic conspiracy theories.
So you came to this substack, that clearly has an atheist bent, to comment on how strange it is to you that the author did not entertain this ill-defined, baseless, unfalsifiable hypothesis that has no explanatory power? If השם cannot be understood by humans, then השם is of no use as a hypothesis, and you are simply wasting people's time.
Sir, Madam, or Other: perhaps it may assist you in recognising the intent of the comment if it is explained that this is not meant absolutely seriously, but is an example of what is known commonly as a "joke", or jocular/humorous expression intended to evoke hilarity in the readers/listeners rather than an attempt to stick it to the atheists.
I will bet you $500 that the commenter Alex Power was not joking. Please for the love of השם tell me there is some actual confidence behind all that smug pedantry.
There was a hint of a joke there; if these two rationalists note they are Jewish yet aren't willing to consider the theory that השם has something to do with things on Earth, how Jewish are they?
Perhaps the societies in which the Sephardim existed were less amenable to such success by religious minorities or perhaps even the majority population. Spain and Portugal were deeply cursed by the resource trap, as I recall.
My impression is that, prior to the last century or two, it was the Sephardim who did well. David Ricardo was Sephardic. But the Rothschilds were Ashkenazi, so that would be an exception.
"Achievement" is some function of secularization (can't contribute productively to modern science if you're dissecting the Torah) * demographics (Jews were expanding as a share of the European population up until ~1900) * literacy rate.
Ashkenazi Jews tended to be affluent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as they were invited to the Polish commonwealth to fill bourgeois jobs needing literacy and numeracy.. But their population boomed so much from, say, 1600 to 1900, that they filled up all the upscale jobs open to them, such as finance, and many were forced down the economic ladder to be tailors or milkmen or whatever.
The 2005 Cochran-Harpending paper on the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is immensely informative on this topic:
The Russians, like Catharine the Great, invited the Germans in to do advanced stuff. Germany was far enough a way that this didn't see too much of a security risk.
The Polish aristocrats thought about inviting in numerate German after the Mongols massacred a lot of their indigenous urban bourgeoisie in the 1200s, but then they worried that the Germans lived right next door and might try to take over Poland. So, they chose Rhineland Jews to be their new bourgeois.
Medieval and early modern Poland used to accept any valuable refugees ejected by Europe's perennial conflicts, including wars of religion. E.g. it accepted quite a lot of Huguenots.
It's more like the Germans were invited and did in fact proceed to take over (often successfully, e.g. in Silesia). The put-down of Kraków's bourgeoisie uprising (and subsequent purge of german-speaking citizens) was a major turning point in reinstitution of a centralized Piast state.
"By analyzing the proliferation of long nucleotide sequences that are identical in the unrelated individuals in their sample, the researchers determined that a population bottleneck of approximately just 350 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals occurred in central Europe about 700 years ago, followed by an exponentially rapid population increase." https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry
These 350 individuals probably consisted largely of high-IQ lawyers, bankers and scholars. This genetic profile would have remained in the same population that exploded in Eastern Europe. Even if these Eastern Jews were mostly peasants (because there wasn't a huge division of labor in the High Middle Ages), they were obviously very smart peasants.
When the Industrial Revolution and capitalism opened up opportunities for intelligent people to achieve financial success after circa 1800, the Jews were naturally able to take advantage.
They weren't peasants. Eastern Europe already had a peasantry, and even hereditary serfdom well past its abolition in western Europe. Jews had middle-men occupations.
They were more likely to be in those positions, it's true. But there weren't enough middle-man positions in such an undeveloped economy for all Jews to have one (like tax collectors, merchants, landlords, licensed vodka dealers).
But having a high IQ leads to better productivity in almost any job. So I would imagine that Jews tended to be more successful as farmers as well. ("Peasant" was a poor choice of words because you are right they weren't really feudal peasants in the legal sense but just agrarian smallholders). Of course, back then, unlike today, having a consistently higher income meant lots more surviving children than a poor person (say, 8 vs. 1) and a correspondingly geometric increase in population percentage.
I am kind of surprised that essentially none of the comments mention IQ or genetics. I wonder if it's because people don't know the facts or if they're just afraid to mention them even in an anonymous comment.
My understanding is that they ran out of middlemen positions after their population exploded. Which reminds me of the downward mobility in Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".
It's beyond doubt that IQ is important in this, with Ashkenazi jews probably averaging ten points higher than the mean of 100. IQ is the best predictor of future success in education, employment and financial stability. I am not for one moment saying it is the only thing we should value about people (finding ways for people who aren't gifted that way to be valued and successful in society is something we have failed to address in modern times), but it cannot be ignored as an embarrassing form of 'privilege' we pretend isn't there.
There is also the fascinating hypothesis that jews in the diaspora were selected for intelligence, often being restricted to the unchristian work of moneylending and working with figures, and perhaps doing all the bookkeeping mentally to avoid written records come the next tax collector. I can't speak to the American immigrant experience, but I did live in the east end of London many years ago, where poor jewish people were common. Even then, they didn't stay poor long as the work ethic shone through and they soon made the clockwise trek to the north London suburbs. And good for them. An example to the rest of us, especially considering the pretty horrible way the establishment spoke of them in those days.
Those were Sephardi, so it’s not relevant to Ashkenazi achievement. In Europe Jews were prohibited by law from owning land or many professions. Medicine and moneylending were not excluded. I don’t think a Jewish lawyer would have gotten a fair hearing for a client so most likely the lawyer stereotype emerged in the 19th Century. Culture matters, like Moses Mendelssohn walking hundreds of miles to be allowed to study, or Richard Feynman mentioning that a yeshiva student’s mother observed her day was made because she had met a General and a Professor the same day, and most would not put the two in the same esteem.
Yes, exactly. Scott claimed that Jewish intellectual success is limited to post 1800 Ashkenazim, which is obviously false. It is also present in pre 1800 Ashkenazim and pre 1800 Sephardim.
Maybe the key is mixing low income traditional Jews into a western society that tolerates them? Looking at French Jews, most of them nowadays are Sephardic and they're famous for all being doctors and lawyers. Might be difficult to have data on the phenomenon given ethnic statistics are forbidden on France, but maybe Israeli statistics on olim from France could be useful.
Read up on figures like Josef Nasi, the Sassoon family, or the success of Sephardim in England, the Netherlands, Ottoman lands, etc. There was plenty of success.
Plus there was the privileged status of many Ashkenazim in the Polish Commonwealth.
Ashkenazim in Central Europe and the East were some of the last to get emancipated and also happened to be where the bulk of Jewish population growth was following the reconquista; so the notion of them being the only ones to experience a sudden boom in well being and only following 1800 is probably a reflection of it being a relatively large phenomenon being observed in a particular time.
Surprising the Scottish Enlightenment is referenced, but there is no mention of the Haskalah -- the contemporaneous Jewish enlightenment -- that began in Germany in the 1800's then spread eastward. Prior to this event, European Jews were a backwards people, at least by Enlightenment Europe standards.
Modern-day Ultra Orthodox Jews provide the best glimpse of pre-enlightenment Jewish culture. It's also probably not a coincidence that one of the poorest towns in the US -- Kiryas Joel, NY -- is a modern-day Orthodox shtetl. The same pattern repeats itself in Israel today, with Ultra Orthodox communities resembling the third-world.
While there is genetic evidence for higher Ashkenazi IQ's, the most important historical factor was living in close proximity the European Enlightenment, much like the Scotts you mentioned. Without it, Jewish communities would have continued to live in relative poverty, with minimal cultural advancement.
Actually, on re-reading, I note that I missed that Noah does discuss this theory: "In addition, I think that a large part of whatever Jewish overachievement remains will probably be attributable to the fact that Judaism is a religious minority, and religious minorities tend to overachieve."
I heard a claim that at one time Jehovah's Witnesses were discouraged from pursuing higher education due to their prediction of the imminence of the end of the world (so it wouldn't be very useful to become an expert in worldly matters). I'm not sure if this is still the case, but there's something on the JW web site about higher education not being that important or valuable:
In Orthodox Judaism, secular higher education is often sometimes viewed with suspicion or not seen as very prestigious compared to religious study (although there are certainly many Orthodox and observant Jews in secular academia). But in more liberal and secularized forms of Judaism, it's *very* prestigious, and often more so than religious education. So that's kind of a complicated subject that also varies from Jewish community and denomination to Jewish community and denomination.
One other thing that seems different between the Witnesses and Judaism is that the Witnesses have a particular central authority that is supposed to study and interpret the scriptures for them, and then send out authoritative interpretations and teachings (which are often presented in very simple, straightforward language that can be understood without a lot of education). In Judaism, there is no such central authority, and, while the Orthodox definitely have a very strong emphasis on respecting spiritual authorities (like one's own community's rabbi), there's also commonly an idea that (1) any Jewish man is capable of aspiring to contribute to religious scholarship or to become a religious authority (although in Chassidic Judaism there can be a hereditary element to some forms of religious authority), and (2) all Torah study is inherently spiritually beneficial to any Jewish man or woman, and inherently makes the world better, and the more of it the better, in the world as a whole or in an individual's life.
On the latter point, I think I once heard someone claim that the very first verse read in translation by an idly but genuinely curious lapsed Jew pleases God just as much as the millionth verse re-read in Hebrew by an aged rabbi who immediately thinks of 100 connections and associations. Although I don't remember where that claim comes from at all, and I might have more or less made it up.
Yes, this is exactly correct. Note also that this also probably also applies to the Ashkenazim, and to many other groups such as the remaining Zoroastrians (i.e. Parsi).
There also seems to be a second effect in the Levant where the Christians holdouts didn't mix so much with later arrivals that might have had lower genotypic IQ.
Note that in the US, there is something of an inverse relationship between the average income of a Protestant denomination and the degree to which it is populated by more recent convert families. The highest income is seen in the Episcopal Church and the PCUSA, which are basically direct descendants of the Church of England and Church of Scotland, respectively, and neither has ever been very good at conversion and thus both of them mostly consist of families that have been in those churches a very long time. Meanwhile Baptists, who mostly represent families that abandoned those churches in the 19th century, are considerably poorer. A group like Jehovah's Witnesses seems to consist of people who then abandoned groups like the Baptists in the 20th century.
If its really helpful to continue in the racial success vein, what is the rate of success in America of all immigrant groups at the same time in the same regions?
You could compare with the Irish (mine), Italians, other Eastern Europeans such as the Poles, the Germans, the list goes on. My quick answer is all groups did well in America comparatively- depending on region and time.
Chosen professions of course affect income- which is not the only measure of success, but seems to be dominant in the world we’ve chosen. (We as in present day America). To explain that a bit; if your father was a firefighter or a cop being that might be more important than “income.”
If your father had a love of the soil and raised you the same, being a farmer might be more important than income (it had better be).
Maybe if we must take this path we compare the different groups? Instead of looking inward at a closed circle?
Scott doesn’t compare apples to oranges but by saying “America” certainly that’s the context.
Is this meant to be a direct reply to my comment above? I don't see the connection. But yes, for the most part there's not an obvious large disconnect in achievement between the various European groups that migrated to the US in the 19th century and early 20th century. Of course, for the most part these groups are more related to one another than any of them are to the Ashkenazim, and they've intermarried in the time since their arrival in the US to a much greater degree than the Ashkenazim have.
The obvious disconnect among white people is mostly between earlier arrivals -- the British who ended up in Appalachia vs. those who ended up in New England, say (later arrivals tended to avoid places that were already poor, i.e. the South). Albion's Seed would suggest the differences between British-descended populations are cultural, which probably makes sense, they mostly came from the same island. Though, while I'm not an expert on the current evidence here, I also have to think they started with some genetic differences, and the pattern of American migration (e.g. brain drain from poorer regions to richer ones) might have exacerbated those differences.
If they were orthodox jews I would fine it surprising, but of course they are not. I find this comment more surprising, because it suggests that God interferes in temporal matters, which, considering the sum of temporal matters currently, I find a very amusing suggestion.
This is to be fair, a rationalist blog. But if we were to countenance it then we would have to agree that it took about 2000 years for God to get going with that blessing. Longer, maybe.
If true, this hypothesis could be both tested empirically and exploited practically.
But if we admit theological explanations for the success of religious groups, I don’t think the overall evidence favors Jewish monotheism specifically.
This comment is on is the blog of the author of https://unsongbook.com/ . I'm sure the thought of testing the hypothesis has occurred to him. It has also occurred to me.
It's an easy hypothesis to test. We just have to create a different universe with a different God, and see how much money the Jews make then. The grant proposal writes itself.
I'm pretty sure that it was also written in Bible that blessing is conditional on following God and his Law and unless they do, they will be punished severely by God. And I think that most of American Jews are far from being Orthodox, they are mostly atheists now, I guess.
I'm not saying that your explanation is impossible but I would consider this as the another argument against
I was going to suggest that, it doesn't seem like Jewish piety correlates with economic success, which would be the only way to come close to testing this hypothesis.
Because it's an extremely unlikely theory, requiring far stronger evidence to be believed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If mundane solutions such as genetics and culture exist and are equally able to explain the data, they are to be vastly preferred.
I read aloud in my head, so it annoys me when people use scripts I can't pronounce in otherwise Latin text. It also comes across as a little smartassy - flaunting your knowledge of foreign scripts to signal learnedness. Please transliterate next time.
I once read that in early 20th century Budapest, Jews had an illegitimacy rate of 10%, compared to Christians who were around 30%. This was brought up as one of the many reasons why Jews had a higher population growth in that era compared to Christians: child mortality was significantly higher among ilegitimate children.
We are a people with a deep connection to Jewish sacred texts and at the same time a people who were persecuted for that connection. That persecution bound us closer to our books, The modern world is a world of words not muscle. That's my explanation.
Christian minorities also seemed to do better than average within the Ottoman empire. In "The Long Divergence" Timur Kuran (who is himself Turkish) explains it via Islamic law entrenching principles that made it difficult to form corporations.
perhaps. but the statement that sephardic and mizrahi jews don't seem as accomplished only holds up for the past couple hundred years, when sephardic and mizrahi jews were living in less developed countries than ashkenazic jews.
I think an interesting contrast between Ashkenazim and Sephardim is how their prayer services go. Sephardim (in my experience) do most of the prayer service out loud and in a communal way. Ashkenazim have far more long stretches where everyone reads to themselves quietly. I've always assumed it was because literacy levels were higher in Europe so the people could actually just read from their prayer books. But in communities where literacy wasn't the norm there's far greater focus on learning everything off by heart.
Admittedly I've never actually checked if this is accurate in any way.
My paternal grandparents were both Jews who emigrated to America separately before World War I. My grandfather was the son of a Polish cobbler (and the first person in his family who was taught to read). My grandmother was the daughter of a Russian rabbi who was killed in a pogrom and who walked out of Russia without any other family as part of a group of people emigrating to America via Hamburg. Both came from small villages and neither could have been considered anything but poor.
"But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural."
That seems the more plausible answer, if one is willing to consider that cultural norms can be embedded very deeply into individuals. The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
My grandfather and some of his friends were discussing their children one day, and he finally responded to the many "my son the doctor" remarks with "my son TEACHES doctors." (Dad was on the faculty of Stanford Medical School at the time.) The story goes that the conversation changed topics after a long pause.
> The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
I would be interested in seeing a survey about people's cultural attitudes toward physical books and how those relate to their cultural background. E.g., things like
* do you feel better in some way having more physical books present in a place where you live or work? (does it make you feel more comfortable or emotionally positive toward that location?)
* do you feel bad in some way when you or someone around you shows physical disrespect for a book? (e.g., throwing it in the trash or recycling; placing it on the ground; breaking or damaging the spine; physically throwing it across a room)
* do you find it emotionally pleasing to acquire books and emotionally difficult to part with them, in a way that feels subjectively different from acquiring and parting with possessions in general?
These things are all true for me, and I grew up in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish household, but I also noticed that they were and are true of many of my middle-class friends from non-Jewish backgrounds.
It's an interesting cultural proxy I've anecdotally noticed myself. Whenever jewish friends would visit my home in the US the first thing they almost always noticed the above average number of books we had. In Israel it's very common for people to have decorative bookshelves for their most treasured (usually religious) books the same way many other cultures have special cases for their dining china.
Hmm, my parents (not Jewish, and only first generation intellectuals) had the same feelings about physical books; I grew up lovingly reading lots of books, but resented this sacred admiration of books as such. It was partly just teenage rebellion, but partly me living in a society where printing was already cheap, a lot of garbage got printed, and books were gradually moving into virtual reality anyway.
Cultural preferences and genetics are deeply interwoven in humans. The reason why the Dutch are so tall is that culturally they don’t have a preference for shorter women most societies have.
Of course, another plausible cause here is that Jews who couldn't hack it within that religious tradition left for other religions, so this ended up serving as a selective effect for high literacy, which probably meant higher IQ. So while it's a plausible cultural thing, it's also plausible that the culture eventually gave them a genetic advantage by selecting against lower IQ members.
I'm still confused, because the key says that the colors indicate geographic region. And then those colors are sorta... split up? Like all the Europe is on the left, but then there are Asian countries in the middle and on the right...? And if they were just spacing out the points for legibility then why are a bunch of them clustered on top of each other so as to not be legible?
if you click through to the source, there the axis also doesn't have a label but does at least have a title: "Age/Sex-Adjusted US-Born Median Personal Incomes in 2015-2019"
If the “groups should be represented according to their share of the population” (in college admissions, professions, etc.) standard were applied to Jews it would be devastating.
Luckily, Jews are “white” so for some reason it doesn’t count? And people decided Jewish quotas were immoral discrimination but Asian quotas (not explicit ones, admittedly) are somehow ok? This doesn’t make any sense on principle, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I hope we end up with “discrimination is bad”.
The current situation is just begging for court cases where gentiles who are discriminated against because white people are over-represented, but who are in a situation where gentiles ares underrepresented, go to court to demand that Jews are treated as a separate ethnic group for discrimination purposes.
We have noticed the skulls wrt 'discrimination is bad.'
Quotas may not be the best solution (and they're not common), but we've certainly learned that discrimination exists in various forms even when it's not being intentionally implemented. And that if you think that's bad, you need to take active, sometimes counter-intuitive measures to oppose it.
Nah. We should crack down on discrimination where we can find it, but "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"
Really my concern is that people are too quick to infer discrimination from weak evidence like "disparate outcomes", so we impose discriminatory rules to counter discrimination that doesn't exist.
For example, Jews have very good outcomes; should we infer massive pro-Jewish discrimination and impose massive anti-Jewish rules? (No)
Presumably, it refers to the phenomenon described in this article of Scott's (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/) where widely-known criticisms to a field are inapplicable because by the time the public is generally aware of them, they've already been taken to heart by insiders.
That said, I'm not sure what it would mean for *society* to have noticed the skulls, since my understanding of the phrase a Scott used it requires some sort of inner circle to have already learned from what the wider public still thinks of as valid criticisms. Who's the wider public if that inner circle is "society"?
Anecdotal, of course, but in my Jewish upbringing it was always said or implied that Jewish success was partly due to a culture considerably more education-focused than the norm. More educated people tend to be more successful and make more money, and we also see similar patterns among other immigrants with strong pro-education cultures; it can be joked that American Jews are basically the early 1900s equivalent of modern Asian Americans.
And this does make some sense: after all, the central text of Jewish life was not the Torah but the Talmud, which is the Torah plus the random comments, debates, and thoughts of a bunch of rabbis. And you can see it in other parts of Jewish culture, too: here's "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof:
If I were rich, I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day.
That would be the sweetest thing of all.
Perhaps it's no surprise that people growing up in that cultural milieu tended to make a lot of academic discoveries.
^this. I'm not Jewish, but from my reading and observation, this is a huge part of it. No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem. Then over multiple generations, people who value education and have the skills to succeed at it marry people who value education & have the skills, and the process repeats, over and over.
Add to that persecution, which forced the community to build extremely strong internal trust networks. Sephardic Jews, though second class citizens, never faced the same level of persecution as Ashkenazi Jews.
Now take that community, remove the persecution, but keep the deep communal trust bonds (there is a massive literature on trust and economic growth) and the cultural emphasis on education and study. The recipe for success is complex, but trust and education are two major ingredients.
>No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
On the other hand, Augustine, Aquinas, and countless other Christian theologians were sainted. I think this counts as rewards and esteem.
One observation by my father (an Ashkenazi Jew) was that Christian theologians and priests didn't marry and have children, whilst Jewish equivalents were encouraged to have lots of children. Multiply that over the generations and you've got built-in eugenics.
As I understand it, Christian priests or monks (I don't know whether there were theologians who weren't priests or monks) were supposed to not marry and not have sex, but the rule against sex was hard to enforce. I suppose their children were less likely to have the advantages of being acknowledged members of families, but I await further information.
Cleric celibacy is not a Christian rule, but a Catholic rule mostly established during the 11th to 12th century period. It was strongly advocated by popes Gregory VII and Urban II during the 11th century, and afterwards "enshrined" in the 1st Lateran Council in 1123.
It is specific to Catholics; the Orthodox, Protestant and other Christian priests largely do marry. (in the Orthodox world, only the highest echelons of the church are expected to be celibate, and I'm not sure about the various Protestant denominations)
Christian monks are indeed celibate, but monks are different from priests in many religions, and I think they are celibate in most.
But interestingly there are no monks in Judaism. I think the whole idea of monkhood is pretty counter to Jewish ideals like "Tikkun Olam" which means fixing the world. Which is clearly not something you can do by withdrawing completely from the world.
My argument is cultural, not genetic, so the unacknowledged children of priests would not be in a position to benefit from their fathers' learning and study.
> No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
The Chinese case is particularly interesting, because their book learning was extremely specific in use. You learned poetry as the vast majority of the curriculum, with the goal of achieving a cushy government position. On the other hand, China as a nation was terribly poor and underperforming for most of the past 300 years or so.
On the other hand, Chinese emigrants tend to do really well wherever they go, becoming the successful merchant class of wherever they end up. (Thomas Sowell's book "Race and Culture" goes into this a lot.)
That together, to me, suggests a strong cultural story, where the cultural importance of education gets put to different uses, one productive and one not.
If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
If you study hard and fail the test, you leave your country seeking higher status elsewhere, and being blocked from government you become a merchant, applying your intellect in higher productivity areas.
If you don't study, you just remain a peasant in the home country.
> If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
You may also have more children than the average peasant, increasing the frequency of any genes that helped with passing the test (related to intelligence, or even just ability to sit down and focus on studying!)
That's true. It doesn't do much for the overall wealth of China, which was my point. The Chinese testing system seemed to not do much for the Chinese living in China, but the culture of educational attainment seemed to do them a lot of good once they left and got real jobs.
I don't think scott has done cochran's argument much justice...part of it is overdominance at alleles governing certain cognitive traits, but it also allows for frequency changes of alleles with additive effect under selection, which would be less conspicuous than the diseased homozygotes.
A related mystery about the Ashkenazim that I have not seen discussed: How come there are so damn many of us?
The notion of real genetic differences is rooted in the founder effect, which itself comes from a tremendous population bottleneck 600-800 years ago (probably the Crusades) which reduced the Ashkenazi Jewish population to about 350 people, and thanks to endogamy (marriage only within the clan) only 4 maternal groups account for 40-70% of the current Ashkenazi population. As a result, Jews have an unusual prevalence of Tay Sachs and Crohn's and other rare genetic diseases, and maybe(!) as a result have higher general intelligence as well. And these difference are mostly what we focus on when we talk about Ashkenazi exceptionalism.
But population is a mystery to me too. There are now maybe 10 million Ashkenazi in the world, an increase in population of 30,000-fold since the bottleneck. Meanwhile, since 1000 AD global population has increased by about 20X. European population has increased by maybe 15X. These differences are... not small. You can absolutely get to 30,000X with regular generational doublings over hundreds of years, but no one else seemed to. Maybe some of the reason that everyone's Jewish ancestors were so poor was because it was impossible to accumulate wealth with so many kids.
Anyway, I'd love to hear if anyone has any data on household size of Jews in Middle Age Europe, or similar. The explanation here is probably cultural, but it is as deserving of a rigorous explanation as the other phenomena, and I can't find one.
This is a really interesting question. Like you, I think it had to do with medieval demographics. Before the demographic transition, people like Greg Clark have pointed out that the wealthiest tended to be the most fecund (which makes sense given appalling child mortality rates in medieval times). We also know that European Jews occupied a white collar niche, which meant outsized wealth for Jewish elites.
Cities tended to be demographic sinks for European Christians, who didn't have the kind of public health engineering skills of Roman aqueduct builders until maybe the 19th Century. But Ashkenazis could grow their populations in urban settings.
Ashkenazis were particularly adept at surviving in cities. They had more hygienic habits and more money on average than Christians, which allowed them to have more rooms per person which cut down on infections spreading at home.
Genetic databases like ancestry.com or 23andme.com have to correct for Ashkenazi similarity when they tell you that they have found your "third cousin" or whatnot. The fifth cousins in my database can have a higher relatedness than my (non-Jewish) wife's third cousins because of so much inbreeding in the population over the years.
Thank you; those are all interesting. My understanding of the genetics is limited. However, none of those papers suggests a bottleneck in the 13th-15th century. The first suggests a bottleneck 100 generations ago, which I guess means roughly around 0 AD? The second suggests a bottleneck may be the best explanation for prevalence of certain diseases, but is silent on timing, and specifically suggests admixture may be a superior explanation to a bottleneck in explaining linkage disequilibrium. The third rejects bottleneck as an explanation for Crohn's disease, stating that preferential selection is a more likely explanation.
Certainly Ashkenazi relatedness is a phenomenon. But inbreeding/lack of interbreeding may be a sufficient explanation, rather than a specific low-population bottleneck in 1300.
Ashkenazi family trees probably have a bottleneck during Roman times when a fairly small number of Hebrews arrived in Europe (perhaps in Italy) and, apparently, took European wives. There may have been another bottleneck as Italy's population dropped until Jewish survivors of the barbarian invasions appeared in the Rhineland at least by Charlemagne's time. Then Rhineland Jews were invited to Poland after the Mongol pillaging of Polish cities in the 1200. There they grew dramatically in numbers over the centuries.
My understanding is that the exact timing has maybe ±100 year error bars, but 1300 is not a bad place to start. And the finding holds up across many different studies.
FWIW, there are plenty of south Asian populations that appear to have similar founder effects, but I do not think they are as well studied yet.
David Brooks took a DNA test and was very excited to be told that Steven Pinker was his third cousin. But most Ashkenazis are "cumulative cousins" of other Ashkenazis to a high degree (i.e., via multiple genealogical pathways, they end up about as genetically related to most other Ashkenazis in sum as an extremely outbred individual like Tiger Woods is to his cousins via a single genealogical pathway).
Well they don't correct very well, I've got 3rd cousins out the wazoo on 23andMe to the point that I've started ignoring their "you've got a new genetic relative!" notifications (I'm an Ashkenazi)
I think the population bottleneck might be an illusion caused by the existence of a hereditary priesthood who in the absence of any lasting Jewish secular structures since the Khazars loat thwir state were de facto almost always the highest-status group. High-status fathers have more children, both due to generally being wealthier and also being able to attract extramarital partners more easily (I'm not sure but I guess that lower-status men are likelier to knowingly bring up the higher-status father's children as well). This means that Jews are fairly unique in Europe and the Middle East at least in having a genetically consistent group with the most chance of passing on their own genes at the expense of others. Over time this will reduce genetic variation in a population as in each generation an increasing proportion of children are gathered by high-status individuals or descendents of high-status individuals.
This is true in the sense that this is the first commandment which appears in the text we have received (at Gen 1:22 and 28). In composition order, I think the first commandment is "You shall love Jahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deut 6:5). Some (including but not only Jesus) have considered this also to be the first commandment in the sense of being primary.
Alternatively, if Deutronomy originally began at chapter 12, the first commandment would, less romantically, be "You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods, on the mountain heights, on the hills, and under every leafy tree."
Obviously if the ten commandments were a pre-existing code, the first commandment was "You shall have no other gods before/besides me."
In terms of importance, Hillel summarizes the most important commandment for Judaism as the golden rule: "What is hateful to you, don't do to others"
But the thing about "Be fruitful and multiply" is that since it's commanded long before the Jewish people actually exist, it's not only directed at Jews. It's directed at every living thing. You could think of metaphorically as God kick-starting evolution ;-)
One of the pitfalls of your argument (potentially) is that many of the statistics that lend themselves to the conclusion that "Jews are outliers in success" include non-Ashkenazi Jews. If your hypothesis about the 4 maternal groups is correct, this would not apply to non-Ashkenazi populations. This begs the question - are non-Ashkenazi Jews similarly outliers according to success metrics?
The statistics about Jews (such as IQ or Nobelists) are usually specifically about Ashkenazi. Sephardic Jews score significantly lower than Ashkenazi in IQ, for example. But of course the Ashkenazi tend to be Western European or American, which means that you aren't truly holding culture constant with that comparison. Even in Israel, where both groups coexist, environmental factors between the two groups remain. So the differences are evocative, and might rule out some environmental hypotheses, but it's still not a slam dunk for genetics.
do you have citations for the overall diff in sephardic IQ and the difference between ashk/seph/mizrahi jews in israel. (Israel is also not a perfect example because of historical and ongoing cultural differences, but...)
It should be noted that the true outlier statistics such as the number of Nobel prize winners provide a mixed bag of support for a genetics hypothesis. The US has had many more Ashkenazi Nobelists than Israel despite having a similar number of Ashkenazi Jews. So clearly (and unsurprisingly) factors beyond genetics are profound.
Scott has analyzed this before ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/ ). The simplest comparision (all American Jewish vs Israeli Nobelists by present population) is somewhat misleading; if we use a more apples-to-apples comparison (Nobelists from the last few decades, Ashkenazi Jews only), Americans still have more, but "only" by a factor of ~1.8.
A small correction: while the US and Israel has a similar total number of Jews, the Americans are almost all Ashkenazi, while only about half of the Israeli Jews are.
Israel was a fairly poor country until recently. One of my Israeli colleagues explained their tech boom was fueled by immigration of well-educated Soviet Jews in the 80s and 90s.
You should probably be careful with some of the assumptions built into this understanding. As a further thread demonstrates, the exact dates and other information is not clearly understood and can be off significantly. To say that the population dropped to 350 may be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 pretty easily due to lack of records and proper classification. 35,000 people spread out over Europe is still a tiny population, but that has monumental implications for the 30,000-fold increase idea you presented. That would still be an outlier in terms of population increase, but far more believable and easier to explain.
As for how their population could increase significantly, I imagine large families is part of it, but you should also consider that they would not have been permitted (or likely as interested) to join the military and die in the hundreds of European wars during the relevant timeframe.
I'm sure a non-zero number died in wars, especially if civilian populations were killed (which is often the case). That said, they would have been pretty unwelcome in both Christian and Muslim armies, especially during the Crusades and in any war otherwise related to religion - which for a long time was most of them, even if the religious reasons were only symbolic or a cover for geopolitical concerns.
I don't know if it's actually true, but I grew up being told Jews had a lower death rate during the plague (not the current one) because passover cleaning made their homes less interesting to rats. If the lower death rate there is true, when European populations were absolutely obliterated, you'd jack up their prevalence and probably leave them particularly set up to succeed afterward.
Agreed, we should add large error bars and recognize that the data evolves. But it's hard to reconcile a founder population of 35,000 people with the independent data that 40-70% of Ashkenazi have mitochondrial DNA from just four women (or close female relatives). That is not nuts with a 350-person bottleneck. Given multiple strands of evidence, this seems less likely to be a simple data analysis error, but I'm open to pushback on the specifics.
Sure, a lower estimate may be more accurate, but the date is also unknown, so we could be talking about some much earlier time period - like 500 AD instead of 800 or 1200, and that makes a big difference on population growth as well.
Surely a lot of the answer is contained in the fact that a lot of time passed during which Europe's population barely increased. But by simple virtue of the fact that lots of time passed, a lot of population dynamics happened, and merely citing the change in total European population might falsely suggest things were more static than they were. Certain family lines exploded in their number of progeny and others went extinct. All of us, Jew or Gentile, are descended from winners in that contest. The difference is that the Jewish family lines are identifiable and the Gentile ones merged into the European whole.
> This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history;
In my experience self-made wealthy people (sample size of 3-8 depending on how confident I want to be in my assessment of others wealth) all want to play up how they and their family were poor or had really hard circumstances of some sort to overcome.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but something to consider...
I think I undersold something in my comment. When I say "play up" it makes it sound like these people are deceiving us, but what I really meant is that they've convinced themselves.
Another anecdote to add to the pile: My grandfather's dog was killed by Russian soldiers during one of the various pogroms he lived through as a child in what's now Ukraine. The one photo I've seen if him as a boy, he looks gaunt to the point of malnourishment. When he came to the US he opened a shop selling window fixtures. So most definitely poor/working class, and yet all three of his first-generation children went to college, including one (my mother) to an Ivy League.
One more anecdote: the last members of my family to leave Germany, in 1938, were skilled professionals (medicine etc.).
This is consistent with Scott's picture in which economic pressure mostly causes emigration of the poor, while political pressure (as in late-1930s Germany) mostly causes emigration of the rich.
Surely it makes sense to consider several factors none of which explains all of a phenomenon and each of which adds a little. Some comments: 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times. So what? The middle-class habitus was still there, together with the drive to move (back) upwards. And yes, all (voluntary) immigrants are self-selecting, though not necessarily quite in the same way. 2. Again, this is part of it. Obviously "such-and-such % of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, compared to % of the world population" is fallacious - what counts is the percentage of (not very poor) inhabitants of cities in wealthy countries. There's still a gap, but the ratio is what, the square root of what it would be otherwise? 3. Oh yes. See: Nobel Prize winners. (If anything, people of mixed ancestry and descendants of converts to Christianity are probably overrepresented in that list - vastly so up to the mid-20th century, once you consider that the rate of intermarriage anywhere pre-WWI was essentially nil, and conversion was always a trickle, relatively speaking.) 4 is a strong argument against racial explanations. It's also something that clarifies that, when we are talking about cultural explanations, we are not looking at anything intrinsic to the term "Jewish", or to Judaism (even if it may have had an effect in a refracted sort of way, or even by virtue of being left behind) but rather at the set of values and practices that immigrants from a particular class in particular parts of Europe had in 1880-1910. (In other words, part of what people still sometimes refer to as "Jewish", sometimes to the annoyance of some observant Jews; cultural images die hard.) None of this makes the matter less interesting - just less surprising. It also makes the phenomenon *more* relevant to discussions of other ethnic groups in the US and elsewhere; a unique or inexplicable phenomenon would be less relevant.
“ 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times.”
Emigrating via steerage class was not expensive, and was subsidized by the incredibly high fares paid by passengers in 1st class.
Well, it would still be rather expensive for the poorest of the poor! Even for the merely poor, it would require the ability to save and plan well, which if anything is a more relevant characteristic than simply having money.
Oh, but it does. Voluntary immigration always imposes a filter, both in terms of wanting to go to the place you are going to and in the sense that there were always (even) poorer people who didn't make the trip. It's one factor among many.
My understanding of this issue is that Jews performed a "rural service minority" (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-economic-ecology-of-jews-as-a-rural-service-minority.html) role in Europe that endowed them with commercial skills and values that ended up serving them very well in modernity relative to their Christian peasant counterparts. If your ancestors were a series of moneylenders and merchants and middlemen it makes a lot of sense to me that you'd be more likely to be drawn towards intellectual pursuits and high paying professional jobs compared to someone whose recent ancestors were in more traditional feudal roles.
My Ashkenazi ancestors were both rich and poor. One set (grandmother's family) were relatively well-off Russians from Minsk. They left in the late 1880s, presumably motivated by the recent pogroms, and my great-grandfather who arrived as a teenager was valedictorian at his American high school and went on to become a lawyer. They were fine. I have assumed that they had sufficient old country wealth to enable this good start in the new one.
The other set were poor Galicianers; that great-grandfather was the youngest of six and wandered around as a performer/beggar/probably thief until he married and left for the US for better prospects.
Also, avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history. Not just for those coming to the US, but crossing from Russia to Austria-Hungary or vice versa, hiding out with relatives, etc. I don't think the Russian army in 1860 was a pleasant place to be Jewish (or a pleasant place, period).
"avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history." Me too. A Jewish Great Grandfather of mine moved to America to not be drafted into the Czar's army. My parents had their first child (me) earlier than they otherwise would have to help my dad avoid the Vietnam War draft.
My Jewish great-grandfather came to America to avoid fighting for Austria-Hungary in WWI.
I was amused to read that Jewish immigrants claimed to be tailors; my great-grandfather was a genuine tailor. His pretext for leaving Hungary just before the war was that he was going to buy cloth in Hamburg.
So what you are saying is that there is some strong anecdotal evidence for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis often espoused by antisemites?
Hearing you it seems absolutely OK and common and nothing to be the least ashamed of that Jews are loyal first to their family and kin and sees themselves as having little or no duties to the country they reside in, and in this particular case the duty is the highest one can have toward his country (I write his here because women have never been expected to fight in conscripted armies before quite recently) - it is also the most dangerous, duty one can have towards the county who has granted one citizenship.
But then we have the particular fact that US jews often, at least compared to any other group of immigrants as far as I understand things, go to Israel to do their years of conscription in the Israeli army.
I am a gentile with some jewish friends, one which I would call a close friend, and have always assumed jews are as everybody else with a european heritage but belonging to a different religion and culture with different holidays and a heavy focus on studying and perhaps being of a higher intelligence than most other whites (I am not really that well read on this whole intelligence thing) but that differences between jew and gentile are not much else.
But hearing it from you, who present yourself as jewish, jews seem to have or at least had, in many historical times and places, at least very little loyalty towards the country which they had citizenship in. When jews were not allowed citizenship I fully understand it but since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citiizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia (I am not that well read on jewish history).
This was interesting to hear. Have you guys got any other anecdotes you might want to share that points to support for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis? I am always interested in finding out the truth however labeled it my be.
PS: I mean no harm and Jews are obviously not in any position of being killed in pogroms today with Israel being one of the five states that possesses a solid nuclear triad that can inflict millions of casualties on any country that tries to exterminate jews.
In my ancestors' cases, there was a world of difference between the countries of the Old World and the USA. My great-grandfather is a (US) WW1 veteran, wounded in France, and my grandfather a US WW2 veteran, combat engineers. As far as I know, all of my relatives today in the US consider themselves citizens of our country first. My impression is that the decision to immigrate was usually accompanied by a decision to become American, and that Jews responded to the generally-welcoming environment of the New World with both gratitude and loyalty. Even prior to the peak immigration years, Twain's essay on Jews cites War Department statistics that suggest Jews served proportionally in the US Civil War.
You write: "since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia"
Not so much. Western Europe, this is sort of true; but Poland, Russia, and the rest of the East largely not. Even in the west, there were nasty exceptions to the equality laws, 'full citizenship' under the law often did not mean societal acceptance, and societal acceptance, even when granted, could be withdrawn. For examples, see the Edgardo Mortara case, the German 'Hep Hep' riots, or the French Dreyfuss affair, all of which took place post-emancipation in the 19th century. A poor, but not totally inaccurate analogy, is to Irish immigrants in the US 1840s-50s: certainly able to participate in society, and equal de jure under the law, but not seen as equal citizens by (many/most of) their peers.
Plus, the 19th century concept of nationality was rather more complicated than the 20th. Did a Czech or Serb in Austria-Hungary owe his loyalty to the Empire of which he was a 'full citizen', or to the project of independence for his co-linguists? In these fights the Jews were excluded on all sides, regardless of emancipation. The Serb saw the Jew as an agent of the Empire, who could never be fully Serb; the Empire saw a citizen whose loyalty was suspect and might easily be compromised. One common Jewish response was to adopt a position of personal political neutrality, an example of which is contained in the Twain essay, where his Jewish correspondent declares, proudly, that the Jews are apolitical: not out of national disloyalty, but because neither side would have them.
My impression is that the time and place mattered greatly. German Jews were often quite patriotic; German-Jewish WW1 veterans were common Holocaust victims. If you are interested in the subject, one place to start might be "The Pity of It All", by Amos Elon, which covers the societal place of German Jews from about 1750-1933.
Something I would like a demographer or historian much smarter than myself to investigate is a "creaming the top theory" to Jewish exceptionalism. Specifically that in addition to cultural norms like specializing in certain occupations and having high literacy and smart rabbis getting the girls and having more kids, there is also a negative selection pressure on the less successful Jews to remain Jewish over centuries of persecution, programs, holocaust etc. Maybe if you just want a normal, comfortable life you decide to convert and become a follower of orthodox Jesus in the 9th century or become Muslim in the 11th century and stop paying the dhimmi tax whereas only the truly exceptional people could afford to continue on their minority traditions. Or more negatively you get murdered or forced to convert during one of the many persecutions over the millennia and can't continue your line while the most successful among you managed to survive and continue your ancestors traditions.
What immediately makes me question this hypothesis though is the plight of the gypsies/Romani. They are similarly persecuted for a similar duration of history but on every social economic status dimension, they are near the bottom of European populations. Then again the Parsis in the indian subcontinent do mirror the Jews in achievement so that's another foil.
Maybe today's gypsies are really, really good at being gypsies and whatever that entails doesn't tend to produce high economic status while Jews got really, really good at being Jews and that does entail things that produce high economic status. Different selective pressures select for different things.
True or if both had persecutions. If I'm hearing you right, the skills/strategies that enabled gypsies to escape persecution and avoid being wiped out were equally successful at at it's primary goal but are maladapted to success in a 21st century society. Whereas whatever it is that allowed Jews to continue on, just happened to be suitable for high economic status professions today. Both strategies were equally successful at preservation albeit were wildly different.
The Roma are travelers, the Jews are a middleman minority. Middlemen minorities transition cleanly into finance, which currently basically runs our entire economy since we decided usury wasn't a sin any more. Travelers are really good at doing lots of petty crimes (since they move to another city before you can catch them for stealing stuff from you), which is increasingly less effective as the law enforcement apparatus becomes increasingly sophisticated.
I think that both gypsies and Jews tend(ed) to choose jobs that separated themselves from others, like musician, doctor, banker, beggar, salesman/shop owner, thief, etc. This is in contrast to jobs where you have to be embedded in a community on equal footing, need to hire people from outside, etc, like a farmer, factory worker, etc.
A difference seems to be that Jews managed to achieve a higher class of these kind of jobs, despite being mistrusted.
A hint as to why this was possible might be found in Hitler's lamentation that every Jew had a gentile speaking up for them. Perhaps Jews were distrusted collectively, but had cultural traits that made gentiles trust them individually sufficiently for them to be accepted as a doctor, banker, etc.
I get a sense that in places where they dislike gypsies a lot, few of those gypsies have non-gypsies who would speak out for them.
I haven't read an enormous amount of Jews, but I linked to my post where I host Thomas Sowell's essay "Are Jews Generic?" on middle-man minorities. Amy Chua's "World on Fire" is about a similar topic, though she uses the term "market-dominant minorities" and focuses on poorer countries. I mentioned Yuri Slezkine's "The Jewish Century" which labels both Jews & Gypsies as "Mercurians" who again have a specialized economic role with respect to a larger host population. He's Russian-Jewish and over the course of the book the focus on Russia increases, though he also notes how many (including his own relatives) moved to Israel during the later years of the USSR and contrasts them with the Jews who moved to America.
A lot of the comments on this page trying to compare the Romani and Jewish people show how little people know about the different types of Romani or the differences in how they were or are treated in different countries. These differences go all the way back to different waves of Romani leaving India centuries ago. In some areas they were held as slaves with proper 'for sale' signs until the 1850s and now these groups are unsurprisingly the poorest and most visible of Romani people in Europe. In fact, people often think that if a Romani person don't look or act like the poorest of the poor Romanian Romani, then they aren't 'real.' In other areas of Europe, such as Hungary, they were forced to give up their native Sanskrit-based language, take surnames and frankly this did help them get ahead Romani in other countries. This included having access to military service and education.
The thing about being Romani or part-Romani is that once one becomes successful or educated, non-Romani or even members of their own community might say you're not 'a real Gypsy.' They become 'White' with 'South Asian and West Asian DNA.' This feeds into the idea that there are no educated Romani people or "Good Gypsies", when 'Romani' is often not even an option on say, university entrance forms or HR forms. Oddly, you'll see Romani-Americans or Romani-British (not Irish Travellers) putting "White and Asian" on these forms.
As far as persecution goes, it depends on country. The European Roma Rights Centre covers segregated schooling, forced sterilisation, policing problems and lead poisoning issues (see all the crime / IQ / health issues that is hotly debated now) still happening today.
In terms of WWII, aside from the expected genocide, forced labour and medical experimentation (https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/forgotten-victims), there was different issues with Romani citizens of Germany losing their citizenship and property and not being able to get anything back, unlike (some) Jews. Of course, people made the excuse that Romani people don't ever own possessions and are 'travellers' so they couldn't possibly have been middle class people who had citizenship, businesses and property seized. See all the comments below saying that Romani people are 'travellers' despite the vast majority of Europe's largest minority being settled. A very good overview into the history and current situation of the Romani is I Met Lucky People by Yaron Matras.
Fitting with the topic of this post, many well educated Romani activists do also have mixed parentage and there's a few paragraphs on this in I Met Lucky People. There's quite a few Jewish-Romani activists, which is not an unusual combination in cities such as Budapest. I'm certainly not arguing that the Romani people overall are doing well or are anywhere as successful as the Jewish people or even a state's ethnic majority, but rather that when Romani people become middle-class or successful, they tend to become invisible and often actively hide their heritage to avoid discrimination. They certainly aren't good enough to be on My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/is-my-big-fat-american-gypsy-wedding-unfair-to-the-romani-community.html) Many actually explain their darker skin or dark eyes by saying they have Jewish heritage!
"My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding" is quite obviously confectionary TV that has little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although they do draw the motives from that millieu.
Oksana Marafioti, the gypsy college graduate and classically trained pianist complaining about TLC's TV show in the Slate piece, has herself little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although she is drawn from that millieu. I mean, will someone next start complaining that the reality-TV show "The Real Housewives of Wherever" does not *really* depict the reality of the real real-housewives-of-wherever?
TLC purveys the kind of confectionary entertainment that its viewers are looking for, and Slate purveys the kind of confectionary worldview that its readers are looking for. Whoever wishes to gain insight into the lives and customs of most gypsies, might want to look for it in other places than reality-TV entertainment and Slate.
Back to the original topic - the parallels between the Jewish and Romani minorities. The fate of Romani in WWII was about as horrendous as that of Jews, absolutely. But the societal outcomes of the two groups were worlds apart, both before and after WWII. Romani were frequently talented at music. Jews were talented at pretty much everything. Both were discriminated against by significant portions of the ethnic majority. And their outcomes - in the end - lined up quite well with their differences in talent.
P.S. About Romani traded as slaves "in some areas" until the 1850s, I take it you're referring to the Ottoman Empire? (the rest of this article is mostly focused on Europe)
I don't know much about jews and jewish history but the discrimination that Roma people have fared surely has a basis in that Roma people, the different kinds that exist of them, are quite the opposite of jews, being still a largely parasitic class having no second thoughts about stealing from or hustling a gadjo, as is their name for everybody that is non-romani.
As you say there is a frequent problem in that Roma people who want to leave the Roma lifestyle with it's paralell society with clans, a paralell legal system, an aversion to schooling or letting the gadjo get their grips into their children (because the children might possible leavve the Roma lifestile) and forced marriages complete with targeted criminal exploitation of the majority population (Roma people for instance specialize in stealing from elderly people (80+ years), most often women living alone, in all the Scandinavian countries because they feel they have no moral duties towards non-roma and the punishments are lenient in these countries) is no longer regarded as part of the Roma community which makes leaving the community and even semi-assimilating very hard.
I think it's quite unappropriate and possible anti-semitic comparing the situation of Roma people who obviously have no moral regard for the outgroup and who have no intention of even semi-assimilation and who's only contribution to the society they live in is the need for the employment of a lot of police officers, welfare care-takers and other such people, with the situation of jews who have frequently been among some of the most productively contributing citizens and who has semi-assimilated from being all ultra-orthodox before the 20th century, to being a well-liked minority in every western country.
Perhaps people are only responding rationally in their discrimination towards roma people - the easiest way of avoiding problems with a problematic group is avoiding any dealings with them and having no contact at all with them, ie avoiding them at a cost that is proportional to the problems they create. That is not to say there are some quite exceptional roma people, but bringing the situation of Roma people into the conversation when Jews as a group are talked about seems incredibly unfair to jews.
I've been inclined towards this sort of theory myself after reading the following about Armenians in the 19th century Ottoman Empire:
"Historian A. Tchamkerten writes 'Armenian achievements in the Empire was not only in trade, however. They were involved in almost all economic sectors and held the highest levels of responsibility. In the 19th century, various Armenian families became the Sultan's goldsmiths, Sultan's architects and took over the currency reserves and the reserves of gold and silver, including customs duty. Sixteen of the eighteen most important bankers in the Ottoman Empire were Armenian.'"
Amy Chua is one of the pop social science authors I enjoy the most. Its always made a lot of sense to me why Jews in Europe, Armenians in the ottoman empire, and Chinese in Malaya were all genocides against once more populist governments took over. Bring a market dominant sounds great in theory but when push comes to shove your safety is totally at the whim of the lords who hold the power of the gun. When regime change happens and people view you as a parasite to be cleansed, you are screwed.
From the abstract of this study https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104 "Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait." My theory: the survivors of centuries of pogroms may have survived partially because of their higher intelligence. Simultaneously, Jewish clannishness and cultural/religious separation from their Christian neighbors, combined with a much higher rate of consanguinity, may have contributed to keeping the markers associated with intelligence prominent. And, while it may be true today that higher intelligence correlates with 'important educational, occupational and health outcomes' that may not have been true in centuries past when socio-economic tiers were much more fixed. So, the low status of the immigrant forebears of today's 'successful Jews' doesn't preclude that many may have been highly intelligent. And in America, where one could more easily rise in socio-economic status based on performance, it would make sense that the grandson of a Jewish egg-candler from Galicia could be a university professor or an investment banker in the US today.
If it were true that pogroms a major intelligence filter, why do we not see waves of geniuses after other ones? Why is there not a new generation of brilliance from the Congo, or Zimbabwe?
Not a demographer so just speculating. Maybe it only triggers if you have such a large bottlebeck like 99% wiped out that the IQ of the remaining population would be enough to establish a founder effect of sorts. If the 1% remaining were average compared to say the rest of gentile europe, than it would not matter. But if the 1% remaining were the super geniuses within the total population, that founder effect could get real. I believe an earlier poster above mentioned that indeed there may have been such an extreme bottleneck for ashkenazis during the time of the crusades. Now as to why a given 1% remains a smart fraction or an average fraction or a dumb fraction, could be luck or chance, I have no clue.
Hey, just tossing out an idea. But the difference in this case would be centuries of pogroms. Also, it seems as though it may have been easier to migrate across borders in medieval Europe than in contemporary Africa? The smarter and nimbler got away? But I don't know if that's true.
"People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes."
No, I think people act like people who suggest genetic engineering are only ever about a half-second away from suggesting eugenics. I can't imagine what historical events might have instilled that fear in them.
we know that Scott is aware of this from his previous writing - that said he also knows that he has quite special kind of readership who are willing to consider unorthodox ideas. I don't think that eugenics go very well with utilitarianism either.
Why not? I mean, obviously utilitarianism doesn't think much of *ineffective* eugenics, but I could see an argument that aborting all psychopaths would be a net gain for society.
Genetic engineering/eugenics goes very well with utilitarianism. Changing the composition of the future population in a way that increases the production of utility could be a big win, e.g. happier, more conscientious, more intelligent, less psychopathic people, and fewer net-sufferers that need support.
If there is one moral philosophic system that goes well with eugenics it is utilitarianism. No other competing school of thought within moral philosophy gives such clear support for eugenics. No school of thought is even close in how massive the arguments, viewed from the point of szaid swchool, is with eugenics.
The only other moral philosophic school of thought that might give a degree of support for eugenics that might even be somewhat near as big as the support for eugenics is from a utilitarian standpoint is virtue ethics since we know that the affinity one individual has for most virtues and vices are almost certainly to quite a large extent affected by an individual's genotype.
Well, the obvious response to that is: what's wrong with eugenics? Note that this is a very different questing from 'what's wrong with the specific cruel and coercive methods that were used by the Progressives and the Nazis to pursue eugenic goals in the early-to-mid 20th Century?'. There is something evil about forcibly sterilising people, but there is nothing *in principle* wrong with non-coercive policies to raise the levels of desirable cognitive traits among the population, including IQ (or at least considering putting an end to policies that are having an actively dysgenic effect) - we just seem to have got ourselves into a bad equilibrium where lots of people immediately wrinkle their nose and think 'smells like Hitler' without actually giving fair consideration to whether any specific eugenic proposal would pass a cost/benefit analysis. I don't think Scott would disagree.
Like, sure a reproductively-coercive dystopia would be worth avoiding, but, since Scott has already linked to Anatoly Karlin, I don't think it would be out of place to say that the Age of Malthusian Industrialism* would *also* be worth avoiding: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/where-do-babies-come-from/
For example, things that could conceivably have a eugenic effect on intelligence, or at least have a less-dysgenic effect, but that cannot reasonably be considered tyrannical, might include: tax breaks for children born to parents above a certain IQ threshold, government funded research into the genetic correlates of IQ followed by subsidised embryo screening, a ban on sperm banks accepting samples from low IQ men - or indeed, payment for samples scaled to IQ, or ... Project Prevention, a charity which pays drug addicts to get long-term birth control, on a purely voluntary basis (drug addiction here presumably being a good proxy for high impulsiveness and a moderate proxy for low intelligence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention . I vaguely remember Scott having written positively about them, at least in a 'I can't understand why so many people find this idea so horrifying' sort of way, but I think that might have been at his now-deleted old LiveJournal. I don't think the charity is *deliberately* intended as a eugenic project, but it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't have some eugenic effect.
At the risk of getting slightly more edgy, I could see offering violent criminals a reduced sentence in exchange for getting long-term contraception when they get out of jail, again on a purely voluntary basis, as being a policy that might be worth considering - at least we would be trading the alleged horror of monkeying with the gene pool against the undeniably real horror of violent crime - though there are possibly enough people whose brains instinctively recoil from the idea that propensity to violence could even *be* heritable that it would be a political non-starter.
*A deleted earlier version of this comment had this down as 'Age of Industrial Malthusianism', and since Karlin is in this thread, I'd better get the title of his essay series the right way round :-)
Of course, let's economically discriminate against people with low IQ, as if they don't have enough problems already. No way that doesn't become coercive or cruel, not to mention racist, since based on prior experience in this forum, many of the commenters here have already internalized "genetically predisposed to low IQ = Black."
Hey, I'm not even claiming that we *should* do any of these things, necessarily - just that none of them are anywhere near the 'forced sterilisation or extermination of undesirables' tier horror that people seem to associate with the e-word, so I don't really get why all the performative pearl-clutching. There is a really important difference between 'trying to achieve an aim by using the tax structure to subtly nudge people in a particular direction', and 'trying to achieve an aim by brutal coercion' - a distinction which most people are perfectly capable of making in most other contexts. But here, there seems to be a default assumption that *anything at all* that we could do to nudge the population in the direction of higher genetic potential for intelligence must inevitably lead us down the slippery slope to horrors. That's an assumption that I think people ought to have to defend, rather than simply assert.
And to the particular point of 'economically discrimiating against people with low IQ' - the suggestion was one that economically discriminates *in favour of the creation of more people with higher IQ'. That is, it would only apply to decisions on whether or not to have children. It's not as if I'd suggested charging high-IQ people lower taxes generally.
Though I'm curious - do you think it would be ethically acceptable to discontinue an existing tax structure if it was found to have dysgenic effects, on that basis? (like, for example, if it turned out that your child benefits programme was causing low-IQ people to have more children than high-IQ people than would otherwise be the case?)
Let me rephrase your question, would it be ethically acceptable to go to someone and say "sorry, I know you love your kids, but it turns out some social scientist proved your kids aren't going to meet our arbitrarily set IQ metrics, so we would rather you struggle to feed them than risk any more people like you becoming parents." Is that the question?
I think the question is "Should we discourage people from having more children than they can afford?" considering that we have safe, effective, cheap, long-lasting birth control options.
Well, you've phrased it in a maximally-hostile way, and you've presupposed that the children are already born and already receiving government benefits that are going to be withdrawn, but here's the crucial thing: it's not that someone who advocates such a set-up *wants people to suffer*. It's that they *accept that you get what you subsidise*, and if you subsidise the birth of low-intelligence children relative to high-intelligence children, we'll get more low-intelligence children in the next generation ... meaning a less-productive populace, that is less capable of producing the surplus wealth that allows us to subsidise children in the first place.
So let me turn it around a bit. How about: "Sorry, I know you will love your future kids if you have them, but we have strong evidence to suggest that they will likely be a net drain on societal resources. We're not going to *punish* you if you decide to go ahead and have children, we're just not going to *pay* you to do so, so you should take that into account in your fertility decisions".
That strikes me a manifestly, obviously nowhere near the ballpark level of evil that we associate with the Progressive/Nazi Era coercive eugenics, so if you think that it is comparably horrifying, I really will need to ask you to explain why - or at least, explain why you think that ceasing a dysgenic social policy must inevitably lead to Progressive/Nazi-tier cruelty.
Because the implication of your position seems to be that we are *morally obliged* to continue to actively practise dysgenics if we discovere that that's what we've been doing.
Well I think I would prefer to live in a kinder society than yours, one that gears its policies towards what will curb suffering and enable the happiness of individuals and communities without regard to what instrumental use they might be to society. A little utopian perhaps, but that's my personal guiding star, that society should be dialing down selection pressures, not dialing them up. And ultimately, I reject your entire notion that low IQ people are somehow a detriment to humanity that should be weeded out. There is an understandable bias in the rationalist community towards intelligence, and I recognize that most of the wonders of modernity are the result of high-achieving intelligent people, but to use this as an excuse to start a pogrom (even a very polite one) against people who (let's face it) your biggest problem is that you feel like you can't relate to, is on a personal level sociopathic, and on a broader level, a form of imperialism.
Let me hit you with a little parable cobbled together from the bible and various rationalist blogs: suppose the AI folks are right and it is the final fate of each of us to be judged by a computer-mind that is so far advanced that by its standards you are roughly on the same mental level as a dachshund. Do you want it making decisions about whether or not its policies might encourage you to reproduce based on how smart it finds you? Judge not lest ye be judged.
Abortions are also a half-second away from eugenics, if that (as aborting people with Down syndrome and others disabilities seems very common now). Yet that doesn't have the same stigma...
There has been a pretty interesting and profound conversation around it though. About whether people with Downs constitute a unique culture and whether losing that culture will decrease human flourishing in the long-term. I think a lot of people understand though that ultimately its the choice of the parents, and I include myself in that. If there were public policy encouraging people to abort children with down's syndrome I think the conversation would be a lot thornier.
Similarly, if particular parents want to gene-edit their kids to be smarter, I guess I understand, as a matter of personal choice. Although I think none of us can predict what the long-term unintended consequences of making that into a general trend might be.
It seems rather weird that all this stuff is tolerated as long as you present individual benefits and collective downsides, but not vice versa.
Imagine that you can discuss the benefits/costs of more schooling, but you can't discuss how a better educated populace might have benefits for society as a whole, but can only discuss how the specific individual and their parents benefit.
"Although I think none of us can predict what the long-term unintended consequences of making that into a general trend might be."
If you are not allowed to discuss that freely, then it becomes very hard to predict it, indeed.
I think you're allowed to discuss it, just be honest. My original criticism of Scott's post wasn't that genetic engineering was inherently evil, it was that I thought he was tip-toeing around the obvious concerns and objections in favor of fantastical ones. And judging by the comments, it seems I was right that plenty of people interpret his call for potential genetic improvement of IQ as a general call for social engineering towards improved IQ. So if we are gonna go there, let's go there without euphemisms or snark.
Also, in this particular community, I feel like the upsides of a society-wide improvement of IQ are rather taken for granted while the downsides (for individuals and communities) go unexplored and uncommented on. I admit its possible in the broader ecosystem it may be the other way around, but definitely not in Codexland.
I think that a lot of people are frustrated by the extent to which it has become impossible to figure out what the possibilities are in the first place or to test out improvement techniques. Furthermore, if you criticize this, you often get called a Nazi by those in power. Hence the snark and euphemisms. The first out of frustration, the second out of fear.
I personally don't take the upsides for granted, but I see most objections as fact-free expressions of disgust by people who refuse to allow the truth to be discovered. And I see widespread discriminatory beliefs against the less educated and less intelligent among the well-educated who express this disgust, which makes me very suspicious that they are unconsciously motivated by a desire to keep these people in their place and preserve their own place on top.
There is often a nasty undercurrent to charity anyway, where there is a demand of gratitude and a desire to control the lives of those getting charity, so they 'live right.' These benefits to the benefactor can disappear if the person is taught to fish...
It seems very plausible to me that the net effect of society-wide improvement of IQ is highly positive, but we can only truly determine that if we figure out the scientific and political possibilities. In the absence of the ability to do so, it seems unfair to accuse those who advocate for the potential upsides of ignoring the downsides. That is fair criticism if they were to advocate to just release certain methods into society, but not if they argue for research and discussion, based on potential upsides.
It seems likely to me that it is far easier to fix low IQ than to achieve very high IQ. The greatest hindrance to equal outcomes is unequal ability, so being able to equalize ability to some extent may be one of the best ways to achieve more equal opportunity. Our modern society also seems full of pitfalls and predators that low IQ people suffer from way more often (predatory lenders and bad financial behavior in general, fake medicine, self-help bureaucracy where you need to understand forms, etc). It may be true that this is so deleterious that getting lots of people to a level where they can cope with society much better is a huge benefit, even if they are still at the bottom of relative ability.
From what I've seen so far, the main downsides from higher IQ seems to be that very smart people feel isolated, but again, we don't even know whether it is technically realistic to produce extremely smart people (at all or without unacceptable downsides that make people not even want to pursue it for their kids). Even if it is, we may be able to legislate access. But again, this is all just speculation without more scientific knowledge.
Well that's a pretty decent argument. And I admit, if we were going to try this, I prefer some sort of technical intervention that doesn't require discrimination to succeed. Ironically, it isn't impossible to imagine that in twenty or thirty years I'll be arguing that being able to have your kid's IQ tweaked in the womb is a human right that should be covered by insurance, and not something reserved for rich people. We'll see.
As a general thing, rationalists seem to be much more interested in increasing high intelligence rather than in ameliorating low intelligence, even though there's also a common belief that an IQ below 85(?) tends to lead to much worse lives.
I grant that a great increase in intelligence, even for a small number of people, could have a very large positive impact, but raising low intelligence to the current average would presumably be a lot easier, and I think that should be put into calculations of what to work on.
If you sort the population by IQ and put the highest IQ in on place when the boys and girls are at a fertile age you have a eugenic system. It is also called university.
True in a sense, but only if the people who meet there actually go on to have children at above replacement rate (or at least at a rate higher than everyone else). It's conceivable that one could end up with a cognitive stratification effect where, thanks to decreased fertility in the high echelons, the smart fraction keeps getting smaller, but at the same time, thanks to ever more powerful assortative mating, the dwindling smart fraction also keeps getting *smarter*, so that fewer of them are needed to keep civilisation running, eventually leading to a scenario where a tiny band of supergeniuses maintains the infrastructure that supports a vast underclass of resentful peasants. That sounds like an unstable equilibrium that would be worth avoiding.
This is the most obnoxious comparison in the world. Imagine if every time someone suggested donating money to the poor (let alone tax reform) someone brought up all the people killed by communist regimes and that was considered a slam dunk argument.
Well, I don't know where you live, but I live in the USA, every time we have a conversation about government assistance or tax reform, we absolutely have people wailing about the spectre of communism. Although you are right that I find it annoying.
I don't think Scott is advocating for eugenics, I'm just pointing out that in the past a lot of the people who would be very psyched about improving the average or median IQ in society would have suggested eugenics as a faster, more efficient solution than any kind of genetic engineering. And it didn't take very long after my comment for someone to be like "actually what's wrong with eugenics?" So obviously people like that still exist in one form or another. So I was being sincere that I think that explains the squeamishness around discussing genetic interventions into IQ more than fear of fly-people or whatever. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it really is just fear of mutants.
As far as the culture discussions go: Jewish culture has always placed a tremendous value on literacy and learning, including study (even memorization for quick recall) of enormous volumes of arcana and logical deduction from it. This obligation was not just for the rich, but applied (at least theoretically) to everyone. Literacy (and halakhic critical thinking skills) may have been relatively little help to a 17th century farmer, but it was a conceivably a major boon once commerce began to depend on written records, debt-bound transactions, insurance, or technological advances. If someone wants to dig into a cultural explanation, this seems an obvious place to start.
As far as timing goes, Jewish success starting in the early 19th century is likely related to Napoleon's tide washing over Europe. Jews were released from the ghettoes, in many places for the first time in centuries, and there was an increasing push to allow them to participate in broader civic society. The observation that there was little exceptional contribution to European learning prior to 1800 can be easily (though not necessarily correctly) explained by the segregation of Jews from most of Europe prior to then, and the major change wrought by the Napoleonic wars in most of the continent. Notably, Napoleon had relatively little impact on Russia, where the Jews in the 19th century achieved much less.
More than persecution by gentiles, Orthodox Judaism was a real drag on creative achievement by Jews. Jews had long looked down on Christians in Europe as poor and uncivilized, but by the 18th Century they started to notice that Christians were overtaking them in many areas.
Moses Mendelssohn invented the Jewish Enlightenment in the later half of the 18th Century about three generations after the Enlightenment began. But as the Orthodox might predict, his grandson Felix, the great composer, was baptized a Christian.
Regarding the last few paragraphs, you are assuming that we can scale up whatever factors, be they cultural or biological, that produced Jewish achievement since the Haskalah and Jewish emancipation to the rest of Western society and the world. But what if that's not possible, because those factors are products of the Jews' idiosyncratic history (e.g. being a minority that is both prosecuted and allowed various privileges like money-lending when the Powers that be needed it)? It is sort of like suggestions that the US should copy Scandinavian or continental welfare models, or East Asian development models — good perhaps look for ideas, but is unwise to try to replicate wholesale, both because can't replicate the historical condition that creates those models, and you maybe importing some negative consequences that you might not know of.
That Jewish immigrants to the US were lower quality than the European Jews is a somewhat surprising TIL to me (though of the 3% of my ancestry that is Jewish, a large part of them left Odessa for the US after the Revolution, which is an inversion of the usual pattern, but perhaps that is not that surprising considering they seem to have been well to do bourgeoisie who enjoyed posing for photos during the Imperial era). Would suggest that the Holocaust was even more destructive in human capital terms than you'd expect just be treating Ashkenazi Jews as a globally undifferentiated group (especially considering that the Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are, in turn, duller than the American ones).
PS. While I self-identify as a Russian nationalist, it's hard to see how I am far-right except perhaps if one pigeonholes all biorealists (a significant share of this blog's readership) as far-rightists. The original graph is from Burkina Faso, who is a pro-Soviet blogger, LOL.
Yeah an anomaly to me as well since immigrants from any origin in general tend to self select for more self-efficacy and drive, assuming it was motivated by economics and it wasn't like a penal colony where they were forced to migrate.
Episcopalianism isn't an ethnic religion in quite the same way. In the past, an upwardly mobile man would move to NY and convert from whatever his Protestant sect was to Episcopalianism.
The protagonist of Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" was written to be a representative of that type. And if you haven't heard of American Protestants moving between denominations (something my own parents did multiple times) I don't know what to tell you.
You and your data, man! Read Czeslaw Milosz, Bukovsky, or Navrozov pere or fils. There is no data in any of them, but there is more under heaven and earth than data.
I am increasingly skeptical of this Bayesian cult. Talk about microscopes and lampposts. The microscope certainly shows you what's in front of it, but it shows you nothing else at all. What an efficient device for applying blinders.
I am happy to see that you have grown out of sophomoric obsession with "data" to the exclusion of knowledge (or rather *purported* knowledge, as the replication crisis demonstrates amply) in other forms.
I haven't grown out of it. If anything I have far less patience for wasting time on MM/CY now. I was just addressing someone who said "I literally never heard of this", so there was an extremely low bar.
To be fair, I don't think much of Newbug's writing either. He's basically regurgitating some of his old ideas with less finesse and way more italics. That does not invalidate the concerns expressed in that comment, however. In the first place, not all things have been the subject of a "study", and of those that have, there is the question of how reliable the "studies" are compared to knowledge not dressed up in an academic outfit. You are hardly unaware of the replication crisis, p-hacking, ideological bias and so on. So you still have to engage in what you then called "speculation" to determine which "studies" are trustworthy. This may not necessarily leave you back at square one, but it is not a trivial proposition to prove that it doesn't.
J.P. Morgan was a devout Episcopalian deacon on Sundays so a lot of ambitious young Protestant migrants to New York switched from Congregationalism or Presbyterianism or whatever to Episcopalianism in hopes of catching the great man's eye during a church event.
A big part of the Scottish Enlightenment was that Edinburgh was not Church of England. If you wanted to go to a good university, and you were not Church of England, Edinburgh was it. As the English and Irish colleges and universities got less C of E, Edinburgh was no longer the only option, so the Scottish Enlightenment slowed. Ninjaed already?
Which thing would I be talking out my ass about? That the only citation is a novel? Or maybe you think I’m talking out my ass about what religious movements I’ve heard of?
You really want a bunch of people with axes to grind about the Protestant Reformation as it was imposed on them to start up about Anglicanism? Well ooookay then...
The Episcopal Church as it is today is the straggling descendant of what started off as a branch of the Church of England. The Church of England, in turn, was By Law Established as the State Church of England (Scotland was different due to the Presbyterians and not being brought in under the aegis of one monarch until James VI & I, nor formally united until 1706/07; Wales, God help them, were lumped in with the English, and Ireland had the Church of Ireland imposed on top of us but the natives never converted in large numbers).
The Church of England was the church of the Establishment, and the Establishment church. Dissenters of all stripes headed to America (your famous Pilgrim Fathers) for freedom of religion and the chance to set up their own settlements, but where the government followed, the bosses (to use that term) were CoE.
During and after the American Revolution, there was turmoil in the American church as some of them were British Loyalists and some of them were sympathetic to the Revolution. They solved the problem by cutting themselves off as a branch and setting up as a separate Anglican Church, including doing some fast work around getting bishops ordained. History page out of their own mouths here: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/who-we-are/history-episcopal-church/american-church/
Membership of The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was never huge, and it's tough to get good numbers since general record-keeping only really started in 1830 or thereabouts, but it went from a high of 3,647,297 in 1966 to 1,637,945 in 2019. However, they've always been a snobby bunch, hence the acronym WASP, which is why they made vast efforts to be inclusive'n'diverse (since the 2000s they've liked to boast about "111 dioceses and regional areas in 17 nations" in order to downplay how white and middle- to upper-class they are).
Take it away, Wikipedia:
"In the twentieth century, Episcopalians tended to be wealthier and more educated (having more graduate and postgraduate degrees per capita) than most other religious groups in the United States, and were disproportionately represented in the upper reaches of American business, law, and politics. According to Pew Research Center Episcopal Church "has often been seen as the religious institution most closely associated with the American establishment, producing many of the nation’s most important leaders in politics and business." And about a quarter of the presidents (11) were members of the Episcopal Church.
Old money in the United States was typically associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ("WASP") status, in particularly with the Episcopal and Presbyterian Church. In the 1970s, a Fortune magazine study found one-in-five of the country's largest businesses and one-in-three of its largest banks was run by an Episcopalian. Numbers of the most wealthy and affluent American families such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Whitneys, Morgans, and Harrimans are Episcopalians. The Episcopal Church also has the highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita (56%) of any other Christian denomination in the United States, as well as the most high-income earners. According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, Episcopalians ranked as the third wealthiest religious group in the United States, with 35% of Episcopalians living in households with incomes of at least $100,000. In recent years, the church has become much more economically and racially diverse through evangelism, and has attracted many Hispanic immigrants who are often working-class."
If you will excuse me being snide, the appeal to Hispanic working-class immigrants is the trappings of Catholicism which are familiar to them, plus allowing them to import cultural icons such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, so they get the "dress-up" Catholic-Lite version of High Church Anglicanism in TEC.
But don't take my word for it, this 2006 interview from NYT Magazine with the newly-elected Presiding Bishop, and first woman to hold that post, Katharine Jefferts Schori:
"How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?
About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.
Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?
No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
See? Piskies are smarter than those common Papists and Mormons!
In Britain and Ireland itself, Anglicanism is associated with the 'better' class of people; in Northern Ireland, the majority Protestant denomination(s) are Presbyterian and associated, with Church of Ireland second - from the 2011 census:
"Catholic (41 per cent); Presbyterian (19 per cent); Church of Ireland (14 per cent); Methodist (3.0 per cent)"
Methodism, which is an off-shoot of Anglicanism, is most prevalent in Wales, where Non-Conformists are the majority there (after the 19th century revivals) rather than the Church in Wales, the Anglican church there. Margaret Thatcher allegedly changed from Methodist to Church of England as she climbed to power in the Conservative Party, since the ideal image there is the Low-Church Tory.
Truly, the navel gazing on this page was becoming most tedious, to the point of picking out shades and texture of individual peach fuzz hairs upon the navels.
Let them gaze upon our hairy Hibernian navels instead.
Anglicanism in America wasn't just Anglicanism, it was low-church, vestry Anglicanism. It became known as Episcopalian because it needed some way to say, "We are Church of England but not THAT Church of England".
This is otherwise a good post, this specific part just needed to be pointed out. The thought that the Church hierarchy might consent to send a Bishop to New York was one of the contributing causes to the American Revolution that isn't often mentioned, so I felt the need to mention it.
> a bunch of people with axes to grind about the Protestant Reformation as it was imposed on them
1. What is this noun phrase in reference to? the ACX commentariat? Is it fair to characterise the entirety of the ACX readership as Catholic?
2. Is it fair to suggest that historically Protestantism has been been imposed harder on people than Catholicism has?
3. There are many judgements of the relative merit of Anglicinism versus other dedominations in this comment, is this relevant when we are not trying to judge the moral character of Episcopalians (or do you disagree that "now do Episcopalians" is obviously a call to asess the causes of their relative succes, just as the post does with Jews)?
> If you will excuse me being snide, the appeal to Hispanic working-class immigrants is the trappings of Catholicism which are familiar to them, plus allowing them to import cultural icons such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, so they get the "dress-up" Catholic-Lite version of High Church Anglicanism in TEC.
4. Do you believe that it is generally morally condemnable to allow converts to retain aspects of their former religion? If so what is your opinion one the Catholics Church's decision to allow its converts to continue celebrating Saturnalia as long as they called it christmas?
> No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
> See? Piskies are smarter than those common Papists and Mormons!
5. Is a difference in doctirne neccerily a sign that you look down upon other dedominations? If so what makes Anglicans particularily bad in your eyes.
and finally,
6. Do you actually have an explaination for their relative succes?
> I think this was a potentially reasonable strategy back when you could argue it would distract people away from getting too fired up about racial resentment. But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors is greater than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
On the contrary I think if you want to give people a non-resentment-based explanation for why x are successful, you need to give alternative explanations that aren’t about inherent superiority. People not so flattered will largely reject these out of hand and have boundedly rational (or simply rational) reasons for doing so.
Of course, there’s a lot of direct, obvious evidence of whites benefitting from systematic oppression which doesn’t apply to Jews. But fundamentally I think there are a lot of weird path-dependent ways things can shake out that aren’t a function of individual characteristics or intentions; IMO this is *the* insight of sociology over baseline human intuitions. If Pakistani immigrants are (say) disproportionately cab drivers and convenience store owners, well, that *could* have an explanation in terms of discrimination, conspiracy, or inherent characteristics, but I’m guessing it has very little to do with any of the above. Having “uninteresting” explanations in our toolkit is good, and helps us avoid tumbling towards the disaster that is maximum interestingness.
>On the contrary I think if you want to give people a non-resentment-based explanation for why x are successful, you need to give alternative explanations that aren’t about inherent superiority
Once they have started looking at things in ethnic terns, yes.
The first two Jewish US Senators were slaveowners in the South, with Judah P. Benjamin filling numerous high cabinet posts during the Confederacy before fleeing to England in 1865. His cousin Senator David Levy Yulee served nine months in prison for treason, but then got back to building railroads in underdeveloped Florida, for which he was much admired by Americans, especially relative to his cousin in exile.
In general, down through history, Jews have not particularly shied away from exploiting black labor, such as in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.
To elaborate (since the above post was unkind and necessary, but didn’t give documentation to meet the “true” part of the criteria I believe is still operative here) I mean here that in a US and Western European context*, there’s a long history of explicit institutional advantage to being defined as white, but not to being Jewish (or, say, green-eyed qua green-eyed.) This is relevant when we’re discussing the relative plausibility of claims for differential success. The presence of powerful green-eyed people who owned coffles of slaves etc is just a nonpoint.
*Obviously if we’re talking about say, Israel, then things are quite different. Unlike Steve I believe these things are contextual rather than essences.
The statistical evidence of disparities in outcome in 2021 that are so frequently cited to assert the concept of White Privilege could equally well be used to assert the existence of Jewish Privilege. For example, whites are richer than blacks on average, but Jews are likewise richer than white gentiles on average, by about an order of magnitude in terms of making the Forbes 100.
Today, a large number of Jewish pundits enthusiastically promote the statistics-based concept of White Privilege, without even noticing that the same logic implies the existence of Jewish Privilege.
Clearly, the explanation is that systemic racism by Jews exploits Asians, whites and blacks alike. Or is it that whites use their systemic privilege to favor Jews and Asians over whites? Or was it that immigrant blacks were the ones in charge? Or that they escaped racism somehow?
Hmm.... so difficult to make these facts all internally-consistent without considering that individuals with the same skin color might actually be different from each other in many ways, that skin color doesn't actually explain how people fit into society, compared to skills gained, cultural background, intelligence, life choices, etc...
If only we could have some sort of major civil rights leader come out and give a speech in D.C. about how to judge people.
During the slavery era, relatively few German gentiles immigrated to slave states, but German Jews were less averse to the South. For example, the Lehman Brothers firm whose collapse on 9/15/2008 triggered the Great Recession, was founded by German Jews in Alabama before the Civil War to do business with cotton plantations.
I would actually say that, in the regions of Eastern Europe where the majority of Ashkenazi Jews lived, Jews were in many ways legally privileged relative to the great majority of the Christian population in pre-modern times.
Obviously, the Christian aristocracy was the most privileged and powerful group of all, and anti-Semitic persecution was often quite terrible. But members of the Jewish communities of Russia, Hungary, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were all at least *free* during the centuries when the vast majority of the surrounding Christian peasant population consisted of horribly-oppressed serfs—in Russia, oppressed to the point of being legally indistinguishable from chattel slaves.
Even after the abolition of serfdom, members of the peasant classes in these countries often faced legal discrimination: e.g., before the agrarian reforms of 1905 Russian peasants couldn’t leave their villages without official permission, a restriction on freedom of movement even harsher than that which confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement.
This. I might add that many of those Jews participated in pumping money out of the serfs, by being employed by said Christian aristocracy as estate managers, even renting village churches so that the peasants had to pay a Jew for the privilege of christening their newborns, and (which was especially hateful to the peasants) as the only legal purveyors of alcohol. If there was a movement in the contemporary stetls to condemn the Jews who participated in such practices, I would be happy to learn about it.
A class based view of oppression could easily paint Jews as oppressors because they've been more likely than Christians to be bourgeois.
I don't think that is true, but it's more plausible a priori than supposing I'm benefitting a great deal from inheritance^4 from my great-grandparents getting first dibs on some New Deal era relief program, or inheritance^7 from 1.4% of my great^4 grandparents owning slaves.
There's quite a lot of intergenerational regression-to-the-mean in wealth because it gets spent.
And slavery didn't even enrich the regions in which it was practiced. The south was poorer than the north before the war, and a LOT poorer than the north after the war. Likewise the south was poorer than the north throughout the Jim Crow era. Whatever benefit Jim Crow had for white people in the south, it wasn't even enough for them to catch up with northern whites.
Actually, a class-based view of oppression would view ethnic categories as basically incidental trivia. (This doesn’t account for the full complexity of the world, blah blah blah, but I am fully in favor of a colorblind politics on prudential and brute-preference grounds.)
If you think Marx is not "wholly honest" you should provide evidence, by the way. Rationalists have standards of evidence, and you have claimed that Marx wasn't honest. This will require some effort on your part to show how he was not honest.
One possible, underexplored difference between Christian and Jewish achievement is that rabbis have been encouraged to have as many kids as possible while monks and nuns have been forbidden from having kids.
Anecdotally, many Jewish geniuses are the grandchildren of regionally-famous rabbis.
That’s a good question; I don’t know enough about Muslim culture to confidently say what my theory would predict. I have a very vague notion that education in Islam was insular and privileged far more recently than in Judiasm, with results like the continued complexity of formal Arabic letters; in this way it would be more like Christianity. But the core question “was scholarship historically a selective trait in the Muslim community?” I don’t know the answer to.
Off the top of my head I don’t believe that the Muslim world competes well in hard numbers, e.g. Nobel Laureates, with Jews or Christians. Different ME countries have reputations for being more or less smart, but that points more towards particular institutions, traditions, and situations rather than broad religious trends.
But the Arab world was pretty dominant in the sciences for a long time! Algebra, Arabic numerals (which were an upgrade over the Indian numerals the Arabs got), Ptolemy was one of the great astronomers of antiquity; there was a period of prodigious scholarship. In fact, the Enlightenment was jumpstarted by the Arabic works and translations of ancient Greek works, which Europe had not sustained.
All that is to say that I wouldn’t be surprised if Muslims fall between Christians and Jews on this metric, weak though my evidence is.
And surely if individual academic success isn’t heritable, and cultures that lionizes education as a key selection criteria don’t pull ahead, that would also be very interesting.
Your chronology is cock-eyed. Enlightenment is much too late to have been directly influenced by Latin translations of Arabic works - that's XII-XIII c. Ptolemy is II c. AD and he was a Greek not an Arab; at any rate he wrote in Greek. And if anything was jump-started, it was the Renaissance jump-started by Greek manuscripts and Greek refugees flowing into Italy from Constantinople. Many of the earlier translations from Greek to Arabic were done by Nestorian Christians who, together with Jews, initially constituted much of the intellectual stratum of the Muslim world. Arab scholars took over later and kept the lights in the Hellenistic inheritance on until Al Ghazali's faction won over Averroes.
I think whether the larger point of "Islam had a period of scientific eminence" can survive the loss of the "Ptolemy translations started the Enlightenment". But I don't know if it can survive "Jews and Christians were responsible for the Islamic scientific eminence". Where could I go look to understand that claim? I've never heard even a whisper of it, and I'm Jewish.
I didn't write that Jews and Christians were responsible for Islamic scientific eminence - don't put words in my mouth - but it should be obvious if you know anything of the history of Islam that it couldn't have started out with any scientific eminence, no more than Attila's Huns or Alaric's Goths. As for references, check out Philip Jenkins' Lost History of Christianity (2009) on Nestorian churches, and Lucio Russo's Forgotten Revolution (2004) on the development of science in the ancient world in general.
My thought is that the cultural explanation is purely about education. Jewish people tends to seek higher education more, thus they tend to do better economically-- not really a mystery. It's an ever clearer fit when you look at Asian communities. Vastly different communities of Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, all do well in America because they seem to push their kids towards education fairly hard. Nigerians and Indians do well because they make their kids get tertiary degrees. Why do Episcopalians do better than other Christian groups in America? Probably because they get more college degrees than other groups.
I think the only way to read this question is to ask why different groups acquire different levels of education. We might say it's a matter of genetics, but I'm not sure that makes much sense in light of the evidence-- after all, there's the famous data point that intelligence is more inheritable in the US than in Australia. Every group in America that highly values education seems to do pretty well.
Of course what remains to ask is why the Tuskegee Institute and its larger pro-education ideology didn't make Black Americans overachievers. For the record, I think you do have a lot of Black inventors popping up around this era. But it seems obvious that under legal segregation, lynching, and the like Black Americans were uniquely prevented from succeeding with this strategy.
Hard to disentangle the two since they happened around the same time. I believe Sowell has pointed to the Japanese as a people who decided to improve themselves after they saw how much better other cultures were doing.
A big difference here is how easy it is for racists to tell that someone is black. Emancipated Jews can assimilate far more easily into a majority white society than emancipated black people.
It might be easier for the longest time to do better in America for all groups- say 18th century until..mmm.. the 1970s. Meaning all groups. Americans still have the vastest store of natural resources on earth, guarded by matchless geography- I mean only we can make war here, for the most part only we have made war here. War throws out all the hard work in a very short time, including of course the precious breeding and education.
I think there's a qualitative difference between poor Jews that immigrated and similarly poor Jews who didn't, and this difference might explain at least some of the effect observed in America, although it does nothing for the effect outside America. The Jews that immigrated were the ones that looked around at the pogroms and left, instead of hunkering down and rebuilding. This shows a preference for drastic action, that is well suited to success in America (and especially for success "back-in-the-day".
In response to pogroms in Odessa I had relatives that stayed, and ancestors that left. They saw their family business burnt and confiscated and didn't rebuild. They left, first to Poland then to the USA (many coming via Canada in a years-long process). This prior for action, that all/almost all of the immigrants to the USA during this time period have in their genetics/culture seems a better explanation than intelligence or cultural explanations focused on reading.
This is also reflected in the (frankly ridiculous) list of jobs/careers common among those generations. Peddler to gas station owner to carnie to whatever-else it took, and wherever else, to make a living and keep getting back at it. That's the difference, it's an entire population of people that selected for taking action.
I think you can also contrast this with Irish, Italian, Scottish and Germany immigration to America. Many of those groups came because of incredible multi-generational poverty that ground them for a prolonged time period vs general middle class lifestyle followed by sudden and violent descent to lower class.
I was surprised to see that 3% of Jews in the Pale were in the military, forming 6% of all people with that occupation there. Based on the Appollonian/Mercurian distinction Yuri Slezkine wrote about in "The Jewish Century", I would have expected them to be underrepresented.
My great grandfather was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Jews were, according to family lore, rare in the officer corps then but less so in the rank and file.
Of the great powers involved in WW1, I believe Austria-Hungary was the only one that allowed Jews to serve as general officers. About 8% of the officer corps was Jewish, the third largest group after Catholics (79%) and Protestants (also about 8%).
Germany also had Jewish officers in WWI, not just Austria-Hungary. Anecdotally, lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, a Nuremberg Jew, was the direct superior officer of corporal Adolf Hitler during most of 1918. (Gutmann has perhaps not spotted Hitler's issues at that time; Hitler received his 1st Class Iron Cross medal in 1918 due to Gutmann's recommendation)
When it comes to higher-rank army membership in WWII Germany, Jerry Klinger at the Jewish Magazine has pulled out the following stats: "A large number of former Mischlings rose to high rank: 2 Field Marshals, 15 Generals, 2 full Generals, 8 Lieutenant Generals, and 5 Major Generals."
While "full" Jews would have been excluded as of 1935's Nuremberg laws, it appears that on the mixed-marriage or patrilineal side, persons with Jewish ancestry have been fairly successful in reaching the highest military ranks. "Mischling" was the Nazi term for people with 1/2 to 1/8 Jewish ancestry. In 1933 Germany had about 67 million people, of whom about 500 thousand Jews plus about 200-400 thousand "Mischling".
If Klinger's stats above are correct, then they depict a relatively high number of Marshals and Generals from a quite small subset of the population (around half percent). Their ascent was achieved in spite of the considerable discrimination against their subgroup (less extreme than the discrimination against Jews, but still -quite- considerable). Which suggests that this subgroup may have inherited sufficient advantages (whether from "culture/nurture" or "genes/nature") to not only offset the said discrimination, but to go on to significantly "outperform" any of the other subgroups who haven't faced even remotely similar levels of discrimination.
While I'm uncertain how many Jews actually served in the Russian military, one thing that seems to stand out in the 20th century (and *especially* in the first half of the 20th century) is just how successfully Russian Jews started or organized militaries, relative to Jews anywhere else. The top commander of the Red Army during the Civil War was Leon Trotsky; of the 10 leaders of the Red Army cited by Wikipedia, 3/10 are Jewish. (Most of the Stavka, or chiefs of staff, were ex-Tsarist officers who were presumably not Jews.)
Some of the early Zionist forces also seemed dominated by Russian Jews. The Jewish Self-Defense Organization was famously founded by a man named Vladimir (Jabotinsky). Trumpeldor, who founded the first Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, was a former patriotic Russian who had volunteered for service in the Russo-Japanese War, and never learned to competently speak any language besides Russian. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who organized the Haganah in the 1920s, was formerly the leader of the *Russian* Poalei Zion. The first Irgun commander, Tehomi, was from Odessa, and the second, Bitker, was a veteran of the Russian Civil War on the *White* side (very unusually). Stern, who founded Lehi, was unusual as a native Russian speaker from modern Poland. By the time of the 1948 war, a large number of the leaders were sabras or had only spent their childhoods outside of Palestine.
The borders of the Russian Empire were sort of arbitrary (or at least probably didn't correspond too much to the pre-existing Jewish divides), but it seems very clear that at least Russian-speaking or Russian-assimilated Jews tended towards much greater militarism during the first half of the 20th century, and it seems like there's a vague pattern where Jews from further east were likelier to be military leaders. I wonder why this is, and whether it has to do with Russian culture, Jewish culture, the interplay between them, or whatever else.
Here’s another possible factor: selective pressure for intelligence. Has any other identifiable human population benefited in terms of reproductive fitness in knowing when and how to hide, when and how to leave, how to travel with children, and how to function safely in new societies for as long as the Jews have? For about 3500 years, being smarter made it a little more likely that your Jewish genes would continue. This was probably significant for most Jews right into the 20th Century. And, related to the One Drop point, if you managed to completely assimilate, you ceased to be counted as a Jew.
If you're interested a good book is I Met Lucky People.
It seems most people commenting here are aware that there are different groups of Jewish people, such as Ashkenazi and Sephardi, but are unaware that the Roma left India in several waves and settled in a number of different countries through different routes. This has a huge impact on whether they speak a Sanskrit-based language, how many words of that language were influenced by their host nation (or nations) language, or whether they just speak the local language. Were they allowed to own land, join the military or convert to the local religion? Attend local schools? Do they have local citizenship? What religion are they? How many wars did they go through before WWII and after?
Although there are some common traits such as working in entertainment or metalworking and using words rooted in Sanskrit, the difference between a Roma living in the US, Gaza, Iran, Hungary, Romania, the UK or Denmark are going to be huge. This is further muddled by the fact that since the EU was formed, there are now 'local' Romani who might have lived in one country for a centuries and 'new arrivals' from poorer nations in Eastern Europe. Like the poor Jews from the East who were unpopular in say, early 1900s Austria and then the US, these new arrivals are often seen as giving the local Romani a bad name. There's no religion unifying all the Roma into helping each other out. They might not even be able to understand each other.
How do we compare darker skinned Romani people who were slaves through the 1850s and still speak their own language to Romani people elsewhere who only speak the national language and have always been relatively free? Or Romani who were discriminated against for not being Muslim? Or for being Muslim elsewhere? Some communities have huge problems with lead exposure and terrible prenatal care which I imagine also is a problem for IQ.
If I recall correctly from I Met Lucky People, the Nazis also permitted those Romani who they determined to be 'pure' Romani (hilarious since they had been mixing blood since walking out of India) to live, while those who were half (and often more middle class and property owning) were killed and their properties and businesses seized. Now people act like there never was a set of middle class Romani people.
Darker skinned Romani can't hide as easily no matter what type of lifestyle they lead. When these people can't pass as White or have surnames that mean 'Gypsy' in the local national language, such as Cigan or Tsigany, that has a huge impact on their housing and employment applications. That said, in some countries they are very mixed, look very White and only speak English. Many Romani people moved to the United States and stopped being 'Romani' and started being whatever passport they had been carrying when they arrived. Unlike giving up a religion, they could just become say, "Hungarian-American" rather than "Hungarian-Romani-American." Darker skin? Well, maybe they're part Italian! Or Jewish! Why not have a fresh start? I just happen to play the violin.
I'm not against making comparisons, but I think to make a comparison we need to be very clear about our concept of Roma and which group of Roma we're talking about. Holocaust aside, I think for many Roma a better comparison would be to compare them with African-Americans. Darker skin, a history of slavery, medical experimentation, ongoing court cases over forced sterilisation, segregated schooling, slum housing conditions, police brutality and so on. The European Roma Rights Centre is full of stories about lawsuits trying to get Romani children into normal schools. People will say it's their fault and they hate the culture rather than the race (and the race on a dna test looks like a mix of South Asian, West Asian and whatever their ancestors mixed with on their way) but I don't think it's terribly useful to compare them with the Jewish people despite them both being minorities found in Europe. That said, as I mentioned in another comment on here, there are actually no shortage of people who are part Romani and part Jewish.
Maybe, but pogroms were sporadic and somewhat hard to predict. It may not have been the violence of the persecution Jews faced; it may have mostly been the fact that they were barred from many occupations, and thus were forced into professions where intellectual ability was favored significantly moreso, so the smarter you were, the better you were at horse trading, so you made more money, had more kids who were healthy enough to survive the latest cholera outbreak or whatever. I can't remember where I read this theory.
You probably either read Cochrane and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion, or you read about the kerfuffle where a New York Times writer got into big trouble for citing those authors :-)
Reflecting on my own upbringing, I noticed two big recurring messages:
1. High in-group preference repeatedly emphasized (do most groups teach this?). Not in the sense of looking down on other groups, more like: It's important that you're Jewish, and you should be nice to everybody, but you should especially be nice to fellow Jews.
2. Our oral/educational tradition is important to us. Actually, it's so important that if you want to engage with your heritage, you will have to learn an entire goddamn language. Have fun!
And I think somewhere between those two, you have a recipe for at least longterm affiliation and survival, if not necessarily excellence. How normal is it to emphasize these two priorities? Can anyone speak to, say, a Chinese, or Indian, or WASPy upbringing?
Middle Easterners in general often have a strong tendency toward staying a people for immensely long periods of time: e.g., there are two Samaritan villages left, there were 50,000 Gnostics in the swamps of Iraq in 2003, the Lucifer-worshipping Yezidis have been in the news, the Druze, etc etc.
The Roma tend to stay Roma despite huge efforts by Europeans over the centuries to get them to knock it off. But it doesn't help the Roma win many hard science Nobel Prizes.
High in-group preference, particularly in situations where your in-group is a really small minority, could easily become counter-productive, I would think, both individually and on a group level.
If the difference were cultural, we wouldn't you get these results for Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews? Does anyone think that all those top scientists of the 20th century had the same natural abilities as the rest of us? There is strong evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have higher cognitive abilities, and that this is one of the primary reasons for the disproportionate success.
It's not one of the most interesting mysteries in the world. But figuring out a way to avoid a conversation about heritability and intelligence... that's one of the most stimulating puzzles in the world.
"If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone..."
- Eugenics would be simpler and more popular than genetic engineering
- Eugenics isn't popular
- It's so unpopular that we have full-on dysgenic policies in place
>- Eugenics would be simpler and more popular than genetic engineering
Uh, no. I really don't think the government telling me who to fuck, or taxing me for being stupid and having kids anyway, or whatever other mechanism to manage eugenics (I'm being nice and assuming we're not going to do what we did last time, with all the forced sterilizations of epileptics and the like), will be more popular than the hospital offering my pregnant wife a scientifically-tested that alters our child's genes so their IQ, conscientiousness, and physical fitness go up by 1-2std. Frankly this is a baffling statement.
It doesn't take anything nearly so overt to create artificial selection pressures. We're already doing it. When I say it would be "more popular," it's a cheeky way of saying that putting some intentional pressures on breeding would be easier than genetic engineering, which is rather unpopular.
I think the idea of a simple IQ + Fitness boost during pregnancy is a rather sanguine projection of how that will turn out, but we shall see.
>When I say it would be "more popular," it's a cheeky way of saying that putting some intentional pressures on breeding would be easier than genetic engineering, which is rather unpopular.
If putting such artificial selection pressures would be popular, why are we doing a dysgenic manner rather than a eugenic one? Obviously the government would be perfectly happy to make sociopaths have fewer children than non-sociopaths, but every obvious mechanism (cutting social safety net, punishing single mothers, arresting men for having children out of wedlock, etc) is wildly unpopular. (Arresting men for failure to pay child support has obviously proved insufficient; and ways of making it more sufficient, like hiking rates beyond what poor people can pay, are not popular.)
>I think the idea of a simple IQ + Fitness boost during pregnancy is a rather sanguine projection of how that will turn out, but we shall see.
Given that neurogenesis is extremely limited post-birth, and these kinds of genetic traits are among the most studied and ones that would have the most interest/impact, I don't really see any other probable route for general population genetic engineering. The most obvious alternative is the bottle baby idea (state grows babies in vats for its purposes), but the state could already pay surrogates and use donated eggs and sperm to do a similar thing for not much different prices, and states do not actually do this because they have no interest in doing so.
The main dysgenic policy is sort of an emergent property of the school system and the job market. It systematically selects all the smartest women to stay in school longest and then do high-pressure careers where they don't have time for kids. By the time they feel securely established in careers they're 35 and not particularly attractive nor fertile.
There could be a government policy that pays women to take a gap decade and have a few kids between undergrad and grad school.
It seems risky to have a TFR of half-replacement among female PhDs before we have adequate compensatory genetic engineering. If we overestimate how soon we'll get it, we might never get it. We might end up in the Idiocracy attractor.
It's my understanding that there have been a lot of government policies tried in various countries, aimed at offering women the chance to not have to choose between a career and a child, and they are all completely ineffectual. Estonia gives you 100% wages for 435 days after birth and their fertility rate is lower than the USA's, which, uh, does not do that.
The US is way more religious than Estonia and I think that explains a lot of the fertility difference.
Secular people tend towards living hedonistically till they're 40 and then trying to settle down at the last minute before the biological clock strikes midnight.
But since all religions are false I can't condone any intervention to spread religion.
People need to hear better secular arguments for having more children and practicing more prudent lifestyles. I should get around to reading Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Children".
> Obviously the government would be perfectly happy to make sociopaths have fewer children than non-sociopaths, but every obvious mechanism (cutting social safety net, punishing single mothers, arresting men for having children out of wedlock, etc) is wildly unpopular.
Why do you expect these measures to be good mechanisms for selectively reducing the number of children sociopaths have? Are you predicting that (e.g.) men who have children out of wedlock are notably more likely to be sociopaths?
Yes. Sociopaths tend to be sexually promiscuous and uncaring about the consequences of their actions on others - great traits to make someone go bareback in a girl or sabotage birth control or any of a dozen other ways to get a child out of wedlock.
It seems unlikely to me that those characterize more than a small proportion of single mothers or men who have children out of wedlock, and people are (correctly) strongly averse to policies which have some small eugenic effect while causing large amounts of harm to innocents.
Given where the Intelligentsia have taken America to in 2021, and where they took Europe and Asia in the 20th century perhaps we may not wish to select for Intelligence so much? It seems to correlate with psychopathic behavior, and worse psychopaths getting into power. Intelligence perhaps is not virtue.
How? Culturally, Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim are drastically apart, in about every way other than religion - and religion is not what is at play here, except in so far as the remnants of some religious values got refracted in a particular time and place (or in so far as *leaving* a religion tended to have certain effects at one time and place).
In addition to possible differences in conscientiousness and other controversial traits, the gaps between the outcomes are likely the same due in part to average African American IQ being 85, White being 100 and Ashkenazi Jewish IQ being 115. I would think this is worth mentioning, however if you mention this and genetics you have now dipped into the IQ debate. You seem skeptical that the explanation is cultural and you seem skeptical that Smith is adequately explaining these gaps. I hope it is okay for me to ask this question but why are you able to discuss differences in ability due to genetic causes between Jews and non-Jews but intelligence differences between races evokes this reaction:
>This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.
The obvious next question if Ashkenazi success is due in part to genetics is what about other racial gaps? I find it odd that you would touch on this issue when you try to route around a very similar issue with regard to race. And if Smith is employing the same "routing" around the issue with regards to Jewish accomplishment, can you blame him if you do the same with racial differences in intelligence?
I don't believe you're obligated to talk about genetics, differences between groups in outcomes, culture war issues and so forth. But having this discussion without talking about genetic differences in IQ is silly. Why not just go all the way and mention it? I guess I don't understand the middle position of nearly saying it but not going a step too far.
Why do people who talk about those possible genetic differences between races in intelligence possibly deserve to die in a ditch but you can argue through implication that there may be Jewish and non-Jewish genetic differences in accomplishment?
It seems to be the logical outcome of the following facts and motivations:
1. Talking about intelligence gaps causing "underachievement" is very sensitive
2. Talking about intelligence gaps causing "overachievement" in minorities is less sensitive
3. The author wants rein in people who are wrong, with minimal treading on the sensitivity.
4. If you say [2], then that implies [1]. If you imply [2], that's two degrees of implication away from [1], which is a comfortable semantic distance. It would be difficult for someone with a short attention span to pin something on you or tweet about it.
In his autobiography Feynman recounts asking this question to a bunch of rabbinical students (in particular, about why Jewish people are academically successful). At a different point, he asks a Japanese ambassador about how his country managed to make such a miraculous economic recovery after the war. The answer in both cases is basically the same: a particularly high regard for learning (the rabbinical students also add that this is because rabbis themselves are essentially teachers/scholars). Feynman adds to this the following anecdote:
“It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was invited to one of the rabbinical students’ home, and he introduced me to his mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands together, in ecstasy, and said, 'Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a general, and a professor!'
I realized that there are not many people who think it’s just as important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general.”
Also, Thomas Sowell has an interesting essay related to this where he compares the situation of a number of different minorities (Jews, Lebanese, Armenians, Chinese in Southeast Asia etc.). He, too, gives evidence that high regard for education is a relevant factor, but also adds some other things, such as strong family/community ties that contribute to their successes.
(Not sure if any of this is a sufficient answer, but I think it's interesting)
American culture has been preaching high regard for education since before my grandparents were born, but it doesn't seem to have caught on in some areas. By all means continue preaching, but don't expect different results.
Being bad at something tends to lead to a lower regard for it, as in Aesop's story of the fox and the grapes. Self-serving bias works like this: If I'm good at X, then I update towards "X matters", but if I'm bad at X, I update towards "X doesn't matter".
Jewish high regard for education could be seen as a consequence of ability. Ghetto low regard for education could be seen as a consequence of inability.
The only path to creating a high regard for education in the ghetto might be through genetic engineering.
Not sure if it applies to us education as a whole but that Aesop's thing rings true to me. One of our drum majors back when I was a kid told us that if we got better at marching band competitions we would enjoy winning and like it more. That virtuous cycle never materialized as we were all lazy kids who mostly did band to socialize.
> American culture has been preaching high regard for education since before my grandparents were born, but it doesn't seem to have caught on in some areas
American culture (or at least middle class American culture) seems to greatly value education in the sense of "cruise your way through a college degree so that you can make more money", but not so much in the sense of "learning is great (and high status!) for its own sake".
The founding fathers were really into education for its own sake. The US has been the world's biggest source of technological innovation ever since it caught up with Britain sometime in the 1800s. Probably at least half of US innovators were not jewish. Valuing education for its own sake seems to be a significant thing in the US beyond the Jewish community.
But to partially concede your point, maybe one could draw some overlapping bell curves of the terminal value various groups assign to knowledge and jews would be one of the right-most bell curves. I would be surprised if these bell curves looked much different from the IQ bell curves.
I don't think 'cultural' = 'easy to change', so the fact that outcomes have proven to be hard to change doesn't disqualify the cultural explanation in my opinion. And I think the word 'preaching' is important here: Sowell alludes to the idea that part of the reason why it was possible to maintain a focus on education in these groups might have been that they saw it as part of their identity and a feature that distinguished them from the rest of society. It seems much less likely that it would catch on if it's being forced on from the outside - indeed, you could have the inverted situation when high regard for learning becomes a mark of the outgroup and therefore shunned.
If culture-only were the root cause, it should be easy to prove with transracial adoption studies. Get some jewish parents to raise black babies and some black parents to raise jewish babies. If the former babies end up with an avg IQ of 111 and the latter babies end up with an avg IQ of 85, QED. But that's not how actual transracial adoption studies turn out. So far they're more consistent with the partially hereditarian view.
That's interesting. Do you have some references in mind for these studies? I wonder if there are sufficiently big sample sizes for these particular cases to draw reliable conclusions.
another thing: it seems like you are particularly focusing on IQ differences here. The cultural differences I mentioned would not necessarily manifest in IQ, but could still be relevant to overall success (or even just likelihood to participate) in various fields.
There are a number of fairly accomplished groups in the world like the Armenians. And then there are the Ashkenazis, who have been in a class by themselves for accomplishment since the latter 1800s.
How long will that last? It seems like Southern California Jews since the 1970s have tended to smoke a lot of dope, which is not highly conducive to keeping up their ancestors' Promethean levels of accomplishment. On the other hand, Greater Hollywood is now filling up with Jews and part Jews from Iran, Israel, the Soviet Union, and so forth.
I dunno, maybe the various kinds of Persians? Maybe the people who are from the Soviet Union via a stay in Israel, but who aren't necessarily all that Jewish?
The recent Armenians from the Soviet Union haven't yet lived up to the old Armenians' level: they are mostly Eastern Armenians who were more cut off from the Mediterranean and the West than the Western Armenians who came earlier.
But the Armenians now have a lot of institutions like their own private schools, so they'll hopefully wrestle the "-yan" Armenian newcomers into behaving more like the "-ian" Armenian oldtimers.
An interesting analysis would be to compare the success (as defined here) of Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups with the success of those Jews with Sephardic and Mizrachi backgrounds. I know there are not a ton of Sephardic/Mizrachi Jews in the US, but surely the analysis could be made.
Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews tend to show up in the US history books as the First Jewish-American Whatevers: e.g., slave state US senators Yulee-Levy and his cousin J.P. Benjamin, or Cardozo the second Jewish Supreme Court justices.
Then the German Jews started arriving after 1848 and did spectacularly well. Many of those tended to be highly-selected for business skills. E.g., the Rothschilds wanted to send an heir to open a sixth branch office in New York, but after staffing their five European branches, they couldn't find a sixth member of the third generation they felt worthy of managing a New York office.
Interestingly, elder Levy tried to start a Zionist farming community in Florida for persecuted Jews in the 1820s, but it didn't catch on. He was a big slavetrader, but promoted gradual emancipation of slaves.
There have been seven Sephardic/Mizrahi Nobel laureates. About 18 times fewer than Ashkenazim, but even after the Holocaust Ashkenazim still made up the bulk of world Jewry. On the eve of the Holocaust, Sephardim/Mizrahim made up about 13% of the world's Jews, or about .09% of the world population. So Sephardim/Mizrahim aren't quite as over-represented, but they're still pretty overrepresented.
Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews strike me a vaguely similar in accomplishment to, say, Armenians, who are pretty accomplished, but who get overshadowed by Ashkenazi pre-eminence.
Mark Twain took his daughter to Vienna to study music for 18 months in the 1890s. He joked in 1898:
"The Jews are harried and obstructed in Austria and Germany, and lately in France; but England and America give them an open field and yet survive. Scotland offers them an unembarrassed field too, but there are not many takers. There are a few Jews in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen; but that is because they can't earn enough to get away. The Scotch pay themselves that compliment, but it is authentic."
In other words, in the estimation of Mark Twain, who was a big admirer of business talent, Jews were the second best businessmen in the world, behind only Scots.
Stop trying to get yourself cancelled. At least post this as a private paid post. Anything with in a stone's throw of Eugenics should not be a topic entertained here. It's a hot potato and will be for a very long time. Don't burn yourself, I like your other content.
I carefully studied the family backgrounds of the first 100 names on the 2019 Forbes 400 list of richest individuals in America.
31 of the 100 had two Jewish parents and 4 had one Jewish parent (Larry Page, Larry Ellison [who was adopted by his teen mother's Jewish aunt and uncle], Steve Ballmer and maybe Donald Bren, IIRC). Keep in mind that the Forbes 400 skews old (average age 66) and in the future there will no doubt be more individuals of mixed backgrounds.
But whether you say that the Forbes 100 is either 31% Jewish or 35% Jewish, or, probably optimally, 33% Jewish, that's still a big number when Jews are about 2% of the population.
A small note on this idea: "But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that's true, I think it would be even more interesting - it would mean there's some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery."
If a small group of people has some trait, call it Trait X, and we can prove that this trait directly leads them to make double the average income, we shouldn't necessarily expect that extending that trait out to everyone would double everyone's income.
Imagine a company enters a market with a small competitive advantage, beats the competition, and makes a ton of money. It's true that the company succeeded because of its unique trait - but it came at the cost of other companies that were /almost/ as good, but not quite as good. If the most competitive company were removed, the market would still be served almost as well, just slightly less efficiently.
In a competitive environment, very small adaptive differences can make a really big difference in outcomes. But at the end of the day, a small advantage is still small - not the sort of thing that could double the productivity of an entire country if applied at scale.
Ah, I had the same thought—but on reflection, I think it's more likely that the Jewish advantage is not just a small competitive edge. For instance, it doesn't seem like Einstein, Chomsky, etc. were working in environments with highly competitive pressures.
The rise of Puritanism in Europe was modeled in part on the success of Jews: "Look, the Jews have what future historians will call bourgeois values, so we should copy some of them."
This also helps explain why there was more country club anti-Semitism in the Northern U.S. than in the Southern U.S. The northerners saw themselves as bourgeois men of commerce, just like the Jews long had, so they tended to resent slight differences in culture between the two similar groups and thus neither group much wanted the other in their country clubs.
In contrast, southern elites saw themselves as landowning warrior aristocrats and were happy when mercantile Jews moved to their small towns to provide them with services they weren't inclined to provide themselves. For example, when Bobby Jones' Augusta National Golf Club (home of The Masters tournament) opened in Augusta, Georgia in the 1930s, local Jewish elites joined. I read an obituary of an old time Jewish member of Augusta National and he was a dynamo of civic spiritedness, a man who individually made life in Augusta better for everybody. But after WWII when northern gentile CEOs joined the club in vast numbers, no more Jews were allowed into Augusta National until maybe the later 1980s.
Imagine if we could make everybody not as smart as the Ashkenazi but as smart as the smartest of them, like a Von Neumann. What a world that would be. I mean sports would be useless but we’d be too busy engaging in mathematical thought experiments to care.
Self driving cars and robots. Not just because we’d have the intellectual horsepower to build them but because a janitor as intelligent as Von Neumann would probably want a better job ( in most cases - you’d get the odd guy who saw it as nice physical work while he contemplated the universe).
Apparently, the one positive trait that we know is negatively correlated with IQ is eyesight. I have fantastic vision for someone my age, so this isn't a brag.
One theory is that smart people spend a lot of time reading books, which makes them short sighted.
I think there's a natural experiment going on right now though, since in the latest generations even the dullards are spending vast amounts of time every day staring at a screen in their hand, so short-sightedness will spread throughout the population.
> figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!)
I want to say that this is an unfair comparison—that Jews' advantage might be positional, in which case it wouldn't scale up past a small fraction of the population. For instance, Jewish people could have a small IQ advantage that allows them to win many of the highest-paying jobs; but maybe the advantage is small enough that if the entire population were to catch up, we would only see a small increase in total productivity.
On the other hand, if we could give everyone the skills to become a programmer, it seems like that would be a huge win for productivity, certainly much bigger than crime, education, or welfare policy might achieve. So my concern likely does not apply.
Israel has quite a few successful tech startups, but it's not as prosperous as you might expect from having a few million Ashkenazis. I imagine the Zionist social engineering project to make Israel more of a "normal country" with lots of people happy to be farmers and soldiers succeeded in blunting Ashkenazi intellectualism, at some cost to Israel's economic potential.
I've heard a theory that top mathematicians don't have military training. I don't know how well founded that is, but compulsory military training in Israel might blunt Jewish achievement. Anyone know whether the theory (observation?) is sound?
Does Israel really have a few million Ashkenazis? As Slezkine describes in "The Jewish Century", for many decades, Israel was the poor relation in the competition for Jewish immigrants with USA and USSR. The socialist-minded Jews tended to go to the land of the socialist future and the success-minded Jews tended to go to the land of the capitalist future. Israel got the barrel scrapings and the hard-core nationalists (not necessarily mutually exclusive categories). After independence, Israel accepted a million Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews in the forced-voluntary population exchange in the Middle East with the Arabic nations. After that aliyah was sparse until about the end of USSR, when it accepted a million of Russian Jews, half-Jews and anybody who could claim by hook or by crook to be Jewish. Here is a late Soviet joke on the topic:
A man is in the airport leaving for Israel, and he has a parrot with him in a cage. The customs people refuse to let through a live parrot. They explain to the man that a stuffed parrot or a carcass is okay, but a live parrot is not. The man is stumped. Suddenly the parrot opens his beak and says: I don't mind. Stuffed or carcass, I want to leave this fucking place.
So perhaps Israel is doing okay with what it has. It does have lots of chip designer houses, for instance. Intel's design arm is based in Haifa.
I suspect Scotland was braindrained by emigration to London, America, and Canada. For example, Scottish businessmen were so successful in the U.S. in the early 20th Century (e.g., Andrew Carnegie) that their favorite sport, golf, became the pastime of America's business class. Scottish-Canadian-American businessman Charles Blair Macdonald is known as the Father of American Golf. He designed the landmark National Golf Links of America in the Hamptons in 1911.
Over time, though, Scots in the U.S. merely merged socially with what are now called WASPs, so they lost their distinctive identity.
Somebody above points to the 1496 education act in Scotland that started Scotland on the road to being better educated on average than England. In the US in the latter 20th Century, people with Scottish surnames were still over-represented among college graduates.
In general, life in Scotland was a stern test, and the Scots tended to rise to the challenge. They needed to make good use of what little their far northern land afforded them to resist being pushed around by the English the way the Irish were.
But, Scotland is complicated and I don't pretend to understand it well: e.g., there were two separate Scottish ethnicities: the southern, lowland, English-dialect-speaking civilization and the northern, highland, Celtic-speaking semi-barbarians. TB Macaulay has a wonderful description of how barbaric his recent ancestors were in his History of England. But I can't keep straight in my head how this ethnic divide (which was quite permeable) played out in Scottish politics and religion.
Lowland Scots are mostly Anglo-Saxons, while highland and insular Scots are mostly Gaels.
The lowland Scots adopted Presbyterianism, which is a Calvinist denomination. In contrast, highland and insular Scots retained Catholicism long after other parts of Britain adopted Protestantism. Hence the Scottish Highlands being the staging ground for the abortive Catholic reconquest of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Along with retaining Catholicism longer than other parts of Britain, the Scottish Highlands also retained feudalism longer.
The Presbyterians were known as "Covenanters" during the English Civil Wars, and starting on the staunchly anti-Catholic side of Parliament at first, then switching when the Stuarts offered to endorse their religion (after previously attempting to recruit an army from Ireland to put them down). Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland was a Presbyterian, as was Andrew Jackson.
Anyway, my general question is how did Scotland stay Scotland, a consistent territorial polity, for so long despite two quite different ethnicities sharing the territory?
Thank you Steve and others (and sorry I had made a typo, I should have said 18th and 19th centuries). If I may ask an off-topic question: do we know why British science took off in such a big way in the latter half of the seventeenth century? I see some post-civil-war boom given as an explanation, but is that the only? "How much" is the contribution of this boom to the much later industrial revolution?
Neal Stephenson's four volume "Baroque" novels ponder late 17th Century English science in vast depth. Here's Laura Miller's interview with Stephenson:
Queen Anne was at the beginning of the 18th century, while the crucial point of transformation seems to be earlier - the active period of Hooke, Boyle and Newton between 1650 and 1700. Before that Europe had path-breaking scientists (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo), Britain did have scientists albeit not as path-breaking (the Elizabethan William Harvey, John Napier), but during 1650-1700 Britain seems to have become the very best - all of a sudden rather than gradually catch up? There is something discrete about the process: all of a sudden a bunch of geniuses could totally transform the world, in a way smart Britons or in 1600-1650 or smart Europeans in most other European countries could not.
Here's a thought: In December 1825, progressive Russian military officers who'd invaded France in 1814 and been impressed by what they saw, tried to overthrow the Romanovs. They were put down hard. The survivors decided to give up on political reform and put their energies into cultural spheres like literature and music. Over the next century, Russia became a cultural great power in Europe, which it hadn't been before.
I'm wondering if something like that happened in England after the Civil War of the 1640s. The progressive Puritans won the war but then lost the peace and in 1660 England invited the Stuarts back. Perhaps Puritan intellectual energies turned somewhat away from politics and toward science for awhile.
Well Steve there’s still plenty of Scotch-Irish where I’m at, admittedly a different breed. Ireland didn’t improve their disposition, I think they select for Orneriness.
Alternative hypothesis: even relatively poor Jews were at least somewhat educated. Those poor and failed merchants were merchants. They could read and write and do arithmetic.
Something I hadn't been aware of until I studied international versions of the Forbes 400 in detail is how many Jewish billionaires there are in places like Brazil and South Africa. For example, there is one billionaire in Haiti, and, yeah, he's Jewish.
Jews are about 0.2% of the world population, but they seem to be in the range of 10% to 20% of all the billionaires in the world.
In other words, the Jewish-Gentile Billionaire Gap is smaller in the United States than in the rest of the world as a whole. After all, America tended to be settled by quite productive and enterprising peoples, so gentile Americans tend to do pretty well for themselves compared to, say, gentile Brazilians.
What if success is unlocked by a combination of factors -- nature + nurture -- that, when combined during this specific period of time of civic and economic development, happen to be dis-proportionally advantageous?
Yes, exactly. That and English laws and property rights combined with vast untapped resources are key to Americas success- that and geographical isolation from Eurasia’s endless marauding armies.
Institutionalized assortative mating, such as, among Jews, the matching of promising male scholars with wealthy brides, incentivizes scholarship and improves the gene pool.
On the culture side of things, I think there is some cultural weight around asking questions and challenging authority that may lead to more scientific-oriented careers, more knowledge consumption, and more critical thinking.
The true challenge of relativism is: maybe this problem only seems interesting to you because you are Jewish!
Lots of cultures succeed at getting their members to excel at in-culture virtues. Probably the most natural example is the Mongols, who were extraordinarily good at producing skilled horse archers; during the period in history when this correlated with military success they conquered the known world; afterwards not so much.
But the question of what precise ingredients—whether cultural or genetic—contribute to this equestrian excellence seems, not boring to me per se, but a little abstruse. It’s probably some sort of gestalt of cultural factors at every level? I doubt another culture could just adopt a few simple tricks to capture even a notable fraction of this success. There’s probably an interesting academic subfield of study on the matter. But I don’t feel overwhelmingly compelled to extract the Mongol Essence of Equestrianism and disseminate it to produce a horsier world.
On the other hand, the prospect of a world much more well-off and with much more Nobel-grade science is pretty exciting to me. And it’s exciting to Scott as well.
But of course—we are both Jewish!
Maybe the Jewish secret sauce is of genuinely universal interest. It certainly seems, as articulated here, to be of pragmatic value in the current world regime (but so was horse archery). It is, I think, genuinely difficult to say for sure.
The Mongol empire basically coincided with the the Eurasian steppe. Per Wikipedia, "Today researchers doubt that Ögedei's death was the sole reason for the Mongols withdrawal [from Central Europe]. Batu didn't return to Mongolia, so a new Khan wasn't elected until 1246. Climatic and environmental factors, as well as the strong fortifications and castles of Europe, played an important role in the Mongol's decision to withdraw."
The Mongols at one point ran into the Swedes, and then it rained. Rain made their composite bows useless.
In the Middle East they made some headway until they ran into the Malmuks. The Malmuks like the Samurai made war and battle the study of their life. Unlike the Samurai (who had a narrow escape from Mongol rule) the Malmuks weren’t crippled at the outset by ritual war but fought to win. The Mongols had good soldiers and excellent leaders. The Malmuks excelled in both.
Your caveat about the limits of the Mongol conquests, while accurate, has offended the Great Chinngis Khaan. To atone, please listen to this song on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1gDSao1eA
People want money. They also want to have written books.
It’s not clear to me—specifically, as someone who’s made a number of choices to target rather than optimize my earning potential—that people want to become the sort of people who live lives that involve making more money.
I'm not sure how much of modern American Jewish culture goes in for haggling. My family didn't, at least about small things. I don't know how they approached mortgages.
Jews are about a standard deviation above average in intelligence. Occam's razor. Boom.
Mystery of success solved.
Figuring out why this is true (presumably founder effects, selection stemming from concentration in certain professions, etc.), is a separate, interesting question. I am surprised Scott shies away from the obvious genetic answer. I hope he's not going politically correct on us.
(I wish there was a good resource about IQ, like TalkOrigins is about evolution, that I could link here.)
> was Binet testing for learning disabilities?
Certainly not, because learning disabilities are defined like "a disability in learning that is dysproportional to child's intelligence".
For example, if someone with IQ 50 cannot reliably distinguish between "b" and "d", we take it for granted. But if someone with IQ 100 cannot distinguish betwen "b" and "d", this requires an explanation, and we call it "dyslexia".
Greg Cochran has told me that some Jewish people strongly dislike his work on the genetics of Jewish intelligence because they fear that people believing that Jews are especially smart in part because of genetics, might cause another holocaust.
I don't follow the logic of this concern. The Holocaust didn't happen because of a belief that Jews were especially intelligent. If anything, the Nazis believed Jews to be genetically inferior.
Not quite, the nazis considered intellectualism itself to be inferior/degenerate, and that the Jews excelled at it was simply more evidence against them.
On the cultural side, I think Jews like intelligence. Ever since I got interested in the question, I've been looking for anti-intellectual Jews and I haven't found them.
I've found non-intellectual Jews (Natalie Goldberg's parents, I think), but even those are rare.
This is interesting. Usually this gets framed as "some cultures place a higher importance on education" rather than "some cultures have place a higher attractiveness value on intelligence."
But it seems like coolness/sexiness is a lot more motivational than usefulness/virtue.
Maybe valuing intelligence goes together with accommodating autistic traits, too. I'm a bit out on a limb here but it seems to me that people on the autistic spectrum fail badly without high intelligence and as well in unwelcoming circumstances and can succeed extraordinarily, to the point of reproducing, if they're intelligent and nourished.
> Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story.
Should we reject it completely?
Based on what we know about human nature, wouldn't it be surprising if a group of people, once they've attained a position of power and privilege (e.g. Whites, Jews, Freemasons, or Harvard grads), didn't wind up making decisions that privileged members of their in-group, whether consciously or unconsciously?
It's unlikely to explain 100% of the difference (since how does the group attain that position in the first place?) but it would be surprising to me if it explained zero percent.
Theories of Systemic Racism assume that whites unconsciously discriminate against blacks, as proved by whites having more money than blacks. The same logic could also be used to assert the existence of Systemic Anti-Gentilism, but "Anti-Gentilism" isn't even a term, so the concept never occurs to most Americans.
The conventional view does have going for it the fact that Europeans brought over Africans as slaves, then after slavery was abolished instituted Jim Crow laws against them. Jews never really had a distinct legal status here (unlike in Europe, where religion had long been a huge deal)
But Systemic Racism theory says that we can tell that Systemic Racism is as strong as ever because white-black gaps in, say, wealth haven't much closed over the last 57 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Jewish-gentile gaps in wealth have probably widened over that same time period, but while we are supposed to think about White Privilege, we aren't supposed to think about Jewish Privilege. So it just doesn't come up. The last time I checked, the New York Times has used the term "Jewish privilege" three times since 1851.
A more sympathetic account of a theory of systemic racism (w/r/t Black Americans) might go like this:
In the period from 1619 to 1865, Africans were enslaved and imported to the US. They, and their descendants classified as Black were subject to extraordinarily violent oppression and escalating legal restrictions. We can, I hope, agree that this was racist. It also interfered with any research on the races. A study of, e.g. comparative racial literacy rates in the 1700s would reflect not actual aptitudes (to the extent that this is a coherent concept), but the literal criminalization of Black literacy at that time.
From 1863 to 1876, slavery was legally outlawed and much of the prior structures of oppression were disestablished and banned. However, for the next seventy or eighty years, the Jim Crow system was implemented to replace it. Jim Crow, which relied on facially neutral laws unjustly applied, putatively equal facilities that were manifestly unequal, and state and private violence, was enormously effective at excluding Black Americans from social, economic, and political power until it, too, was disestablished in the 50s and 60s. This, too, distorted any data; examining the racial inequality in college degrees awarded in 1920 would show the effects of Jim Crow, not raw aptitudes. And I hope we can agree that this, too, was racist.
BUT, and this is the key point, white intellectuals, even self-conceived liberal ones, during this period would have doubted those final points! There perspective would have been something like: “Slavery has been abolished and formal equality is the law of the land. Maybe some Southern elections are corrupt, but so is New York City; lynchings are bad, but so are all sorts of murders. The Black newspapers have a lot of complaints, but don’t they always?” And so on.
This provides an important outside-view corrective to our own thinking. We ALSO live in a period in history characterized by formal equality and measurable differences in outcomes. From the outside view, however, we can’t simply conclude that NOW our society reflects equality and reality. Instead, we need to test the hypothesis. Maybe new systems, subtler or more obscure than slavery or Jim Crow are at play, producing similar effects.
An assessment of the potential mechanisms at play and the evidence for their functions is beyond the scope of this comment. (Personally, I am persuaded by the evidence that they exist and suffice to explain the disparities observed.)
But I would describe the theory-family of “systemic racism” as rooted in the observation that structural factors can produce racialized inequality in a way that is not obvious to all members of society; and I think the evidence for this observation is overwhelming.
Northerners were aware the south was very different. Reconstruction had been an attempt to change things there, and it was known that it was abandoned (though Dunning School historians had portrayed that as a good thing). There were also some smaller black populations in the north, although they weren't considered representative of African-Americans as a whole.
Yes. The history above was condensed to the point of cartoonishness in order to establish the central point: it is possible to build a social system that is at least formally neutral but produces dramatic racial inequality, and that those not disadvantaged by it can assume that the equality it produces is natural rather than artificial.
A sincere question: you understand your comment as rebutting or redirecting the overall thrust of my (overlong) comment? Is it a friendly amendment? An invitation to more closely explore the regional intellectual history of the nadir of American race relations? Something else? Not sure how to understand your note.
Systemic racism is a plausible explanation for some outcome differences, a less plausible one for others. My objection to the way it is used on political discussion is the tendency to assert that outcome difference implies systemic racism, rather than to demonstrate that this outcome difference is caused by (say) the long-term consequences of redlining or Jim Crow laws or something.
But if you're separating out religious groups, what about other high earning groups like Episcopalians? If you consider the wealth of the Mormon Church, are Mormons also overly rich perhaps?
> I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview.
This is quite a surprising assertion, especially given your previous discussion of things like the "dark matter universe" of people very unlike you (in I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup). IIRC, your father is also a doctor, and you wrote this about your upbringing:
> When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
And you also majored in philosophy, which I'm guessing was with at least tacit support from your parents for getting a degree with no obvious practical application.
I think all of these speak to your upbringing being pretty far away from "completely average American", and I can't imagine your worldview would be the same if those were all different!
(I'm not taking a swipe at any of those life experiences - I also happen to be the son of a Jewish doctor whose parents got him music lessons that didn't achieve much and who went on to get an impractical liberal-arts degree - but I don't have the impression that I'm culturally typical, or that it had nothing to do with my parents being Jewish.)
Not Jewish, not son of a doctor, but DID get the music lessons that didn't achieve much and went on to get an impractical liberal-arts degree. This must be the connection!
I was required to study an instrument in a public elementary school. It seemed extremely common for any Christian parents who could afford it to give their children music lessons. My best friend in elementary school was the son of two WASP doctors and my parents are a WASP lawyer and a WASP high-level bureaucrat. My overachieving WASP mother got me a library card before I started kindergarten and sent me to chess tournaments in elementary school. The cultural payload has probably more to do with class than Judaism.
> I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview.
You were raised by "Jews" and not "Jew". You may be underestimating the extent to which your normal upbringing had good outcomes because your had two parents. Single parenthood is the number one correlate with lower achievement, and is concentrated within underachieving groups and subgroups.
If by "Jews" you mean extended family and an intact community, all the better.
Switching gears, the Scottish Enlightenment was almost certainly the result of the Education Act of 1496, which was the first law in the world mandating education for a subset of the population (eldest sons of landowners). Cultural norms valuing education are almost certainly the most important norms there are.
I am not Jewish and am less acquainted with pre-modern Jewish norms regarding education. I have heard Jews claim that the origin of Jewish overachievement is a millennia-long tradition of literacy via Torah study. I am not sure how accurate this is, but I am inclined to believe these accounts.
"Single parenthood is the number one correlate with lower achievement"
Only single parenthood that results from a deadbeat parent. Single parenthood because of a death in the family has no such effect. In other words, lacking a parent isn't causal for low achievement, inheriting the genes of deadbeat parents is.
The latter - dead father - are the only single mom’s I know who pull it off. Its also a trifling number compared to single moms overall.
I’m not sure you can entirely blame the fathers however, the system penalizes in terms of benefits the father being there as opposed to not living in the house. Due to welfare for children the actual poverty line is when Daddy’s job pays more than the government. Thats $60K for 4 children.
What about big 5 traits? I don’t think it would come as any surprise if Jews scored higher in trait neuroticism (stereotype) but I’d be interested in conscientiousness and openness as well. But it’s probably IQ. lol
While Jews are obviously over represented in nearly all achievements, it seems to me they have a certain affinity for complex systems as well. And their religion is a much more “of this world” type, vs say Christians who spend much more of their time and focus on the afterlife
1.) The Scottish were a market dominant minority in England after the Acts of Union. The joining of the two countries created an open border and England was much wealthier so the Scotts moved down and set up in business. Of course, they had the advantage over the other market minorities (Jews, Huguenots) that they could just go back to Scotland if they wanted. And Scotland had universities and all that they could work in.
2.) Your friend whose parents were a Kosher butcher and transporting logs has misremebered the social prestige of their occupations. Those would have been upper middle class professions. A kosher butcher especially would have been educated and well respected. And someone who moved logs on a major river in Tsarist Russia would have required special legal privileges to do so.
3.) Part of the antipathy of local Jews against immigrants was ethnic/cultural. American Jews prior to the late 19th century were mostly from England, the Netherlands, etc. They were Sephardic Jews. The Eastern European Jews were Ashkenazi. These two groups did not get along. There were even theories about how Sephardic Jews were white and Ashkenazi were not. The two were separated in most racial classifications at the time.
4.) There were a few unusual thing about EE Jews against the general population. They were hugely underrepresented among both elite professions (landowners, lawyers, etc) and common professions (mostly enserfed farmers). This meant they were pushed into the middle where they were largely artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, etc. They were also unable to leave these professions. A rich gentile could buy an estate and become an aristocrat. Jews could not. Add in relatively high literacy and relatively sophisticated financial networks and you have a world where business ownership and education were hugely important. Their business and education were one of the few places Jews could park capital. You couldn't buy an estate but you could pay to become a doctor or open a tailor's shop.
5.) As for who came over, from that chart, the main thing that stands out was they're disproportionately artisans and secondarily traders. These would have been common professions in general. It looks like a bunch of people who had enough money from a trade to pay for passage but who weren't rich or established enough to have deep roots.
Personally, I don't think Jews are all that unique among other Market Dominant Minorities. I think the disproportionate contributions to wealth and science are normal for MDMs But Jews were effectively forced to be a MDM in Europe and continued to be one in the US.
I think American Jews were mostly German by the time of the big influx of Polish Jews
My understanding is that Jews tended to specialize in occupations were they could easily carry their wealth with them if they had to leave (diamond merchant would be an example). So investing in land would go against that even if there weren't legal restrictions. Although there's a common cause between such restrictions and forces that could compel them to leave before they could easily liquidate their wealth.
Interesting that you discounted culture and saved it for last. I'm a gentile who just happens to have a lot of Jewish friends and ended up in a Jewish fraternity in college. So I have an outside-insider view and I think it's 100% cultural (and to the extent cultural traits get encoded over time, genetic). Almost universally, the Jewish families I know value education above all. They also emphasize financial literacy. Maybe that seemed normal to you but it's not.
By contrast "white culture" (feels weird to put it that way... also I'll limit this to men) I would say values athletics, manual labor, military service, and, at most, business. Call it a blue collar v. white collar idealization/aspiration... Another way to put it might be greater cultural stock placed on "hard work" vs. "intelligence." I'm not just talking about hillbillies and rednecks. Even among upper-middle class whites, there isn't the same moral value attached to education and intelligence. Or personal financial decisions. Education, and particularly higher education, has a neutral moral value at best. At worst, academia is viewed as effeminate or lazy. Jews I know had extreme parental pressure (or at least expectations) to become doctors and lawyers. Most white parents are perfectly happy to let their kids dream of becoming a baseball player or navy seal. Bad grades are no big deal. School is esoteric with limited real-world application. These are all generalizations, of course, but that's the point.
Another gut intuition I would have about Jewish success is the "grit" factor. I know this will sound tone deaf but... overcoming adversity is a real benefit in terms of achieving long term success. I think that works at the individual and group level. If you're conditioned to being oppressed, wouldn't you expect to thrive when the playing field is (relatively) equalized? This is also sort of related to the "necessity is the mother of innovation" theory and Israel. Survival is a hell of a motivator.
Interesting comment, I agree with your thoughts on "white culture" totally. Out of curiosity, what does the emphasis on financial literacy look like in practice?
I don’t mean “cheap” or [Insert stereotype]. Being smarter about anything in general, including money, is probably a virtue.
I just mean literally talking openly with your family and friends about money management, investments, loans, interest rates, etc. Discouraging frivolous or extravagant spending. Encouraging savings and investing. Understanding the power of basic concepts like compound interest starts at a much younger age. Stuff I didn’t really appreciate until much older... partly because I’m an idiot and partly because talking about money wasn’t part of my culture as a kid. No idea why but it still makes me uncomfortable.
By contrast it seems culturally normal for white families to live paycheck to paycheck even if they are high income. Mostly short term thinking and optimism and not talking about it.
To each their own when it comes to money—people “value” it differently—but one way is definitely more likely to build wealth. Seems like a culture relevant to “success.”
Very interesting comment, especially regarding "white culture values" - rings true to me. I'd be curious to know whether it's "white American" or "European" as well (I think it's the former).
Also, curious how/why you ended up in the Jewish fraternity and what your experience there was like.
Thanks, and I agree it's probably limited to American culture. I'm an American.
Re my experience, I basically just stumbled into it by chance. I had several friends who were joining it, they encouraged me to join too, and I didn't want to miss the parties. It was a good experience and many of my closest friends to this day are brothers.
That said, I'll admit there were some politics that made me uncomfortable. Some members advocated for the fraternity to focus more heavily, or even exclusively, on recruiting Jews instead of... people like me. They tended to be the more religious sort, contra the (more common) secular sort. I respect them not wanting to lose the fraternity's "identity" but our low gentile numbers never really constituted a threat to it, so it could feel personal. I suspect there were a few who you resented me, but the vast majority were really open and couldn't care less. I felt the same way: couldn't care less about your religion or identity as long as you're a good guy. I was happy to go along with their traditions in the absence of any of my own, and I actually came to enjoy and appreciate those traditions even though it's not like I'd want to convert.
There's something paradoxically refreshing about them. They're not commercialized or trivialized. "White culture" is lacking in formalized traditions that are connected to a larger community and history. Even Christian culture. Catholics are probably the closest comparison, but they're not as fun.
I still feel conflicted about the (mostly ethnic) exclusiveness in Judaism. For example, I have friends that would only consider marrying a Jew (even though they will date non-Jews). I think I understand their reasons and the larger context, but conceptually it just feels wrong to me.
1. There is important context missing in the section about "american jews sending angry letters to European Jewish leaders..." American-born Jews had developed businesses, success, etc. in the US (largely in NY) and were concerned that other Americans would associate them with the incoming low-class Eastern European immigrants. There was a concern that this would diminish American-born Jewish social status and/or give rise to antisemitism. A lot of this is covered in Robert Caro's "The Power Broker;" Robert Moses' (an American-born Jew of German origin) mother ran clubs in NYC that attempted to "teach" new immigrants. The word "Kike" was born out of New York Jews who attempted to distance themselves from those immigrants. My point being: I'm not sure this situation can necessarily be generalized.
2. Judaism encourages education. The whole practice of studying the Torah and all of the interpretations of the Torah, the arguments between Rabbis over the centuries, etc. all encourage the practice of asking questions. I suppose this isn't something easily proven empirically but this was always my understanding.
Many American cities, such as Birmingham, Alabama, had two Jewish country clubs, one for the Germans and one for the Ostjuden.
Lots of Jewish families have oft-repeated stories of great-grandpa getting blackballed by a country club he wished to join as evidence of gentile persecution, but they've forgotten that great-grandpa didn't want to join a gentile country club, he wanted to join a German-Jewish golf club, like the Century in Westchester County, but got blackballed for being an uncouth Eastern European.
I wouldn't be surprised if the advantage from halachic Judaism isn't just a tradition of education, it's also a tradition of arguing. I don't know that it's full-on rationality (it's starting with a holy book, after all), but it's at least rationality-adjacent.
Yes, on average, Jews enjoy arguing more than do gentiles.
One possibility is that because Ashkenazis had fewer weapons and little training with them, their culture tolerated a more aggressive interpersonal style because arguments would hardly ever lead to fatal brawls: to paraphrase Heinlein: An unarmed society is an impolite society.
In contrast, gentiles encouraged each other to be genteel to avoid fights breaking out among armed men.
Alternative explanation: "honor culture" vs. "dignity culture" (vs. newcomer "victimhood culture"). In Ye Olde Time, anti-criminal deterrence came in the form of a reputation for vindictiveness, both on a personal and clan level. (And being conspicuously armed.) However, practically this reputation needed to be built with a response to an event that was higher-frequency and more public than actual crime; an exaggerated thin-skinnedness to insults ("apologize or we duel") is common. Probably this leads to a formal system of politeness.
On the other hand, once a (sub-) society develops something like a court system to resolve disputes, ignoring insults in favor of getting on with business becomes the useful norm, thus the "middle class" or bourgeois comparative thick-skinnedness. A monopoly on violence, and consequent disarmament (carrying a sword everywhere is inconvenient) happens at the same time, or slightly earlier.
Why is the Nobel Prize listed as if it's objective? Isn't that just some people's opinions on who made the best discovery? Maybe they're just prosemitic.
The Nobel Prize was the most prominent academic award of the 20th century, and generally not felt to have any bias. It's a "nothing-up-my-sleeve" choice of top prominent intellectuals. If you still don't like that, there are probably half a dozen other metrics you can use that will give similar results.
"there are probably half a dozen other metrics you can use that will give similar results." Then use those. And maybe also mention the subjective opinions of people that you subjectively feel aren't biased in the section for subjective reasons.
I think you'd actually be extremely hard pressed to find a better metric here. If you look at highest number of publications, or highest number of citations, or something like that, you're looking at something that is just as much shaped by subjective decisions along the way, but less likely to correlate with the meaningful thing. It's very hard for me to imagine anything useful that would be more objective than those, which are only barely more objective than the Nobel. What you'd probably reasonably want as the most accurate measure is a survey of a hundred current scientists about who they think are the most prominent scientists of the first half of the 20th century. But that would be far more subjective.
Regardless of if you think it's a good idea, Scott did specifically say he was looking at objective metrics. This is certainly something worth considering, but it's not an objective metric. Also, how exactly do you tell if the Nobel Prize committee is biased on the relevant axis?
If Pro-Semitic bias were influencing the Nobel committee, you'd expect them to award more Nobels to Jews in politicized Peace and woozy Literature than in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine. Instead, the opposite is true.
The three hard science Nobels are clearly less political than the Peace Prize, the hard to evaluate Literature prize (since books are published in so many different languages that it's hard for a Swede to have a trustworthy opinion that, say, this Slovenian poet is better than that Slovakian novelist), and the Economics Prize. Jews do better in the three hard science Nobels than in the Peace and Literature Prizes, although Jews win most of all in Economics (which maybe isn't really a Nobel and is awarded by a different institution than the real Nobels).
The most likely bias in the Nobels is pro-Swedish, which is forgivable. In general, the Swedes do a pretty good job of it.
If you don't like the Nobel Prizes, there are numerous other prizes, such as the Fields.
While Ashkenazi-Americans clearly average higher IQs than white gentile Americans, Ashkenazis tend to be most successful in some roles and less so in others. For example, if look at Academy Award winners, Jews do extremely well in producing (Best Picture) and in screenwriting. In contrast, American Jews seldom get nominated for Best Cinematography (although the great Mexican cameraman Lubezki is Jewish). I think one thing that is going on is that American Jews with the visual talent to be great cinematographers are more likely to direct (e.g., Kubrick and Spielberg).
But it also seems likely that Ashkenazis are particularly strong with words and numbers, but less so with visual cognition.
Ben Rich, Norwegian-American Kelly Johnson's successor as head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, mentions in his memoir that Jews are somewhat rare in engineering (despite huge numbers of Jews living near Lockheed's old HQ in Burbank, CA due to the entertainment industry being centered nearby).
I would like to see a follow-up article on Jews and achievement/participation rates in sports and athletics. Is there a similar discrepancy, perhaps in the opposite direction? Would such a differential be nature or nurture? I get the impression, from a distance, that working-class Jews have a less favorable attitude towards their children excelling in such areas compared to working-class Gentiles.
I think this might be a golden age for Jewish baseball players: e.g., Alex Bregman almost edged out Mike Trout for the AL MVP award in 2019 (but then the Houston Astros were caught stealing signs). Max Fried of Atlanta has a 29-15 career record. And there are more and more part Jewish ballplayers like Ryan Braun, 2011 NL MVP (caught for steroids later), Ian Kinsler, and Jock Peterson. There hasn't been a Jewish superstar recently of the caliber of Greenberg, Rosen, or Koufax, but a lot of Jewish suburban kids play on expensive baseball travel teams these days so there is a steady supply of well-trained prospects. Trying to see how far you'll go in baseball usually leaves you time to get an MBA or the like after you wash out, so it's not an unreasonable career path for upper middle class scions. And the chance of becoming, say, a relief pitcher and making 8 figures over the course of your career is not infinitesimal if you can throw 90 mph by your senior year in high school.
Jews were more likely to be country club members than gentiles as far back as the 1920s, according to a 1925 article in "American Hebrew" by the Italian American golf champion Gene Sarazen, who usually was employed by Jewish golf clubs as their star golf pro.
Of the country club sports, Jews have done best in swimming (e.g., Mark Spitz and quite a few other gold medalists), okay in tennis, and not that good in golf, Cory Pavin being the best American Jewish golf pro. Although lots of Jews play golf, they also tend to see it as the ultimate gentile sport (or second to polo), so American Jews tend to have a lot of complicated attitudes involving golf. I wouldn't be surprised if professional golf requires 3-D visualization cognitive skills (e.g., reading the breaks in an undulating green) that Jews aren't particularly good at.
My question wasn't about American golfers and baseball players, but sports and athletics worldwide or, at least, in western countries. So are Jews over-represented or under-represented? And there is a difference between hobby and occupation; so someone who plays sports with friends, schoolmates, co-workers and clients is entirely different from someone for which it is a passion or livelihood. I myself have bowled and played badminton casually, but no-one would ever call me a "jock".
Lots of Jewish sportswriters, lots of Jewish sports franchise owners, lots of Jewish hardcore sports fans (like the recent Adam Sandler movie "Uncut Gems" about a jeweler who has a sports gambling addiction).
Not all that many Jewish athletes at the highest levels, although there are some. For example, Jewish Baseball News says that there are seven Jewish ballplayers in the majors right now. There are ~780 players on big league rosters at any moment, but a lot come from abroad. So, say there are 500 Americans in the major leagues, and 7 of them meet whatever the website's definition of being Jewish is. 7 out of 500 would be 1.4%, or maybe slightly below the Jewish percentage of the American population, but not by all that much.
Because Jews are so successful in so many other fields, it can seem like there are no Jewish jocks. From "Airplane:"
Elaine: Would you like something to read?
Old Lady: Do you have anything light?
Elaine: Uhh...how about this leaflet, Famous Jewish Sports Legends?
" the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. "
I think you are much more likely to argue arcane technical points, create abstractions, accept (or at least entertain) conclusions that sound strange or uncomfortable while you evaluate logical arguments, and generally debate other people (especially while remaining friends with them), than the average American. (I think your posts and the fact that you're prominent in the Rationalsphere demonstrate this claim). These are also things that are generally associated with Jewish culture (or at least Ashkenazi culture) and which are probably useful for conducting academic research or engaging in intellectually demanding (but lucrative) professions like law and programming. I would be surprised if all these factors were unrelated.
I realize this isn't the most on-topic question, but what is the x-axis on that chart of income vs region of origin? Why is China closer to Egypt and Quebec than Thailand?
the x-axis is just there because if everything was bunched together, it'd be visually cluttered and confusing. The only relevant information is on the y-axis.
Re the "Temporary Group And Country Effects" section, I think Noah's point regarding Jewish over-achievement being a "blip" is something like accounting for the multiple comparisons problem. I.e., there are a lot of ethnic and cultural groups out there, and their measured level of achievements all vary to some degree based on happenstance factors we would categorize as "noise," and if there's enough of these we should just expect an apparent outlier on the scale of the Jews from measurement noise alone. If that were the case, we could expect Jewish achievement to revert to the mean, just as apparently happened with the Scots*. I don't know that this is a very convincing explanation, but it's something that would need to be considered (there really are *lots* of groups of humans out there.)
Regarding the last paragraph - I think it's probably a known thing that there exist cultural norms that powerfully select for (certain kinds of) success, surely? This all goes back to the discussions of social class on this very blog. Middle-class kids learn the norms that got their parents into cushy upper-middle-class jobs and lifestyles, working-class kids learn the norms that let their parents succeed in working-class endeavors, etc. (I guess the super-upper-class kids get some crazily powerful and advanced cultural programming, but who knows.) If Jews were just a bit better than other groups at promulgating the very typical upper-middle-class norms that put kids on a trajectory towards white-collar jobs, that would probably explain the whole thing.
Quibble: is Israeli residence, as a metric, really free of the "one drop rule" issue? AIUI you don't have to be halachically Jewish to immigrate to Israel, just Jewish enough that the Nazis would have persecuted you, and in particular I remember reading somewhere that a significant fraction of Russian immigrants to Israel aren't halachically Jewish.
The San Fernando Valley now has a lot of people who were born in the Soviet Union with one to three Jewish grandparents, then emigrated to Israel under the Law of Return, and then bounced to Los Angeles, which they seem to like more than Israel.
Something like a quarter, and many of them are just Russians who married a Jew at some point. The most prominent *Russian*-Jewish politician (the leader of the Russian party, Liberman, is a Moldovan/Romanian Jew who happens to speak Russian), Yoel Edelstein, is the son of a Russian Orthodox priest.
Ethnic Russians who immigrate to Israel often become Israeli hyper-nationalists to compensate. Anastasia Michaeli (who was Miss St. Petersburg 1995 and is, ethnically, 100% Russian) is a famous example of this tendency within Israel.
I’ve come around to the position that, barring a true system of racism (I.e. slavery, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, etc.), group differences are explained by basically the same forces as individual differences. It is a combination of nature and nurture, with culture being the most important aspect of the “nurture” component in the group context. Despite tremendous amounts of effort and money going into alternative “systemic” explanations, I find most such explanations deeply unsatisfying, for reasons similar to ones pointed out in this piece. We need to disentangle normative claims from empirical claims here and get to a place where we recognize that groups are different in significant ways with significant real-world impacts, but, particularly because within group differences are far greater than between group differences, none of this justifies treating any individual as more or less or different based on group affiliation.
I think I mostly agree with this idea (except that, of course, you need to emphasize how these nature-and-nurture-type factors tend to be certain values for people of a certain ethnicity). The continuous-ish spread of ethnicities on the chart regardless of continental origin also supports a simplistic model where every ethnicity gets a random-ish and roughly independent set of socioeconomic factors and some ethnicities just happen to have a set of really good factors by pure chance.
Armenians seem to be more successful outside of Armenia, and ethnic Chinese are more successful outside China. So I give some stock to the institutionalists vs a Hive Mind-esque focus on the human capital of the individuals in a polity.
Fair point. You have to control for political and economic freedom and corruption when comparing across national boundaries. The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia (where I live) are a very interesting example because they are heavily discriminated against and resented and yet dominate the private sector. In Malaysia, there is actually a legal system of ethnic discrimination against Chinese and in favor of Malays, and the Chinese still dominate the private sector and just about every other metric of human thriving.
This touches on yet another point, implicated by duck_master, which is how finely we define ethnicity. "Ethnic Chinese" is a crude description of the ethnic Chinese people who thrive throughout Southeast Asia, who are basically all of Hoklo origin and from a certain region in Fujian province and thus have a culture (and probably gene pool) distinct from the Han majority (although they are considered a subgroup of Han). "Asian" is an even more crude description. It is obviously impossible to draw solid boundaries, but I think the point is that even subtle cultural and genetic differences can lead to significant differences in real-world outcome. This would explain the great variation between different groups from the same continent seen in Mr. Alexander's chart.
The most obvious hypothesis should be violence restriction. The Jews were not allowed to serve in army and hold arms in most countries where they were successful, and in countries with few restrictions they didn't especially stand out (Caucasus and, maybe, Spain/Morocco - but I'm no expert). Same happens with other nations, Greeks and Armenians of Ottoman Empire come to mind. The violence restriction pushes the whole society to specific direction, incentivizes marriages etc. So yes, Jews are extremely successful in non-violent world because they started earlier. In violent, though, it differs.
(Btw, Indians probably earn more mostly because they're programmers on working visas rather than everyone else).
As I commented here, Jews were surprisingly overrepresented in the military in the Pale of Settlement during the peak years of Jewish migration to the US.
Jf course this is not binary. There were Jews serving here and there by chance and circumstances, including Czarist Russia. That doesn't change the fact that the whole nation was long (hundreds of years, multiple generations) incentivized against military (+ other power roles) and towards knowledge- and negotiation-based social roles.
In the Pale it wasn't just "here and there by chance", they were overrepresented. It's entirely plausible that was a recent phenomena and the past was very different (mass military mobilization was itself an outgrowth of the French revolution), but that's the data I'm aware of.
Is it really true that the far-right Russian nationalists' incentives to lie go the other way? Don't most anti-semites use Jewish over-representation as proof that we are engaged in a massive conspiracy to control the weather and global financial markets? Seems like showing over-population among (((Communist)))) Scientists would be useful towards those ends.
Its interesting that I don't really hear much about the culture of country of origin as a possible factor in these kinds of discussions. Living in a country/culture for several hundred years must have some (maybe positive) influence right.
The part about the American Jewry writing angry letters about the newer crappier immigrants reminded me of a book about my own ethnic group, the Italians, called “The Madonna of 115th Street”. When the Italians started coming over in the late 19th century, they weren’t consistent churchgoers and brought all their weird folk religious practices with them, much to the chagrin of established American Catholics.
The Irish and the Poles had basically just gotten other Americans to tolerate Catholicism, and then all these Italians doing some voodoo-looking version of Catholicism show up. So they wrote angry letters to the Pope asking “WTF is wrong with these people?!”
The Pope, being Italian, responded by making the Madonna statue in the Italian church on 115th Street in Harlem something like the third holiest object in the Western Hemisphere. My grandparents were from Italian Harlem and have an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel engraved on their tombstone.
Jews have been enthusiastic baseball and basketball fans for the last century. But they haven't numbered much among professional players.
On the other hand, as the intellectual demands of running sports franchises have grown during the Moneyball Era, more baseball executives are now Jewish, such Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the leading baseball franchise at present. Similarly, Theo Epstein ran the Chicago Cubs to their famous World Series win in 2016. His great grandfather and identical twin brother, the Epstein Twins, wrote the final screenplay of "Casablanca."
Two Jewish baseball Hall of Famers -- Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax. An arguable third was Lou Boudreau, who had one Jewish biological parent but was given up for adoption and raised by Catholics. Because I usually assume nature and nurture are about equally important, I'd call Boudreau one-fourth Jewish, but I realize that's an idiosyncratic methodology I invented.
There was a famous Jewish NFL quarterback in the 1940s, Sid Luckman, the son of a top Jewish mobster. There was a Jewish NBA star in the 1950s, Dolph Schayes. There have been quite a few successful Jewish coaches and executives.
Based on the chart, it looks like the top two ethnicities are actually *Belarusian* and *Chinese* (in that order), with third place is roughly a six-way tie between Maltese/Estonian/Latvian/Korean/Thai (in order of x-axis position); in contrast, Israel (which I'm using a proxy for Jews, since there's no dot on the chart labeled "Jews" or anything like that) is roughly the top of the -5000 to 5000 (I have no idea what units these are supposed to be) cluster of mediocre ethnicities. This means that, though it would be an improvement if everyone could become as successful as typical Jews, it would be *even more* of an improvement if everyone were to become Belarusian or Chinese, so the disproportionate attention paid to Jews is kind of unjustified.
> Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
Isn't the other side of the equation (self-identification as Jewish) potentially vulnerable too? People might be more or less likely to see themselves as Jewish depending on how successful they are.
To a certain extent, all forms of ethnic identification such as "Jewish", etc., are squishy and not-completely-objectively-well-defined; self-identification is probably close to the most nothing-up-my-sleeve-y identification methods can get.
I agree, I don't think those studies could have done much better. But we should keep self-identification biases in mind as another potential source of the effect they're studying.
You can look up in the "Early Life" section of Wikipedia and usually figure out pretty closely how Jewish somebody is. For example, the Forbes 100 plutocrat I had the hardest time with was Larry Page of Google. His mother is famously Jewish, but his father was very reticent about ethnicity other than to say he disapproved of religion. But, I'm now fairly sure, that Page's father was a standard WASP or Old American.
For the 31 of the Forbes 100, it appeared that both parents were Jewish and for 4 others, it appeared that one parent was Jewish. The latter figure will likely go up in the future, but there isn't that much ambiguity at present.
According to surveys, self-identification as Jewish among partly Jewish Americans seems to be growing. E.g., football player Julian Edelman is only 1/4th Jewish but self-identifies as Jewish. Amy Chua's conservative daughter is half-Jewish and self-identifies as Jewish.
People of conservative, loyalist personality (like most jocks) increasingly identify as Jewish if they can. Quarterback Tom Brady could probably get away with identifying as Irish in public, but if he were to announce that he tries to be a credit to the white race (which he is), he'd be in big trouble.
My impression (Jewish immigrant from FSU to USA here) is that, in the USA, among siblings who are half-Jewish half-non-Jewish, identifying as Jewish often feels correlated with assertiveness. Someone who sees themselves as politically extremist (whether hyper-woke or a reader of yours) is likelier to identify as Jewish than someone without any interest in the news, and a strong inclination toward sport among high schoolers is predictive of identification with Jewry. Maybe 2/3 of such people, in the US, do end up identifying as Jews. I have a vague impression that there is a "boiling-off" process, with the least ambitious part-Jews being least likely to identify as such.
Obviously the number of halakhic/"real" Jews in the US is decreasing, but identification as Jews is common enough among part-Jews that I think the number of self-identified Jews in the US is continuing to grow, and a very large part of this is because Jewishness seems attractive to people like Julian Edelman in a way that it certainly didn't more than 50 years ago.
"Hand-counting Jewish high-achievers" can be replicated. For example, here's my count of the top 50 political donors in the 2018 election cycle. I come up with 66% of the money given by the top 50 to be from Jews (counting half of half-Jewish/half-Episcopalian Tom Steyer's donations).
Please feel free to attempt to replicate my work and let me know if you get different numbers:
UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine's 2004 book "The Jewish Century" talks about the three migrations of Eastern European Jews in the "Fiddler on the Roof" era: to America, to Palestine, and to the big cities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Slezkine's basic idea is that the world over time has come to reward more the kinds of bourgeois skills that Ashkenazis tended to have.
To take a post-2004 example, being a baseball executive has recently come to require a high level of statistical reasoning skills. So it's not surprising that many of the most successful baseball executives, like Andrew Friedman of the Dodgers, are now not old-time baseball lifers but financial analysts, often Jewish, who made a career change to baseball and brought their finance skills with them.
(Interestingly, Israel consciously tried to move in the opposite direction and reward old gentile skills like fighting and farming.)
>Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
I'm confused by the phrasing, it produces a kind of Necker-cube effect on me:
a) possible typo? intended to read : Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is immune to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
b) not a typo, can be restated as : Any source of data that doesn't involve hand-counting Jewish high-achievers avoids this problem, and we have lots of sources of data.
I'm uncertain how to confidently tie either back to the train of thought, can someone please assist?
I'm fairly sure that the correct reading is b, and the underlying reason is that while it's easy for bias to enter into the process of identifying Jewish high-achievers on a a case-by-case basis, it's less likely for processes which count Jewish people by systematic criteria to be biased in a particular direction.
It wouldn't be surprising if some means of accounting of the success of Jewish people systematically biased the data in a particular direction, but it would be fairly surprising if all the different means of accounting biased the data in the same direction.
Thank you for your explanation, Desertopa, this is very helpful.
I definitely follow your second paragraph, it's a nice application of the basic theory of random errors. I'm still having trouble with the first paragraph, and by extension with Scott's original comment.
In general, don't people speak of "case-by-case" analysis as being more exacting than superficial surveys? Couldn't the process of "hand-counting Jewish high-achievers" be informed by validated systematic criteria as well?
In principle, couldn't a case-by-case analysis produce a tighter estimate (with smaller standard error) and then be held up as the gold standard study?
In theory, maybe, but it's hard to generate a systematic set of criteria for who counts as notably successful which isn't subject to potential bias. You can do it with objective, limited categories like "Nobel prize winners" which are small enough to go through all the individuals case by case with predefined criteria, but it's hard to do that with larger groups, which are very relevant to the question of whether Jewish people stand out as exceptionally successful overall.
Analyzing trends rather than hand picked cases is practically necessary to distinguish between the hypotheses of Jewish people having higher average achievement or a higher standard deviation, which could equally explain a high number of standout achievers.
Hypothetically, the problem with using Nobel prize winners as a metric is that it might have been chosen because it's the sort of thing Jews are good at.
Interesting that no one has mentioned this but I always just assumed the disproportionate success was analogous to a superbug that has become resistant to anti-biotics. For 2000 years Jews have remained a homogenous ethnic group exposed to multiple rounds of ethnic cleansing. Inevitably the most resilient of bunch survive to reproduce.
Culture, culture, culture. Until this comes to the forefront of the conversation about inequality, there will be no real progress on the issue. Other cultures (including my own- white Irish, which has historically been shamefully unsupportive of Jewish people) would do well to sit up and look to learn some lessons from Jewish and south-east-asian-American cultures instead of whining about supposed unfairness all the time. As Scott points out, there may be no barn-door cultural factors- they may be quite subtle or even latent- but that does not mean they do not exist. This is by far the most logical, and happily, hopeful explanation.
Yes, fair point, I had Filipinos in mind as an example so I should’ve just said that. And of course Indian-Americans another good example, as per article.
Filipinos in California do quite well on the state school achievement test and make a fair amount of money. But they are kind of like Mexicans in not being super ambitious. A big Jewish advantage is that they seldom lack the confidence to try to make it big, whereas few Mexicans or Filipinos in North Hollywood think to themselves, "You know, I should try writing a screenplay/creating an app/making my shop into a national chain" or whatever.
You're reminding me of a thing I read by someone who started out anti-Semitic but was working for a Jew. Eventually, the anti-Semite came to realize that Jewish wanting to have a successful business wasn't some conspiratorial thing, it was wanting to take care of his family. I think the anti-Semite stopped being an anti-Semite.
This is like my point about the lack of Jewish anti-intellectuals-- it's not just that Jews support education, it's that Jews don't squelch their own abilities, or at least not as much as other groups.
> But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
Forgive me if I'm projecting my own Jewish anxiety here, but it was hard for me to watch people indiscriminately attack Jews on the streets of NYC and LA last month and not conclude that the inevitable conclusion of the "Standard Model"/wokeism/successor ideology/what have you is the new wave of anti-Semitism that we are currently witnessing. I imagine those same events were in the back of Scott's mind as he wrote this. The "achievement = oppressor" dogma was always woefully inadequate; it now risks becoming downright dangerous.
I don't think the mentally ill homeless people in NYC have paid much attention to elite ideology. I think it's a decline in policing that's making things more chaotic.
The decline in policing is definitely a contributor to the rise in violent crime across the board. But I also don't think that mentally ill homeless people in NYC are torching synagogues or waving Palestinian flags while assaulting Jews (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/us/anti-semitism-attacks-violence.html).
Most of the speculation I've seen about a genetic explanation couples it with a higher incidence of genetic problems like demylanation (sp) to explain why these mutations aren't universal. Whether or not it's true genetic mod to make everyone a bit more smart/diligent mostly keeps everyone running in place. Far better to engineer hypomania in everyone.
Also I wouldn't discount the simple effect of being a small close knit community plus simple randomness. Many immigrant groups cluster in certain fields and Jews simply clustered in academic or intellectual ones.
And don't discount the cultural effects of all that rabbinical study increasing the standing of intellectuals in the community.
It made me sort of uncomfortable to read [the first part of] this, because it sounded a whole lot like "here's all the reasons why my race is superior to most other races" and that thought pattern sometimes goes to really bad places.
I agree that the conclusion is really interesting.
Racists do not generally feel the need to inquire into the reasons as to their race's supposed superiority. They are completely satisfied with the explanation that they're just better than everyone else.
Have you read any classical or Enlightenment philosophy? Western political or religious thought of the past four hundred years or so? How about texts from the early days of formal biology, or the first hundred years of anthropology? The Western canon takes a great deal of interest in explaining why some races are better than others.
The missing word here is bourgeois. Most Jewish immigrants were from bourgs, cities, towns, "stetls". The stetl has been reimagined as some awful place. Actually, it was the center of economic activity for the surrounding countryside, often with a legally enforced privilege over trade. Jews were already bourgeois. They already had educations. Most other immigrants were not. They were first generation city. That is a huge difference that meant access to different networks, different aspects of American life that were more likely to be profitable.
It's interesting that you mention bankruptcy. That's not a sign of poverty. It's a sign of someone who had enough money to have significant debts, and to have wiped the slate clean. Farmworkers of the 1800s didn't go bankrupt. They just ate less. Non-Jewish immigrants were overwhelmingly farmworkers before they came.
The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 42) by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein
How the Jewish people went from farmers to merchants
In 70 CE, the Jews were an agrarian and illiterate people living mostly in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia. By 1492 the Jewish people had become a small group of literate urbanites specializing in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine in hundreds of places across the Old World, from Seville to Mangalore. What caused this radical change? The Chosen Few presents a new answer to this question by applying the lens of economic analysis to the key facts of fifteen formative centuries of Jewish history. Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein offer a powerful new explanation of one of the most significant transformations in Jewish history while also providing fresh insights into the growing debate about the social and economic impact of religion.
Immigration stories: My mother and my grandparents fled Ukraine in 1935. It was good time to leave. They had no money themselves, but my grandmother's uncle who had emigrated before WWI had been a successful business man in small town Ohio. he started collecting junk on a horse drawn wagon in small mining towns out there, turned the wagon into a business wholesaling candy and cigarettes to little country stores, and bought some real estate. He paid for my grandparents to come over and sponsored their immigration. My grandfather worked for him in the candy & cigarettes business. The family had picked my grandparents to be the ones to leave because they thought he was too much of a capitalist and that he was going to get himself killed.
My wife's father left Vienna in 1938 a couple of days after Kristallnacht. He was young and single. He had been involved in Scouting and an American Scoutmaster got him a job in Denmark as a way station out. He too had relatives in the US who sponsored him. But, none of them were monied, although they were middle class people with jobs.
How about cultural attitudes towards literacy and education? Jewish men had to read from the Torah. It helped if mom was literate too. She could teach her sons. Presbyterians were expected to read their Bible. Scots had a relatively high literacy rate by the 18th century. Nations influenced by Confucius have had civil service exams since way when. Literacy was a path to a good job and possibly more. I’m less sure about India, but I know literacy was valued by the English running the place. They needed a native civil service as well as an army.
Jewish immigrants to the US were noted for spending a lot on education as opposed to physical goods. Knowledge is portable and hard to confiscate or destroy. Jews have a long history of getting kicked out of places, so this kind of thinking makes sense. The overseas Chinese share this, so there is a tendency to think of what happens after the next pogrom or edict. What can you take with you? Education packs lightly.
The secret of Jewish success is no secret at all. 1. Get an education. Read books, Go to college, go to graduate school. 2. Delay marriage until you have an education. Delay child bearing until you are married. 3. Avoid alcohol, drugs, and fooling around outside of your marriage. 4. Stay married. 5. Save money for your children's education and for your retirement. 6. Remember the Sabbath. On Friday night have a nice family dinner with prayers, candles, and wine.
Here is what it says in the Talmud: A father is obligated to circumcise his son, to redeem him by payment to a priest, if he is a firstborn, to teach him the Law, to find him a wife, and to teach him a trade. And some say: to teach him to swim.
Sounds dull and bourgeois? You bet. Wash rinse and repeat for 120 generations, and this is what you get.
By the way, none of that is conditional on the actions of outsiders.
I was wondering about this and for me this rises the same questions as Fussell's On Class (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class) No one taught me to be middle class because we were not middle class growing up. Plus my parents were not in a position to teach much (father gone and mother too busy making ends meet). And yet I instinctively disdain cruise ships and other stereotypical working-class attributes.
Similarly, no one taught me how to be a Jew because I didn't even know I was a Jew until the age of twenty one. Judaism is not a thing among Russian Jews and my (Jewish) father's real religion was communism. And yet I grew up to fit most of the Western Jewish stereotypes. I tried my hand at being a journalist/psychologist/mathematician before settling on software engineering. Those are the most Jewish trades period, aside from standup comedian (which I also am).
If I didn't pick it from Judaism or any secular Jewish culture, where did it come from? Is it just the result of the previous 120 generations of selection?
Stereotypes are self-confirming; if you had ended up being a professional golf player, you would never have dreamt of explaining your choice in terms of your father's ancestry. That said, a habitus is something that can be transmitted, consciously or unconsciously, even when religion or big-C culture aren't. Of course, in the West, what happened (in my perception) was that (a) secular Jewish culture (big-C culture, in the sense of Yiddish literature, say) flowered and then went into a rapid decline already within the first half of the twentieth century, to the extent that (to judge with my experience talking to fellow students back in the 90s) it is seen by many observant young (and not so young) Jews as an anachronism, or something that was alien to them; (b) the habitus of upwardly mobile and sometimes intellectually ambitious lower-middle-class immigrants from Russia, Poland, etc., was transmitted to some extent for some a few generations, outlasting (a); it is now definitely on the decline, and has been on a clear decline for several decades, in part due to assimilation and acculturation but also (and this bears mentioning) in cases where there has been a return to religion; the values privileged by traditional Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, etc.) are simply not the same as the values of the immigrant population 140 to 100 years ago, just like Protestantism, let alone Evangelical Christianity, is not the same as the "Protestant ethic". I don't know what the time line was like in Russia; perhaps (a) happened a little sooner (partly under coercion - murdered poets and so forth) and (b) a little later?
PS. One reason why (b) could happen later in the Soviet Union: family wealth can *erode* both intellectualism and striving. I can't imagine Brenda Patimkin's family life having been intellectually stimulating. Of course most American Jews aren't wealthy, but some are, and many are very comfortably upper middle class. Jewish communities in many Latin American countries? Often fairly wealthy (particularly with respect to the rest of the local population) and almost completely unintellectual.
During the Soviet Regime, Jews in the Soviet Union were identified on their identity cards as Jews because the Soviets regarded it as a national identity, not a religion. So, they knew they were Jewish.
Before the 20th Century almost all of the Jews who lived in the Russian Empire lived outside of Russia proper in the Pale of Settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement. Today most of that area is outside of Russia in Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.
My mother was born in what was then and is now Ukraine. She learned Russian because that was what was taught in their schools. Her family spoke Yiddish at home. Most of their non-Jewish neighbors were Ukrainian, not Russian. She knew Russian and loved Russian literature, but she never regarded herself as Russian.
Sensible advice, applicable by and to (nearly) anyone at any time. I *think* you're coming down on the side of Jewish success being cultural. But then there's this: "Wash rinse and repeat for 120 generations, and this is what you get."
That's the rub, isn't it? How did the Jews keep that going for 120 generations? How did they avoid "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations"? Why did Generation 114 continue the pattern when so much of what we observe about human tendencies tell us that they should have rebelled against Generation 123, and blown the wealth left for them by Generation 112?
The answer cannot be that education and discipline resulted in a pile of resources that the subsequent generations could use to make themselves educated and disciplined. That's just... not the history of very poor European Jews, and very poor Jewish immigrants to America. Scott isn't a psychiatrist because his chicken-farmer great-grandfather left him money to go to med school.
What your comment illuminates is that the behaviors that Jews use to be successful are heritable. This isn't a cultural explanation at all.
How about Deep Culture with a theological sanction. I quoted the Talmud. The most basic prayer of Judaism is the Shema. It begins a proclamation the unity of God. It then reminds us of our obligation to love God and to obey his commandments. It then says that you shall teach them diligently to your children.
My assumption was always that it was combination of intelligence and tight communities.
There is enough written about the intelligence, but we can see even the letter from American Jews to European that they did consider helping the immigrants to be their natural obligation (in stronger sense than other minorities did). Intelligence combined with nepotism would seem like a powerful factor.
That said, with Jews becoming just a vague cultural group instead of the tight religious one, I expect regression to mean in the future.
RE: This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history; family lore usually focuses on how our ancestors were the poorest of the poor.
For the record, this is also true of many Indian immigrants, the lore is often a story of extreme poverty and survival. The story tends to fall apart on closer examination, though.
Yes, they arrived with very little money, but maybe also a PhD.
Or, another version: yes, there was this weird time during partition when they were bankrupt and they were begging on street corners for a month and their siblings died of preventable disease, but if you go back one more generation, you find they were wealthy before partition started. The period of hardship was maybe 5 years and then they got back on their feet.
That is to say, the poverty and struggle is often real, but the struggle was happening to someone who was raised as an elite, with all of the soft social cues, skills, and cognitive aptitudes that this implies, so the struggle was in short order overcome.
Given what I have observed in the Indian case, I am not surprised if with subsequent retellings, the "overcoming poverty" story gets exaggerated in the Jewish case.
A lot of Jewish family stories of ancestors being oppressed in America involve great-grandpa having to start his own country club because he got blackballed by an existing club.
I remember Cao Dewang (Owner of Fuyao of "American Factory" fame) telling this sob story about how he grew up poor and a quick google search revealed he was full of it. Wealth more often than not comes from wealth.
Perhaps Jews have a disproportionate effect on what is considered "success" or "achievement" and thus skew the axis, so to speak, to disproportionately represent themselves within it. full disclosure: I am a jew and I am presently having a disproportionate effect on what is considered "achievement"--while representing myself within it. And so is Scott.
Why would a man of sense take Noah Smith seriously. He's the guy who wrote that the "Explanation of Japan for Westerners" is, quote, "Japan is a collection of rocks with some human beings on it. That's the vast majority of what you need to know." That got Spandrell's goat, as you can imagine. The latter's response applies equally to the post you are responding to:
~~~
Let me translate this to you: Pattern Recognition is Bad. No, it's positively Evil. You should not try to use your brain and notice things. That may get you into trouble, and certainly prevent you from getting a job as an economics professor. What you need to do is ἐποχή squared; suspend all judgment, and if possible all cognitive function. Just do as you're told by your academic betters, i.e. me. [...] Which is not much because I myself do not judge, do not recognize patterns, and do not try to notice things. But I am en expert™ through living 3 years (on and off) [in Japan], during which my expertly trained non-noticing skills led me to not learn the language, not understand anything and certainly not noticing anything about the country. I did notice there were rocks and human beings; but that's probably safe to notice. Right? Right??
Solvay conference, not Solvang, more physics and less pointy hats…
Ashkenazi Jews have one standard deviation higher average IQ thanks to Europe’s unintended selective breeding experiment on them spanning a millennium, and income is correlated with IQ. I wonder how much of the income gap is explained by this alone.
>The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone (...)
I really want to discourage everyone from entertaining this kind of ideas. It cannot.
The ability to live a good life remains positional. Some people have it easier to get into those positions, and an individual intervention might help an individual, but the systemic problem is not ability, it's scarcity. We've already tried exactly this with mass education, and it turns out a diploma that guarantees a stable high-prestige job when held by 1% of the population has long ceased doing so at 50%. (We've apparently also tried it with making more Jews, there's a post upthread about how a population boom forced most of them down the economic ladder.)
Of course, maybe it might work in a roundabout way, by producing a population more likely to understand the need for, and demand, systemic changes. (Jews famously used to be overrepresented in socialist organizations, so there's that.) Then again - education, so far, didn't. Maybe 50% is too low of a number, maybe it merely encourages discrimination against the remaining 50%, maybe we'd need something like 80%. But then again, the cutoff line would probably simply move higher, like it once did from lite-/nume-racy to high school, then from high school to college.
When I first read it, I thought he raised more interesting objections than Smith did here. He focuses on the genetic condition explanation and notes that one of the authors distanced himself (I assume Cochran) from it in a review of his response.
2. Many of the cultural explanations focus on the Talmudic tradition. We know schooling has causal effects on intelligence, which Ritchie & Tucker-Drob estimate between 1-5 per year (depending on the design). Have you looked into how many American jews get some additional schooling for religious reasons and how much that time sums to? I have no idea myself, but it could shake out to plausibly add a few points, right?
3. You said you got a totally normal "cultural payload". I had thought you at least attended some after school cheder or so, but did I imagine that because I assumed there was no other way for you to have learned all the arcana embedded in Unsong?
Quote : <i>I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average</i> That is exactly my case and I cannot find anything special in myself or my environment, yet I mostly found myself successful. Having lived a long and varied life, I think we Ashkenazi Jews are normal while most of the people are somewhat defective and a little crazy.
I'd be very surprised if this effect turned out to be a blip. Looking at Portuguese History (the one I'm most familiar with), Jewish elites seem to have been filling high offices to the point where it fuelled attacks on the King at least as early as the 13th century. What's more, many of the leading figures of Portugal's Golden Age in the 15th century were Jewish and there's an interesting argument that the end of said Golden Age was triggered by the expulsion of the Jews. (It works chronologically. Of course there are all sorts of socio-political confounders, with persecutions elsewhere and whatnot; but the basic story seems the same as today. Of course I don't have an answer either, but whatever is going on seems to have been going on for a while.)
For me, the biggest question is this: Why are the Jews so succesful in so many diverse fileds?
In early 20th century, a few Jewish men, generally from humble backgrounds, moved to a certain place in California and started making movies. Somehow they became so successful, that Hollywood is in a sense the cultural center of the world since then. The big studios, Fox, Warner bros, Paramount, Columbia, Universal, were all founded by Jews in the early era of Hollywood. (Disney is a big counterexample here, he was not Jewish).
Some Jewish people started drawing comics about funnily dressed people punching villains. Somehow it became an important cornerstone of modern culture. The two creators of Batman were Jewish. The two creators of Superman were Jewish. Stan Lee, creator of lots of important Marvel heroes, was Jewish.
I once looked at a list of "the 13 greatest Broadway composers ever". 10 were Jewish. (In the same list, they were less successful, though still overrepresented in other categories: 4 out of 9 writers, 3 out of 8 the greatest directors in Broadway history.) As checking if they are generally good at music, I looked at BBC's "10 greatest compesers of the 20th century" list. 4 were Jewish.
At this point, I am confused what the general skill is that makes them successful in science, finance, producing the kind of intellectuels as Marx and Freud, making big in new fields (like early 20th century film industry), making good music and being lucky in creating popular superheroes.
I don't think IQ alone is enough to answer that, I don't expect it to correlate that strongly with success in the early film industry, or being a good composer. I think there must be some other secret ingredients too (enterpreneurship for example?), which might be cultural or genetic again.
> There...aren't a lot of European Jews left to survey, but a lot of pre-Holocaust Europe's greatest geniuses seemed to be Jewish.
On this point: I recently heard an argument that WWI was made possible by the Haber process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen in ammonia, invented a few years earlier. When Germany was cut off from foreign nitrate supplies by the British blockade, it depended on the Haber process for its supply of nitrogen-based explosives and nitrogen-based fertilisers. And - yes, Haber was Jewish.
Conversely, by WWII, political persecution in Germany and Italy had cost them a substantial fraction of their top scientific talent, who had left because they were Jewish (e.g. Einstein, Szilard, Franck), had Jewish wives (e.g. Hess, Fermi), or just had friends in those categories. Counterfactuals are always dangerous - but, if the Axis hadn't lost those strategic assets, it seems reasonable that the war would have gone a little more favourably for them.
USA and the world really missed a big chance when Bernie wasn't nominated by the Dems. He would've been the first Ashkenazi president, right? And as far as I know there aren't any other high profile Ashkenazi politicians that can be nominated soon. SMH.
As a Protestant grandfather who has attended numerous Jewish services and followed the Sunday school teachings at the Synagogue I believe that expectation and gratitude are far higher among Jews, but are invisible to them, since they permeate their lives and communities. The level of institutional gratitude is far above other demographics. Couple a high level of gratitude with expectation of general success, the bar and bat mitzvah expectations, and you have a winning human being. These cultural characteristics are invisible to Jews because they have always been part of their world from infancy and they project them on others without realizing that the others live in a different culture.
Gratitude is an incredibly powerful human belief, and rewards its believers in endless ways.
I mean that it is all throughout the Torah, the services are full of God's favor and expressions of gratitude for the things on earth. It is a default belief among Jews, but they don't see it as unique since it permeates their culture. They assume everyone is like them, but in this they are incorrect.
Being raised Reformed "Gratitude" was possibly the biggest religious meme I was raised with, so I question how unique this is to Judaism. (think "Amazing Grace)
As a mathematician, occasionally I read biographies of mathematicians for fun on Wikipedia. Usually I'm surprised when they *aren't* Jewish. It's really quite impressive, and a reason why Germany went from the place to be for mathematics (especially Göttingen) before WW2 to basically another mid-tier European mathematics location.
The ritual by whitch a Jewish boy becomes a man requires the boy to demonstrate their ability to read, by reading out loud to the community (at the bar mitzvah). I believe was the case even when been able to read was far less common in the general population.
I reckon that fact by itself provides a fair bit of weight to the claim that the difference is cultural.
The central thesis is that many recent-immigrant groups do better because of a peculiar combination of superiority complex and insecurity. As in "we need to show that our culture is better" and "we haven't quite settled yet, can't afford to relax". It lists many examples of immigrant groups that are supposed to be "victims", but instead do very well on average. (Cubans, Nigerians, people from East Asia)
The piece also states that by the third generation that immigrant advantage disappears and grandchildren of the newcomers do no better than any native-born roots-in-the-ground white person. I don't know how much data there is behind this claim, but it fits into my personal observations.
I think this theory also suggests why Jewish people have been doing better than average on some metrics for longer than the prescribed two generations: they haven't had the opportunity to relax. At least not until the last couple of decades. Because they remained consistently different from the majority population and many never quite assimilated, there was always a need to prove yourself and a possibility that the "locals" will turn on you. (Even if in practice you were often more local than them) And even a fully assimilated Jew is often easy to tell apart from his/her French or German neighbour.
That would also explain the experience of Chinese diaspora in South East Asia. From my limited knowledge, it seems that in many countries, like Malaysia and Philippines, Chinese people occupied a niche similar to Jews in the West, complete with their own local versions of pogroms and worse.
Full disclaimer: I am a fully-assimilated Australian Jewish software engineer from Russia who used to play chess like crazy.
"I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in."
Something indeed along those lines, after the Acts of Union in 1706/07, Scotland being brought in to form one parliament, and English markets being opened, the disadvantages that Scotland had previously laboured under were ameliorated to greater or lesser degrees.
But this sounds rather like Dr. Johnson, who seems to have either had a poor enough impression of Scotland and the Scots, or to have enjoyed teasing Boswell, a Scotsman himself: https://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html
"The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!"
And there certainly was, post-1707, the impression of 'the Scotsman on the make', as Scottish talent and ambition headed south. J.M. Barrie, born in Scotland: "There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make."
So perhaps the parallel does make more sense as, given access to wider and freer opportunities, the talented and ambitious Scots and Jews were successful out of proportion to their numbers?
The interesting examination there is the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, as to why the Eastern Europeans seem to have done much better than the Southern Europeans? Is that down to genetics as well?
When I was a kid, the explanation I was given by my WASP parents was that a) Jews did a better of job of in-group networking, and more importantly 2), Jews were much, much less likely to become dysfunctional, roaring alcoholics as adults. Are these things true?
That's interesting. 1) I'm pretty bad at any kind of networking, in-group or out-group. Not all Jews are super-nerds though. 2) We do seem to have considerably lower rates of alcoholism than general population. Which is at least partly genetic from what I understand. (Some people get serotonin/dopamine boost from drinking) High rates of many types of mental illness though.
Regarding Noah Smith's first point, it sure sounds to me like he was talking about World War 2 specifically, so your arguments about immigration decades before that aren't very applicable.
I can't remember where I read this, and a quick Google search didn't help, but I do remember reading somewhere (that I felt at the time I could believe, at least) that American Jews went from one of the lowest IQ groups in the country before WWII to one of the highest after. Their argument, which would match your claims, was that immigration to the US was all initially from the least capable, looking for a new life out of desperation. Then, when the build-up to the Holocaust happened, you had a flood of the most capable (and those with the most means) Jewish immigrants leaving Europe for the US. This could also maybe explain the disproportionate numbers in Russia.
Is there a possibility that (kind of as an inverse of the 'one-drop-rule') "unsuccessful" people of Jewish heritage are less likely to identify as Jews and pass on this heritage? Orphans, children born out of wedlock etc. might for example have had more incentives to assimilate to the mainstream culture, but similarly had worse socio-economic starting conditions?
I'm guessing its a combination of a good sense of community, strong culture of education, and a long history in America. Ultimately, there is not much difference between Asian and Indian Americans other than that Jewish people have a more cohesive culture (Jewish schools, Synagogue, etc.) and have been in America longer, meaning they have had more time to accrue wealth.
I thought it was common knowledge that successful people were less likely to emigrate? It wasn't the Duke of Buggeringham that was upping sticks to go be a pioneer in America, but at most the fifth son of some minor noble, who had no chance of inheriting the family estate and even that wasn't much.
And that is certainly not limited to Jews. Hell, the reason that Florida and Texas have famously debtor-friendly laws is because a lot of the first families of those states were folks fleeing their creditors.
"People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes. But I would be pretty happy if it could just make everyone do as well as Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history, even before we started giving people the ability to shoot acid out of their eyes."
It seems likely that to engineer everyone to have the material success of the average Ashkenazim, you would need to engineer everyone to the specifications of the average Ashkenazim. There are obvious trade-offs: How many guys named "Cohen" can slam-dunk? The NBA would soon be unwatchable.
I imagine that we would be willing to sacrifice professional basketball to eliminate poverty, but the unprovent assumption here is that the successes of 2% of the population will scale. At some point we have all the lawyers, psychiatrists, and movie producers that we need, and all those smart engineered Ashkenazim clones will need to find something else to do. Somebody needs to deliver the mail and do oil changes. My conception of intelligence is that (most of) those types of non-intellectual tasks (not slam-dunking) can be done at least as well by someone with a 130 IQ, but I doubt that this person will be satisfied with his lot in life. He knows he's just as smart as the neurosurgeons, but he's stuck delivering mail because there just weren't enough neurosurgeon jobs. On the other hand, I know of a lower-class white guy who was ecstatic (to the point of bragging to women) that he was earning $800 a week as a roofer.
>How many guys named "Cohen" can slam-dunk? The NBA would soon be unwatchable.
The NBA would be very different, but I'm not sure it would be unwatchable. Remember when Jews dominated professional basketball, and the thing that everyone thought mattered most was being a tricky, artful, fast little guy?
Focusing solely on Ashkenazim from the 1800s onwards seems iffy. Sephardim we’re doing fairly well in England, France, and the Ottoman lands beforehand and early American Jews were Sephardic or German Ashkenazim (which is partly why they were so critical of the shtetl folks in East, who they considered to be rabble). Figures like Josef Nasi the Duke of Naxos or the Sassoon family of Baghdad (later dubbed the Rothschilds of the East as they expanded enterprises to Bombay and Shanghai - akin to Rothschild sending his sons to the various great European financial centers - and even helping to found HSBC) we’re doing their thing separate from the Ashkenazic world.
The simpler answer is that there’s something (or a bundle of somethings) about Jews generally which tends towards them having significant capacity once you take down the structural constraints preventing their success. The bulk of Jews taking off in the 1800s and 1900s (whereas previously it was a few elites who represented the community as a whole who did quite well) correlates well with Jewish emancipation.
Scott, you once wrote (or maybe i'm confusing you with EY, but i dont think so) that Jewish families seem to get a little more secular with every generation. Is anything similar happening culturally? Are religious traditions kept as belief fades? I've heard Jewish families usually start a religious preschool earlier than others, is that being maintained?
>I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be
I would speculate that you dont spend large amounts of time with lower-achieving groups, and that it would be more obvious if you did.
When considering the success of a Jew, shouldn't we adjust for the success of their parents, which gave them a better starting point? i.e. compare their success only to gentiles with similarly successful parents?
I think this will eliminate most of the gap, leaving only the generation which made the jump up the social ladder. The conditions for that generation were more unique, so might be easier to explain
I agree with the comments I'm seeing about Scott nor fully addressing Cochran's views. It's been a little while since I read the 10,000 Year Explosion but my brief summary from the time suggests that Cochran and Harpending say Ashkenazi intellectual achievement is a recent change that arose because of:
1. Jews' careers in cognitively demanding jobs (traders, then financiers/moneylenders, then management)
2. Wealthier people reproducing more (and living in less crowded - which I suppose implies less dangerous / unhealthy? - conditions)
3. Stable rules against intermarriage
4. Intellectual ability being highly heritable
Non-Ashkenazi Jewish achievement doesn't track in the same way, they argue, because Jews in the Islamic world had less intellectually-demanding jobs.
I enjoyed this comment because it does what very few others do: assumes the heritability of intelligence. At this point, that shouldn't be controversial. Yet most folks, it seems, don't want to come out and say "intelligence is heritable; Jews are intelligent; children of Jews therefore tend to be intelligent." Perhaps this explanation is regarded as facile. I tend to think this is a manifestation of Westerners (via indoctrination into Liberalism) reflexively resisting challenges to the Dogma of Zero Group Differences. But this community doesn't strike me as one that is resistent to heterodox thought.
The cultural explanations offered in this discussion (including your #1 through #3) tell us *how* genes for intelligence propogate. In short: use intelligence to gather resources, use resources to have and protect offspring. And: Judaism requires more of an intellectual commitment than most faiths, so the Jews who didn't have the intellect for it stopped being Jews. But without #4, a lot of these explanations are Lamarckian: Dad read the Talmud and debated with his brothers, therefore Dad's children were smart.
Not a scientist and probably not as smart as most of the people reading this blog or writing these comments--as well, my comment will be entirely informed by the headlines of two-bit science-y websites:
if epigenetics can "prove" that trauma is inherited, why wouldn't "propensity to study and learn" be considered one of the potential causes that works towards explaining Jewish "success" (as a failure Jew, my use of scare quotes is meant to imply deep resentment).
It seems, then, like it wouldn't be just the culture of learning which contributes to success, but a cumulative genetic effect of such cultural values.
> But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the [sic] benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
This sentence has me so confused. The first part means, I think, 'in the standard model, there are only two options for high achieving minorities. Either they are not really high achieving or they are creating structures which entrench their power, and therefore Smith et al must explain away high achievement in ethical minorities because to accept their success is to accept their pernicious power structures. This is bad and ought be avoided as a strategy.'
But then the second part eludes me. Who is 'they'? Smith and the other Standard Modelers? 'This' must be the strategy of explaining away high achievement as uninteresting. Why is there a benefit to not-yet-having-applied said strategy? Is 'us' some given minority? Is there a benefit for a given minority to still being considered interestingly successful? If so, what is it? And how does one weigh these together? Why would the benefit only exist under the standard model? Shouldn't the view that a certain minority is successful be moreso outside the standard model? I'm very lost.
Well the most successful group in the last graph is "Belarusian", and this word breaks down into two roots meaning "White" and "Rus' ". I'm not sure how you can get more literal with the Whites being the richest group.
The sphingolipid diseases are illustrative of the selective pressures, not necessarily the major or dominant effects of selection. The key point is the prevalence of childhood-lethal recessive alleles in the population. Now, some level of these will be present simply from de novo mutation, but in the Ashkenazi population you have individual mutations that are common, and are at anomalously high frequencies.
We can do the population genetics math. Suppose you have an allele of prevalence p in your population, and it does very bad things to those who inherit two copies, like causing major neurodegenerative disorders in childhood, to the point where homozygotes have no children. All things equal, the prevalence will go down, though not to zero, since the selective pressure against it drops quadratically as the prevalence drops. So if it's not very close to zero, then some compensating advantage is bringing it up: those carrying a single allele must do better than average. We can estimate about how much.
If the fraction of carriers in the population is f, then the necessary selective advantage in heterozygotes must be about f/2(1-f) in order for the prevalence to stay static. At that level, the advantage in heterozygotes balances the disadvantage in homozygotes and it stops changing frequency.
So. There are several neurological diseases distinct to Ashkenazi Jews. Tay-Sachs is the most well-known. About 1 in 27 Ashkenazi are carriers, and about 1 in 3,600 babies die of really sad neurological disorders from it. It's caused by a mutation in HEXA, linked to a shared haplotype across all Ashkenazim, looks to be ~40 generations old. Running the math, that requires a selective advantage of ~2% for heterozygotes. Niemann-Pick type A is caused by a mutation in SMPD1. About 1 in 200 Ashkenazi are carriers, and about 1 in 40K of their babies die terribly of it. Selective advantage of ~0.2%. Gaucher's disease has a carrier frequency of ~9%, with 1 in 450 with it. It is not deadly to children, and causes problems including decreased lifespan, but those affected can have children. As such it's hard to estimate the selective advantage in heterozygotes. It would be ~5% if those affected had no children, but must be less than that to some extent. We also have torsion dystonia, which is not a recessive but instead variably penetrant dominant: those affected have only 1 copy of the gene, but don't always get the disease. Rate of about 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 6,000. That one is hard! How else do you drive up the frequency of a dominant mutation that high other than with some positive effects?
These are all strong evidence of selective pressure on the population. They are rare enough that they are unlikely to be major contributors to total heritable variance in the population, in the same way that Marfan's is not responsible for a large fraction of the variance in height. If there were strong selective pressures for intelligence that caused these alleles to go to high prevalence, then it would have also caused less destructive changes: small changes in prevalence of many low-impact alleles.
" . . . figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!). Far from trying to make this sound "less interesting", we should be recognizing it as one of the most interesting (and potentially socially useful) problems in the world."
In addition to other factors mentioned in the conversation (e.g. valuing education, bourgeois values, etc.) I suggest a greater focus on the distinctive characteristics of intellectual dialogue in Jewish culture.
The distinctiveness of intellectual dialogue as a cultural trait may be invisible to people here because it is the water in which we all swim: everyone involved in the conversation on this blog (and all other intellectual blogs) is ipso facto immersed in the world of discussing ideas. But "discussing ideas" is not normal human behavior in most cultures around the world.
Insofar as Jewish culture has long been based on arguing Talmudic ideas as a foundational aspect of their religion, it has had an unusual focus both on textual analysis but also the normalization of disagreeing about the meaning of the ideas in texts. While there have been limited intellectual classes who discussed ideas in many cultures (priestly classes), my impression is that these sorts of textual discussions have been unusually prominent in Jewish culture at the level of every day life.
For a hint at complementary evidence on the importance of the nature of conversation in the home, the "30 million word gap" in the speech environments of young children that results in dramatic differences in educational outcomes later on has spawned an increasingly nuanced body of research focused on differing species of household talk. For a sample of the debate,
"“There is some evidence that the sheer amount of language input affects language growth (Huttenlocher et al. 1991), whereas other studies suggest that the quality of language input, such as the diversity and complexity of vocabulary and grammar (Huttenlocher et al. 2010, Rowe 2012), the contingency of language addressed to children (Bornstein et al. 2008), the use of questions (Aram et al. 2013), and language that goes beyond the here-and-now (decontextualized language; Rowe 2012), is also important. Recent research examining both quantity and quality simultaneously suggested that quality might be the primary predictor of language outcome (Rowe 2012, Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015a), and different qualitative characteristics might play a role in different developmental periods (Rowe 2012, Tamis-LeMonda et al. 2014). For example, the diversity and sophistication of vocabulary facilitate toddlers’ lexical growth, whereas decontextualized language is more beneficial for later vocabulary growth in preschool (Rowe 2012).”
Rather than accept this dated summary as definitive, I would just note that:
1). The role of different kinds of dialogue in the home might have a significant impact on the intelligence of children and
2). Jewish patterns of dialogue might be distinct from the patterns of verbal interaction practiced in other cultures.
This hypothesis doesn't differentiate Ashkenazi from Sephardic Jewish outcomes (unless there are differing relationships to dialogue in the home among the two). But insofar as both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews outperform other cultural groups and insofar as both feature Talmudic debate as a cultural foundation, there is at least a hypothesis worth exploring here.
Insofar as I've been able to identify verbal vs. mathematical comparisons of Jewish vs. Chinese intelligence, it appears to be the case that Jews tend to score comparatively higher on verbal metrics and Chinese comparatively higher on mathematical metrics. This differential would be consistent with a distinctive Jewish verbal culture contributing to a distinctive species of intelligence.
Insofar as it is de facto forbidden to discuss the root causes of cultural discrepancies in outcomes, we are prevented from a frank and open discussion of underlying cultural foundations of success. One might have imagined that concerns about genetic root causes might have redoubled interest in researching cultural root causes, but instead both have been rendered off limits.
My vested interest: I believe intellectual dialogue, led by intelligent people who are interested in debating ideas (i.e. not most K12 teachers, who have low average SAT scores) should be a foundational experience in both elementary and secondary schools. It could be that exposure to intellectual dialogue is only valuable in the sensitive period of early childhood. But it could also be that ongoing immersion within a culture in which intellectual dialogue is actively practiced, nurtured, and respected is essential to the preservation and development of intellectual gains. It could also be that later immersion in intellectual dialogue can result in intellectual gains even among those who did not receive it as children (this is my belief based on my experience but I only have evidence based on tiny sample sizes).
I come from a white Lutheran working class culture which did a great job of inculcating a "Lake Wobegon" work ethic but in which intellectual dialogue was entirely alien. When I visited home after college, I found my Socratic mode of inquiry was actively unwelcomed by my family as an inappropriate form of social interaction. In essence, learning intellectual dialogue was like learning a foreign language for me. I've seen countless working class kids in public schools who had a similar experience - often they found that when I was working to engage them in intellectual dialogue they needed to violate familiar norms of interaction. Some knew they would get in trouble at home for interacting in such a manner. My sense is most Jewish families welcome discussions of ideas (so much so that Scott is unaware that this is not universally "American.")
More broadly, I believe that K12's focus on curriculum, assessment, etc. is the wrong model for education. Instead, it should be the design and deployment of subcultures that transmit the real habits and attitudes of success, with Joseph Henrich and Judith Rich Harris serving as key influences on my thinking here, see "Cultural Design as Educational Innovation,"
It should not be controversial to note that the insights of Henrich and Harris are not even on the map with respect to educational policy debates.
With respect to Harris, her "No Two Alike," which analyzes the causes of personality differences between identical twins, provides several distinct mechanisms through which significant differences in personality can develop even when the genetic material is identical. She refers to the components of her explanation as a relationship system, a socialization system, and a status system,
Again, if we are interested in how human beings vary beyond genetics, one might have thought that Harris' schema here might have received more attention.
Another data point for the notion that the transmission of cultural norms should be the focus of education: Utah has the highest rate of social mobility in the U.S. despite having the lowest per capita expenditures in K12 education. The most likely hypothesis is that Mormon social technology (i.e. culture) has a greater impact than does curriculum, assessment, etc.
Nothing about our current K12 model is focused on the consistent development of habits and attitudes for success through immersion in a distinctive subculture. Nothing about how we think about education is focused on the deliberate design of subcultures. The notion that the "playbooks" of Duckworth's Character Lab could have a serious impact in light of Henrich's analysis of culture and Harris's analysis of personality development strikes me as laughable,
Well it somewhat depends who you ask, of course. But I think it's fair to say that he's far from being universally loved. I'd even go as far as to say that his fans are in a minority, but I don't have hard data to back that up, so it may be skewed by my particular outlook on the linguistics community (discipline- and geography-wise -- I'm based in Europe). In particular, the consensus in the US might be different.
Still, I'm firmly in the camp that finds it unfortunate that Chomsky of all modern linguists has become a household name. I think linguistics should strive to be an empirical science, examining real-world language data, conducting experiments etc. But Chomsky has always been an armchair linguist, preferring speculation and introspection, trying to justify this approach on a philosophical level by references to Descartes and 17th c. rationalism.
And he's *really* good at introspecting and speculating without letting any real-world data seep into his mind and -- God forbid -- moderate any of that in any way. For instance, I was really surprised when I learned that he actually has kids. His intuitions on how language acquisition should work (or rather must work -- he's persuaded he's rationally proven there's no other way) are so bizarre that I'd always thought he'd never spent a more than negligible amount of time in the company of a child.
(Then again, I guess having kids doesn't necessarily mean you've spent time with them.)
In a nutshell, Chomsky spawned a tradition in linguistics and psychology which is obsessed with trying to prove that a lot of language can't be learned because of "poverty of stimulus", so it must therefore be innate. There's a paper I really like (http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~mramscar/papers/Ramscar%20Dye%20McCauley%202013.pdf) which has this to say about it:
> Strikingly, psychologists studying rats have found it impossible to explain the behavior of their subjects without acknowledging that rats are capable of learning in ways that are far more subtle and sophisticated than many researchers studying language tend to countenance in human children.
This is rather veiled, but some people really hold a grudge against him. I mean I do too, but not to the point of spending time and energy to vent it in peer-reviewed publications. This review (https://www.grsampson.net/ARsy.pdf) is a good and entertaining sample of that end of the spectrum.
It has an interesting explanation for Chomsky's penchant for the arcane -- that he's basically a charlatan. He heard some exciting buzzwords in the corridors at MIT in the 1950s, applied them in a slapdash way to linguistics, and when the boat started leaking, retreated to increasingly abstract and abstruse ground. (Is the argument, which I find plausible, but YMMV.)
If you're interested, I wrote a more extended take on Chomsky here: https://dlukes.github.io/cathedral-and-bazaar.html. Fair warning: the text is five years old at this point and I've come across really exciting research in the meantime that would play a central role in the article if I were to rewrite it today (here's a link to one of the papers, for anyone interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03991; or google for Michael Ramscar).
I also don't have Scott's knack for effortless writing about complex subjects, plus it was for a grad school assignment, so it might not be the most digestible of reads :)
I suspect, with low confidence, that the key to (obviously real) Jewish overperformance is "don´t be a peasant". Medieval Jews had largely urban or at least other nonagricultural occupations, and it is easy to construct a story when this situation led to both cultural and genetic skew towards traits that would be more useful in nonpeasant dominated world than those of their agricultural neighbors
1-I get the feeling there are a disproportionate number of Jews in the rationalist community as well. For what it’s worth that includes me. I’m not sure if I’m even right but I’ve wondered why this is.
2-I wonder how, if it all, extensive Talmud study affects a person. I personally feel it has majorly shaped the way I think. I could definitely imagine it making the rationalist way of thinking more appealing.
I’m a bit surprised you don’t extend this to psychological data, which seems like a better way to explore root causes of behavior than personal anecdote or a theory about intelligence alleles. Surely there are relevant ethnic differences on Big Five personality traits for Jewish Americans, and those could easily influence things like income, wealth, and educational achievement.
I’m not sure they’re all things I would wish upon my (Jewish!) children though.
Noah Smith also points out that other minority religious groups, such as Quakers, Mormons, Jains, Christian Arabs etc. also do very well.
Is it possible that perhaps if a minority religion is not optimized for producing generations financially successful, family supporting and fertile followers it will quickly die out, and therefore the observed success is just survivorship bias?
non-successful religious minorities include: Roma, Uyghurs in China, Muslims in Europe, Palestinians in Israel, Aboriginals in Australia, Natives in North America, tribal religions in Africa, Taiwanese indigenous animists.
Seems unlikely that there's any big benefit to being a religious minority per se. It's more like a publication bias than a survivorship bias.
In the 1995 book "Jews and the New American Scene," the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp. 26-27]
I assume Jews were about 3% of the US population in 1965-1995, so these are impressive proportions.
There might have been something intellectually important going on with Jews pretty early. The Talmud was created and preserved, and I don't know of anyone else who has something like that.
Agreed; the idea that the Jews only prospered from the 19th century onwards seems a bit strange as well. Even during the most Jew-oppresive times of the early middle ages, during the Crusades, many, if not most, of the European monarchs had Jewish advisors and financiers.
There could have been something intellectually important happening pretty early-- I don't think any other group produced something like the Talmud, or at least if they did, it wasn't preserved.
You overlook another political motive to downplay or "erase" Jewish success. We'd like to believe that the presence of massive historical trauma (e.g., slavery, holocaust) means centuries of group underperformance that can only be fixed by government intervention.
It's the cork effect! When you hold a cork under water, it needs to "work harder to barely reach the surface". Take away the oppression and it shoots up out of the water.
The observed slope downwards fits perfectly with that model, since you don't need to work hard at the very top, a cork will come back down soon after, too.
This has a variation, the "soaked sponge", where if you hold down a sponge for many generations, it soaks up water and sinks, no matter whether the oppression is lifted.
One of the issues with statistics is that if you take data and try to find statistically significant irregularities, YOU WILL. This is why the parameters of a study must be decided before the study is done(You have a 37% chance of 1 of 1000 tests to a set of data being true if each test has a 0.1% chance of being randomly true on its own)
As a result, we should expect some outliers in terms of performance merely due to random factors. Additionally, we know high achieving (HA) parents create high achieving kids. Accordingly, we expect noise in the form of HA to propagate through multiple generations.
I would expect this to not merely be true at the family unit level but also at the cultural level and for some cultures to share child-rearing strategies which impact level-of-achievement.
Obviously, Jews or US Jews don't really share a culture per se but this would still thicken the tail of the per-culture achievement histogram.
Great piece but he surely cannot believe what he is writing. Maybe we need to go Straussian here and analyse what he's not allowed to tell us. Prevent Jewish education by "marrying non-jews", lol it's clear what his solution is. (Interesting to note that he too is a jew)
Scott, the answers to virtually all the group difference questions are pretty straightforward: information technology. The rise of the Jews is closely connected to requiring universal male literacy, i.e., adopting books before everyone else. The rise of Western Europe relative to others is not difficult to connect to the printing press.
"But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet""
The "than" seems out of place. Someone quoted you down in the comments section and it seems like this sentence used to be:
"is greater than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
When I was in grad school (in the USA), in the mid 2000s, a professor from China was asking me questions about my family and said, "You're Jewish, right?" I told him no, and he looked startled. "I thought all the smart Americans were Jews," he explained. I didn't try to correct him, as it seemed like a reasonable mistake for him to make, but it wasn't like he had a secret racist or non-racist agenda or really thought much about American ethnicities at all. He, or his colleagues, had simply observed that all the smart Americans they knew were Jews and made an induction accordingly.
Of course, I don't think you can actually double income by making everyone after/whatever, because income is largely positional, and jobs are based on supply and demand.
If the average IQ became 130, burger flippers wouldn't suddenly become middle management, nor would burger flippers get paid twice as much for the same work. It would just mean that burger flippers have an IQ of 125 now, and possibly suffer more from the tedium and frustration of wasted potential than they did before.
I think the idea is that if everyone gets smarter, then every job where intelligence matters gets done better. And if lots of jobs are getting done better, then society as a whole runs better and everyone prospers.
You could just as easily make the case that if everyone is smarter and better educated then more workers will argue with their bosses, join unions, read Marxist theory and devise revolutionary strategies.
People talk a lot about IQ, but they seldom talk about level of motivation. Seems to me that motivation is far more important. IQ tells us 'if you can'. Motivation tells us 'if you want to'. The world is full of people with all sorts of talents, including high IQ, who are unreliable-- and unsuccessful.
People with Jewish backgrounds have, on average, much higher rates of anxiety than people with non-Jewish backgrounds. Anxiety-- about bad outcomes in the future, either specific, well visualized bad outcomes, or just generalized bad outcomes-- is a very, very strong motivator to try and avoid those bad outcomes.
Students who are more anxious about the future, study longer and harder, and try harder to do well on tests. Adults who are more anxious about the future, work longer and harder, try to please the boss or their customers by being helpful and reliable, and save more money as a cushion against the future. It just makes sense that group of people who are, on average, more anxious, are also going to, on average, end up in jobs that are better paying, and more economically secure--regardless of their average IQ.
In my personal experience, anxiety hurts performance pretty badly. It's a big part of why I didn't make it through college on my first try. (For what it's worth, I'm half Jewish, and neither of my parents had this problem.)
No doubt anxiety is one of those things where you need to be in the right range-- enough to motivate, but not enough to paralyse.
There's probably something to look at in whether people believe there's something which will take the edge off the anxiety. If you believe education/achievement will make you feel at least a little better, there can be a positive effect on your life, even if you would be happier if you were calmer.
If effort/success makes you feel more anxious, you have a problem.
I would agree with this, and add that when we talk about people with "anxiety" we tend to look at people who have enough of it to destabilize them. I doubt we have good measures of anxiety in most of the population (i.e. those that are not so anxious as to seek medical help), to verify the hypothesis of "right range" levels. That said, we may have code words that we use to talk about either anxiety or related concepts - "Type A personality" - that may be a decent proxy for what we are considering.
So complicated, but probably includes something to do with the Jewish emphasis on education that others have mentioned. (Even if you belief there is a metaphysical component- and I am an Orthodox Jew myself- it's still necessary to have a temporal context in which Providence can take shape.) Although it's true that some very religious Jews are skeptical of secular education, this tends to be limited to knowledge that isn't "necessary" to live a successful lifestyle, e.g. classics, abstract math, certain sciences, but doesn't include those disciplines which are practical.
It's also definitely not the case that religious Jews are brainless fundamentalists who spend all their time in prayer and memorizing lengthy catechisms. Traditional Jewish study is intensely rigorous and exceedingly intellectual in many regards. Scholarship is prized and rewarded socially and the most advanced students will be sought out for rabbinic positions.
In the secular or less Orthodox Jewish worlds, the primacy of erudition has been at most displaced on, or at least, shared with secular disciplines. Interestingly, however, I don't know to what extend secular Jews share the pragmatism of their highly religious peers. Non religious Jews, for instance, are much more likely to value attending a prestigious college, whereas many religious Jews would choose to attend schools with lower tuition costs.
This one I'm not as sure about, but there may be some relevance to Judaism's emphasis on practice, as opposed to belief, for which it is often contrasted with Christianity (perhaps unfairly so). The highlighting of this world, as opposed to the next, may feed the pragmatic impulse, at least in part. A person very focused on the perfect existence of heaven, may feel less inclined to exert themselves more than necessary and that extra push might've gone a long way.
Finally, there's definitely a component of the Jewish emphasis on community. Largely due to the prevalence of anti-semitism, Jews formed strong communal organizations and high levels of trust between coreligionists. Although Jews from around the globe have varying customs, they are also more or less similar, in contrast with the heritage differential between Philippine and Argentine Catholics, for instance. Even today, if I call up an Orthodox synagogue anywhere on Earth and explain that I'll be in town for the Sabbath and need a place to stay, I'll be given accommodations almost immediately.
How has the term "sexual selection" not been mentioned yet? If there are proximal cultural causes ("likes books") then presumably mate selection strategies would be one of the more ultimate of those ("likes wo/men who like books", or more realistically, "blessing of parents/friends/etc. is important and also rather contingent on candidate-mate intellect").
It might not be intellect per se, but I think a culturally-mediated sexual-selection bias has to be concerned with a (more) intrinsic factor like intelligence, to produce resilience against short-term environmental effects. This is basically to say choosing a mate who's rich is not as good a strategy long-term as choosing a mate who is capable.
"the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview"
I expect that this statement is highly incorrect. Just considering how niche of a cultural group you wound up in, whether rationalist, or people who write highly controversial blogs for other people who are more interested in truth than group acceptance, what have you. When you get your own show on CNN with millions of viewers, then maybe you can be considered closer to the mainstream.
More pointedly in favor of the cultural view is that point about black students trying to do well in school "acting white". The mistake made there is claiming that race is the distinctive marker; those students are not acting white, they are acting successful. When I taught I saw the difference frequently, and it had little to do with race. In fact, native born college students were often worse about it than foreign or first generation immigrant students. Responsibility, taking charge of their education, etc. was engrained in some students and not in others. Some students would email questions if they didn't understand the homework, some would only ask after they handed it in. Or they wouldn't hand it in at all and cite some confusion as an excuse, having never contacted me despite having ample time.
What seems strange to me is that social scientists always focus on differences between ethnic groups then dither about genetics vs culture instead of looking at homogenous ethnic groups and then considering the differences between performances. The in-group differences are pretty broad for US groups, so why not see if the same things that make some of group X more successful than others in group X also make some of group Y more successful than others in group Y?
It is not surprising that John Ogbu, the Nigerian sociologist who first called attention to the phenomenon of black students trying to do well in school being accused of "acting white" is not only Nigerian, but Igbo, the tribe often described as the Jews of Africa because of their disproportionate success both intellectually and entrepreneurially,
It is estimated that 75% of black medical doctors in the U.S. are Nigerian and most of those are probably Igbo.
Nigerian universities have differing admissions standards designed to prevent Igbos from dominating those universities just as elite U.S. universities have different standards designed to prevent Jews and Asians from taking up "too many" spots. Anambra state, in the account below, is predominantly Igbo,
"The cut-off mark for a male pupil from Yobe State in the 2018/2019 session is two. It is four points for the male candidate from Zamfara while the male candidate from Taraba State only needs three points out of 300 to be a proud student of any of the federal government colleges he so chooses. But the minimum score is 139 for any male or female pupil from Anambra State nursing the hope of getting place in a unity college."
Well, the Nigerians are indeed princes among men, so one would expect them to have much higher levels of success! Probably the highest level of princes per capita than anywhere else in the world.
That is a great point to bring up relative to the Igbo especially. A comparatively small subculture being far more common in a particular field than others is remarkably common across the world. Almost as though genetics and culture can combine to make some groups more effective at certain jobs than others. I prefer to focus on culture, as genetics is tricky to shift and seemingly throws up a lot of randomness, but both do seem to be important.
I think your discussion of Scots sort of dances around the point Noah is making with it. His point I take it, is that if Scots can have been disproportionately successful relative to the English, to whom we are basically genetically identical (goes the assumption; no idea if it's true) then the edgy Cochran-style genetic race science explanation for the success of Ashkenazim is ruled out. I don't think he's actually really saying that it means that there is nothing further to explain, just that 'hey, Jews sure do value education' or other plausible sociological explanations are less interesting in the "will start a big fight' way.
Also, I think there's a mistake here: ' On the other, I'm not sure that the Scottish Golden Age is really appropriate. I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in
Also, I think this bit is just a mistake: ' I took Noah's point about the Scots to be that we were disproportionately successful *compared* to the English who also enjoyed all the same advantages, but that no one really cares about this or dreams of thinking it's genetic. No idea if that's actually true, but it's not a rebuttal of that point to bring up advantages we shared with the English relative to the rest of the world
'But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that's true, I think it would be even more interesting - it would mean there's some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery. I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. But if I'm wrong, figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!).'
I think the kind of reasoning here of 'hey, Jews make double the average income because they have X traits, so if everyone has X traits-high IQ etc.-they'd all be making that money' is very dubious in a way that I'm surprised someone as sharp as you didn't pick up on. (Unless I'm misreading you? Which I guess is not that unlikely, and I apologize if I am). Some of the extra income Jews earn, perhaps even most of it, comes from their *relative* advantage next to everyone else in the labour market, and would go away if everyone was average IQ 115 or whatever, but the badly paid jobs still had to be filled. Obviously, it is more complicated than that, since likely everyone being more intelligent would raise productivity and hence raise real incomes, but its certainly not as simple as 'hey, if we made everyone like Jews, they'd automatically earn the same money!"
I think there's a few important differences in the narratives about white people controlling everything and creating structures that favor whites vs Jews doing that.
1. White people factually *did* do that in the past, whereas as far as I know, Jews never did. Saying there are remnants of that structure/control isn't really controversial; it's just a matter of degree.
2. Whereas STEM fields feature plenty of other ethnic groups doing better than whites, politicians, CEOs, and other groups that *actually* control structures/institutions are overwhelmingly white (and have not ever been overwhelmingly Jewish). Frankly, those groups are also much easier to bullshit your way into than STEM fields (where you're more often measured in objective skill), so they're more likely to indicate actual bias.
1. Exactly whom the controlling whites were controlling matters, right? The barriers erected by American whites to Jewish success are trivial compared to the roadblocks thrown in the way of blacks. To the extent that Jews were considered white (or at least non-black), they benefitted from the structures that favored whites. Simple example: some whites would not have qualified for Major League Baseball if superior players had not been relegated to the Negro Leagues. That's almost certainly true for Jews, too, as they were in the league from its earliest days.
2. I don't have hard numbers for the percentage of Jews in STEM vs. Bullshit. Could be higher, could be lower, and complicated by the difficulty in identifying the Bullshit careers. Whatever those are (law, finance, CEOs, journalism, entertainment, politics), certainly there are a lot of Jews earning a nice living in Bullshit. You're correct in saying that these fields are not "overwhelmingly Jewish" (exception: entertainment executives? Biden's cabinet?), but they're punching well above their 2% weight. However, there aren't many Indians or east Asians in Bullshit. Perhaps whites are able to bias the Patels and Changs of the world out of Bullshit careers. But it would seem that Jews are on the Oppressor side of the equation along with the (rest of the) whites, because they thrive in the Bullshit fields.
I'd like to see a historical comparison between European Jews and Romani. A general explanation from the circumstances of the Jews (which of course this isn't) would also have to explain the lack of Romani Nobel Prize winners, as the Romani faced very similar discrimination, which you'd expect would cause broadly similar outcomes. I've seen a few hints at "you can explain Jewish success just from circumstances" ideas, but none that have answered the question of where my Romani scientists are.
"...figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems..."
2) A neuroscientist told me (in conversation, no reference, sorry) that human language got a lot more complex (recursive) when literacy developed. This speaks to the culture idea. Others have made related points - for example, that intellectual discussion is not the norm in most cultures, but probably is among the Ashkenazim.
3) My wife and I are both very verbally intelligent (one was a classics major and reads 6 languages; the other repeatedly scored 800 on the verbal SAT and GRE). Regression to the mean implies that our kids should be noticeably less smart as we are. But at 2.5 years old, my kid asked for help when a tower fell over: "Daddy, give it stability." And at 3.25 years old, casually said: "Bedroom is a metaphorical word for a living room with a baby sleeping in it."
To demonstrate and analyze cultural transmission of intelligence, it would be worth looking at the intelligence of children of intelligent parents. In families where the kids are as intelligent as the parents, figure out what cultural or behavioral factors are adding to the portion of intelligence that's not genetic.
4) Even the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that intelligence will be strongly influenced by language structure. Not the textbook version of the language, but the version spoken by the individual. There are many versions of English, varying in important ways - for example, whether double negation means negative or positive. I suspect that when studied through this lens, languages spoken in high-intelligence families will turn out to be more highly structured and more reflective of logic than the versions spoken in the general population.
5) In another post, Scott wrote: "many studies show that smarter teachers make students learn more (though this specifically means high-IQ teachers; making teachers get more credentials has no effect)." https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
There's clearly no genetic effect here, but there is apparently an effect clear enough to imply a mechanism. Whatever that mechanism is, it likely works in families as well - which makes yet another argument for the "payload" hypothesis.
Scott, if you read this, I'm very curious whether you agree that this intelligent-teacher effect is relevant to the plausibility of a cultural-payload effect.
6) I recently wrote and taught a 9-week class on computer fundamentals, 2 hours per week, no homework. The students were high schoolers in a program aimed at getting students of color into tech. Some of the students were unfamiliar with spreadsheets; some weren't comfortable with multi-column add-with-carry-by-hand; some couldn't balance parentheses.
For 80% of the classes, by self-report, the students were in the "Learning zone" (as opposed to the "Panic zone" or the "Comfort zone") and only 2 out of 65 felt panicked for more than 2 of the 9 classes.
In those 18 hours, we covered rigorously a sequence of about 20 closely-linked conceptual frameworks from MOSFET transistors, through CPU architecture, through hash tables and execution contexts, to how object oriented inheritance and async/await programming are implemented in JavaScript. By the ninth week they could all understand statements like "The function creates an execution context and puts it into the "then" data structure of the local Promise so it will be loaded and run when that Promise is satisfied, then returns the function Promise so that whatever called this function can await on it."
Actually, I only taught 41 of the students; another volunteer teacher used my material in a 24-student class with equal success. Whatever was responsible for this level of student learning, it wasn't my teaching; it was something - some payload - in the material.
My strategy was to demystify every concept and provide complete rigor at every step; to leave no student behind at any point, going as slowly as necessary to answer every question fully; to make no assumptions about their prior knowledge, giving them every concept needed for all future topics; to demonstrate from the start that every topic was fundamentally simple and comprehensible. Somehow, that payload got 65 high schoolers through college level material at college speed.
7) If 18 hours of "payload" can instill advanced computer science topics, what might be the effect of an entire childhood in the company of parents from a Talmud-studying culture - or for that matter, a parent who reads classical Greek for fun and another who writes software professionally?
Can this kind of "payload" be distilled and made available to every person and family that would benefit from it, pan-culturally? It seems that some useful fraction of it can be delivered to young adults in 18 hours. For example, could a set of simple language exercises be developed that would broaden and/or augment people's structure of thinking?
Even if it's the result of selective immigration, that it persists two generations later poses the same interesting cultural/genetic quandary of how to replicate it for all.
It's a fact that Jews were vastly overrepresented in STEM throughout the 20th century in every place that had a large Jewish population, it's not just USA.
Evolutionary speaking, Jews in both Russia and Europe were for many generations living under special rules and subjected to a different kind of selective pressure than the rest of the population. Excluded from military and law enforcement, prohibited from owning land, forcefully converted to Christianity (those who accepted the conversion were effectively removed from the modern Jewish gene pool), and so on. Different selective pressure -> different traits. This is one strong candidate for the "why".
I have to go with Noah Smith in rating the topic a qualified "uninteresting." Factors in the causal path of exceptional behavior of any form are interesting but, as framed, the discussion shares attributes with conversations I can imagine among early rationalists attempting to explain planetary motion while holding Earth as the unquestioned center of those motions (for theological reasons, even).
It seems certain that we will soon identify specific genetic profiles that predispose those who possess them to excel in specific types of human endeavors and perhaps in possessing them to be unlikely to excel in others. Based on what we know about genetic diversity, it seems even more certain that none of our historically antiquated family resemblance constructs, Jew included for there is no single non-trivial criterion for "Jew" that runs through all cases of those we call Jews, will demonstrate discriminant validity for the profile.
Separately, portions of this discussion are permeated with a sense of pride or superiority for attributes that are inherently accidents of birth and thus are not logically subject to praise or blame.
And if the cultural trait is "a sense of alienation from mainstream society" (incentivizing reflection and an analytical approach to he world)? If it is that, it will be impossible to apply in large scale.
christians made its high iq people into monks that had no kids, hebrews made its high iq people into rabbis that had 10 kids, this isn't overly complicated
Source of the soviet scientists chart is an official publication "Statistical material for the 250th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences" here: https://history-russia.livejournal.com/45339.html
I think a larger piece of overlooked dark matter here is the substantially lower rates of alcohol use and abuse in Jewish populations across both time and geographies. One of many studies here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095014
Ashkenazi jews are smart because they are the result of the original hebs mixing with petite roman royalty and then when they had enough of hellenization, they developed a complex mechanism of conversion to keep themselves separate.
Not any goyische idiot could convert to judaism, it was a proto-IQ test of sorts.
Rereading your piece about Hungarian-Jewish scientific achievement and mentally replacing the Budapest high schools with Bronx Sci and Stuyvesant in the 20s-60s
One is education: Jewish culture has valued education more, and valued it for much longer, than mainstream culture. This started for religious reasons, with the belief that Jews needed to study Jewish law carefully and extensively in order to fully understand and properly obey it. This built a pro-study attitude that later carried over to secular intellectual pursuits.
The second is social support: Jewish culture places a high value on Jews helping other Jews. Anti-Semites tend to cast this as a source of malign conspiracy, but more often it just means helping each other with the ordinary burdens of life. This is an underrated factor in helping people to accomplish more without burning out, and it does a lot to help kids succeed in school, get into good colleges, get good jobs, and succeed in those jobs.
I'm not Jewish, but I read a lot, and this is my best guess based on the information I have. I also suspect that these two factors reinforce each other: lots of social support from a network of highly educated and accomplished people does a lot to help kids grow up to be highly educated and accomplished themselves.
I think it would be interesting to do these comparisons adjusted for IQ. Like how do gentiles (of which I am one) with a 115-130 IQ do compared to Jews with a 115-130 IQ. I remember seeing somewhere that Episcopalians at some point in the past (probably '60s) had a comparable IQ to Jews.
If the 115-130 gentile cohort performed (however you want to define it - income , level of education, etc.) comparably to the 115-130 Jewish cohort, then the case could be made that Jewish outperformance is IQ based. If the Jewish cohort outperformed the gentile cohort, then Jewish outperformance may be culturaly based.
I tend to think its a combination of the two (maybe they are interelated - higher IQ leads to a "better" culture).
A while ago, I did a simple statistical analysis. I looked at the number of white people in the US, assumed a 100 mean IQ/15 standard deviation and used the normal distribution to estimate how many white gentiles have an IQ over 115. I then did the same analysis on the US Jewish population with a 115 mean IQ to get the number of Jews with an IQ > 115.
The result was that the number of gentiles with a 115+ IQ was a multiple of the number of Jews with a 115 IQ (simply because there are some many more gentiles). To me, this pointed to there being a meaningful cultural component of Jewish outperformance.
The anti-semite might say that is because of some nefarious clanninish or cunning that isn't captured in IQ. Others might say it due to a focus on education, achievement, family, etc.
Not that I'll be around, but it'll be interesting to see if Jewish (and Asian, for that matter) outperformance continues in 200 years. The Scottish Enlightenment is a good example, but so is the relative performance of Greeks in the US in the '60s. They were the super immigrant group for a while, but seem to have blended in with the broader population.
I also think the trend of Jewish excellence goes back much further than Noah Smith allows for, especially when you control for how few Jews there were in Europe and the Middle East compared to the majority populations, and the sheer level of disadvantage and suspicion they faced. Before 1800 there were certain periods in certain countries when they weren't relentlessly harassed and persecuted, and those periods always coincided with impressive achievements:
And even in the really anti-Semitic countries you had Jews who were barred from doing virtually everything else becoming highly successful in the financial sector, culminating in the phenomenon of the powerful and influential "court Jew":
I think it's hard work combined with looking for ways to be well-paid for hard work.
"If you compare Ashkenazi Jews with other white ethnic groups in America, they seem less special. They don't top the charts in IQ, wealth, or any other "interesting" metric I can think of."
Wait which American white ethnic groups do you mean have comparable IQ, wealth, and other interesting metrics, as Jews?
Very interesting, thank you. If you have the statistics on WASP IQ and wealth on hand I would be grateful to get a link! I agree that it is kinda misleading to compare "Ashkenazi jews" to "non Ashkenazi white people" because the latter group is a vast and highly diverse group. Someone in these comments said something like all Ashkenazis share mitochondrial DNA with 4 women, or something to that effect, so it is almost like looking at a specific family tree rather than a race.
It's interesting that in the graph in the original post the ethnicity that does the best are Belarusians. I wonder what the average american-belarusian IQ is.
Have higher rates of depression or higher rates of seeking treatment? I am not aware of the data of which you speak
Being smarter is correlated with higher rates of depression. They think more and that depresses them. Ignorance is bliss.
Would you be willing to expand on how Jewish culture feels foreign to you?
it is definitely within rationalist thinking https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYWhKXRsMAyvRKRYz/you-can-face-reality
> as it would point out the intrinsic supremacy of one group over another, with no recourse given to individuals in either group to change this perceived disparity.
I think there are very few individuals in the world who can change any group disparity. A couple of kings and Bill Gates, maybe. For most of us, that's not a productive goal. It's probably more helpful to focus on how I can change individual (not group) circumstances, whether in my own life or lives of those around me.
I'm also not sure about the "intrinsic supremacy" part. If nation A defeats nation B in a war, we don't say it's because of intrinsic supremacy of the nation A. Same if athlete A defeats athlete B.
I do agree that such a piece would feel iffy. But I also feel it's often worth it to investigate and understand why something is iffy.
It's perhaps surprising that an alternative solution, that Jews are disproportionately successful because of the blessing of השם, is not mentioned in your post, and is mentioned in Noah's only to note that he will not be considering it.
I think the Holocaust is generally viewed as an argument against that.
Do you mean that the Holocaust was so awful השם cannot exist, or do you mean that the Holocaust proves the Jews are not השם's chosen people?
(depending on your answer, you may want to note that השם made a great people out of the Ishmaelites as well)
Surely he means neither of these, but simply that the Holocaust proves that being the chosen people doesn't mean that you'll be materially successful or happy.
Maybe that being the "chosen people" was not (and never was) equivalent to being "disproportionately successful."
There are plenty of hints in the Hebrew Bible, and in history since then, that terms of the blessing are something like "you will be so improbably prosperous, given your resources, that your neighbors will constantly be tempted to kill, enslave, and oppress you."
It's a fairly common theme in the patriarchal narrative: see Gen 26:12-14; Gen 31:1-2; and mostly notably Ex 1:7-14.
Jahweh is expressly identified as a warrior in the Song of the Sea (aka the Song of Moses): Ex 1:3. Some believe this song to be very ancient. If correct, one might infer the warrior aspect to be original.
I think you nailed it with middleman.
Which didn’t have to happen in America, but as of today has and did.
"tempted to" is hedging language. Makes the prophecy true even if nothing happens.
I don't think that's what's in the bible-- it's more like if you don't obey God, your neighbors will attack you, maybe even conquer you.
That is in the Bible, as well.
I think that's basically a conversation-ending theory. If one accept that as a theory, what more is there to say or talk about? So like, its technically valid, but can be ignored, the same way "we're all in a simulation" can be ignored
From the perspective of "truth-seeking" (in contrast to "entertainment-seeking") - conversation-ending is a great feature of theory, isn't it? Anyway, I would reserve this term to theories which are self-defiance (such as absolute solipsism etc).
And by the way, Scott - I don't know if you're aware - but the way you explicitly distinguish Ashkenazi from other Jews here would be considered highly racist in Israel. Probably similarly to how discussing the possibility that blacks have lower IQ than whites may be perceived in the USA.
Well, it ends the conversation before we reach any kind of understanding that would allow us to make predictions. One says "God did it" and shrugs, while other people say "no wait, I think physical reality might follow certain rules and equations..." and end up with greater predictive power later on.
The nature vs nurture argument (and more specifically, the IQ vs culture argument) has been going on for the past fifty or so years. Both sides have been unable to convince the extremists on other side of the rightness of their interpretation. With the advent of PCR techniques, The IQers have been able to point to specific alleles which are significantly correlated with IQ, and have said, "Aha! See intelligence is a heritable characteristic!" The Culturists point out that IQ tests are pretty one dimensional when it comes to measuring the full range of human talents and behavioral repertoires, and that the tests can (a) be culturally biased, and (b) different testers and testing regimes can significantly improve or depress the results of the testees. Most researchers now agree that it intelligence is heritable but that also can be affected by environment and cultural situation. Of course, there are the extremists on either side of this question that are still fighting the old wars. What has been achieved? Little really. If you're extremist on either side of this question, you will not be convinced by the evidence that other side marshals. If you're in the middle, you'll shrug your shoulders.
However, I will leave you with on tidbit. Lewis Terman did a long-term study of the life-outcomes of people who tested 3 sigma above the IQ mean (i.e. geniuses) — n was ~1200 if I recall correctly. The study continued to run after his death. The study showed that geniuses were not very exceptional achievers. Most of Terman's "Termites" ended up with middle-class to upper middle class incomes. A lot were very successful in professional careers, such as Drs and Lawyers. But a lot didn't achieve much of anything of note. No Nobel prizes. No great works of literature or art. A few millionaires, but none of them became super wealthy. Of course, most of the "Termites" were WASPs. I'm not sure what a similar study on the life outcomes of Ashkenazi Jews with +3 sigma IQs would show.
Hypotheses involving divine agency are notoriously difficult to falsify. I don't fault their exclusion here.
Why do only post-19th century Ashkenazim get this blessing? There's little sign of similar success among any other Jewish tradition or before 1800.
I think the Jewish people have always been disproportionately successful. That’s why there’s always been conspiracy theories about them. It’s just that the intellectual system changed in the 1800s. Measuring and rewarding academic achievement more fairly. Perhaps believing you are a unique and special people is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I think the simple fact that Jewish people were often the only visible ethnic minority around has for more explanatory power than Jews being economically successful for why there are so many antisemetic conspiracy theories.
The Roma have been around as well in Europe for about 600 years. But, contra Yuri Slezkine, Ashkenazis and Roma have remarkably little in common.
Napoleon accidentally transferred God's blessing from the French to the Jewish people.
My only response on this substack is “השם works in mysterious ways”.
+1
my only response is your counting of responses works in mysterious ways
So you came to this substack, that clearly has an atheist bent, to comment on how strange it is to you that the author did not entertain this ill-defined, baseless, unfalsifiable hypothesis that has no explanatory power? If השם cannot be understood by humans, then השם is of no use as a hypothesis, and you are simply wasting people's time.
yeah what sort of a nutter links the Jews with God
Sir, Madam, or Other: perhaps it may assist you in recognising the intent of the comment if it is explained that this is not meant absolutely seriously, but is an example of what is known commonly as a "joke", or jocular/humorous expression intended to evoke hilarity in the readers/listeners rather than an attempt to stick it to the atheists.
I will bet you $500 that the commenter Alex Power was not joking. Please for the love of השם tell me there is some actual confidence behind all that smug pedantry.
There was a hint of a joke there; if these two rationalists note they are Jewish yet aren't willing to consider the theory that השם has something to do with things on Earth, how Jewish are they?
Perhaps the societies in which the Sephardim existed were less amenable to such success by religious minorities or perhaps even the majority population. Spain and Portugal were deeply cursed by the resource trap, as I recall.
My impression is that, prior to the last century or two, it was the Sephardim who did well. David Ricardo was Sephardic. But the Rothschilds were Ashkenazi, so that would be an exception.
It's quite simply IMO.
"Achievement" is some function of secularization (can't contribute productively to modern science if you're dissecting the Torah) * demographics (Jews were expanding as a share of the European population up until ~1900) * literacy rate.
Ashkenazi Jews tended to be affluent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance as they were invited to the Polish commonwealth to fill bourgeois jobs needing literacy and numeracy.. But their population boomed so much from, say, 1600 to 1900, that they filled up all the upscale jobs open to them, such as finance, and many were forced down the economic ladder to be tailors or milkmen or whatever.
The 2005 Cochran-Harpending paper on the Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence is immensely informative on this topic:
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
My recollection from Sowell is that Volkdeutsch filled many such roles in Russia proper, but they were purged in the world wars & revolution.
The Russians, like Catharine the Great, invited the Germans in to do advanced stuff. Germany was far enough a way that this didn't see too much of a security risk.
The Polish aristocrats thought about inviting in numerate German after the Mongols massacred a lot of their indigenous urban bourgeoisie in the 1200s, but then they worried that the Germans lived right next door and might try to take over Poland. So, they chose Rhineland Jews to be their new bourgeois.
Those were some prescient Polish nobles. Although there had already been Germans seizing territory in the east by then.
Actually, before XV century it was rather Polish princes, dukes and kings which did the inviting, and they did invite a lot of German settlers.
Medieval and early modern Poland used to accept any valuable refugees ejected by Europe's perennial conflicts, including wars of religion. E.g. it accepted quite a lot of Huguenots.
It's more like the Germans were invited and did in fact proceed to take over (often successfully, e.g. in Silesia). The put-down of Kraków's bourgeoisie uprising (and subsequent purge of german-speaking citizens) was a major turning point in reinstitution of a centralized Piast state.
"By analyzing the proliferation of long nucleotide sequences that are identical in the unrelated individuals in their sample, the researchers determined that a population bottleneck of approximately just 350 Ashkenazi Jewish individuals occurred in central Europe about 700 years ago, followed by an exponentially rapid population increase." https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry
These 350 individuals probably consisted largely of high-IQ lawyers, bankers and scholars. This genetic profile would have remained in the same population that exploded in Eastern Europe. Even if these Eastern Jews were mostly peasants (because there wasn't a huge division of labor in the High Middle Ages), they were obviously very smart peasants.
When the Industrial Revolution and capitalism opened up opportunities for intelligent people to achieve financial success after circa 1800, the Jews were naturally able to take advantage.
They weren't peasants. Eastern Europe already had a peasantry, and even hereditary serfdom well past its abolition in western Europe. Jews had middle-men occupations.
They were more likely to be in those positions, it's true. But there weren't enough middle-man positions in such an undeveloped economy for all Jews to have one (like tax collectors, merchants, landlords, licensed vodka dealers).
But having a high IQ leads to better productivity in almost any job. So I would imagine that Jews tended to be more successful as farmers as well. ("Peasant" was a poor choice of words because you are right they weren't really feudal peasants in the legal sense but just agrarian smallholders). Of course, back then, unlike today, having a consistently higher income meant lots more surviving children than a poor person (say, 8 vs. 1) and a correspondingly geometric increase in population percentage.
I am kind of surprised that essentially none of the comments mention IQ or genetics. I wonder if it's because people don't know the facts or if they're just afraid to mention them even in an anonymous comment.
My understanding is that they ran out of middlemen positions after their population exploded. Which reminds me of the downward mobility in Greg Clark's "A Farewell to Alms".
It's beyond doubt that IQ is important in this, with Ashkenazi jews probably averaging ten points higher than the mean of 100. IQ is the best predictor of future success in education, employment and financial stability. I am not for one moment saying it is the only thing we should value about people (finding ways for people who aren't gifted that way to be valued and successful in society is something we have failed to address in modern times), but it cannot be ignored as an embarrassing form of 'privilege' we pretend isn't there.
There is also the fascinating hypothesis that jews in the diaspora were selected for intelligence, often being restricted to the unchristian work of moneylending and working with figures, and perhaps doing all the bookkeeping mentally to avoid written records come the next tax collector. I can't speak to the American immigrant experience, but I did live in the east end of London many years ago, where poor jewish people were common. Even then, they didn't stay poor long as the work ethic shone through and they soon made the clockwise trek to the north London suburbs. And good for them. An example to the rest of us, especially considering the pretty horrible way the establishment spoke of them in those days.
Are you kidding???? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Court_Jews or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule. " For instance, Jews ... were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Baghdad. The list goes on and on. How could you possibly say that?
Those were Sephardi, so it’s not relevant to Ashkenazi achievement. In Europe Jews were prohibited by law from owning land or many professions. Medicine and moneylending were not excluded. I don’t think a Jewish lawyer would have gotten a fair hearing for a client so most likely the lawyer stereotype emerged in the 19th Century. Culture matters, like Moses Mendelssohn walking hundreds of miles to be allowed to study, or Richard Feynman mentioning that a yeshiva student’s mother observed her day was made because she had met a General and a Professor the same day, and most would not put the two in the same esteem.
Yes, exactly. Scott claimed that Jewish intellectual success is limited to post 1800 Ashkenazim, which is obviously false. It is also present in pre 1800 Ashkenazim and pre 1800 Sephardim.
Maybe the key is mixing low income traditional Jews into a western society that tolerates them? Looking at French Jews, most of them nowadays are Sephardic and they're famous for all being doctors and lawyers. Might be difficult to have data on the phenomenon given ethnic statistics are forbidden on France, but maybe Israeli statistics on olim from France could be useful.
If it's correct that there was no similar success before 1800, we could rule out a genetic explanation.
Yep. But that's the opposite of correct.
Scott has to know better. He also knows the data on Jewish IQ and the data on the genetic basis of IQ. So he's playing dumb for whatever reason.
Read up on figures like Josef Nasi, the Sassoon family, or the success of Sephardim in England, the Netherlands, Ottoman lands, etc. There was plenty of success.
Plus there was the privileged status of many Ashkenazim in the Polish Commonwealth.
Ashkenazim in Central Europe and the East were some of the last to get emancipated and also happened to be where the bulk of Jewish population growth was following the reconquista; so the notion of them being the only ones to experience a sudden boom in well being and only following 1800 is probably a reflection of it being a relatively large phenomenon being observed in a particular time.
Surprising the Scottish Enlightenment is referenced, but there is no mention of the Haskalah -- the contemporaneous Jewish enlightenment -- that began in Germany in the 1800's then spread eastward. Prior to this event, European Jews were a backwards people, at least by Enlightenment Europe standards.
Modern-day Ultra Orthodox Jews provide the best glimpse of pre-enlightenment Jewish culture. It's also probably not a coincidence that one of the poorest towns in the US -- Kiryas Joel, NY -- is a modern-day Orthodox shtetl. The same pattern repeats itself in Israel today, with Ultra Orthodox communities resembling the third-world.
While there is genetic evidence for higher Ashkenazi IQ's, the most important historical factor was living in close proximity the European Enlightenment, much like the Scotts you mentioned. Without it, Jewish communities would have continued to live in relative poverty, with minimal cultural advancement.
We did pretty well against Pharaoh that one time, admittedly after a bit of a losing streak
Because the Jews only discovered European culture (or greek wisdom as they used to call it) in the 18th century
And by a strange coincidence the jewish group that discovered european culture was the group of jews who lived among europeans
I find it hard to believe that the Ashkenazim took nearly two millennia to pick up the culture of the place where they lived.
They're not the only European Jews, either. There are also the Sephardim.
Actually, on re-reading, I note that I missed that Noah does discuss this theory: "In addition, I think that a large part of whatever Jewish overachievement remains will probably be attributable to the fact that Judaism is a religious minority, and religious minorities tend to overachieve."
I don't think Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses tend to overachieve.
Jehovah's Witnesses underachieve but I think part of that is that their religion
1) relies on converts, who are mostly poor to begin with
2) bans practitioners from public service, meaning the law will never be better-than-neutral in favor of the community
I heard a claim that at one time Jehovah's Witnesses were discouraged from pursuing higher education due to their prediction of the imminence of the end of the world (so it wouldn't be very useful to become an expert in worldly matters). I'm not sure if this is still the case, but there's something on the JW web site about higher education not being that important or valuable:
https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesses/faq/jw-education-school/
In Orthodox Judaism, secular higher education is often sometimes viewed with suspicion or not seen as very prestigious compared to religious study (although there are certainly many Orthodox and observant Jews in secular academia). But in more liberal and secularized forms of Judaism, it's *very* prestigious, and often more so than religious education. So that's kind of a complicated subject that also varies from Jewish community and denomination to Jewish community and denomination.
One other thing that seems different between the Witnesses and Judaism is that the Witnesses have a particular central authority that is supposed to study and interpret the scriptures for them, and then send out authoritative interpretations and teachings (which are often presented in very simple, straightforward language that can be understood without a lot of education). In Judaism, there is no such central authority, and, while the Orthodox definitely have a very strong emphasis on respecting spiritual authorities (like one's own community's rabbi), there's also commonly an idea that (1) any Jewish man is capable of aspiring to contribute to religious scholarship or to become a religious authority (although in Chassidic Judaism there can be a hereditary element to some forms of religious authority), and (2) all Torah study is inherently spiritually beneficial to any Jewish man or woman, and inherently makes the world better, and the more of it the better, in the world as a whole or in an individual's life.
On the latter point, I think I once heard someone claim that the very first verse read in translation by an idly but genuinely curious lapsed Jew pleases God just as much as the millionth verse re-read in Hebrew by an aged rabbi who immediately thinks of 100 connections and associations. Although I don't remember where that claim comes from at all, and I might have more or less made it up.
A possible reason for this: The poor members of a religious minority leave for the majority faith. Coptic Christians in Egypt are an example for this.
Yes, this is exactly correct. Note also that this also probably also applies to the Ashkenazim, and to many other groups such as the remaining Zoroastrians (i.e. Parsi).
There also seems to be a second effect in the Levant where the Christians holdouts didn't mix so much with later arrivals that might have had lower genotypic IQ.
Note that in the US, there is something of an inverse relationship between the average income of a Protestant denomination and the degree to which it is populated by more recent convert families. The highest income is seen in the Episcopal Church and the PCUSA, which are basically direct descendants of the Church of England and Church of Scotland, respectively, and neither has ever been very good at conversion and thus both of them mostly consist of families that have been in those churches a very long time. Meanwhile Baptists, who mostly represent families that abandoned those churches in the 19th century, are considerably poorer. A group like Jehovah's Witnesses seems to consist of people who then abandoned groups like the Baptists in the 20th century.
If its really helpful to continue in the racial success vein, what is the rate of success in America of all immigrant groups at the same time in the same regions?
You could compare with the Irish (mine), Italians, other Eastern Europeans such as the Poles, the Germans, the list goes on. My quick answer is all groups did well in America comparatively- depending on region and time.
Chosen professions of course affect income- which is not the only measure of success, but seems to be dominant in the world we’ve chosen. (We as in present day America). To explain that a bit; if your father was a firefighter or a cop being that might be more important than “income.”
If your father had a love of the soil and raised you the same, being a farmer might be more important than income (it had better be).
Maybe if we must take this path we compare the different groups? Instead of looking inward at a closed circle?
Scott doesn’t compare apples to oranges but by saying “America” certainly that’s the context.
Is this meant to be a direct reply to my comment above? I don't see the connection. But yes, for the most part there's not an obvious large disconnect in achievement between the various European groups that migrated to the US in the 19th century and early 20th century. Of course, for the most part these groups are more related to one another than any of them are to the Ashkenazim, and they've intermarried in the time since their arrival in the US to a much greater degree than the Ashkenazim have.
The obvious disconnect among white people is mostly between earlier arrivals -- the British who ended up in Appalachia vs. those who ended up in New England, say (later arrivals tended to avoid places that were already poor, i.e. the South). Albion's Seed would suggest the differences between British-descended populations are cultural, which probably makes sense, they mostly came from the same island. Though, while I'm not an expert on the current evidence here, I also have to think they started with some genetic differences, and the pattern of American migration (e.g. brain drain from poorer regions to richer ones) might have exacerbated those differences.
how is that surprising?
If they were orthodox jews I would fine it surprising, but of course they are not. I find this comment more surprising, because it suggests that God interferes in temporal matters, which, considering the sum of temporal matters currently, I find a very amusing suggestion.
This is to be fair, a rationalist blog. But if we were to countenance it then we would have to agree that it took about 2000 years for God to get going with that blessing. Longer, maybe.
If true, this hypothesis could be both tested empirically and exploited practically.
But if we admit theological explanations for the success of religious groups, I don’t think the overall evidence favors Jewish monotheism specifically.
This comment is on is the blog of the author of https://unsongbook.com/ . I'm sure the thought of testing the hypothesis has occurred to him. It has also occurred to me.
It's an easy hypothesis to test. We just have to create a different universe with a different God, and see how much money the Jews make then. The grant proposal writes itself.
How can it be tested, if any apparent conflict between it and the facts is dismissed with "השם works in mysterious ways"?
I'm pretty sure that it was also written in Bible that blessing is conditional on following God and his Law and unless they do, they will be punished severely by God. And I think that most of American Jews are far from being Orthodox, they are mostly atheists now, I guess.
I'm not saying that your explanation is impossible but I would consider this as the another argument against
I was going to suggest that, it doesn't seem like Jewish piety correlates with economic success, which would be the only way to come close to testing this hypothesis.
Wouldn't that require the whole burden of proof of the existance of השם?
Because it's an extremely unlikely theory, requiring far stronger evidence to be believed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If mundane solutions such as genetics and culture exist and are equally able to explain the data, they are to be vastly preferred.
I read aloud in my head, so it annoys me when people use scripts I can't pronounce in otherwise Latin text. It also comes across as a little smartassy - flaunting your knowledge of foreign scripts to signal learnedness. Please transliterate next time.
השם transliterates to "hashem" literally meaning "the name", often used by Jews in lieu of writing/saying the creator's name.
Thanks!
Any chance anyone has data on the percentage of Jewish children born to married parents over time vs. other ethnicities?
I once read that in early 20th century Budapest, Jews had an illegitimacy rate of 10%, compared to Christians who were around 30%. This was brought up as one of the many reasons why Jews had a higher population growth in that era compared to Christians: child mortality was significantly higher among ilegitimate children.
We are a people with a deep connection to Jewish sacred texts and at the same time a people who were persecuted for that connection. That persecution bound us closer to our books, The modern world is a world of words not muscle. That's my explanation.
Wouldn't the same be true of Sephardic & Mizrahi Jews? They don't seem as accomplished.
they may not be accomplished recently, as they lived in countries that were poor in the 18th-20th centuries, but they certainly have been accomplished in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Court_Jews or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule. " For instance, Jews ... were invited to settle in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, where they would often form a prosperous model minority of merchants acting as intermediaries for their Muslim rulers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Baghdad
Christian minorities also seemed to do better than average within the Ottoman empire. In "The Long Divergence" Timur Kuran (who is himself Turkish) explains it via Islamic law entrenching principles that made it difficult to form corporations.
perhaps. but the statement that sephardic and mizrahi jews don't seem as accomplished only holds up for the past couple hundred years, when sephardic and mizrahi jews were living in less developed countries than ashkenazic jews.
I think an interesting contrast between Ashkenazim and Sephardim is how their prayer services go. Sephardim (in my experience) do most of the prayer service out loud and in a communal way. Ashkenazim have far more long stretches where everyone reads to themselves quietly. I've always assumed it was because literacy levels were higher in Europe so the people could actually just read from their prayer books. But in communities where literacy wasn't the norm there's far greater focus on learning everything off by heart.
Admittedly I've never actually checked if this is accurate in any way.
My paternal grandparents were both Jews who emigrated to America separately before World War I. My grandfather was the son of a Polish cobbler (and the first person in his family who was taught to read). My grandmother was the daughter of a Russian rabbi who was killed in a pogrom and who walked out of Russia without any other family as part of a group of people emigrating to America via Hamburg. Both came from small villages and neither could have been considered anything but poor.
"But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural."
That seems the more plausible answer, if one is willing to consider that cultural norms can be embedded very deeply into individuals. The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
My grandfather and some of his friends were discussing their children one day, and he finally responded to the many "my son the doctor" remarks with "my son TEACHES doctors." (Dad was on the faculty of Stanford Medical School at the time.) The story goes that the conversation changed topics after a long pause.
No one made the obvious retort: “Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"?
Not part of Grandjoe’s story if they did.
> The millennia-old respect for learning and scholarship that is so much a part of Jewish culture - as it is for Chinese culture as well - is the most likely candidate for a single cultural value that confers a systemic advantage upon a group.
I would be interested in seeing a survey about people's cultural attitudes toward physical books and how those relate to their cultural background. E.g., things like
* do you feel better in some way having more physical books present in a place where you live or work? (does it make you feel more comfortable or emotionally positive toward that location?)
* do you feel bad in some way when you or someone around you shows physical disrespect for a book? (e.g., throwing it in the trash or recycling; placing it on the ground; breaking or damaging the spine; physically throwing it across a room)
* do you find it emotionally pleasing to acquire books and emotionally difficult to part with them, in a way that feels subjectively different from acquiring and parting with possessions in general?
These things are all true for me, and I grew up in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish household, but I also noticed that they were and are true of many of my middle-class friends from non-Jewish backgrounds.
It's an interesting cultural proxy I've anecdotally noticed myself. Whenever jewish friends would visit my home in the US the first thing they almost always noticed the above average number of books we had. In Israel it's very common for people to have decorative bookshelves for their most treasured (usually religious) books the same way many other cultures have special cases for their dining china.
Hmm, my parents (not Jewish, and only first generation intellectuals) had the same feelings about physical books; I grew up lovingly reading lots of books, but resented this sacred admiration of books as such. It was partly just teenage rebellion, but partly me living in a society where printing was already cheap, a lot of garbage got printed, and books were gradually moving into virtual reality anyway.
Cultural preferences and genetics are deeply interwoven in humans. The reason why the Dutch are so tall is that culturally they don’t have a preference for shorter women most societies have.
Of course, another plausible cause here is that Jews who couldn't hack it within that religious tradition left for other religions, so this ended up serving as a selective effect for high literacy, which probably meant higher IQ. So while it's a plausible cultural thing, it's also plausible that the culture eventually gave them a genetic advantage by selecting against lower IQ members.
What does the horizontal scale on the chart represent?
Geography, but not very effectively. It's just added in so not everyone is in the same place.
Are you trying to say that the world is not one dimensional?
Don't be silly, it's two dimensional (provided you don't count the turtles)
Ah, thank you!
I'm still confused, because the key says that the colors indicate geographic region. And then those colors are sorta... split up? Like all the Europe is on the left, but then there are Asian countries in the middle and on the right...? And if they were just spacing out the points for legibility then why are a bunch of them clustered on top of each other so as to not be legible?
Agreed. I can't make sense of why groups are where they are.
Why are Greeks next to Luxemburgers but way off from Macedonians?
Why are Egyptians next to the Japanese but a world away from Moroccans?
Why are Nigerians so far from most Africans for instance Ghanians[sic]?
Why are Brazilians so far from Agentineans [sic]?
Why are French Canadians around Australians, Japanese, Nigerians and Pakistani?
There has got to be some rationale...
I assume the vertical axis is income? It doesn't seem to be labeled.
if you click through to the source, there the axis also doesn't have a label but does at least have a title: "Age/Sex-Adjusted US-Born Median Personal Incomes in 2015-2019"
So, yes, it does seem to be income. Sort of.
If the “groups should be represented according to their share of the population” (in college admissions, professions, etc.) standard were applied to Jews it would be devastating.
Luckily, Jews are “white” so for some reason it doesn’t count? And people decided Jewish quotas were immoral discrimination but Asian quotas (not explicit ones, admittedly) are somehow ok? This doesn’t make any sense on principle, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I hope we end up with “discrimination is bad”.
Well said.
> This doesn’t make any sense on principle
Maybe the people doing it don't have principles, other than "do what benefits me / my group / my ideology".
LA Times had an editorial on Harvard admissions. Answer seemed to be that Asians should just suck it up.
The current situation is just begging for court cases where gentiles who are discriminated against because white people are over-represented, but who are in a situation where gentiles ares underrepresented, go to court to demand that Jews are treated as a separate ethnic group for discrimination purposes.
We have noticed the skulls wrt 'discrimination is bad.'
Quotas may not be the best solution (and they're not common), but we've certainly learned that discrimination exists in various forms even when it's not being intentionally implemented. And that if you think that's bad, you need to take active, sometimes counter-intuitive measures to oppose it.
Nah. We should crack down on discrimination where we can find it, but "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race"
Really my concern is that people are too quick to infer discrimination from weak evidence like "disparate outcomes", so we impose discriminatory rules to counter discrimination that doesn't exist.
For example, Jews have very good outcomes; should we infer massive pro-Jewish discrimination and impose massive anti-Jewish rules? (No)
Yeah, like I said, society has noticed the skulls regarding that type of simplistic formulation.
Anything that can be fully summarized in a single sentence, is probably wrong.
"society has noticed the skulls"
What is this supposed to mean?
That most people agree with you? But they don't (e.g. the recent failure of prop 22 in California).
That we've tried what I'm suggesting before and it's gone horribly wrong? But we haven't (AFAIK?).
Presumably, it refers to the phenomenon described in this article of Scott's (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/) where widely-known criticisms to a field are inapplicable because by the time the public is generally aware of them, they've already been taken to heart by insiders.
That said, I'm not sure what it would mean for *society* to have noticed the skulls, since my understanding of the phrase a Scott used it requires some sort of inner circle to have already learned from what the wider public still thinks of as valid criticisms. Who's the wider public if that inner circle is "society"?
Regarding the last paragraph:
Anecdotal, of course, but in my Jewish upbringing it was always said or implied that Jewish success was partly due to a culture considerably more education-focused than the norm. More educated people tend to be more successful and make more money, and we also see similar patterns among other immigrants with strong pro-education cultures; it can be joked that American Jews are basically the early 1900s equivalent of modern Asian Americans.
And this does make some sense: after all, the central text of Jewish life was not the Torah but the Talmud, which is the Torah plus the random comments, debates, and thoughts of a bunch of rabbis. And you can see it in other parts of Jewish culture, too: here's "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof:
If I were rich, I'd have the time that I lack
To sit in the synagogue and pray.
And maybe have a seat by the Eastern wall.
And I'd discuss the holy books with the learned men, several hours every day.
That would be the sweetest thing of all.
Perhaps it's no surprise that people growing up in that cultural milieu tended to make a lot of academic discoveries.
^this. I'm not Jewish, but from my reading and observation, this is a huge part of it. No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem. Then over multiple generations, people who value education and have the skills to succeed at it marry people who value education & have the skills, and the process repeats, over and over.
Add to that persecution, which forced the community to build extremely strong internal trust networks. Sephardic Jews, though second class citizens, never faced the same level of persecution as Ashkenazi Jews.
Now take that community, remove the persecution, but keep the deep communal trust bonds (there is a massive literature on trust and economic growth) and the cultural emphasis on education and study. The recipe for success is complex, but trust and education are two major ingredients.
>No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
On the other hand, Augustine, Aquinas, and countless other Christian theologians were sainted. I think this counts as rewards and esteem.
One observation by my father (an Ashkenazi Jew) was that Christian theologians and priests didn't marry and have children, whilst Jewish equivalents were encouraged to have lots of children. Multiply that over the generations and you've got built-in eugenics.
As I understand it, Christian priests or monks (I don't know whether there were theologians who weren't priests or monks) were supposed to not marry and not have sex, but the rule against sex was hard to enforce. I suppose their children were less likely to have the advantages of being acknowledged members of families, but I await further information.
Cleric celibacy is not a Christian rule, but a Catholic rule mostly established during the 11th to 12th century period. It was strongly advocated by popes Gregory VII and Urban II during the 11th century, and afterwards "enshrined" in the 1st Lateran Council in 1123.
It is specific to Catholics; the Orthodox, Protestant and other Christian priests largely do marry. (in the Orthodox world, only the highest echelons of the church are expected to be celibate, and I'm not sure about the various Protestant denominations)
Christian monks are indeed celibate, but monks are different from priests in many religions, and I think they are celibate in most.
But interestingly there are no monks in Judaism. I think the whole idea of monkhood is pretty counter to Jewish ideals like "Tikkun Olam" which means fixing the world. Which is clearly not something you can do by withdrawing completely from the world.
@Clive Exactly!
My argument is cultural, not genetic, so the unacknowledged children of priests would not be in a position to benefit from their fathers' learning and study.
> No other faith or ethnic group has spent centuries rewarding people for otherwise "economically unproductive" Torah study, and held those people in high esteem.
Have you heard of the Imperial exams in China, an attempt to pick candidates by merit for cushy imperial government jobs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
The Chinese seem to be as much a People of Books as the Jews. Overseas Chinese even occupied a similar Middle Man position in other countries.
And intermarriage between secular American Jews and Chinese Americans are surprisingly common.
The Chinese case is particularly interesting, because their book learning was extremely specific in use. You learned poetry as the vast majority of the curriculum, with the goal of achieving a cushy government position. On the other hand, China as a nation was terribly poor and underperforming for most of the past 300 years or so.
On the other hand, Chinese emigrants tend to do really well wherever they go, becoming the successful merchant class of wherever they end up. (Thomas Sowell's book "Race and Culture" goes into this a lot.)
That together, to me, suggests a strong cultural story, where the cultural importance of education gets put to different uses, one productive and one not.
If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
If you study hard and fail the test, you leave your country seeking higher status elsewhere, and being blocked from government you become a merchant, applying your intellect in higher productivity areas.
If you don't study, you just remain a peasant in the home country.
> If you study hard and succeed in the test, you become a government official with low productivity, possibly even negative, despite your intellect.
You may also have more children than the average peasant, increasing the frequency of any genes that helped with passing the test (related to intelligence, or even just ability to sit down and focus on studying!)
That's true. It doesn't do much for the overall wealth of China, which was my point. The Chinese testing system seemed to not do much for the Chinese living in China, but the culture of educational attainment seemed to do them a lot of good once they left and got real jobs.
I don't think scott has done cochran's argument much justice...part of it is overdominance at alleles governing certain cognitive traits, but it also allows for frequency changes of alleles with additive effect under selection, which would be less conspicuous than the diseased homozygotes.
A related mystery about the Ashkenazim that I have not seen discussed: How come there are so damn many of us?
The notion of real genetic differences is rooted in the founder effect, which itself comes from a tremendous population bottleneck 600-800 years ago (probably the Crusades) which reduced the Ashkenazi Jewish population to about 350 people, and thanks to endogamy (marriage only within the clan) only 4 maternal groups account for 40-70% of the current Ashkenazi population. As a result, Jews have an unusual prevalence of Tay Sachs and Crohn's and other rare genetic diseases, and maybe(!) as a result have higher general intelligence as well. And these difference are mostly what we focus on when we talk about Ashkenazi exceptionalism.
But population is a mystery to me too. There are now maybe 10 million Ashkenazi in the world, an increase in population of 30,000-fold since the bottleneck. Meanwhile, since 1000 AD global population has increased by about 20X. European population has increased by maybe 15X. These differences are... not small. You can absolutely get to 30,000X with regular generational doublings over hundreds of years, but no one else seemed to. Maybe some of the reason that everyone's Jewish ancestors were so poor was because it was impossible to accumulate wealth with so many kids.
Anyway, I'd love to hear if anyone has any data on household size of Jews in Middle Age Europe, or similar. The explanation here is probably cultural, but it is as deserving of a rigorous explanation as the other phenomena, and I can't find one.
This is a really interesting question. Like you, I think it had to do with medieval demographics. Before the demographic transition, people like Greg Clark have pointed out that the wealthiest tended to be the most fecund (which makes sense given appalling child mortality rates in medieval times). We also know that European Jews occupied a white collar niche, which meant outsized wealth for Jewish elites.
Cities tended to be demographic sinks for European Christians, who didn't have the kind of public health engineering skills of Roman aqueduct builders until maybe the 19th Century. But Ashkenazis could grow their populations in urban settings.
Ashkenazis were particularly adept at surviving in cities. They had more hygienic habits and more money on average than Christians, which allowed them to have more rooms per person which cut down on infections spreading at home.
I was unaware of the population bottleneck suggestion and I'd like to learn more. Can you recommend a source?
There are a bunch of studies that all point more or less in the same direction. Here are a selection:
"MtDNA evidence for a genetic bottleneck in the early history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population", https://www.nature.com/articles/5201156
"Signatures of founder effects, admixture, and selection in the Ashkenazi Jewish population", https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/37/16222.full.pdf
"Insights into the genetic epidemiology of Crohn's and rare diseases in the Ashkenazi Jewish population", https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007329
Genetic databases like ancestry.com or 23andme.com have to correct for Ashkenazi similarity when they tell you that they have found your "third cousin" or whatnot. The fifth cousins in my database can have a higher relatedness than my (non-Jewish) wife's third cousins because of so much inbreeding in the population over the years.
Thank you; those are all interesting. My understanding of the genetics is limited. However, none of those papers suggests a bottleneck in the 13th-15th century. The first suggests a bottleneck 100 generations ago, which I guess means roughly around 0 AD? The second suggests a bottleneck may be the best explanation for prevalence of certain diseases, but is silent on timing, and specifically suggests admixture may be a superior explanation to a bottleneck in explaining linkage disequilibrium. The third rejects bottleneck as an explanation for Crohn's disease, stating that preferential selection is a more likely explanation.
Certainly Ashkenazi relatedness is a phenomenon. But inbreeding/lack of interbreeding may be a sufficient explanation, rather than a specific low-population bottleneck in 1300.
Ashkenazi family trees probably have a bottleneck during Roman times when a fairly small number of Hebrews arrived in Europe (perhaps in Italy) and, apparently, took European wives. There may have been another bottleneck as Italy's population dropped until Jewish survivors of the barbarian invasions appeared in the Rhineland at least by Charlemagne's time. Then Rhineland Jews were invited to Poland after the Mongol pillaging of Polish cities in the 1200. There they grew dramatically in numbers over the centuries.
My apologies for not getting you a cite for the c.a. 1300 bottleneck. You can find a summary here: https://systemsbiology.columbia.edu/news/study-sheds-light-on-ashkenazi-jewish-genome-and-ancestry or here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1216062/.
My understanding is that the exact timing has maybe ±100 year error bars, but 1300 is not a bad place to start. And the finding holds up across many different studies.
FWIW, there are plenty of south Asian populations that appear to have similar founder effects, but I do not think they are as well studied yet.
David Brooks took a DNA test and was very excited to be told that Steven Pinker was his third cousin. But most Ashkenazis are "cumulative cousins" of other Ashkenazis to a high degree (i.e., via multiple genealogical pathways, they end up about as genetically related to most other Ashkenazis in sum as an extremely outbred individual like Tiger Woods is to his cousins via a single genealogical pathway).
Well they don't correct very well, I've got 3rd cousins out the wazoo on 23andMe to the point that I've started ignoring their "you've got a new genetic relative!" notifications (I'm an Ashkenazi)
If this really happened you shouldn't find just genetic evidence for this, is there no historical evidence for this bottleneck.
I think the population bottleneck might be an illusion caused by the existence of a hereditary priesthood who in the absence of any lasting Jewish secular structures since the Khazars loat thwir state were de facto almost always the highest-status group. High-status fathers have more children, both due to generally being wealthier and also being able to attract extramarital partners more easily (I'm not sure but I guess that lower-status men are likelier to knowingly bring up the higher-status father's children as well). This means that Jews are fairly unique in Europe and the Middle East at least in having a genetically consistent group with the most chance of passing on their own genes at the expense of others. Over time this will reduce genetic variation in a population as in each generation an increasing proportion of children are gathered by high-status individuals or descendents of high-status individuals.
I don’t know if this is true, but I was told that the first commandment (or mitzvah) in the Old Testament is “Be fruitful and multiply.”
This is true in the sense that this is the first commandment which appears in the text we have received (at Gen 1:22 and 28). In composition order, I think the first commandment is "You shall love Jahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (Deut 6:5). Some (including but not only Jesus) have considered this also to be the first commandment in the sense of being primary.
Alternatively, if Deutronomy originally began at chapter 12, the first commandment would, less romantically, be "You must demolish completely all the places where the nations whom you are about to dispossess served their gods, on the mountain heights, on the hills, and under every leafy tree."
Obviously if the ten commandments were a pre-existing code, the first commandment was "You shall have no other gods before/besides me."
In terms of importance, Hillel summarizes the most important commandment for Judaism as the golden rule: "What is hateful to you, don't do to others"
But the thing about "Be fruitful and multiply" is that since it's commanded long before the Jewish people actually exist, it's not only directed at Jews. It's directed at every living thing. You could think of metaphorically as God kick-starting evolution ;-)
One of the pitfalls of your argument (potentially) is that many of the statistics that lend themselves to the conclusion that "Jews are outliers in success" include non-Ashkenazi Jews. If your hypothesis about the 4 maternal groups is correct, this would not apply to non-Ashkenazi populations. This begs the question - are non-Ashkenazi Jews similarly outliers according to success metrics?
The statistics about Jews (such as IQ or Nobelists) are usually specifically about Ashkenazi. Sephardic Jews score significantly lower than Ashkenazi in IQ, for example. But of course the Ashkenazi tend to be Western European or American, which means that you aren't truly holding culture constant with that comparison. Even in Israel, where both groups coexist, environmental factors between the two groups remain. So the differences are evocative, and might rule out some environmental hypotheses, but it's still not a slam dunk for genetics.
do you have citations for the overall diff in sephardic IQ and the difference between ashk/seph/mizrahi jews in israel. (Israel is also not a perfect example because of historical and ongoing cultural differences, but...)
This is one. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17052383/
I have not found much else.
It should be noted that the true outlier statistics such as the number of Nobel prize winners provide a mixed bag of support for a genetics hypothesis. The US has had many more Ashkenazi Nobelists than Israel despite having a similar number of Ashkenazi Jews. So clearly (and unsurprisingly) factors beyond genetics are profound.
Scott has analyzed this before ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/29/four-nobel-truths/ ). The simplest comparision (all American Jewish vs Israeli Nobelists by present population) is somewhat misleading; if we use a more apples-to-apples comparison (Nobelists from the last few decades, Ashkenazi Jews only), Americans still have more, but "only" by a factor of ~1.8.
A small correction: while the US and Israel has a similar total number of Jews, the Americans are almost all Ashkenazi, while only about half of the Israeli Jews are.
Israel was a fairly poor country until recently. One of my Israeli colleagues explained their tech boom was fueled by immigration of well-educated Soviet Jews in the 80s and 90s.
You should probably be careful with some of the assumptions built into this understanding. As a further thread demonstrates, the exact dates and other information is not clearly understood and can be off significantly. To say that the population dropped to 350 may be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 pretty easily due to lack of records and proper classification. 35,000 people spread out over Europe is still a tiny population, but that has monumental implications for the 30,000-fold increase idea you presented. That would still be an outlier in terms of population increase, but far more believable and easier to explain.
As for how their population could increase significantly, I imagine large families is part of it, but you should also consider that they would not have been permitted (or likely as interested) to join the military and die in the hundreds of European wars during the relevant timeframe.
The idea that the Jews did not die in war is interesting!
I'm sure a non-zero number died in wars, especially if civilian populations were killed (which is often the case). That said, they would have been pretty unwelcome in both Christian and Muslim armies, especially during the Crusades and in any war otherwise related to religion - which for a long time was most of them, even if the religious reasons were only symbolic or a cover for geopolitical concerns.
I don't know if it's actually true, but I grew up being told Jews had a lower death rate during the plague (not the current one) because passover cleaning made their homes less interesting to rats. If the lower death rate there is true, when European populations were absolutely obliterated, you'd jack up their prevalence and probably leave them particularly set up to succeed afterward.
Agreed, we should add large error bars and recognize that the data evolves. But it's hard to reconcile a founder population of 35,000 people with the independent data that 40-70% of Ashkenazi have mitochondrial DNA from just four women (or close female relatives). That is not nuts with a 350-person bottleneck. Given multiple strands of evidence, this seems less likely to be a simple data analysis error, but I'm open to pushback on the specifics.
Sure, a lower estimate may be more accurate, but the date is also unknown, so we could be talking about some much earlier time period - like 500 AD instead of 800 or 1200, and that makes a big difference on population growth as well.
Surely a lot of the answer is contained in the fact that a lot of time passed during which Europe's population barely increased. But by simple virtue of the fact that lots of time passed, a lot of population dynamics happened, and merely citing the change in total European population might falsely suggest things were more static than they were. Certain family lines exploded in their number of progeny and others went extinct. All of us, Jew or Gentile, are descended from winners in that contest. The difference is that the Jewish family lines are identifiable and the Gentile ones merged into the European whole.
> This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history;
In my experience self-made wealthy people (sample size of 3-8 depending on how confident I want to be in my assessment of others wealth) all want to play up how they and their family were poor or had really hard circumstances of some sort to overcome.
Obviously, this doesn't prove anything, but something to consider...
My great-uncles invented a rich and successful ancestor, court jeweler to the tsar or some such. That was the story they wanted to tell.
I think I undersold something in my comment. When I say "play up" it makes it sound like these people are deceiving us, but what I really meant is that they've convinced themselves.
Another anecdote to add to the pile: My grandfather's dog was killed by Russian soldiers during one of the various pogroms he lived through as a child in what's now Ukraine. The one photo I've seen if him as a boy, he looks gaunt to the point of malnourishment. When he came to the US he opened a shop selling window fixtures. So most definitely poor/working class, and yet all three of his first-generation children went to college, including one (my mother) to an Ivy League.
One more anecdote: the last members of my family to leave Germany, in 1938, were skilled professionals (medicine etc.).
This is consistent with Scott's picture in which economic pressure mostly causes emigration of the poor, while political pressure (as in late-1930s Germany) mostly causes emigration of the rich.
Surely it makes sense to consider several factors none of which explains all of a phenomenon and each of which adds a little. Some comments: 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times. So what? The middle-class habitus was still there, together with the drive to move (back) upwards. And yes, all (voluntary) immigrants are self-selecting, though not necessarily quite in the same way. 2. Again, this is part of it. Obviously "such-and-such % of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, compared to % of the world population" is fallacious - what counts is the percentage of (not very poor) inhabitants of cities in wealthy countries. There's still a gap, but the ratio is what, the square root of what it would be otherwise? 3. Oh yes. See: Nobel Prize winners. (If anything, people of mixed ancestry and descendants of converts to Christianity are probably overrepresented in that list - vastly so up to the mid-20th century, once you consider that the rate of intermarriage anywhere pre-WWI was essentially nil, and conversion was always a trickle, relatively speaking.) 4 is a strong argument against racial explanations. It's also something that clarifies that, when we are talking about cultural explanations, we are not looking at anything intrinsic to the term "Jewish", or to Judaism (even if it may have had an effect in a refracted sort of way, or even by virtue of being left behind) but rather at the set of values and practices that immigrants from a particular class in particular parts of Europe had in 1880-1910. (In other words, part of what people still sometimes refer to as "Jewish", sometimes to the annoyance of some observant Jews; cultural images die hard.) None of this makes the matter less interesting - just less surprising. It also makes the phenomenon *more* relevant to discussions of other ethnic groups in the US and elsewhere; a unique or inexplicable phenomenon would be less relevant.
“ 1. Surely the fact that travel to America was expensive kept out the poorest of the poor. The examples you give are mainly of people who were culturally middle class but had fallen on hard times.”
Emigrating via steerage class was not expensive, and was subsidized by the incredibly high fares paid by passengers in 1st class.
Well, it would still be rather expensive for the poorest of the poor! Even for the merely poor, it would require the ability to save and plan well, which if anything is a more relevant characteristic than simply having money.
Why wouldnt the same logic apply to Irish, Italian, Polish, German, etc. immigrants?
Oh, but it does. Voluntary immigration always imposes a filter, both in terms of wanting to go to the place you are going to and in the sense that there were always (even) poorer people who didn't make the trip. It's one factor among many.
My understanding of this issue is that Jews performed a "rural service minority" (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-economic-ecology-of-jews-as-a-rural-service-minority.html) role in Europe that endowed them with commercial skills and values that ended up serving them very well in modernity relative to their Christian peasant counterparts. If your ancestors were a series of moneylenders and merchants and middlemen it makes a lot of sense to me that you'd be more likely to be drawn towards intellectual pursuits and high paying professional jobs compared to someone whose recent ancestors were in more traditional feudal roles.
My Ashkenazi ancestors were both rich and poor. One set (grandmother's family) were relatively well-off Russians from Minsk. They left in the late 1880s, presumably motivated by the recent pogroms, and my great-grandfather who arrived as a teenager was valedictorian at his American high school and went on to become a lawyer. They were fine. I have assumed that they had sufficient old country wealth to enable this good start in the new one.
The other set were poor Galicianers; that great-grandfather was the youngest of six and wandered around as a performer/beggar/probably thief until he married and left for the US for better prospects.
Also, avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history. Not just for those coming to the US, but crossing from Russia to Austria-Hungary or vice versa, hiding out with relatives, etc. I don't think the Russian army in 1860 was a pleasant place to be Jewish (or a pleasant place, period).
"avoiding compulsory military service shows up a LOT in my family's history." Me too. A Jewish Great Grandfather of mine moved to America to not be drafted into the Czar's army. My parents had their first child (me) earlier than they otherwise would have to help my dad avoid the Vietnam War draft.
My Jewish great-grandfather came to America to avoid fighting for Austria-Hungary in WWI.
I was amused to read that Jewish immigrants claimed to be tailors; my great-grandfather was a genuine tailor. His pretext for leaving Hungary just before the war was that he was going to buy cloth in Hamburg.
The Russian Army's term of conscription was 25 years (e.g., age 18-43), so getting the hell out was a good idea.
So what you are saying is that there is some strong anecdotal evidence for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis often espoused by antisemites?
Hearing you it seems absolutely OK and common and nothing to be the least ashamed of that Jews are loyal first to their family and kin and sees themselves as having little or no duties to the country they reside in, and in this particular case the duty is the highest one can have toward his country (I write his here because women have never been expected to fight in conscripted armies before quite recently) - it is also the most dangerous, duty one can have towards the county who has granted one citizenship.
But then we have the particular fact that US jews often, at least compared to any other group of immigrants as far as I understand things, go to Israel to do their years of conscription in the Israeli army.
I am a gentile with some jewish friends, one which I would call a close friend, and have always assumed jews are as everybody else with a european heritage but belonging to a different religion and culture with different holidays and a heavy focus on studying and perhaps being of a higher intelligence than most other whites (I am not really that well read on this whole intelligence thing) but that differences between jew and gentile are not much else.
But hearing it from you, who present yourself as jewish, jews seem to have or at least had, in many historical times and places, at least very little loyalty towards the country which they had citizenship in. When jews were not allowed citizenship I fully understand it but since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citiizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia (I am not that well read on jewish history).
This was interesting to hear. Have you guys got any other anecdotes you might want to share that points to support for the "dual loyalty" hypothesis? I am always interested in finding out the truth however labeled it my be.
PS: I mean no harm and Jews are obviously not in any position of being killed in pogroms today with Israel being one of the five states that possesses a solid nuclear triad that can inflict millions of casualties on any country that tries to exterminate jews.
In my ancestors' cases, there was a world of difference between the countries of the Old World and the USA. My great-grandfather is a (US) WW1 veteran, wounded in France, and my grandfather a US WW2 veteran, combat engineers. As far as I know, all of my relatives today in the US consider themselves citizens of our country first. My impression is that the decision to immigrate was usually accompanied by a decision to become American, and that Jews responded to the generally-welcoming environment of the New World with both gratitude and loyalty. Even prior to the peak immigration years, Twain's essay on Jews cites War Department statistics that suggest Jews served proportionally in the US Civil War.
You write: "since the early 1800s and the enlightenment I believe Jews were granted citizenship and full rights in almost all countries in Europe except Russia"
Not so much. Western Europe, this is sort of true; but Poland, Russia, and the rest of the East largely not. Even in the west, there were nasty exceptions to the equality laws, 'full citizenship' under the law often did not mean societal acceptance, and societal acceptance, even when granted, could be withdrawn. For examples, see the Edgardo Mortara case, the German 'Hep Hep' riots, or the French Dreyfuss affair, all of which took place post-emancipation in the 19th century. A poor, but not totally inaccurate analogy, is to Irish immigrants in the US 1840s-50s: certainly able to participate in society, and equal de jure under the law, but not seen as equal citizens by (many/most of) their peers.
Plus, the 19th century concept of nationality was rather more complicated than the 20th. Did a Czech or Serb in Austria-Hungary owe his loyalty to the Empire of which he was a 'full citizen', or to the project of independence for his co-linguists? In these fights the Jews were excluded on all sides, regardless of emancipation. The Serb saw the Jew as an agent of the Empire, who could never be fully Serb; the Empire saw a citizen whose loyalty was suspect and might easily be compromised. One common Jewish response was to adopt a position of personal political neutrality, an example of which is contained in the Twain essay, where his Jewish correspondent declares, proudly, that the Jews are apolitical: not out of national disloyalty, but because neither side would have them.
My impression is that the time and place mattered greatly. German Jews were often quite patriotic; German-Jewish WW1 veterans were common Holocaust victims. If you are interested in the subject, one place to start might be "The Pity of It All", by Amos Elon, which covers the societal place of German Jews from about 1750-1933.
Something I would like a demographer or historian much smarter than myself to investigate is a "creaming the top theory" to Jewish exceptionalism. Specifically that in addition to cultural norms like specializing in certain occupations and having high literacy and smart rabbis getting the girls and having more kids, there is also a negative selection pressure on the less successful Jews to remain Jewish over centuries of persecution, programs, holocaust etc. Maybe if you just want a normal, comfortable life you decide to convert and become a follower of orthodox Jesus in the 9th century or become Muslim in the 11th century and stop paying the dhimmi tax whereas only the truly exceptional people could afford to continue on their minority traditions. Or more negatively you get murdered or forced to convert during one of the many persecutions over the millennia and can't continue your line while the most successful among you managed to survive and continue your ancestors traditions.
What immediately makes me question this hypothesis though is the plight of the gypsies/Romani. They are similarly persecuted for a similar duration of history but on every social economic status dimension, they are near the bottom of European populations. Then again the Parsis in the indian subcontinent do mirror the Jews in achievement so that's another foil.
Maybe today's gypsies are really, really good at being gypsies and whatever that entails doesn't tend to produce high economic status while Jews got really, really good at being Jews and that does entail things that produce high economic status. Different selective pressures select for different things.
True or if both had persecutions. If I'm hearing you right, the skills/strategies that enabled gypsies to escape persecution and avoid being wiped out were equally successful at at it's primary goal but are maladapted to success in a 21st century society. Whereas whatever it is that allowed Jews to continue on, just happened to be suitable for high economic status professions today. Both strategies were equally successful at preservation albeit were wildly different.
The Roma are travelers, the Jews are a middleman minority. Middlemen minorities transition cleanly into finance, which currently basically runs our entire economy since we decided usury wasn't a sin any more. Travelers are really good at doing lots of petty crimes (since they move to another city before you can catch them for stealing stuff from you), which is increasingly less effective as the law enforcement apparatus becomes increasingly sophisticated.
They are also increasingly forced to stay put, which upsets the entire business model.
I think that both gypsies and Jews tend(ed) to choose jobs that separated themselves from others, like musician, doctor, banker, beggar, salesman/shop owner, thief, etc. This is in contrast to jobs where you have to be embedded in a community on equal footing, need to hire people from outside, etc, like a farmer, factory worker, etc.
A difference seems to be that Jews managed to achieve a higher class of these kind of jobs, despite being mistrusted.
A hint as to why this was possible might be found in Hitler's lamentation that every Jew had a gentile speaking up for them. Perhaps Jews were distrusted collectively, but had cultural traits that made gentiles trust them individually sufficiently for them to be accepted as a doctor, banker, etc.
I get a sense that in places where they dislike gypsies a lot, few of those gypsies have non-gypsies who would speak out for them.
That’s basically Cochran et al’s theory.
My understanding from reading Cochran was that there wasn't any such tendency toward conversion prior to Jewish Emancipation.
Seems like I should check out Cochran's work! Are there other seminal authors on this topic?
I haven't read an enormous amount of Jews, but I linked to my post where I host Thomas Sowell's essay "Are Jews Generic?" on middle-man minorities. Amy Chua's "World on Fire" is about a similar topic, though she uses the term "market-dominant minorities" and focuses on poorer countries. I mentioned Yuri Slezkine's "The Jewish Century" which labels both Jews & Gypsies as "Mercurians" who again have a specialized economic role with respect to a larger host population. He's Russian-Jewish and over the course of the book the focus on Russia increases, though he also notes how many (including his own relatives) moved to Israel during the later years of the USSR and contrasts them with the Jews who moved to America.
A lot of the comments on this page trying to compare the Romani and Jewish people show how little people know about the different types of Romani or the differences in how they were or are treated in different countries. These differences go all the way back to different waves of Romani leaving India centuries ago. In some areas they were held as slaves with proper 'for sale' signs until the 1850s and now these groups are unsurprisingly the poorest and most visible of Romani people in Europe. In fact, people often think that if a Romani person don't look or act like the poorest of the poor Romanian Romani, then they aren't 'real.' In other areas of Europe, such as Hungary, they were forced to give up their native Sanskrit-based language, take surnames and frankly this did help them get ahead Romani in other countries. This included having access to military service and education.
The thing about being Romani or part-Romani is that once one becomes successful or educated, non-Romani or even members of their own community might say you're not 'a real Gypsy.' They become 'White' with 'South Asian and West Asian DNA.' This feeds into the idea that there are no educated Romani people or "Good Gypsies", when 'Romani' is often not even an option on say, university entrance forms or HR forms. Oddly, you'll see Romani-Americans or Romani-British (not Irish Travellers) putting "White and Asian" on these forms.
As far as persecution goes, it depends on country. The European Roma Rights Centre covers segregated schooling, forced sterilisation, policing problems and lead poisoning issues (see all the crime / IQ / health issues that is hotly debated now) still happening today.
In terms of WWII, aside from the expected genocide, forced labour and medical experimentation (https://www.un.org/en/exhibits/forgotten-victims), there was different issues with Romani citizens of Germany losing their citizenship and property and not being able to get anything back, unlike (some) Jews. Of course, people made the excuse that Romani people don't ever own possessions and are 'travellers' so they couldn't possibly have been middle class people who had citizenship, businesses and property seized. See all the comments below saying that Romani people are 'travellers' despite the vast majority of Europe's largest minority being settled. A very good overview into the history and current situation of the Romani is I Met Lucky People by Yaron Matras.
Fitting with the topic of this post, many well educated Romani activists do also have mixed parentage and there's a few paragraphs on this in I Met Lucky People. There's quite a few Jewish-Romani activists, which is not an unusual combination in cities such as Budapest. I'm certainly not arguing that the Romani people overall are doing well or are anywhere as successful as the Jewish people or even a state's ethnic majority, but rather that when Romani people become middle-class or successful, they tend to become invisible and often actively hide their heritage to avoid discrimination. They certainly aren't good enough to be on My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/05/is-my-big-fat-american-gypsy-wedding-unfair-to-the-romani-community.html) Many actually explain their darker skin or dark eyes by saying they have Jewish heritage!
"My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding" is quite obviously confectionary TV that has little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although they do draw the motives from that millieu.
Oksana Marafioti, the gypsy college graduate and classically trained pianist complaining about TLC's TV show in the Slate piece, has herself little to do with the lives of most gypsies. Although she is drawn from that millieu. I mean, will someone next start complaining that the reality-TV show "The Real Housewives of Wherever" does not *really* depict the reality of the real real-housewives-of-wherever?
TLC purveys the kind of confectionary entertainment that its viewers are looking for, and Slate purveys the kind of confectionary worldview that its readers are looking for. Whoever wishes to gain insight into the lives and customs of most gypsies, might want to look for it in other places than reality-TV entertainment and Slate.
Back to the original topic - the parallels between the Jewish and Romani minorities. The fate of Romani in WWII was about as horrendous as that of Jews, absolutely. But the societal outcomes of the two groups were worlds apart, both before and after WWII. Romani were frequently talented at music. Jews were talented at pretty much everything. Both were discriminated against by significant portions of the ethnic majority. And their outcomes - in the end - lined up quite well with their differences in talent.
P.S. About Romani traded as slaves "in some areas" until the 1850s, I take it you're referring to the Ottoman Empire? (the rest of this article is mostly focused on Europe)
I don't know much about jews and jewish history but the discrimination that Roma people have fared surely has a basis in that Roma people, the different kinds that exist of them, are quite the opposite of jews, being still a largely parasitic class having no second thoughts about stealing from or hustling a gadjo, as is their name for everybody that is non-romani.
As you say there is a frequent problem in that Roma people who want to leave the Roma lifestyle with it's paralell society with clans, a paralell legal system, an aversion to schooling or letting the gadjo get their grips into their children (because the children might possible leavve the Roma lifestile) and forced marriages complete with targeted criminal exploitation of the majority population (Roma people for instance specialize in stealing from elderly people (80+ years), most often women living alone, in all the Scandinavian countries because they feel they have no moral duties towards non-roma and the punishments are lenient in these countries) is no longer regarded as part of the Roma community which makes leaving the community and even semi-assimilating very hard.
I think it's quite unappropriate and possible anti-semitic comparing the situation of Roma people who obviously have no moral regard for the outgroup and who have no intention of even semi-assimilation and who's only contribution to the society they live in is the need for the employment of a lot of police officers, welfare care-takers and other such people, with the situation of jews who have frequently been among some of the most productively contributing citizens and who has semi-assimilated from being all ultra-orthodox before the 20th century, to being a well-liked minority in every western country.
Perhaps people are only responding rationally in their discrimination towards roma people - the easiest way of avoiding problems with a problematic group is avoiding any dealings with them and having no contact at all with them, ie avoiding them at a cost that is proportional to the problems they create. That is not to say there are some quite exceptional roma people, but bringing the situation of Roma people into the conversation when Jews as a group are talked about seems incredibly unfair to jews.
I've been inclined towards this sort of theory myself after reading the following about Armenians in the 19th century Ottoman Empire:
"Historian A. Tchamkerten writes 'Armenian achievements in the Empire was not only in trade, however. They were involved in almost all economic sectors and held the highest levels of responsibility. In the 19th century, various Armenian families became the Sultan's goldsmiths, Sultan's architects and took over the currency reserves and the reserves of gold and silver, including customs duty. Sixteen of the eighteen most important bankers in the Ottoman Empire were Armenian.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenians_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#Role_of_Armenians_in_the_Ottoman_economy
Amy Chua is one of the pop social science authors I enjoy the most. Its always made a lot of sense to me why Jews in Europe, Armenians in the ottoman empire, and Chinese in Malaya were all genocides against once more populist governments took over. Bring a market dominant sounds great in theory but when push comes to shove your safety is totally at the whim of the lords who hold the power of the gun. When regime change happens and people view you as a parasite to be cleansed, you are screwed.
From the abstract of this study https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104 "Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait." My theory: the survivors of centuries of pogroms may have survived partially because of their higher intelligence. Simultaneously, Jewish clannishness and cultural/religious separation from their Christian neighbors, combined with a much higher rate of consanguinity, may have contributed to keeping the markers associated with intelligence prominent. And, while it may be true today that higher intelligence correlates with 'important educational, occupational and health outcomes' that may not have been true in centuries past when socio-economic tiers were much more fixed. So, the low status of the immigrant forebears of today's 'successful Jews' doesn't preclude that many may have been highly intelligent. And in America, where one could more easily rise in socio-economic status based on performance, it would make sense that the grandson of a Jewish egg-candler from Galicia could be a university professor or an investment banker in the US today.
If it were true that pogroms a major intelligence filter, why do we not see waves of geniuses after other ones? Why is there not a new generation of brilliance from the Congo, or Zimbabwe?
Not a demographer so just speculating. Maybe it only triggers if you have such a large bottlebeck like 99% wiped out that the IQ of the remaining population would be enough to establish a founder effect of sorts. If the 1% remaining were average compared to say the rest of gentile europe, than it would not matter. But if the 1% remaining were the super geniuses within the total population, that founder effect could get real. I believe an earlier poster above mentioned that indeed there may have been such an extreme bottleneck for ashkenazis during the time of the crusades. Now as to why a given 1% remains a smart fraction or an average fraction or a dumb fraction, could be luck or chance, I have no clue.
Hey, just tossing out an idea. But the difference in this case would be centuries of pogroms. Also, it seems as though it may have been easier to migrate across borders in medieval Europe than in contemporary Africa? The smarter and nimbler got away? But I don't know if that's true.
"People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes."
No, I think people act like people who suggest genetic engineering are only ever about a half-second away from suggesting eugenics. I can't imagine what historical events might have instilled that fear in them.
It is deeply distressing that neither the post nor the majority of commenters seem to be considering this at all. Thanks.
we know that Scott is aware of this from his previous writing - that said he also knows that he has quite special kind of readership who are willing to consider unorthodox ideas. I don't think that eugenics go very well with utilitarianism either.
Why not? I mean, obviously utilitarianism doesn't think much of *ineffective* eugenics, but I could see an argument that aborting all psychopaths would be a net gain for society.
Genetic engineering/eugenics goes very well with utilitarianism. Changing the composition of the future population in a way that increases the production of utility could be a big win, e.g. happier, more conscientious, more intelligent, less psychopathic people, and fewer net-sufferers that need support.
Blacktrance, you are obviously right.
If there is one moral philosophic system that goes well with eugenics it is utilitarianism. No other competing school of thought within moral philosophy gives such clear support for eugenics. No school of thought is even close in how massive the arguments, viewed from the point of szaid swchool, is with eugenics.
The only other moral philosophic school of thought that might give a degree of support for eugenics that might even be somewhat near as big as the support for eugenics is from a utilitarian standpoint is virtue ethics since we know that the affinity one individual has for most virtues and vices are almost certainly to quite a large extent affected by an individual's genotype.
Well, the obvious response to that is: what's wrong with eugenics? Note that this is a very different questing from 'what's wrong with the specific cruel and coercive methods that were used by the Progressives and the Nazis to pursue eugenic goals in the early-to-mid 20th Century?'. There is something evil about forcibly sterilising people, but there is nothing *in principle* wrong with non-coercive policies to raise the levels of desirable cognitive traits among the population, including IQ (or at least considering putting an end to policies that are having an actively dysgenic effect) - we just seem to have got ourselves into a bad equilibrium where lots of people immediately wrinkle their nose and think 'smells like Hitler' without actually giving fair consideration to whether any specific eugenic proposal would pass a cost/benefit analysis. I don't think Scott would disagree.
Like, sure a reproductively-coercive dystopia would be worth avoiding, but, since Scott has already linked to Anatoly Karlin, I don't think it would be out of place to say that the Age of Malthusian Industrialism* would *also* be worth avoiding: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/where-do-babies-come-from/
For example, things that could conceivably have a eugenic effect on intelligence, or at least have a less-dysgenic effect, but that cannot reasonably be considered tyrannical, might include: tax breaks for children born to parents above a certain IQ threshold, government funded research into the genetic correlates of IQ followed by subsidised embryo screening, a ban on sperm banks accepting samples from low IQ men - or indeed, payment for samples scaled to IQ, or ... Project Prevention, a charity which pays drug addicts to get long-term birth control, on a purely voluntary basis (drug addiction here presumably being a good proxy for high impulsiveness and a moderate proxy for low intelligence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention . I vaguely remember Scott having written positively about them, at least in a 'I can't understand why so many people find this idea so horrifying' sort of way, but I think that might have been at his now-deleted old LiveJournal. I don't think the charity is *deliberately* intended as a eugenic project, but it's hard to imagine that it wouldn't have some eugenic effect.
At the risk of getting slightly more edgy, I could see offering violent criminals a reduced sentence in exchange for getting long-term contraception when they get out of jail, again on a purely voluntary basis, as being a policy that might be worth considering - at least we would be trading the alleged horror of monkeying with the gene pool against the undeniably real horror of violent crime - though there are possibly enough people whose brains instinctively recoil from the idea that propensity to violence could even *be* heritable that it would be a political non-starter.
*A deleted earlier version of this comment had this down as 'Age of Industrial Malthusianism', and since Karlin is in this thread, I'd better get the title of his essay series the right way round :-)
Of course, let's economically discriminate against people with low IQ, as if they don't have enough problems already. No way that doesn't become coercive or cruel, not to mention racist, since based on prior experience in this forum, many of the commenters here have already internalized "genetically predisposed to low IQ = Black."
Hey, I'm not even claiming that we *should* do any of these things, necessarily - just that none of them are anywhere near the 'forced sterilisation or extermination of undesirables' tier horror that people seem to associate with the e-word, so I don't really get why all the performative pearl-clutching. There is a really important difference between 'trying to achieve an aim by using the tax structure to subtly nudge people in a particular direction', and 'trying to achieve an aim by brutal coercion' - a distinction which most people are perfectly capable of making in most other contexts. But here, there seems to be a default assumption that *anything at all* that we could do to nudge the population in the direction of higher genetic potential for intelligence must inevitably lead us down the slippery slope to horrors. That's an assumption that I think people ought to have to defend, rather than simply assert.
And to the particular point of 'economically discrimiating against people with low IQ' - the suggestion was one that economically discriminates *in favour of the creation of more people with higher IQ'. That is, it would only apply to decisions on whether or not to have children. It's not as if I'd suggested charging high-IQ people lower taxes generally.
Though I'm curious - do you think it would be ethically acceptable to discontinue an existing tax structure if it was found to have dysgenic effects, on that basis? (like, for example, if it turned out that your child benefits programme was causing low-IQ people to have more children than high-IQ people than would otherwise be the case?)
Let me rephrase your question, would it be ethically acceptable to go to someone and say "sorry, I know you love your kids, but it turns out some social scientist proved your kids aren't going to meet our arbitrarily set IQ metrics, so we would rather you struggle to feed them than risk any more people like you becoming parents." Is that the question?
I think the question is "Should we discourage people from having more children than they can afford?" considering that we have safe, effective, cheap, long-lasting birth control options.
Well, you've phrased it in a maximally-hostile way, and you've presupposed that the children are already born and already receiving government benefits that are going to be withdrawn, but here's the crucial thing: it's not that someone who advocates such a set-up *wants people to suffer*. It's that they *accept that you get what you subsidise*, and if you subsidise the birth of low-intelligence children relative to high-intelligence children, we'll get more low-intelligence children in the next generation ... meaning a less-productive populace, that is less capable of producing the surplus wealth that allows us to subsidise children in the first place.
So let me turn it around a bit. How about: "Sorry, I know you will love your future kids if you have them, but we have strong evidence to suggest that they will likely be a net drain on societal resources. We're not going to *punish* you if you decide to go ahead and have children, we're just not going to *pay* you to do so, so you should take that into account in your fertility decisions".
That strikes me a manifestly, obviously nowhere near the ballpark level of evil that we associate with the Progressive/Nazi Era coercive eugenics, so if you think that it is comparably horrifying, I really will need to ask you to explain why - or at least, explain why you think that ceasing a dysgenic social policy must inevitably lead to Progressive/Nazi-tier cruelty.
Because the implication of your position seems to be that we are *morally obliged* to continue to actively practise dysgenics if we discovere that that's what we've been doing.
Well I think I would prefer to live in a kinder society than yours, one that gears its policies towards what will curb suffering and enable the happiness of individuals and communities without regard to what instrumental use they might be to society. A little utopian perhaps, but that's my personal guiding star, that society should be dialing down selection pressures, not dialing them up. And ultimately, I reject your entire notion that low IQ people are somehow a detriment to humanity that should be weeded out. There is an understandable bias in the rationalist community towards intelligence, and I recognize that most of the wonders of modernity are the result of high-achieving intelligent people, but to use this as an excuse to start a pogrom (even a very polite one) against people who (let's face it) your biggest problem is that you feel like you can't relate to, is on a personal level sociopathic, and on a broader level, a form of imperialism.
Let me hit you with a little parable cobbled together from the bible and various rationalist blogs: suppose the AI folks are right and it is the final fate of each of us to be judged by a computer-mind that is so far advanced that by its standards you are roughly on the same mental level as a dachshund. Do you want it making decisions about whether or not its policies might encourage you to reproduce based on how smart it finds you? Judge not lest ye be judged.
Abortions are also a half-second away from eugenics, if that (as aborting people with Down syndrome and others disabilities seems very common now). Yet that doesn't have the same stigma...
There has been a pretty interesting and profound conversation around it though. About whether people with Downs constitute a unique culture and whether losing that culture will decrease human flourishing in the long-term. I think a lot of people understand though that ultimately its the choice of the parents, and I include myself in that. If there were public policy encouraging people to abort children with down's syndrome I think the conversation would be a lot thornier.
Similarly, if particular parents want to gene-edit their kids to be smarter, I guess I understand, as a matter of personal choice. Although I think none of us can predict what the long-term unintended consequences of making that into a general trend might be.
It seems rather weird that all this stuff is tolerated as long as you present individual benefits and collective downsides, but not vice versa.
Imagine that you can discuss the benefits/costs of more schooling, but you can't discuss how a better educated populace might have benefits for society as a whole, but can only discuss how the specific individual and their parents benefit.
"Although I think none of us can predict what the long-term unintended consequences of making that into a general trend might be."
If you are not allowed to discuss that freely, then it becomes very hard to predict it, indeed.
I think you're allowed to discuss it, just be honest. My original criticism of Scott's post wasn't that genetic engineering was inherently evil, it was that I thought he was tip-toeing around the obvious concerns and objections in favor of fantastical ones. And judging by the comments, it seems I was right that plenty of people interpret his call for potential genetic improvement of IQ as a general call for social engineering towards improved IQ. So if we are gonna go there, let's go there without euphemisms or snark.
Also, in this particular community, I feel like the upsides of a society-wide improvement of IQ are rather taken for granted while the downsides (for individuals and communities) go unexplored and uncommented on. I admit its possible in the broader ecosystem it may be the other way around, but definitely not in Codexland.
I think that a lot of people are frustrated by the extent to which it has become impossible to figure out what the possibilities are in the first place or to test out improvement techniques. Furthermore, if you criticize this, you often get called a Nazi by those in power. Hence the snark and euphemisms. The first out of frustration, the second out of fear.
I personally don't take the upsides for granted, but I see most objections as fact-free expressions of disgust by people who refuse to allow the truth to be discovered. And I see widespread discriminatory beliefs against the less educated and less intelligent among the well-educated who express this disgust, which makes me very suspicious that they are unconsciously motivated by a desire to keep these people in their place and preserve their own place on top.
There is often a nasty undercurrent to charity anyway, where there is a demand of gratitude and a desire to control the lives of those getting charity, so they 'live right.' These benefits to the benefactor can disappear if the person is taught to fish...
It seems very plausible to me that the net effect of society-wide improvement of IQ is highly positive, but we can only truly determine that if we figure out the scientific and political possibilities. In the absence of the ability to do so, it seems unfair to accuse those who advocate for the potential upsides of ignoring the downsides. That is fair criticism if they were to advocate to just release certain methods into society, but not if they argue for research and discussion, based on potential upsides.
It seems likely to me that it is far easier to fix low IQ than to achieve very high IQ. The greatest hindrance to equal outcomes is unequal ability, so being able to equalize ability to some extent may be one of the best ways to achieve more equal opportunity. Our modern society also seems full of pitfalls and predators that low IQ people suffer from way more often (predatory lenders and bad financial behavior in general, fake medicine, self-help bureaucracy where you need to understand forms, etc). It may be true that this is so deleterious that getting lots of people to a level where they can cope with society much better is a huge benefit, even if they are still at the bottom of relative ability.
From what I've seen so far, the main downsides from higher IQ seems to be that very smart people feel isolated, but again, we don't even know whether it is technically realistic to produce extremely smart people (at all or without unacceptable downsides that make people not even want to pursue it for their kids). Even if it is, we may be able to legislate access. But again, this is all just speculation without more scientific knowledge.
Well that's a pretty decent argument. And I admit, if we were going to try this, I prefer some sort of technical intervention that doesn't require discrimination to succeed. Ironically, it isn't impossible to imagine that in twenty or thirty years I'll be arguing that being able to have your kid's IQ tweaked in the womb is a human right that should be covered by insurance, and not something reserved for rich people. We'll see.
As a general thing, rationalists seem to be much more interested in increasing high intelligence rather than in ameliorating low intelligence, even though there's also a common belief that an IQ below 85(?) tends to lead to much worse lives.
I grant that a great increase in intelligence, even for a small number of people, could have a very large positive impact, but raising low intelligence to the current average would presumably be a lot easier, and I think that should be put into calculations of what to work on.
If you sort the population by IQ and put the highest IQ in on place when the boys and girls are at a fertile age you have a eugenic system. It is also called university.
True in a sense, but only if the people who meet there actually go on to have children at above replacement rate (or at least at a rate higher than everyone else). It's conceivable that one could end up with a cognitive stratification effect where, thanks to decreased fertility in the high echelons, the smart fraction keeps getting smaller, but at the same time, thanks to ever more powerful assortative mating, the dwindling smart fraction also keeps getting *smarter*, so that fewer of them are needed to keep civilisation running, eventually leading to a scenario where a tiny band of supergeniuses maintains the infrastructure that supports a vast underclass of resentful peasants. That sounds like an unstable equilibrium that would be worth avoiding.
This is the most obnoxious comparison in the world. Imagine if every time someone suggested donating money to the poor (let alone tax reform) someone brought up all the people killed by communist regimes and that was considered a slam dunk argument.
Well, I don't know where you live, but I live in the USA, every time we have a conversation about government assistance or tax reform, we absolutely have people wailing about the spectre of communism. Although you are right that I find it annoying.
I don't think Scott is advocating for eugenics, I'm just pointing out that in the past a lot of the people who would be very psyched about improving the average or median IQ in society would have suggested eugenics as a faster, more efficient solution than any kind of genetic engineering. And it didn't take very long after my comment for someone to be like "actually what's wrong with eugenics?" So obviously people like that still exist in one form or another. So I was being sincere that I think that explains the squeamishness around discussing genetic interventions into IQ more than fear of fly-people or whatever. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe it really is just fear of mutants.
As far as the culture discussions go: Jewish culture has always placed a tremendous value on literacy and learning, including study (even memorization for quick recall) of enormous volumes of arcana and logical deduction from it. This obligation was not just for the rich, but applied (at least theoretically) to everyone. Literacy (and halakhic critical thinking skills) may have been relatively little help to a 17th century farmer, but it was a conceivably a major boon once commerce began to depend on written records, debt-bound transactions, insurance, or technological advances. If someone wants to dig into a cultural explanation, this seems an obvious place to start.
As far as timing goes, Jewish success starting in the early 19th century is likely related to Napoleon's tide washing over Europe. Jews were released from the ghettoes, in many places for the first time in centuries, and there was an increasing push to allow them to participate in broader civic society. The observation that there was little exceptional contribution to European learning prior to 1800 can be easily (though not necessarily correctly) explained by the segregation of Jews from most of Europe prior to then, and the major change wrought by the Napoleonic wars in most of the continent. Notably, Napoleon had relatively little impact on Russia, where the Jews in the 19th century achieved much less.
More than persecution by gentiles, Orthodox Judaism was a real drag on creative achievement by Jews. Jews had long looked down on Christians in Europe as poor and uncivilized, but by the 18th Century they started to notice that Christians were overtaking them in many areas.
Moses Mendelssohn invented the Jewish Enlightenment in the later half of the 18th Century about three generations after the Enlightenment began. But as the Orthodox might predict, his grandson Felix, the great composer, was baptized a Christian.
Regarding the last few paragraphs, you are assuming that we can scale up whatever factors, be they cultural or biological, that produced Jewish achievement since the Haskalah and Jewish emancipation to the rest of Western society and the world. But what if that's not possible, because those factors are products of the Jews' idiosyncratic history (e.g. being a minority that is both prosecuted and allowed various privileges like money-lending when the Powers that be needed it)? It is sort of like suggestions that the US should copy Scandinavian or continental welfare models, or East Asian development models — good perhaps look for ideas, but is unwise to try to replicate wholesale, both because can't replicate the historical condition that creates those models, and you maybe importing some negative consequences that you might not know of.
That Jewish immigrants to the US were lower quality than the European Jews is a somewhat surprising TIL to me (though of the 3% of my ancestry that is Jewish, a large part of them left Odessa for the US after the Revolution, which is an inversion of the usual pattern, but perhaps that is not that surprising considering they seem to have been well to do bourgeoisie who enjoyed posing for photos during the Imperial era). Would suggest that the Holocaust was even more destructive in human capital terms than you'd expect just be treating Ashkenazi Jews as a globally undifferentiated group (especially considering that the Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are, in turn, duller than the American ones).
PS. While I self-identify as a Russian nationalist, it's hard to see how I am far-right except perhaps if one pigeonholes all biorealists (a significant share of this blog's readership) as far-rightists. The original graph is from Burkina Faso, who is a pro-Soviet blogger, LOL.
Yeah an anomaly to me as well since immigrants from any origin in general tend to self select for more self-efficacy and drive, assuming it was motivated by economics and it wasn't like a penal colony where they were forced to migrate.
Now do Episcopalians.
Episcopalianism isn't an ethnic religion in quite the same way. In the past, an upwardly mobile man would move to NY and convert from whatever his Protestant sect was to Episcopalianism.
I’ve literally never heard of this.
The protagonist of Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" was written to be a representative of that type. And if you haven't heard of American Protestants moving between denominations (something my own parents did multiple times) I don't know what to tell you.
You can tell him:
~~~
You and your data, man! Read Czeslaw Milosz, Bukovsky, or Navrozov pere or fils. There is no data in any of them, but there is more under heaven and earth than data.
I am increasingly skeptical of this Bayesian cult. Talk about microscopes and lampposts. The microscope certainly shows you what's in front of it, but it shows you nothing else at all. What an efficient device for applying blinders.
~~~
http://web.archive.org/web/20101016025744/http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-conservatives-never-quite-catch.html#9162350572906935287
I am happy to see that you have grown out of sophomoric obsession with "data" to the exclusion of knowledge (or rather *purported* knowledge, as the replication crisis demonstrates amply) in other forms.
I haven't grown out of it. If anything I have far less patience for wasting time on MM/CY now. I was just addressing someone who said "I literally never heard of this", so there was an extremely low bar.
#sad
To be fair, I don't think much of Newbug's writing either. He's basically regurgitating some of his old ideas with less finesse and way more italics. That does not invalidate the concerns expressed in that comment, however. In the first place, not all things have been the subject of a "study", and of those that have, there is the question of how reliable the "studies" are compared to knowledge not dressed up in an academic outfit. You are hardly unaware of the replication crisis, p-hacking, ideological bias and so on. So you still have to engage in what you then called "speculation" to determine which "studies" are trustworthy. This may not necessarily leave you back at square one, but it is not a trivial proposition to prove that it doesn't.
By the way, here is an academic reference for Ven: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0520017560
J.P. Morgan was a devout Episcopalian deacon on Sundays so a lot of ambitious young Protestant migrants to New York switched from Congregationalism or Presbyterianism or whatever to Episcopalianism in hopes of catching the great man's eye during a church event.
A big part of the Scottish Enlightenment was that Edinburgh was not Church of England. If you wanted to go to a good university, and you were not Church of England, Edinburgh was it. As the English and Irish colleges and universities got less C of E, Edinburgh was no longer the only option, so the Scottish Enlightenment slowed. Ninjaed already?
Oh yes, I’m totally ninjaed by people whose only citation so far is a novel.
Either you're six years old or you're talking out of your arse. Up to you which you feel is least beclowning yourself.
Which thing would I be talking out my ass about? That the only citation is a novel? Or maybe you think I’m talking out my ass about what religious movements I’ve heard of?
In either case, it’s a weird use of the phrase.
You really want a bunch of people with axes to grind about the Protestant Reformation as it was imposed on them to start up about Anglicanism? Well ooookay then...
The Episcopal Church as it is today is the straggling descendant of what started off as a branch of the Church of England. The Church of England, in turn, was By Law Established as the State Church of England (Scotland was different due to the Presbyterians and not being brought in under the aegis of one monarch until James VI & I, nor formally united until 1706/07; Wales, God help them, were lumped in with the English, and Ireland had the Church of Ireland imposed on top of us but the natives never converted in large numbers).
The Church of England was the church of the Establishment, and the Establishment church. Dissenters of all stripes headed to America (your famous Pilgrim Fathers) for freedom of religion and the chance to set up their own settlements, but where the government followed, the bosses (to use that term) were CoE.
During and after the American Revolution, there was turmoil in the American church as some of them were British Loyalists and some of them were sympathetic to the Revolution. They solved the problem by cutting themselves off as a branch and setting up as a separate Anglican Church, including doing some fast work around getting bishops ordained. History page out of their own mouths here: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/who-we-are/history-episcopal-church/american-church/
Membership of The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was never huge, and it's tough to get good numbers since general record-keeping only really started in 1830 or thereabouts, but it went from a high of 3,647,297 in 1966 to 1,637,945 in 2019. However, they've always been a snobby bunch, hence the acronym WASP, which is why they made vast efforts to be inclusive'n'diverse (since the 2000s they've liked to boast about "111 dioceses and regional areas in 17 nations" in order to downplay how white and middle- to upper-class they are).
Take it away, Wikipedia:
"In the twentieth century, Episcopalians tended to be wealthier and more educated (having more graduate and postgraduate degrees per capita) than most other religious groups in the United States, and were disproportionately represented in the upper reaches of American business, law, and politics. According to Pew Research Center Episcopal Church "has often been seen as the religious institution most closely associated with the American establishment, producing many of the nation’s most important leaders in politics and business." And about a quarter of the presidents (11) were members of the Episcopal Church.
Old money in the United States was typically associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ("WASP") status, in particularly with the Episcopal and Presbyterian Church. In the 1970s, a Fortune magazine study found one-in-five of the country's largest businesses and one-in-three of its largest banks was run by an Episcopalian. Numbers of the most wealthy and affluent American families such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Whitneys, Morgans, and Harrimans are Episcopalians. The Episcopal Church also has the highest number of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita (56%) of any other Christian denomination in the United States, as well as the most high-income earners. According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, Episcopalians ranked as the third wealthiest religious group in the United States, with 35% of Episcopalians living in households with incomes of at least $100,000. In recent years, the church has become much more economically and racially diverse through evangelism, and has attracted many Hispanic immigrants who are often working-class."
If you will excuse me being snide, the appeal to Hispanic working-class immigrants is the trappings of Catholicism which are familiar to them, plus allowing them to import cultural icons such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, so they get the "dress-up" Catholic-Lite version of High Church Anglicanism in TEC.
But don't take my word for it, this 2006 interview from NYT Magazine with the newly-elected Presiding Bishop, and first woman to hold that post, Katharine Jefferts Schori:
"How many members of the Episcopal Church are there in this country?
About 2.2 million. It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.
Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?
No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
See? Piskies are smarter than those common Papists and Mormons!
In Britain and Ireland itself, Anglicanism is associated with the 'better' class of people; in Northern Ireland, the majority Protestant denomination(s) are Presbyterian and associated, with Church of Ireland second - from the 2011 census:
"Catholic (41 per cent); Presbyterian (19 per cent); Church of Ireland (14 per cent); Methodist (3.0 per cent)"
Methodism, which is an off-shoot of Anglicanism, is most prevalent in Wales, where Non-Conformists are the majority there (after the 19th century revivals) rather than the Church in Wales, the Anglican church there. Margaret Thatcher allegedly changed from Methodist to Church of England as she climbed to power in the Conservative Party, since the ideal image there is the Low-Church Tory.
https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/factsheets/christianity-in-britain-factsheet/
So, you’re just saying that we have the exact same phenomenon but with Episcopalians. Cool. Glad that’s settled.
Thank you my fellow Pole. Or Italian.
Or Puerto Rican.
Or whatever you are.
Truly, the navel gazing on this page was becoming most tedious, to the point of picking out shades and texture of individual peach fuzz hairs upon the navels.
Let them gaze upon our hairy Hibernian navels instead.
Fagh a Baghla!
Anglicanism in America wasn't just Anglicanism, it was low-church, vestry Anglicanism. It became known as Episcopalian because it needed some way to say, "We are Church of England but not THAT Church of England".
This is otherwise a good post, this specific part just needed to be pointed out. The thought that the Church hierarchy might consent to send a Bishop to New York was one of the contributing causes to the American Revolution that isn't often mentioned, so I felt the need to mention it.
I have many comments
> a bunch of people with axes to grind about the Protestant Reformation as it was imposed on them
1. What is this noun phrase in reference to? the ACX commentariat? Is it fair to characterise the entirety of the ACX readership as Catholic?
2. Is it fair to suggest that historically Protestantism has been been imposed harder on people than Catholicism has?
3. There are many judgements of the relative merit of Anglicinism versus other dedominations in this comment, is this relevant when we are not trying to judge the moral character of Episcopalians (or do you disagree that "now do Episcopalians" is obviously a call to asess the causes of their relative succes, just as the post does with Jews)?
> If you will excuse me being snide, the appeal to Hispanic working-class immigrants is the trappings of Catholicism which are familiar to them, plus allowing them to import cultural icons such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, so they get the "dress-up" Catholic-Lite version of High Church Anglicanism in TEC.
4. Do you believe that it is generally morally condemnable to allow converts to retain aspects of their former religion? If so what is your opinion one the Catholics Church's decision to allow its converts to continue celebrating Saturnalia as long as they called it christmas?
> No. It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion."
> See? Piskies are smarter than those common Papists and Mormons!
5. Is a difference in doctirne neccerily a sign that you look down upon other dedominations? If so what makes Anglicans particularily bad in your eyes.
and finally,
6. Do you actually have an explaination for their relative succes?
> I think this was a potentially reasonable strategy back when you could argue it would distract people away from getting too fired up about racial resentment. But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors is greater than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
On the contrary I think if you want to give people a non-resentment-based explanation for why x are successful, you need to give alternative explanations that aren’t about inherent superiority. People not so flattered will largely reject these out of hand and have boundedly rational (or simply rational) reasons for doing so.
Of course, there’s a lot of direct, obvious evidence of whites benefitting from systematic oppression which doesn’t apply to Jews. But fundamentally I think there are a lot of weird path-dependent ways things can shake out that aren’t a function of individual characteristics or intentions; IMO this is *the* insight of sociology over baseline human intuitions. If Pakistani immigrants are (say) disproportionately cab drivers and convenience store owners, well, that *could* have an explanation in terms of discrimination, conspiracy, or inherent characteristics, but I’m guessing it has very little to do with any of the above. Having “uninteresting” explanations in our toolkit is good, and helps us avoid tumbling towards the disaster that is maximum interestingness.
>On the contrary I think if you want to give people a non-resentment-based explanation for why x are successful, you need to give alternative explanations that aren’t about inherent superiority
Once they have started looking at things in ethnic terns, yes.
Agreed, there’s usually a better other way to frame things.
May Squiggles forbid the introduction of ethnicity into our discourse.
The first two Jewish US Senators were slaveowners in the South, with Judah P. Benjamin filling numerous high cabinet posts during the Confederacy before fleeing to England in 1865. His cousin Senator David Levy Yulee served nine months in prison for treason, but then got back to building railroads in underdeveloped Florida, for which he was much admired by Americans, especially relative to his cousin in exile.
In general, down through history, Jews have not particularly shied away from exploiting black labor, such as in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.
This is a moronic misreading and you perfectly well know it.
To elaborate (since the above post was unkind and necessary, but didn’t give documentation to meet the “true” part of the criteria I believe is still operative here) I mean here that in a US and Western European context*, there’s a long history of explicit institutional advantage to being defined as white, but not to being Jewish (or, say, green-eyed qua green-eyed.) This is relevant when we’re discussing the relative plausibility of claims for differential success. The presence of powerful green-eyed people who owned coffles of slaves etc is just a nonpoint.
*Obviously if we’re talking about say, Israel, then things are quite different. Unlike Steve I believe these things are contextual rather than essences.
The statistical evidence of disparities in outcome in 2021 that are so frequently cited to assert the concept of White Privilege could equally well be used to assert the existence of Jewish Privilege. For example, whites are richer than blacks on average, but Jews are likewise richer than white gentiles on average, by about an order of magnitude in terms of making the Forbes 100.
Today, a large number of Jewish pundits enthusiastically promote the statistics-based concept of White Privilege, without even noticing that the same logic implies the existence of Jewish Privilege.
Clearly, the explanation is that systemic racism by Jews exploits Asians, whites and blacks alike. Or is it that whites use their systemic privilege to favor Jews and Asians over whites? Or was it that immigrant blacks were the ones in charge? Or that they escaped racism somehow?
Hmm.... so difficult to make these facts all internally-consistent without considering that individuals with the same skin color might actually be different from each other in many ways, that skin color doesn't actually explain how people fit into society, compared to skills gained, cultural background, intelligence, life choices, etc...
If only we could have some sort of major civil rights leader come out and give a speech in D.C. about how to judge people.
Classic inventing a guy to get angry at.
The basic lesson is: Don't think about Ashkenazis.
Green-eyed?
I.e, incidental feature no one gives a fuck about.
During the slavery era, relatively few German gentiles immigrated to slave states, but German Jews were less averse to the South. For example, the Lehman Brothers firm whose collapse on 9/15/2008 triggered the Great Recession, was founded by German Jews in Alabama before the Civil War to do business with cotton plantations.
I would actually say that, in the regions of Eastern Europe where the majority of Ashkenazi Jews lived, Jews were in many ways legally privileged relative to the great majority of the Christian population in pre-modern times.
Obviously, the Christian aristocracy was the most privileged and powerful group of all, and anti-Semitic persecution was often quite terrible. But members of the Jewish communities of Russia, Hungary, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were all at least *free* during the centuries when the vast majority of the surrounding Christian peasant population consisted of horribly-oppressed serfs—in Russia, oppressed to the point of being legally indistinguishable from chattel slaves.
Even after the abolition of serfdom, members of the peasant classes in these countries often faced legal discrimination: e.g., before the agrarian reforms of 1905 Russian peasants couldn’t leave their villages without official permission, a restriction on freedom of movement even harsher than that which confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement.
This. I might add that many of those Jews participated in pumping money out of the serfs, by being employed by said Christian aristocracy as estate managers, even renting village churches so that the peasants had to pay a Jew for the privilege of christening their newborns, and (which was especially hateful to the peasants) as the only legal purveyors of alcohol. If there was a movement in the contemporary stetls to condemn the Jews who participated in such practices, I would be happy to learn about it.
A class based view of oppression could easily paint Jews as oppressors because they've been more likely than Christians to be bourgeois.
I don't think that is true, but it's more plausible a priori than supposing I'm benefitting a great deal from inheritance^4 from my great-grandparents getting first dibs on some New Deal era relief program, or inheritance^7 from 1.4% of my great^4 grandparents owning slaves.
There's quite a lot of intergenerational regression-to-the-mean in wealth because it gets spent.
And slavery didn't even enrich the regions in which it was practiced. The south was poorer than the north before the war, and a LOT poorer than the north after the war. Likewise the south was poorer than the north throughout the Jim Crow era. Whatever benefit Jim Crow had for white people in the south, it wasn't even enough for them to catch up with northern whites.
Actually, a class-based view of oppression would view ethnic categories as basically incidental trivia. (This doesn’t account for the full complexity of the world, blah blah blah, but I am fully in favor of a colorblind politics on prudential and brute-preference grounds.)
It's almost as if Karl Marx wasn't wholly honest about how the world works...
Marx was correct, though. He had a very accurate understanding of how the world works.
I don't know if it was dishonesty or ignorance. Marx's only experience of employer-employee relations was hiring a housekeeper and impregnating her.
Marx certainly wasn't ignorant of how employment worked. He has some excellent chapters regarding it, e.g.:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm
He really was the funniest Marx Brother in the end.
Karl Marx is well known for his acerbic wit. I think Marx also has the whole "it's funny because it's true" thing going for him.
If you think Marx is not "wholly honest" you should provide evidence, by the way. Rationalists have standards of evidence, and you have claimed that Marx wasn't honest. This will require some effort on your part to show how he was not honest.
One possible, underexplored difference between Christian and Jewish achievement is that rabbis have been encouraged to have as many kids as possible while monks and nuns have been forbidden from having kids.
Anecdotally, many Jewish geniuses are the grandchildren of regionally-famous rabbis.
But there are plenty of other religions that don't endorse celibacy. Do Muslims outperform Christians?
That’s a good question; I don’t know enough about Muslim culture to confidently say what my theory would predict. I have a very vague notion that education in Islam was insular and privileged far more recently than in Judiasm, with results like the continued complexity of formal Arabic letters; in this way it would be more like Christianity. But the core question “was scholarship historically a selective trait in the Muslim community?” I don’t know the answer to.
Off the top of my head I don’t believe that the Muslim world competes well in hard numbers, e.g. Nobel Laureates, with Jews or Christians. Different ME countries have reputations for being more or less smart, but that points more towards particular institutions, traditions, and situations rather than broad religious trends.
But the Arab world was pretty dominant in the sciences for a long time! Algebra, Arabic numerals (which were an upgrade over the Indian numerals the Arabs got), Ptolemy was one of the great astronomers of antiquity; there was a period of prodigious scholarship. In fact, the Enlightenment was jumpstarted by the Arabic works and translations of ancient Greek works, which Europe had not sustained.
All that is to say that I wouldn’t be surprised if Muslims fall between Christians and Jews on this metric, weak though my evidence is.
And surely if individual academic success isn’t heritable, and cultures that lionizes education as a key selection criteria don’t pull ahead, that would also be very interesting.
Your chronology is cock-eyed. Enlightenment is much too late to have been directly influenced by Latin translations of Arabic works - that's XII-XIII c. Ptolemy is II c. AD and he was a Greek not an Arab; at any rate he wrote in Greek. And if anything was jump-started, it was the Renaissance jump-started by Greek manuscripts and Greek refugees flowing into Italy from Constantinople. Many of the earlier translations from Greek to Arabic were done by Nestorian Christians who, together with Jews, initially constituted much of the intellectual stratum of the Muslim world. Arab scholars took over later and kept the lights in the Hellenistic inheritance on until Al Ghazali's faction won over Averroes.
Well thank you for informing me!
I think whether the larger point of "Islam had a period of scientific eminence" can survive the loss of the "Ptolemy translations started the Enlightenment". But I don't know if it can survive "Jews and Christians were responsible for the Islamic scientific eminence". Where could I go look to understand that claim? I've never heard even a whisper of it, and I'm Jewish.
*Typo, should read
"I think the larger point '...' can survive ..."
I didn't write that Jews and Christians were responsible for Islamic scientific eminence - don't put words in my mouth - but it should be obvious if you know anything of the history of Islam that it couldn't have started out with any scientific eminence, no more than Attila's Huns or Alaric's Goths. As for references, check out Philip Jenkins' Lost History of Christianity (2009) on Nestorian churches, and Lucio Russo's Forgotten Revolution (2004) on the development of science in the ancient world in general.
My thought is that the cultural explanation is purely about education. Jewish people tends to seek higher education more, thus they tend to do better economically-- not really a mystery. It's an ever clearer fit when you look at Asian communities. Vastly different communities of Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, all do well in America because they seem to push their kids towards education fairly hard. Nigerians and Indians do well because they make their kids get tertiary degrees. Why do Episcopalians do better than other Christian groups in America? Probably because they get more college degrees than other groups.
I think the only way to read this question is to ask why different groups acquire different levels of education. We might say it's a matter of genetics, but I'm not sure that makes much sense in light of the evidence-- after all, there's the famous data point that intelligence is more inheritable in the US than in Australia. Every group in America that highly values education seems to do pretty well.
Of course what remains to ask is why the Tuskegee Institute and its larger pro-education ideology didn't make Black Americans overachievers. For the record, I think you do have a lot of Black inventors popping up around this era. But it seems obvious that under legal segregation, lynching, and the like Black Americans were uniquely prevented from succeeding with this strategy.
Legal segregation ended generations ago. There has been improvement in black SES since then, but not comparable to Jewish Emancipation.
The more important Jewish Emancipation was the self-emancipation that began with the Jewish Enlightenment.
Hard to disentangle the two since they happened around the same time. I believe Sowell has pointed to the Japanese as a people who decided to improve themselves after they saw how much better other cultures were doing.
And the Blacks refuse to self emancipate and embrace the Enlightenment.
Going backwards socially, whatever income is doing.
A big difference here is how easy it is for racists to tell that someone is black. Emancipated Jews can assimilate far more easily into a majority white society than emancipated black people.
It's possible that the economy wasn't as locked down back then.
IQ differences between religious groups are genetic: https://archive.is/z1L1I
If you control for education, is there still Jewish overachievement? I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing yes.
Oooh! That data about intelligence is more inheritable in the US than in Australia sounds fascinating - do you have links I could look at? thanks
It might be easier for the longest time to do better in America for all groups- say 18th century until..mmm.. the 1970s. Meaning all groups. Americans still have the vastest store of natural resources on earth, guarded by matchless geography- I mean only we can make war here, for the most part only we have made war here. War throws out all the hard work in a very short time, including of course the precious breeding and education.
I think there's a qualitative difference between poor Jews that immigrated and similarly poor Jews who didn't, and this difference might explain at least some of the effect observed in America, although it does nothing for the effect outside America. The Jews that immigrated were the ones that looked around at the pogroms and left, instead of hunkering down and rebuilding. This shows a preference for drastic action, that is well suited to success in America (and especially for success "back-in-the-day".
In response to pogroms in Odessa I had relatives that stayed, and ancestors that left. They saw their family business burnt and confiscated and didn't rebuild. They left, first to Poland then to the USA (many coming via Canada in a years-long process). This prior for action, that all/almost all of the immigrants to the USA during this time period have in their genetics/culture seems a better explanation than intelligence or cultural explanations focused on reading.
This is also reflected in the (frankly ridiculous) list of jobs/careers common among those generations. Peddler to gas station owner to carnie to whatever-else it took, and wherever else, to make a living and keep getting back at it. That's the difference, it's an entire population of people that selected for taking action.
I think you can also contrast this with Irish, Italian, Scottish and Germany immigration to America. Many of those groups came because of incredible multi-generational poverty that ground them for a prolonged time period vs general middle class lifestyle followed by sudden and violent descent to lower class.
That was freaking glorious. Thank you ever so much.
I was surprised to see that 3% of Jews in the Pale were in the military, forming 6% of all people with that occupation there. Based on the Appollonian/Mercurian distinction Yuri Slezkine wrote about in "The Jewish Century", I would have expected them to be underrepresented.
My great grandfather was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Jews were, according to family lore, rare in the officer corps then but less so in the rank and file.
Of the great powers involved in WW1, I believe Austria-Hungary was the only one that allowed Jews to serve as general officers. About 8% of the officer corps was Jewish, the third largest group after Catholics (79%) and Protestants (also about 8%).
Are you not counting the US as a great power in WW1, or were Jews really barred from the US officer corps as late as 1917?
I don't know about the US; I was thinking of the European powers.
Also, I don't think that Jews were barred absolutely from the officer corps in any army, just barred from the higher ranks.
Germany also had Jewish officers in WWI, not just Austria-Hungary. Anecdotally, lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, a Nuremberg Jew, was the direct superior officer of corporal Adolf Hitler during most of 1918. (Gutmann has perhaps not spotted Hitler's issues at that time; Hitler received his 1st Class Iron Cross medal in 1918 due to Gutmann's recommendation)
When it comes to higher-rank army membership in WWII Germany, Jerry Klinger at the Jewish Magazine has pulled out the following stats: "A large number of former Mischlings rose to high rank: 2 Field Marshals, 15 Generals, 2 full Generals, 8 Lieutenant Generals, and 5 Major Generals."
http://www.jewishmag.com/158mag/hitler_jewish_soldiers/hitler_jewish_soldiers.htm
While "full" Jews would have been excluded as of 1935's Nuremberg laws, it appears that on the mixed-marriage or patrilineal side, persons with Jewish ancestry have been fairly successful in reaching the highest military ranks. "Mischling" was the Nazi term for people with 1/2 to 1/8 Jewish ancestry. In 1933 Germany had about 67 million people, of whom about 500 thousand Jews plus about 200-400 thousand "Mischling".
If Klinger's stats above are correct, then they depict a relatively high number of Marshals and Generals from a quite small subset of the population (around half percent). Their ascent was achieved in spite of the considerable discrimination against their subgroup (less extreme than the discrimination against Jews, but still -quite- considerable). Which suggests that this subgroup may have inherited sufficient advantages (whether from "culture/nurture" or "genes/nature") to not only offset the said discrimination, but to go on to significantly "outperform" any of the other subgroups who haven't faced even remotely similar levels of discrimination.
Austria-Hungary had a draft, which included Jews, so I'd expect about equal representation in the military, at least in wartime.
While I'm uncertain how many Jews actually served in the Russian military, one thing that seems to stand out in the 20th century (and *especially* in the first half of the 20th century) is just how successfully Russian Jews started or organized militaries, relative to Jews anywhere else. The top commander of the Red Army during the Civil War was Leon Trotsky; of the 10 leaders of the Red Army cited by Wikipedia, 3/10 are Jewish. (Most of the Stavka, or chiefs of staff, were ex-Tsarist officers who were presumably not Jews.)
Some of the early Zionist forces also seemed dominated by Russian Jews. The Jewish Self-Defense Organization was famously founded by a man named Vladimir (Jabotinsky). Trumpeldor, who founded the first Zionist paramilitary in Palestine, was a former patriotic Russian who had volunteered for service in the Russo-Japanese War, and never learned to competently speak any language besides Russian. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who organized the Haganah in the 1920s, was formerly the leader of the *Russian* Poalei Zion. The first Irgun commander, Tehomi, was from Odessa, and the second, Bitker, was a veteran of the Russian Civil War on the *White* side (very unusually). Stern, who founded Lehi, was unusual as a native Russian speaker from modern Poland. By the time of the 1948 war, a large number of the leaders were sabras or had only spent their childhoods outside of Palestine.
The borders of the Russian Empire were sort of arbitrary (or at least probably didn't correspond too much to the pre-existing Jewish divides), but it seems very clear that at least Russian-speaking or Russian-assimilated Jews tended towards much greater militarism during the first half of the 20th century, and it seems like there's a vague pattern where Jews from further east were likelier to be military leaders. I wonder why this is, and whether it has to do with Russian culture, Jewish culture, the interplay between them, or whatever else.
Here’s another possible factor: selective pressure for intelligence. Has any other identifiable human population benefited in terms of reproductive fitness in knowing when and how to hide, when and how to leave, how to travel with children, and how to function safely in new societies for as long as the Jews have? For about 3500 years, being smarter made it a little more likely that your Jewish genes would continue. This was probably significant for most Jews right into the 20th Century. And, related to the One Drop point, if you managed to completely assimilate, you ceased to be counted as a Jew.
Roma?
Awesome possible test case! I don't know enough Romani history to comment on whether the persecution was of similar length and scale.
If you're interested a good book is I Met Lucky People.
It seems most people commenting here are aware that there are different groups of Jewish people, such as Ashkenazi and Sephardi, but are unaware that the Roma left India in several waves and settled in a number of different countries through different routes. This has a huge impact on whether they speak a Sanskrit-based language, how many words of that language were influenced by their host nation (or nations) language, or whether they just speak the local language. Were they allowed to own land, join the military or convert to the local religion? Attend local schools? Do they have local citizenship? What religion are they? How many wars did they go through before WWII and after?
Although there are some common traits such as working in entertainment or metalworking and using words rooted in Sanskrit, the difference between a Roma living in the US, Gaza, Iran, Hungary, Romania, the UK or Denmark are going to be huge. This is further muddled by the fact that since the EU was formed, there are now 'local' Romani who might have lived in one country for a centuries and 'new arrivals' from poorer nations in Eastern Europe. Like the poor Jews from the East who were unpopular in say, early 1900s Austria and then the US, these new arrivals are often seen as giving the local Romani a bad name. There's no religion unifying all the Roma into helping each other out. They might not even be able to understand each other.
How do we compare darker skinned Romani people who were slaves through the 1850s and still speak their own language to Romani people elsewhere who only speak the national language and have always been relatively free? Or Romani who were discriminated against for not being Muslim? Or for being Muslim elsewhere? Some communities have huge problems with lead exposure and terrible prenatal care which I imagine also is a problem for IQ.
If I recall correctly from I Met Lucky People, the Nazis also permitted those Romani who they determined to be 'pure' Romani (hilarious since they had been mixing blood since walking out of India) to live, while those who were half (and often more middle class and property owning) were killed and their properties and businesses seized. Now people act like there never was a set of middle class Romani people.
Darker skinned Romani can't hide as easily no matter what type of lifestyle they lead. When these people can't pass as White or have surnames that mean 'Gypsy' in the local national language, such as Cigan or Tsigany, that has a huge impact on their housing and employment applications. That said, in some countries they are very mixed, look very White and only speak English. Many Romani people moved to the United States and stopped being 'Romani' and started being whatever passport they had been carrying when they arrived. Unlike giving up a religion, they could just become say, "Hungarian-American" rather than "Hungarian-Romani-American." Darker skin? Well, maybe they're part Italian! Or Jewish! Why not have a fresh start? I just happen to play the violin.
I'm not against making comparisons, but I think to make a comparison we need to be very clear about our concept of Roma and which group of Roma we're talking about. Holocaust aside, I think for many Roma a better comparison would be to compare them with African-Americans. Darker skin, a history of slavery, medical experimentation, ongoing court cases over forced sterilisation, segregated schooling, slum housing conditions, police brutality and so on. The European Roma Rights Centre is full of stories about lawsuits trying to get Romani children into normal schools. People will say it's their fault and they hate the culture rather than the race (and the race on a dna test looks like a mix of South Asian, West Asian and whatever their ancestors mixed with on their way) but I don't think it's terribly useful to compare them with the Jewish people despite them both being minorities found in Europe. That said, as I mentioned in another comment on here, there are actually no shortage of people who are part Romani and part Jewish.
Maybe, but pogroms were sporadic and somewhat hard to predict. It may not have been the violence of the persecution Jews faced; it may have mostly been the fact that they were barred from many occupations, and thus were forced into professions where intellectual ability was favored significantly moreso, so the smarter you were, the better you were at horse trading, so you made more money, had more kids who were healthy enough to survive the latest cholera outbreak or whatever. I can't remember where I read this theory.
"I can't remember where I read this theory."
You probably either read Cochrane and Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion, or you read about the kerfuffle where a New York Times writer got into big trouble for citing those authors :-)
Reflecting on my own upbringing, I noticed two big recurring messages:
1. High in-group preference repeatedly emphasized (do most groups teach this?). Not in the sense of looking down on other groups, more like: It's important that you're Jewish, and you should be nice to everybody, but you should especially be nice to fellow Jews.
2. Our oral/educational tradition is important to us. Actually, it's so important that if you want to engage with your heritage, you will have to learn an entire goddamn language. Have fun!
And I think somewhere between those two, you have a recipe for at least longterm affiliation and survival, if not necessarily excellence. How normal is it to emphasize these two priorities? Can anyone speak to, say, a Chinese, or Indian, or WASPy upbringing?
Middle Easterners in general often have a strong tendency toward staying a people for immensely long periods of time: e.g., there are two Samaritan villages left, there were 50,000 Gnostics in the swamps of Iraq in 2003, the Lucifer-worshipping Yezidis have been in the news, the Druze, etc etc.
The Roma tend to stay Roma despite huge efforts by Europeans over the centuries to get them to knock it off. But it doesn't help the Roma win many hard science Nobel Prizes.
High in-group preference, particularly in situations where your in-group is a really small minority, could easily become counter-productive, I would think, both individually and on a group level.
If the difference were cultural, we wouldn't you get these results for Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews? Does anyone think that all those top scientists of the 20th century had the same natural abilities as the rest of us? There is strong evidence that Ashkenazi Jews have higher cognitive abilities, and that this is one of the primary reasons for the disproportionate success.
It's not one of the most interesting mysteries in the world. But figuring out a way to avoid a conversation about heritability and intelligence... that's one of the most stimulating puzzles in the world.
"If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone..."
- Eugenics would be simpler and more popular than genetic engineering
- Eugenics isn't popular
- It's so unpopular that we have full-on dysgenic policies in place
>- Eugenics would be simpler and more popular than genetic engineering
Uh, no. I really don't think the government telling me who to fuck, or taxing me for being stupid and having kids anyway, or whatever other mechanism to manage eugenics (I'm being nice and assuming we're not going to do what we did last time, with all the forced sterilizations of epileptics and the like), will be more popular than the hospital offering my pregnant wife a scientifically-tested that alters our child's genes so their IQ, conscientiousness, and physical fitness go up by 1-2std. Frankly this is a baffling statement.
It doesn't take anything nearly so overt to create artificial selection pressures. We're already doing it. When I say it would be "more popular," it's a cheeky way of saying that putting some intentional pressures on breeding would be easier than genetic engineering, which is rather unpopular.
I think the idea of a simple IQ + Fitness boost during pregnancy is a rather sanguine projection of how that will turn out, but we shall see.
>When I say it would be "more popular," it's a cheeky way of saying that putting some intentional pressures on breeding would be easier than genetic engineering, which is rather unpopular.
If putting such artificial selection pressures would be popular, why are we doing a dysgenic manner rather than a eugenic one? Obviously the government would be perfectly happy to make sociopaths have fewer children than non-sociopaths, but every obvious mechanism (cutting social safety net, punishing single mothers, arresting men for having children out of wedlock, etc) is wildly unpopular. (Arresting men for failure to pay child support has obviously proved insufficient; and ways of making it more sufficient, like hiking rates beyond what poor people can pay, are not popular.)
>I think the idea of a simple IQ + Fitness boost during pregnancy is a rather sanguine projection of how that will turn out, but we shall see.
Given that neurogenesis is extremely limited post-birth, and these kinds of genetic traits are among the most studied and ones that would have the most interest/impact, I don't really see any other probable route for general population genetic engineering. The most obvious alternative is the bottle baby idea (state grows babies in vats for its purposes), but the state could already pay surrogates and use donated eggs and sperm to do a similar thing for not much different prices, and states do not actually do this because they have no interest in doing so.
The main dysgenic policy is sort of an emergent property of the school system and the job market. It systematically selects all the smartest women to stay in school longest and then do high-pressure careers where they don't have time for kids. By the time they feel securely established in careers they're 35 and not particularly attractive nor fertile.
There could be a government policy that pays women to take a gap decade and have a few kids between undergrad and grad school.
It seems risky to have a TFR of half-replacement among female PhDs before we have adequate compensatory genetic engineering. If we overestimate how soon we'll get it, we might never get it. We might end up in the Idiocracy attractor.
It's my understanding that there have been a lot of government policies tried in various countries, aimed at offering women the chance to not have to choose between a career and a child, and they are all completely ineffectual. Estonia gives you 100% wages for 435 days after birth and their fertility rate is lower than the USA's, which, uh, does not do that.
The US is way more religious than Estonia and I think that explains a lot of the fertility difference.
Secular people tend towards living hedonistically till they're 40 and then trying to settle down at the last minute before the biological clock strikes midnight.
But since all religions are false I can't condone any intervention to spread religion.
People need to hear better secular arguments for having more children and practicing more prudent lifestyles. I should get around to reading Bryan Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Children".
> Obviously the government would be perfectly happy to make sociopaths have fewer children than non-sociopaths, but every obvious mechanism (cutting social safety net, punishing single mothers, arresting men for having children out of wedlock, etc) is wildly unpopular.
Why do you expect these measures to be good mechanisms for selectively reducing the number of children sociopaths have? Are you predicting that (e.g.) men who have children out of wedlock are notably more likely to be sociopaths?
Yes. Sociopaths tend to be sexually promiscuous and uncaring about the consequences of their actions on others - great traits to make someone go bareback in a girl or sabotage birth control or any of a dozen other ways to get a child out of wedlock.
It seems unlikely to me that those characterize more than a small proportion of single mothers or men who have children out of wedlock, and people are (correctly) strongly averse to policies which have some small eugenic effect while causing large amounts of harm to innocents.
Given where the Intelligentsia have taken America to in 2021, and where they took Europe and Asia in the 20th century perhaps we may not wish to select for Intelligence so much? It seems to correlate with psychopathic behavior, and worse psychopaths getting into power. Intelligence perhaps is not virtue.
How? Culturally, Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim are drastically apart, in about every way other than religion - and religion is not what is at play here, except in so far as the remnants of some religious values got refracted in a particular time and place (or in so far as *leaving* a religion tended to have certain effects at one time and place).
In addition to possible differences in conscientiousness and other controversial traits, the gaps between the outcomes are likely the same due in part to average African American IQ being 85, White being 100 and Ashkenazi Jewish IQ being 115. I would think this is worth mentioning, however if you mention this and genetics you have now dipped into the IQ debate. You seem skeptical that the explanation is cultural and you seem skeptical that Smith is adequately explaining these gaps. I hope it is okay for me to ask this question but why are you able to discuss differences in ability due to genetic causes between Jews and non-Jews but intelligence differences between races evokes this reaction:
>This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.
The obvious next question if Ashkenazi success is due in part to genetics is what about other racial gaps? I find it odd that you would touch on this issue when you try to route around a very similar issue with regard to race. And if Smith is employing the same "routing" around the issue with regards to Jewish accomplishment, can you blame him if you do the same with racial differences in intelligence?
I don't believe you're obligated to talk about genetics, differences between groups in outcomes, culture war issues and so forth. But having this discussion without talking about genetic differences in IQ is silly. Why not just go all the way and mention it? I guess I don't understand the middle position of nearly saying it but not going a step too far.
Why do people who talk about those possible genetic differences between races in intelligence possibly deserve to die in a ditch but you can argue through implication that there may be Jewish and non-Jewish genetic differences in accomplishment?
Scott brought up Cochran's genetic theory.
Correct.
It seems to be the logical outcome of the following facts and motivations:
1. Talking about intelligence gaps causing "underachievement" is very sensitive
2. Talking about intelligence gaps causing "overachievement" in minorities is less sensitive
3. The author wants rein in people who are wrong, with minimal treading on the sensitivity.
4. If you say [2], then that implies [1]. If you imply [2], that's two degrees of implication away from [1], which is a comfortable semantic distance. It would be difficult for someone with a short attention span to pin something on you or tweet about it.
In his autobiography Feynman recounts asking this question to a bunch of rabbinical students (in particular, about why Jewish people are academically successful). At a different point, he asks a Japanese ambassador about how his country managed to make such a miraculous economic recovery after the war. The answer in both cases is basically the same: a particularly high regard for learning (the rabbinical students also add that this is because rabbis themselves are essentially teachers/scholars). Feynman adds to this the following anecdote:
“It was the same afternoon that I was reminded how true it is. I was invited to one of the rabbinical students’ home, and he introduced me to his mother, who had just come back from Washington, D.C. She clapped her hands together, in ecstasy, and said, 'Oh! My day is complete. Today I met a general, and a professor!'
I realized that there are not many people who think it’s just as important, and just as nice, to meet a professor as to meet a general.”
Also, Thomas Sowell has an interesting essay related to this where he compares the situation of a number of different minorities (Jews, Lebanese, Armenians, Chinese in Southeast Asia etc.). He, too, gives evidence that high regard for education is a relevant factor, but also adds some other things, such as strong family/community ties that contribute to their successes.
(Not sure if any of this is a sufficient answer, but I think it's interesting)
I host Sowell's essay here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2007/09/10/information-wants-to-be-free/
American culture has been preaching high regard for education since before my grandparents were born, but it doesn't seem to have caught on in some areas. By all means continue preaching, but don't expect different results.
Being bad at something tends to lead to a lower regard for it, as in Aesop's story of the fox and the grapes. Self-serving bias works like this: If I'm good at X, then I update towards "X matters", but if I'm bad at X, I update towards "X doesn't matter".
Jewish high regard for education could be seen as a consequence of ability. Ghetto low regard for education could be seen as a consequence of inability.
The only path to creating a high regard for education in the ghetto might be through genetic engineering.
Not sure if it applies to us education as a whole but that Aesop's thing rings true to me. One of our drum majors back when I was a kid told us that if we got better at marching band competitions we would enjoy winning and like it more. That virtuous cycle never materialized as we were all lazy kids who mostly did band to socialize.
> American culture has been preaching high regard for education since before my grandparents were born, but it doesn't seem to have caught on in some areas
American culture (or at least middle class American culture) seems to greatly value education in the sense of "cruise your way through a college degree so that you can make more money", but not so much in the sense of "learning is great (and high status!) for its own sake".
The founding fathers were really into education for its own sake. The US has been the world's biggest source of technological innovation ever since it caught up with Britain sometime in the 1800s. Probably at least half of US innovators were not jewish. Valuing education for its own sake seems to be a significant thing in the US beyond the Jewish community.
But to partially concede your point, maybe one could draw some overlapping bell curves of the terminal value various groups assign to knowledge and jews would be one of the right-most bell curves. I would be surprised if these bell curves looked much different from the IQ bell curves.
I don't think 'cultural' = 'easy to change', so the fact that outcomes have proven to be hard to change doesn't disqualify the cultural explanation in my opinion. And I think the word 'preaching' is important here: Sowell alludes to the idea that part of the reason why it was possible to maintain a focus on education in these groups might have been that they saw it as part of their identity and a feature that distinguished them from the rest of society. It seems much less likely that it would catch on if it's being forced on from the outside - indeed, you could have the inverted situation when high regard for learning becomes a mark of the outgroup and therefore shunned.
If culture-only were the root cause, it should be easy to prove with transracial adoption studies. Get some jewish parents to raise black babies and some black parents to raise jewish babies. If the former babies end up with an avg IQ of 111 and the latter babies end up with an avg IQ of 85, QED. But that's not how actual transracial adoption studies turn out. So far they're more consistent with the partially hereditarian view.
That's interesting. Do you have some references in mind for these studies? I wonder if there are sufficiently big sample sizes for these particular cases to draw reliable conclusions.
See the Minnesota transracial adoption study.
another thing: it seems like you are particularly focusing on IQ differences here. The cultural differences I mentioned would not necessarily manifest in IQ, but could still be relevant to overall success (or even just likelihood to participate) in various fields.
There are a number of fairly accomplished groups in the world like the Armenians. And then there are the Ashkenazis, who have been in a class by themselves for accomplishment since the latter 1800s.
How long will that last? It seems like Southern California Jews since the 1970s have tended to smoke a lot of dope, which is not highly conducive to keeping up their ancestors' Promethean levels of accomplishment. On the other hand, Greater Hollywood is now filling up with Jews and part Jews from Iran, Israel, the Soviet Union, and so forth.
The future is unwritten.
Who are the most accomplished of those from the Men With Gold Chains group in Greater Hollywood now?
I dunno, maybe the various kinds of Persians? Maybe the people who are from the Soviet Union via a stay in Israel, but who aren't necessarily all that Jewish?
The recent Armenians from the Soviet Union haven't yet lived up to the old Armenians' level: they are mostly Eastern Armenians who were more cut off from the Mediterranean and the West than the Western Armenians who came earlier.
But the Armenians now have a lot of institutions like their own private schools, so they'll hopefully wrestle the "-yan" Armenian newcomers into behaving more like the "-ian" Armenian oldtimers.
An interesting analysis would be to compare the success (as defined here) of Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups with the success of those Jews with Sephardic and Mizrachi backgrounds. I know there are not a ton of Sephardic/Mizrachi Jews in the US, but surely the analysis could be made.
Good question.
Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews tend to show up in the US history books as the First Jewish-American Whatevers: e.g., slave state US senators Yulee-Levy and his cousin J.P. Benjamin, or Cardozo the second Jewish Supreme Court justices.
Then the German Jews started arriving after 1848 and did spectacularly well. Many of those tended to be highly-selected for business skills. E.g., the Rothschilds wanted to send an heir to open a sixth branch office in New York, but after staffing their five European branches, they couldn't find a sixth member of the third generation they felt worthy of managing a New York office.
I think the former are all Sephardic rather than Mizrahi, who aren't as prevalent in American history.
Florida Senator David Levy Yulee's father was born in Morocco, but I see him categorized as Sephardic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Elias_Levy
Interestingly, elder Levy tried to start a Zionist farming community in Florida for persecuted Jews in the 1820s, but it didn't catch on. He was a big slavetrader, but promoted gradual emancipation of slaves.
There have been seven Sephardic/Mizrahi Nobel laureates. About 18 times fewer than Ashkenazim, but even after the Holocaust Ashkenazim still made up the bulk of world Jewry. On the eve of the Holocaust, Sephardim/Mizrahim made up about 13% of the world's Jews, or about .09% of the world population. So Sephardim/Mizrahim aren't quite as over-represented, but they're still pretty overrepresented.
Which are the Sephardic/Mizrahi ones?
Elias Canetti, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Emilio Segre, Franco Modigliani, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Baruj Benacerraf, and Salvador Luria.
Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews strike me a vaguely similar in accomplishment to, say, Armenians, who are pretty accomplished, but who get overshadowed by Ashkenazi pre-eminence.
Thanks.
I don't understand this link "compared Scots favorably to Jews "http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-concerningjews.htm" which takes me to a Wizard of Oz theme analysis
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1898twain-jews.asp
Thx!
Mark Twain took his daughter to Vienna to study music for 18 months in the 1890s. He joked in 1898:
"The Jews are harried and obstructed in Austria and Germany, and lately in France; but England and America give them an open field and yet survive. Scotland offers them an unembarrassed field too, but there are not many takers. There are a few Jews in Glasgow, and one in Aberdeen; but that is because they can't earn enough to get away. The Scotch pay themselves that compliment, but it is authentic."
In other words, in the estimation of Mark Twain, who was a big admirer of business talent, Jews were the second best businessmen in the world, behind only Scots.
Stop trying to get yourself cancelled. At least post this as a private paid post. Anything with in a stone's throw of Eugenics should not be a topic entertained here. It's a hot potato and will be for a very long time. Don't burn yourself, I like your other content.
Is Noah Smith risking cancellation?
The entire point of having a substack is to be relatively immune to cancellation.
"3. One Drop Rule"
I carefully studied the family backgrounds of the first 100 names on the 2019 Forbes 400 list of richest individuals in America.
31 of the 100 had two Jewish parents and 4 had one Jewish parent (Larry Page, Larry Ellison [who was adopted by his teen mother's Jewish aunt and uncle], Steve Ballmer and maybe Donald Bren, IIRC). Keep in mind that the Forbes 400 skews old (average age 66) and in the future there will no doubt be more individuals of mixed backgrounds.
But whether you say that the Forbes 100 is either 31% Jewish or 35% Jewish, or, probably optimally, 33% Jewish, that's still a big number when Jews are about 2% of the population.
A small note on this idea: "But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that's true, I think it would be even more interesting - it would mean there's some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery."
If a small group of people has some trait, call it Trait X, and we can prove that this trait directly leads them to make double the average income, we shouldn't necessarily expect that extending that trait out to everyone would double everyone's income.
Imagine a company enters a market with a small competitive advantage, beats the competition, and makes a ton of money. It's true that the company succeeded because of its unique trait - but it came at the cost of other companies that were /almost/ as good, but not quite as good. If the most competitive company were removed, the market would still be served almost as well, just slightly less efficiently.
In a competitive environment, very small adaptive differences can make a really big difference in outcomes. But at the end of the day, a small advantage is still small - not the sort of thing that could double the productivity of an entire country if applied at scale.
Ah, I had the same thought—but on reflection, I think it's more likely that the Jewish advantage is not just a small competitive edge. For instance, it doesn't seem like Einstein, Chomsky, etc. were working in environments with highly competitive pressures.
The rise of Puritanism in Europe was modeled in part on the success of Jews: "Look, the Jews have what future historians will call bourgeois values, so we should copy some of them."
This also helps explain why there was more country club anti-Semitism in the Northern U.S. than in the Southern U.S. The northerners saw themselves as bourgeois men of commerce, just like the Jews long had, so they tended to resent slight differences in culture between the two similar groups and thus neither group much wanted the other in their country clubs.
In contrast, southern elites saw themselves as landowning warrior aristocrats and were happy when mercantile Jews moved to their small towns to provide them with services they weren't inclined to provide themselves. For example, when Bobby Jones' Augusta National Golf Club (home of The Masters tournament) opened in Augusta, Georgia in the 1930s, local Jewish elites joined. I read an obituary of an old time Jewish member of Augusta National and he was a dynamo of civic spiritedness, a man who individually made life in Augusta better for everybody. But after WWII when northern gentile CEOs joined the club in vast numbers, no more Jews were allowed into Augusta National until maybe the later 1980s.
Imagine if we could make everybody not as smart as the Ashkenazi but as smart as the smartest of them, like a Von Neumann. What a world that would be. I mean sports would be useless but we’d be too busy engaging in mathematical thought experiments to care.
Judging by his driving record, there would be many more car accidents - though I suppose that world would have self-driving cars pretty quickly.
Self driving cars and robots. Not just because we’d have the intellectual horsepower to build them but because a janitor as intelligent as Von Neumann would probably want a better job ( in most cases - you’d get the odd guy who saw it as nice physical work while he contemplated the universe).
Apparently, the one positive trait that we know is negatively correlated with IQ is eyesight. I have fantastic vision for someone my age, so this isn't a brag.
Is that just by way of intellectualism?
One theory is that smart people spend a lot of time reading books, which makes them short sighted.
I think there's a natural experiment going on right now though, since in the latest generations even the dullards are spending vast amounts of time every day staring at a screen in their hand, so short-sightedness will spread throughout the population.
> figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!)
I want to say that this is an unfair comparison—that Jews' advantage might be positional, in which case it wouldn't scale up past a small fraction of the population. For instance, Jewish people could have a small IQ advantage that allows them to win many of the highest-paying jobs; but maybe the advantage is small enough that if the entire population were to catch up, we would only see a small increase in total productivity.
On the other hand, if we could give everyone the skills to become a programmer, it seems like that would be a huge win for productivity, certainly much bigger than crime, education, or welfare policy might achieve. So my concern likely does not apply.
What about the population of Israel? It's not entirely Ashkenazi, but it surely has the highest percentage of any country today.
Good point.
Israel has quite a few successful tech startups, but it's not as prosperous as you might expect from having a few million Ashkenazis. I imagine the Zionist social engineering project to make Israel more of a "normal country" with lots of people happy to be farmers and soldiers succeeded in blunting Ashkenazi intellectualism, at some cost to Israel's economic potential.
I've heard a theory that top mathematicians don't have military training. I don't know how well founded that is, but compulsory military training in Israel might blunt Jewish achievement. Anyone know whether the theory (observation?) is sound?
Does Israel really have a few million Ashkenazis? As Slezkine describes in "The Jewish Century", for many decades, Israel was the poor relation in the competition for Jewish immigrants with USA and USSR. The socialist-minded Jews tended to go to the land of the socialist future and the success-minded Jews tended to go to the land of the capitalist future. Israel got the barrel scrapings and the hard-core nationalists (not necessarily mutually exclusive categories). After independence, Israel accepted a million Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews in the forced-voluntary population exchange in the Middle East with the Arabic nations. After that aliyah was sparse until about the end of USSR, when it accepted a million of Russian Jews, half-Jews and anybody who could claim by hook or by crook to be Jewish. Here is a late Soviet joke on the topic:
A man is in the airport leaving for Israel, and he has a parrot with him in a cage. The customs people refuse to let through a live parrot. They explain to the man that a stuffed parrot or a carcass is okay, but a live parrot is not. The man is stumped. Suddenly the parrot opens his beak and says: I don't mind. Stuffed or carcass, I want to leave this fucking place.
So perhaps Israel is doing okay with what it has. It does have lots of chip designer houses, for instance. Intel's design arm is based in Haifa.
It would greatly increase cybercrime and cyber welfare fraud (yes, that’s a thing).
I suspect Scotland was braindrained by emigration to London, America, and Canada. For example, Scottish businessmen were so successful in the U.S. in the early 20th Century (e.g., Andrew Carnegie) that their favorite sport, golf, became the pastime of America's business class. Scottish-Canadian-American businessman Charles Blair Macdonald is known as the Father of American Golf. He designed the landmark National Golf Links of America in the Hamptons in 1911.
Over time, though, Scots in the U.S. merely merged socially with what are now called WASPs, so they lost their distinctive identity.
@Steve, what are the explanations for why Scots were over-represented in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries?
Somebody above points to the 1496 education act in Scotland that started Scotland on the road to being better educated on average than England. In the US in the latter 20th Century, people with Scottish surnames were still over-represented among college graduates.
In general, life in Scotland was a stern test, and the Scots tended to rise to the challenge. They needed to make good use of what little their far northern land afforded them to resist being pushed around by the English the way the Irish were.
But, Scotland is complicated and I don't pretend to understand it well: e.g., there were two separate Scottish ethnicities: the southern, lowland, English-dialect-speaking civilization and the northern, highland, Celtic-speaking semi-barbarians. TB Macaulay has a wonderful description of how barbaric his recent ancestors were in his History of England. But I can't keep straight in my head how this ethnic divide (which was quite permeable) played out in Scottish politics and religion.
Lowland Scots are mostly Anglo-Saxons, while highland and insular Scots are mostly Gaels.
The lowland Scots adopted Presbyterianism, which is a Calvinist denomination. In contrast, highland and insular Scots retained Catholicism long after other parts of Britain adopted Protestantism. Hence the Scottish Highlands being the staging ground for the abortive Catholic reconquest of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Along with retaining Catholicism longer than other parts of Britain, the Scottish Highlands also retained feudalism longer.
The Presbyterians were known as "Covenanters" during the English Civil Wars, and starting on the staunchly anti-Catholic side of Parliament at first, then switching when the Stuarts offered to endorse their religion (after previously attempting to recruit an army from Ireland to put them down). Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland was a Presbyterian, as was Andrew Jackson.
Now, I'm getting confused again.
Anyway, my general question is how did Scotland stay Scotland, a consistent territorial polity, for so long despite two quite different ethnicities sharing the territory?
I've pondered similarly:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/#comment-13509
Thanks.
Thank you Steve and others (and sorry I had made a typo, I should have said 18th and 19th centuries). If I may ask an off-topic question: do we know why British science took off in such a big way in the latter half of the seventeenth century? I see some post-civil-war boom given as an explanation, but is that the only? "How much" is the contribution of this boom to the much later industrial revolution?
Neal Stephenson's four volume "Baroque" novels ponder late 17th Century English science in vast depth. Here's Laura Miller's interview with Stephenson:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/neal-stephenson-on-puritans-and/
Thanks very much. Looks like a great candidate for a book review here.
Queen Anne and the Royal Academy of Science?
Queen Anne was at the beginning of the 18th century, while the crucial point of transformation seems to be earlier - the active period of Hooke, Boyle and Newton between 1650 and 1700. Before that Europe had path-breaking scientists (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo), Britain did have scientists albeit not as path-breaking (the Elizabethan William Harvey, John Napier), but during 1650-1700 Britain seems to have become the very best - all of a sudden rather than gradually catch up? There is something discrete about the process: all of a sudden a bunch of geniuses could totally transform the world, in a way smart Britons or in 1600-1650 or smart Europeans in most other European countries could not.
Sorry I am going too far away from the post.
Here's a thought: In December 1825, progressive Russian military officers who'd invaded France in 1814 and been impressed by what they saw, tried to overthrow the Romanovs. They were put down hard. The survivors decided to give up on political reform and put their energies into cultural spheres like literature and music. Over the next century, Russia became a cultural great power in Europe, which it hadn't been before.
I'm wondering if something like that happened in England after the Civil War of the 1640s. The progressive Puritans won the war but then lost the peace and in 1660 England invited the Stuarts back. Perhaps Puritan intellectual energies turned somewhat away from politics and toward science for awhile.
Well Steve there’s still plenty of Scotch-Irish where I’m at, admittedly a different breed. Ireland didn’t improve their disposition, I think they select for Orneriness.
Alternative hypothesis: even relatively poor Jews were at least somewhat educated. Those poor and failed merchants were merchants. They could read and write and do arithmetic.
"4. Temporary Group and Country Effects"
Something I hadn't been aware of until I studied international versions of the Forbes 400 in detail is how many Jewish billionaires there are in places like Brazil and South Africa. For example, there is one billionaire in Haiti, and, yeah, he's Jewish.
Jews are about 0.2% of the world population, but they seem to be in the range of 10% to 20% of all the billionaires in the world.
In other words, the Jewish-Gentile Billionaire Gap is smaller in the United States than in the rest of the world as a whole. After all, America tended to be settled by quite productive and enterprising peoples, so gentile Americans tend to do pretty well for themselves compared to, say, gentile Brazilians.
What if success is unlocked by a combination of factors -- nature + nurture -- that, when combined during this specific period of time of civic and economic development, happen to be dis-proportionally advantageous?
Yes, exactly. That and English laws and property rights combined with vast untapped resources are key to Americas success- that and geographical isolation from Eurasia’s endless marauding armies.
Institutionalized assortative mating, such as, among Jews, the matching of promising male scholars with wealthy brides, incentivizes scholarship and improves the gene pool.
This has downsides though, see other Scott's story about how being "Shtetl Optimized" made it very hard for him to date in the secular world.
On the culture side of things, I think there is some cultural weight around asking questions and challenging authority that may lead to more scientific-oriented careers, more knowledge consumption, and more critical thinking.
"Why on this night and not all other nights?..."
The true challenge of relativism is: maybe this problem only seems interesting to you because you are Jewish!
Lots of cultures succeed at getting their members to excel at in-culture virtues. Probably the most natural example is the Mongols, who were extraordinarily good at producing skilled horse archers; during the period in history when this correlated with military success they conquered the known world; afterwards not so much.
But the question of what precise ingredients—whether cultural or genetic—contribute to this equestrian excellence seems, not boring to me per se, but a little abstruse. It’s probably some sort of gestalt of cultural factors at every level? I doubt another culture could just adopt a few simple tricks to capture even a notable fraction of this success. There’s probably an interesting academic subfield of study on the matter. But I don’t feel overwhelmingly compelled to extract the Mongol Essence of Equestrianism and disseminate it to produce a horsier world.
On the other hand, the prospect of a world much more well-off and with much more Nobel-grade science is pretty exciting to me. And it’s exciting to Scott as well.
But of course—we are both Jewish!
Maybe the Jewish secret sauce is of genuinely universal interest. It certainly seems, as articulated here, to be of pragmatic value in the current world regime (but so was horse archery). It is, I think, genuinely difficult to say for sure.
The Chinese today also seem to be interested in Jewish success.
The Mongols didn't conquer "the known world". They knew western Europe existed, they just didn't get that far.
I was told somewhere that a khan died just as they were on the frontiers of Europe and that meant that the troops had to come back home to pay respects to the deceased khan for cultural reasons (c.f. https://mongolhistory.com/5-reasons-the-mongols-never-invaded-europe/ ). (This also makes me think of why the Mongols didn't conquer Africa: as I just learned today, they couldn't even conquer Egypt: c.f. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9fjlak/why_didnt_the_mongols_invade_africa/ , https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-Mongols-invade-Africa ). In retrospect it doesn't seem too far-fetched to imagine that the Mongols could have literally conquered the entirety of Europe/Asia/Africa at their height, although of course they didn't.
Not the entirety. They couldn't fight effectively in India or Southeast Asia.
The geography of western Europe was less friendly to horse archers.
The Mongol empire basically coincided with the the Eurasian steppe. Per Wikipedia, "Today researchers doubt that Ögedei's death was the sole reason for the Mongols withdrawal [from Central Europe]. Batu didn't return to Mongolia, so a new Khan wasn't elected until 1246. Climatic and environmental factors, as well as the strong fortifications and castles of Europe, played an important role in the Mongol's decision to withdraw."
The Mongols at one point ran into the Swedes, and then it rained. Rain made their composite bows useless.
In the Middle East they made some headway until they ran into the Malmuks. The Malmuks like the Samurai made war and battle the study of their life. Unlike the Samurai (who had a narrow escape from Mongol rule) the Malmuks weren’t crippled at the outset by ritual war but fought to win. The Mongols had good soldiers and excellent leaders. The Malmuks excelled in both.
Your caveat about the limits of the Mongol conquests, while accurate, has offended the Great Chinngis Khaan. To atone, please listen to this song on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1gDSao1eA
Atoned.
Making money appeals, more or less, to everybody, and Jews make up about one-third of the one hundred richest Americans in 2019.
People want money. They also want to have written books.
It’s not clear to me—specifically, as someone who’s made a number of choices to target rather than optimize my earning potential—that people want to become the sort of people who live lives that involve making more money.
More gentiles than Jews have a psychological aversion to haggling over money. They'd rather Pay Retail than bargain.
I'm not sure how much of modern American Jewish culture goes in for haggling. My family didn't, at least about small things. I don't know how they approached mortgages.
And just for something even more anecdotal, the hardest haggler I've met was a blonde woman from Texas.
A statement based on solid research, no doubt.
Is that not the basis of success Luck and Choice
Jews are about a standard deviation above average in intelligence. Occam's razor. Boom.
Mystery of success solved.
Figuring out why this is true (presumably founder effects, selection stemming from concentration in certain professions, etc.), is a separate, interesting question. I am surprised Scott shies away from the obvious genetic answer. I hope he's not going politically correct on us.
Is intelligence testable?
Does the IQ test measure intelligence, or was Binet testing for learning disabilities? <<
> Is intelligence testable?
Yes.
(I wish there was a good resource about IQ, like TalkOrigins is about evolution, that I could link here.)
> was Binet testing for learning disabilities?
Certainly not, because learning disabilities are defined like "a disability in learning that is dysproportional to child's intelligence".
For example, if someone with IQ 50 cannot reliably distinguish between "b" and "d", we take it for granted. But if someone with IQ 100 cannot distinguish betwen "b" and "d", this requires an explanation, and we call it "dyslexia".
Greg Cochran has told me that some Jewish people strongly dislike his work on the genetics of Jewish intelligence because they fear that people believing that Jews are especially smart in part because of genetics, might cause another holocaust.
Andrew Yang agrees with him in his book.
I don't follow the logic of this concern. The Holocaust didn't happen because of a belief that Jews were especially intelligent. If anything, the Nazis believed Jews to be genetically inferior.
Inferior but dangerous.
Not quite, the nazis considered intellectualism itself to be inferior/degenerate, and that the Jews excelled at it was simply more evidence against them.
On the cultural side, I think Jews like intelligence. Ever since I got interested in the question, I've been looking for anti-intellectual Jews and I haven't found them.
I've found non-intellectual Jews (Natalie Goldberg's parents, I think), but even those are rare.
This is interesting. Usually this gets framed as "some cultures place a higher importance on education" rather than "some cultures have place a higher attractiveness value on intelligence."
But it seems like coolness/sexiness is a lot more motivational than usefulness/virtue.
Nancy wouldn't be the first I've heard make that observation. I don't think I've seen any data on it though.
Maybe valuing intelligence goes together with accommodating autistic traits, too. I'm a bit out on a limb here but it seems to me that people on the autistic spectrum fail badly without high intelligence and as well in unwelcoming circumstances and can succeed extraordinarily, to the point of reproducing, if they're intelligent and nourished.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29388003/
> Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story.
Should we reject it completely?
Based on what we know about human nature, wouldn't it be surprising if a group of people, once they've attained a position of power and privilege (e.g. Whites, Jews, Freemasons, or Harvard grads), didn't wind up making decisions that privileged members of their in-group, whether consciously or unconsciously?
It's unlikely to explain 100% of the difference (since how does the group attain that position in the first place?) but it would be surprising to me if it explained zero percent.
Theories of Systemic Racism assume that whites unconsciously discriminate against blacks, as proved by whites having more money than blacks. The same logic could also be used to assert the existence of Systemic Anti-Gentilism, but "Anti-Gentilism" isn't even a term, so the concept never occurs to most Americans.
The conventional view does have going for it the fact that Europeans brought over Africans as slaves, then after slavery was abolished instituted Jim Crow laws against them. Jews never really had a distinct legal status here (unlike in Europe, where religion had long been a huge deal)
But Systemic Racism theory says that we can tell that Systemic Racism is as strong as ever because white-black gaps in, say, wealth haven't much closed over the last 57 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Jewish-gentile gaps in wealth have probably widened over that same time period, but while we are supposed to think about White Privilege, we aren't supposed to think about Jewish Privilege. So it just doesn't come up. The last time I checked, the New York Times has used the term "Jewish privilege" three times since 1851.
That's three more times than I would have guessed.
I'd like to see some numbers regarding whether the gap has widened.
A more sympathetic account of a theory of systemic racism (w/r/t Black Americans) might go like this:
In the period from 1619 to 1865, Africans were enslaved and imported to the US. They, and their descendants classified as Black were subject to extraordinarily violent oppression and escalating legal restrictions. We can, I hope, agree that this was racist. It also interfered with any research on the races. A study of, e.g. comparative racial literacy rates in the 1700s would reflect not actual aptitudes (to the extent that this is a coherent concept), but the literal criminalization of Black literacy at that time.
From 1863 to 1876, slavery was legally outlawed and much of the prior structures of oppression were disestablished and banned. However, for the next seventy or eighty years, the Jim Crow system was implemented to replace it. Jim Crow, which relied on facially neutral laws unjustly applied, putatively equal facilities that were manifestly unequal, and state and private violence, was enormously effective at excluding Black Americans from social, economic, and political power until it, too, was disestablished in the 50s and 60s. This, too, distorted any data; examining the racial inequality in college degrees awarded in 1920 would show the effects of Jim Crow, not raw aptitudes. And I hope we can agree that this, too, was racist.
BUT, and this is the key point, white intellectuals, even self-conceived liberal ones, during this period would have doubted those final points! There perspective would have been something like: “Slavery has been abolished and formal equality is the law of the land. Maybe some Southern elections are corrupt, but so is New York City; lynchings are bad, but so are all sorts of murders. The Black newspapers have a lot of complaints, but don’t they always?” And so on.
This provides an important outside-view corrective to our own thinking. We ALSO live in a period in history characterized by formal equality and measurable differences in outcomes. From the outside view, however, we can’t simply conclude that NOW our society reflects equality and reality. Instead, we need to test the hypothesis. Maybe new systems, subtler or more obscure than slavery or Jim Crow are at play, producing similar effects.
An assessment of the potential mechanisms at play and the evidence for their functions is beyond the scope of this comment. (Personally, I am persuaded by the evidence that they exist and suffice to explain the disparities observed.)
But I would describe the theory-family of “systemic racism” as rooted in the observation that structural factors can produce racialized inequality in a way that is not obvious to all members of society; and I think the evidence for this observation is overwhelming.
Northerners were aware the south was very different. Reconstruction had been an attempt to change things there, and it was known that it was abandoned (though Dunning School historians had portrayed that as a good thing). There were also some smaller black populations in the north, although they weren't considered representative of African-Americans as a whole.
Yes. The history above was condensed to the point of cartoonishness in order to establish the central point: it is possible to build a social system that is at least formally neutral but produces dramatic racial inequality, and that those not disadvantaged by it can assume that the equality it produces is natural rather than artificial.
A sincere question: you understand your comment as rebutting or redirecting the overall thrust of my (overlong) comment? Is it a friendly amendment? An invitation to more closely explore the regional intellectual history of the nadir of American race relations? Something else? Not sure how to understand your note.
Systemic racism is a plausible explanation for some outcome differences, a less plausible one for others. My objection to the way it is used on political discussion is the tendency to assert that outcome difference implies systemic racism, rather than to demonstrate that this outcome difference is caused by (say) the long-term consequences of redlining or Jim Crow laws or something.
But if you're separating out religious groups, what about other high earning groups like Episcopalians? If you consider the wealth of the Mormon Church, are Mormons also overly rich perhaps?
That is not what theories of systemic racism assert.
> I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview.
This is quite a surprising assertion, especially given your previous discussion of things like the "dark matter universe" of people very unlike you (in I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup). IIRC, your father is also a doctor, and you wrote this about your upbringing:
> When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class.
And you also majored in philosophy, which I'm guessing was with at least tacit support from your parents for getting a degree with no obvious practical application.
I think all of these speak to your upbringing being pretty far away from "completely average American", and I can't imagine your worldview would be the same if those were all different!
(I'm not taking a swipe at any of those life experiences - I also happen to be the son of a Jewish doctor whose parents got him music lessons that didn't achieve much and who went on to get an impractical liberal-arts degree - but I don't have the impression that I'm culturally typical, or that it had nothing to do with my parents being Jewish.)
Not Jewish, not son of a doctor, but DID get the music lessons that didn't achieve much and went on to get an impractical liberal-arts degree. This must be the connection!
I was required to study an instrument in a public elementary school. It seemed extremely common for any Christian parents who could afford it to give their children music lessons. My best friend in elementary school was the son of two WASP doctors and my parents are a WASP lawyer and a WASP high-level bureaucrat. My overachieving WASP mother got me a library card before I started kindergarten and sent me to chess tournaments in elementary school. The cultural payload has probably more to do with class than Judaism.
"Rich Habits" by Tom Corley is an interesting book which provides a mountain of data about class-based cultural payloads, but I don't know which of them are the active ingredients, if any. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IDJGVT4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Would you recommend reading 'Rich Habits'?
I would skim it for the raw data. The author's interpretation doesn't add much.
> I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview.
You were raised by "Jews" and not "Jew". You may be underestimating the extent to which your normal upbringing had good outcomes because your had two parents. Single parenthood is the number one correlate with lower achievement, and is concentrated within underachieving groups and subgroups.
If by "Jews" you mean extended family and an intact community, all the better.
Switching gears, the Scottish Enlightenment was almost certainly the result of the Education Act of 1496, which was the first law in the world mandating education for a subset of the population (eldest sons of landowners). Cultural norms valuing education are almost certainly the most important norms there are.
I am not Jewish and am less acquainted with pre-modern Jewish norms regarding education. I have heard Jews claim that the origin of Jewish overachievement is a millennia-long tradition of literacy via Torah study. I am not sure how accurate this is, but I am inclined to believe these accounts.
"Single parenthood is the number one correlate with lower achievement"
Only single parenthood that results from a deadbeat parent. Single parenthood because of a death in the family has no such effect. In other words, lacking a parent isn't causal for low achievement, inheriting the genes of deadbeat parents is.
Charles Murray of all people has suggested otherwise. A deadbeat dad sets a bad example, whereas a dead dad doesn't.
It probably isn't just that a deadbeat parent sets a bad example, the surviving parent is more likely to have a high level of anger.
That still seems like it's not single parenthood that's causal, but having a poor father figure regardless of whether he's around.
The latter - dead father - are the only single mom’s I know who pull it off. Its also a trifling number compared to single moms overall.
I’m not sure you can entirely blame the fathers however, the system penalizes in terms of benefits the father being there as opposed to not living in the house. Due to welfare for children the actual poverty line is when Daddy’s job pays more than the government. Thats $60K for 4 children.
What about big 5 traits? I don’t think it would come as any surprise if Jews scored higher in trait neuroticism (stereotype) but I’d be interested in conscientiousness and openness as well. But it’s probably IQ. lol
While Jews are obviously over represented in nearly all achievements, it seems to me they have a certain affinity for complex systems as well. And their religion is a much more “of this world” type, vs say Christians who spend much more of their time and focus on the afterlife
One last thought, people definitely sleep on the effects of circumcision
The upper midwest has the highest rates of circumcision in the US. There you see Moynihan's Law of the Canadian Border in action.
1.) The Scottish were a market dominant minority in England after the Acts of Union. The joining of the two countries created an open border and England was much wealthier so the Scotts moved down and set up in business. Of course, they had the advantage over the other market minorities (Jews, Huguenots) that they could just go back to Scotland if they wanted. And Scotland had universities and all that they could work in.
2.) Your friend whose parents were a Kosher butcher and transporting logs has misremebered the social prestige of their occupations. Those would have been upper middle class professions. A kosher butcher especially would have been educated and well respected. And someone who moved logs on a major river in Tsarist Russia would have required special legal privileges to do so.
3.) Part of the antipathy of local Jews against immigrants was ethnic/cultural. American Jews prior to the late 19th century were mostly from England, the Netherlands, etc. They were Sephardic Jews. The Eastern European Jews were Ashkenazi. These two groups did not get along. There were even theories about how Sephardic Jews were white and Ashkenazi were not. The two were separated in most racial classifications at the time.
4.) There were a few unusual thing about EE Jews against the general population. They were hugely underrepresented among both elite professions (landowners, lawyers, etc) and common professions (mostly enserfed farmers). This meant they were pushed into the middle where they were largely artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, etc. They were also unable to leave these professions. A rich gentile could buy an estate and become an aristocrat. Jews could not. Add in relatively high literacy and relatively sophisticated financial networks and you have a world where business ownership and education were hugely important. Their business and education were one of the few places Jews could park capital. You couldn't buy an estate but you could pay to become a doctor or open a tailor's shop.
5.) As for who came over, from that chart, the main thing that stands out was they're disproportionately artisans and secondarily traders. These would have been common professions in general. It looks like a bunch of people who had enough money from a trade to pay for passage but who weren't rich or established enough to have deep roots.
Personally, I don't think Jews are all that unique among other Market Dominant Minorities. I think the disproportionate contributions to wealth and science are normal for MDMs But Jews were effectively forced to be a MDM in Europe and continued to be one in the US.
I think American Jews were mostly German by the time of the big influx of Polish Jews
My understanding is that Jews tended to specialize in occupations were they could easily carry their wealth with them if they had to leave (diamond merchant would be an example). So investing in land would go against that even if there weren't legal restrictions. Although there's a common cause between such restrictions and forces that could compel them to leave before they could easily liquidate their wealth.
Interesting that you discounted culture and saved it for last. I'm a gentile who just happens to have a lot of Jewish friends and ended up in a Jewish fraternity in college. So I have an outside-insider view and I think it's 100% cultural (and to the extent cultural traits get encoded over time, genetic). Almost universally, the Jewish families I know value education above all. They also emphasize financial literacy. Maybe that seemed normal to you but it's not.
By contrast "white culture" (feels weird to put it that way... also I'll limit this to men) I would say values athletics, manual labor, military service, and, at most, business. Call it a blue collar v. white collar idealization/aspiration... Another way to put it might be greater cultural stock placed on "hard work" vs. "intelligence." I'm not just talking about hillbillies and rednecks. Even among upper-middle class whites, there isn't the same moral value attached to education and intelligence. Or personal financial decisions. Education, and particularly higher education, has a neutral moral value at best. At worst, academia is viewed as effeminate or lazy. Jews I know had extreme parental pressure (or at least expectations) to become doctors and lawyers. Most white parents are perfectly happy to let their kids dream of becoming a baseball player or navy seal. Bad grades are no big deal. School is esoteric with limited real-world application. These are all generalizations, of course, but that's the point.
Another gut intuition I would have about Jewish success is the "grit" factor. I know this will sound tone deaf but... overcoming adversity is a real benefit in terms of achieving long term success. I think that works at the individual and group level. If you're conditioned to being oppressed, wouldn't you expect to thrive when the playing field is (relatively) equalized? This is also sort of related to the "necessity is the mother of innovation" theory and Israel. Survival is a hell of a motivator.
Interesting comment, I agree with your thoughts on "white culture" totally. Out of curiosity, what does the emphasis on financial literacy look like in practice?
I don’t mean “cheap” or [Insert stereotype]. Being smarter about anything in general, including money, is probably a virtue.
I just mean literally talking openly with your family and friends about money management, investments, loans, interest rates, etc. Discouraging frivolous or extravagant spending. Encouraging savings and investing. Understanding the power of basic concepts like compound interest starts at a much younger age. Stuff I didn’t really appreciate until much older... partly because I’m an idiot and partly because talking about money wasn’t part of my culture as a kid. No idea why but it still makes me uncomfortable.
By contrast it seems culturally normal for white families to live paycheck to paycheck even if they are high income. Mostly short term thinking and optimism and not talking about it.
To each their own when it comes to money—people “value” it differently—but one way is definitely more likely to build wealth. Seems like a culture relevant to “success.”
Very interesting comment, especially regarding "white culture values" - rings true to me. I'd be curious to know whether it's "white American" or "European" as well (I think it's the former).
Also, curious how/why you ended up in the Jewish fraternity and what your experience there was like.
Thanks, and I agree it's probably limited to American culture. I'm an American.
Re my experience, I basically just stumbled into it by chance. I had several friends who were joining it, they encouraged me to join too, and I didn't want to miss the parties. It was a good experience and many of my closest friends to this day are brothers.
That said, I'll admit there were some politics that made me uncomfortable. Some members advocated for the fraternity to focus more heavily, or even exclusively, on recruiting Jews instead of... people like me. They tended to be the more religious sort, contra the (more common) secular sort. I respect them not wanting to lose the fraternity's "identity" but our low gentile numbers never really constituted a threat to it, so it could feel personal. I suspect there were a few who you resented me, but the vast majority were really open and couldn't care less. I felt the same way: couldn't care less about your religion or identity as long as you're a good guy. I was happy to go along with their traditions in the absence of any of my own, and I actually came to enjoy and appreciate those traditions even though it's not like I'd want to convert.
There's something paradoxically refreshing about them. They're not commercialized or trivialized. "White culture" is lacking in formalized traditions that are connected to a larger community and history. Even Christian culture. Catholics are probably the closest comparison, but they're not as fun.
I still feel conflicted about the (mostly ethnic) exclusiveness in Judaism. For example, I have friends that would only consider marrying a Jew (even though they will date non-Jews). I think I understand their reasons and the larger context, but conceptually it just feels wrong to me.
Two comments:
1. There is important context missing in the section about "american jews sending angry letters to European Jewish leaders..." American-born Jews had developed businesses, success, etc. in the US (largely in NY) and were concerned that other Americans would associate them with the incoming low-class Eastern European immigrants. There was a concern that this would diminish American-born Jewish social status and/or give rise to antisemitism. A lot of this is covered in Robert Caro's "The Power Broker;" Robert Moses' (an American-born Jew of German origin) mother ran clubs in NYC that attempted to "teach" new immigrants. The word "Kike" was born out of New York Jews who attempted to distance themselves from those immigrants. My point being: I'm not sure this situation can necessarily be generalized.
2. Judaism encourages education. The whole practice of studying the Torah and all of the interpretations of the Torah, the arguments between Rabbis over the centuries, etc. all encourage the practice of asking questions. I suppose this isn't something easily proven empirically but this was always my understanding.
Many American cities, such as Birmingham, Alabama, had two Jewish country clubs, one for the Germans and one for the Ostjuden.
Lots of Jewish families have oft-repeated stories of great-grandpa getting blackballed by a country club he wished to join as evidence of gentile persecution, but they've forgotten that great-grandpa didn't want to join a gentile country club, he wanted to join a German-Jewish golf club, like the Century in Westchester County, but got blackballed for being an uncouth Eastern European.
I wouldn't be surprised if the advantage from halachic Judaism isn't just a tradition of education, it's also a tradition of arguing. I don't know that it's full-on rationality (it's starting with a holy book, after all), but it's at least rationality-adjacent.
Yes, on average, Jews enjoy arguing more than do gentiles.
One possibility is that because Ashkenazis had fewer weapons and little training with them, their culture tolerated a more aggressive interpersonal style because arguments would hardly ever lead to fatal brawls: to paraphrase Heinlein: An unarmed society is an impolite society.
In contrast, gentiles encouraged each other to be genteel to avoid fights breaking out among armed men.
Is it really all about weapons? People can just hit each other.
Information about interpersonal violence among Jews would be welcome.
This might fit in with the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have a feminized or at least less masculinized culture) than Gentile.
The next time I hear "an armed society is a polite society", I'm going to bring this up.
Alternative explanation: "honor culture" vs. "dignity culture" (vs. newcomer "victimhood culture"). In Ye Olde Time, anti-criminal deterrence came in the form of a reputation for vindictiveness, both on a personal and clan level. (And being conspicuously armed.) However, practically this reputation needed to be built with a response to an event that was higher-frequency and more public than actual crime; an exaggerated thin-skinnedness to insults ("apologize or we duel") is common. Probably this leads to a formal system of politeness.
On the other hand, once a (sub-) society develops something like a court system to resolve disputes, ignoring insults in favor of getting on with business becomes the useful norm, thus the "middle class" or bourgeois comparative thick-skinnedness. A monopoly on violence, and consequent disarmament (carrying a sword everywhere is inconvenient) happens at the same time, or slightly earlier.
Why is the Nobel Prize listed as if it's objective? Isn't that just some people's opinions on who made the best discovery? Maybe they're just prosemitic.
The three hard science Nobels are pretty legit on the whole.
The Nobel Prize was the most prominent academic award of the 20th century, and generally not felt to have any bias. It's a "nothing-up-my-sleeve" choice of top prominent intellectuals. If you still don't like that, there are probably half a dozen other metrics you can use that will give similar results.
"there are probably half a dozen other metrics you can use that will give similar results." Then use those. And maybe also mention the subjective opinions of people that you subjectively feel aren't biased in the section for subjective reasons.
I think you'd actually be extremely hard pressed to find a better metric here. If you look at highest number of publications, or highest number of citations, or something like that, you're looking at something that is just as much shaped by subjective decisions along the way, but less likely to correlate with the meaningful thing. It's very hard for me to imagine anything useful that would be more objective than those, which are only barely more objective than the Nobel. What you'd probably reasonably want as the most accurate measure is a survey of a hundred current scientists about who they think are the most prominent scientists of the first half of the 20th century. But that would be far more subjective.
We shouldn't care if a metric is "objective". We should care if it's not biased on the relevant axis.
Regardless of if you think it's a good idea, Scott did specifically say he was looking at objective metrics. This is certainly something worth considering, but it's not an objective metric. Also, how exactly do you tell if the Nobel Prize committee is biased on the relevant axis?
If Pro-Semitic bias were influencing the Nobel committee, you'd expect them to award more Nobels to Jews in politicized Peace and woozy Literature than in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine. Instead, the opposite is true.
The three hard science Nobels are clearly less political than the Peace Prize, the hard to evaluate Literature prize (since books are published in so many different languages that it's hard for a Swede to have a trustworthy opinion that, say, this Slovenian poet is better than that Slovakian novelist), and the Economics Prize. Jews do better in the three hard science Nobels than in the Peace and Literature Prizes, although Jews win most of all in Economics (which maybe isn't really a Nobel and is awarded by a different institution than the real Nobels).
The most likely bias in the Nobels is pro-Swedish, which is forgivable. In general, the Swedes do a pretty good job of it.
If you don't like the Nobel Prizes, there are numerous other prizes, such as the Fields.
While Ashkenazi-Americans clearly average higher IQs than white gentile Americans, Ashkenazis tend to be most successful in some roles and less so in others. For example, if look at Academy Award winners, Jews do extremely well in producing (Best Picture) and in screenwriting. In contrast, American Jews seldom get nominated for Best Cinematography (although the great Mexican cameraman Lubezki is Jewish). I think one thing that is going on is that American Jews with the visual talent to be great cinematographers are more likely to direct (e.g., Kubrick and Spielberg).
But it also seems likely that Ashkenazis are particularly strong with words and numbers, but less so with visual cognition.
Ben Rich, Norwegian-American Kelly Johnson's successor as head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, mentions in his memoir that Jews are somewhat rare in engineering (despite huge numbers of Jews living near Lockheed's old HQ in Burbank, CA due to the entertainment industry being centered nearby).
I am sorry but unfortunately we have to give Kelly Johnson to the Swedes..
I would like to see a follow-up article on Jews and achievement/participation rates in sports and athletics. Is there a similar discrepancy, perhaps in the opposite direction? Would such a differential be nature or nurture? I get the impression, from a distance, that working-class Jews have a less favorable attitude towards their children excelling in such areas compared to working-class Gentiles.
I think this might be a golden age for Jewish baseball players: e.g., Alex Bregman almost edged out Mike Trout for the AL MVP award in 2019 (but then the Houston Astros were caught stealing signs). Max Fried of Atlanta has a 29-15 career record. And there are more and more part Jewish ballplayers like Ryan Braun, 2011 NL MVP (caught for steroids later), Ian Kinsler, and Jock Peterson. There hasn't been a Jewish superstar recently of the caliber of Greenberg, Rosen, or Koufax, but a lot of Jewish suburban kids play on expensive baseball travel teams these days so there is a steady supply of well-trained prospects. Trying to see how far you'll go in baseball usually leaves you time to get an MBA or the like after you wash out, so it's not an unreasonable career path for upper middle class scions. And the chance of becoming, say, a relief pitcher and making 8 figures over the course of your career is not infinitesimal if you can throw 90 mph by your senior year in high school.
Jews were more likely to be country club members than gentiles as far back as the 1920s, according to a 1925 article in "American Hebrew" by the Italian American golf champion Gene Sarazen, who usually was employed by Jewish golf clubs as their star golf pro.
Of the country club sports, Jews have done best in swimming (e.g., Mark Spitz and quite a few other gold medalists), okay in tennis, and not that good in golf, Cory Pavin being the best American Jewish golf pro. Although lots of Jews play golf, they also tend to see it as the ultimate gentile sport (or second to polo), so American Jews tend to have a lot of complicated attitudes involving golf. I wouldn't be surprised if professional golf requires 3-D visualization cognitive skills (e.g., reading the breaks in an undulating green) that Jews aren't particularly good at.
My question wasn't about American golfers and baseball players, but sports and athletics worldwide or, at least, in western countries. So are Jews over-represented or under-represented? And there is a difference between hobby and occupation; so someone who plays sports with friends, schoolmates, co-workers and clients is entirely different from someone for which it is a passion or livelihood. I myself have bowled and played badminton casually, but no-one would ever call me a "jock".
Lots of Jewish sportswriters, lots of Jewish sports franchise owners, lots of Jewish hardcore sports fans (like the recent Adam Sandler movie "Uncut Gems" about a jeweler who has a sports gambling addiction).
Not all that many Jewish athletes at the highest levels, although there are some. For example, Jewish Baseball News says that there are seven Jewish ballplayers in the majors right now. There are ~780 players on big league rosters at any moment, but a lot come from abroad. So, say there are 500 Americans in the major leagues, and 7 of them meet whatever the website's definition of being Jewish is. 7 out of 500 would be 1.4%, or maybe slightly below the Jewish percentage of the American population, but not by all that much.
Because Jews are so successful in so many other fields, it can seem like there are no Jewish jocks. From "Airplane:"
Elaine: Would you like something to read?
Old Lady: Do you have anything light?
Elaine: Uhh...how about this leaflet, Famous Jewish Sports Legends?
But there are some.
http://www.jewishbaseballnews.com/players/
" the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. "
I think you are much more likely to argue arcane technical points, create abstractions, accept (or at least entertain) conclusions that sound strange or uncomfortable while you evaluate logical arguments, and generally debate other people (especially while remaining friends with them), than the average American. (I think your posts and the fact that you're prominent in the Rationalsphere demonstrate this claim). These are also things that are generally associated with Jewish culture (or at least Ashkenazi culture) and which are probably useful for conducting academic research or engaging in intellectually demanding (but lucrative) professions like law and programming. I would be surprised if all these factors were unrelated.
I realize this isn't the most on-topic question, but what is the x-axis on that chart of income vs region of origin? Why is China closer to Egypt and Quebec than Thailand?
the x-axis is just there because if everything was bunched together, it'd be visually cluttered and confusing. The only relevant information is on the y-axis.
That made my brain and eyes hurt.
Re the "Temporary Group And Country Effects" section, I think Noah's point regarding Jewish over-achievement being a "blip" is something like accounting for the multiple comparisons problem. I.e., there are a lot of ethnic and cultural groups out there, and their measured level of achievements all vary to some degree based on happenstance factors we would categorize as "noise," and if there's enough of these we should just expect an apparent outlier on the scale of the Jews from measurement noise alone. If that were the case, we could expect Jewish achievement to revert to the mean, just as apparently happened with the Scots*. I don't know that this is a very convincing explanation, but it's something that would need to be considered (there really are *lots* of groups of humans out there.)
Regarding the last paragraph - I think it's probably a known thing that there exist cultural norms that powerfully select for (certain kinds of) success, surely? This all goes back to the discussions of social class on this very blog. Middle-class kids learn the norms that got their parents into cushy upper-middle-class jobs and lifestyles, working-class kids learn the norms that let their parents succeed in working-class endeavors, etc. (I guess the super-upper-class kids get some crazily powerful and advanced cultural programming, but who knows.) If Jews were just a bit better than other groups at promulgating the very typical upper-middle-class norms that put kids on a trajectory towards white-collar jobs, that would probably explain the whole thing.
Quibble: is Israeli residence, as a metric, really free of the "one drop rule" issue? AIUI you don't have to be halachically Jewish to immigrate to Israel, just Jewish enough that the Nazis would have persecuted you, and in particular I remember reading somewhere that a significant fraction of Russian immigrants to Israel aren't halachically Jewish.
The San Fernando Valley now has a lot of people who were born in the Soviet Union with one to three Jewish grandparents, then emigrated to Israel under the Law of Return, and then bounced to Los Angeles, which they seem to like more than Israel.
Something like a quarter, and many of them are just Russians who married a Jew at some point. The most prominent *Russian*-Jewish politician (the leader of the Russian party, Liberman, is a Moldovan/Romanian Jew who happens to speak Russian), Yoel Edelstein, is the son of a Russian Orthodox priest.
Ethnic Russians who immigrate to Israel often become Israeli hyper-nationalists to compensate. Anastasia Michaeli (who was Miss St. Petersburg 1995 and is, ethnically, 100% Russian) is a famous example of this tendency within Israel.
Thanks.
I’ve come around to the position that, barring a true system of racism (I.e. slavery, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, etc.), group differences are explained by basically the same forces as individual differences. It is a combination of nature and nurture, with culture being the most important aspect of the “nurture” component in the group context. Despite tremendous amounts of effort and money going into alternative “systemic” explanations, I find most such explanations deeply unsatisfying, for reasons similar to ones pointed out in this piece. We need to disentangle normative claims from empirical claims here and get to a place where we recognize that groups are different in significant ways with significant real-world impacts, but, particularly because within group differences are far greater than between group differences, none of this justifies treating any individual as more or less or different based on group affiliation.
I think I mostly agree with this idea (except that, of course, you need to emphasize how these nature-and-nurture-type factors tend to be certain values for people of a certain ethnicity). The continuous-ish spread of ethnicities on the chart regardless of continental origin also supports a simplistic model where every ethnicity gets a random-ish and roughly independent set of socioeconomic factors and some ethnicities just happen to have a set of really good factors by pure chance.
Armenians seem to be more successful outside of Armenia, and ethnic Chinese are more successful outside China. So I give some stock to the institutionalists vs a Hive Mind-esque focus on the human capital of the individuals in a polity.
Fair point. You have to control for political and economic freedom and corruption when comparing across national boundaries. The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia (where I live) are a very interesting example because they are heavily discriminated against and resented and yet dominate the private sector. In Malaysia, there is actually a legal system of ethnic discrimination against Chinese and in favor of Malays, and the Chinese still dominate the private sector and just about every other metric of human thriving.
This touches on yet another point, implicated by duck_master, which is how finely we define ethnicity. "Ethnic Chinese" is a crude description of the ethnic Chinese people who thrive throughout Southeast Asia, who are basically all of Hoklo origin and from a certain region in Fujian province and thus have a culture (and probably gene pool) distinct from the Han majority (although they are considered a subgroup of Han). "Asian" is an even more crude description. It is obviously impossible to draw solid boundaries, but I think the point is that even subtle cultural and genetic differences can lead to significant differences in real-world outcome. This would explain the great variation between different groups from the same continent seen in Mr. Alexander's chart.
Thomas Sowell wrote about Malaysia's system in "Affirmative Action Around the World".
The most obvious hypothesis should be violence restriction. The Jews were not allowed to serve in army and hold arms in most countries where they were successful, and in countries with few restrictions they didn't especially stand out (Caucasus and, maybe, Spain/Morocco - but I'm no expert). Same happens with other nations, Greeks and Armenians of Ottoman Empire come to mind. The violence restriction pushes the whole society to specific direction, incentivizes marriages etc. So yes, Jews are extremely successful in non-violent world because they started earlier. In violent, though, it differs.
(Btw, Indians probably earn more mostly because they're programmers on working visas rather than everyone else).
As I commented here, Jews were surprisingly overrepresented in the military in the Pale of Settlement during the peak years of Jewish migration to the US.
Jf course this is not binary. There were Jews serving here and there by chance and circumstances, including Czarist Russia. That doesn't change the fact that the whole nation was long (hundreds of years, multiple generations) incentivized against military (+ other power roles) and towards knowledge- and negotiation-based social roles.
In the Pale it wasn't just "here and there by chance", they were overrepresented. It's entirely plausible that was a recent phenomena and the past was very different (mass military mobilization was itself an outgrowth of the French revolution), but that's the data I'm aware of.
Is it really true that the far-right Russian nationalists' incentives to lie go the other way? Don't most anti-semites use Jewish over-representation as proof that we are engaged in a massive conspiracy to control the weather and global financial markets? Seems like showing over-population among (((Communist)))) Scientists would be useful towards those ends.
I don't think Russian nationalists have the same associations with communism. Many of them are a bit sore over how post-communist Russia has fared.
Its interesting that I don't really hear much about the culture of country of origin as a possible factor in these kinds of discussions. Living in a country/culture for several hundred years must have some (maybe positive) influence right.
The part about the American Jewry writing angry letters about the newer crappier immigrants reminded me of a book about my own ethnic group, the Italians, called “The Madonna of 115th Street”. When the Italians started coming over in the late 19th century, they weren’t consistent churchgoers and brought all their weird folk religious practices with them, much to the chagrin of established American Catholics.
The Irish and the Poles had basically just gotten other Americans to tolerate Catholicism, and then all these Italians doing some voodoo-looking version of Catholicism show up. So they wrote angry letters to the Pope asking “WTF is wrong with these people?!”
The Pope, being Italian, responded by making the Madonna statue in the Italian church on 115th Street in Harlem something like the third holiest object in the Western Hemisphere. My grandparents were from Italian Harlem and have an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel engraved on their tombstone.
Jews have been enthusiastic baseball and basketball fans for the last century. But they haven't numbered much among professional players.
On the other hand, as the intellectual demands of running sports franchises have grown during the Moneyball Era, more baseball executives are now Jewish, such Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the leading baseball franchise at present. Similarly, Theo Epstein ran the Chicago Cubs to their famous World Series win in 2016. His great grandfather and identical twin brother, the Epstein Twins, wrote the final screenplay of "Casablanca."
Weren't there some notable Jewish athletes earlier in the previous century?
Two Jewish baseball Hall of Famers -- Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax. An arguable third was Lou Boudreau, who had one Jewish biological parent but was given up for adoption and raised by Catholics. Because I usually assume nature and nurture are about equally important, I'd call Boudreau one-fourth Jewish, but I realize that's an idiosyncratic methodology I invented.
There was a famous Jewish NFL quarterback in the 1940s, Sid Luckman, the son of a top Jewish mobster. There was a Jewish NBA star in the 1950s, Dolph Schayes. There have been quite a few successful Jewish coaches and executives.
Based on the chart, it looks like the top two ethnicities are actually *Belarusian* and *Chinese* (in that order), with third place is roughly a six-way tie between Maltese/Estonian/Latvian/Korean/Thai (in order of x-axis position); in contrast, Israel (which I'm using a proxy for Jews, since there's no dot on the chart labeled "Jews" or anything like that) is roughly the top of the -5000 to 5000 (I have no idea what units these are supposed to be) cluster of mediocre ethnicities. This means that, though it would be an improvement if everyone could become as successful as typical Jews, it would be *even more* of an improvement if everyone were to become Belarusian or Chinese, so the disproportionate attention paid to Jews is kind of unjustified.
(Disclaimer: am ethnic Chinese.)
> Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
Isn't the other side of the equation (self-identification as Jewish) potentially vulnerable too? People might be more or less likely to see themselves as Jewish depending on how successful they are.
To a certain extent, all forms of ethnic identification such as "Jewish", etc., are squishy and not-completely-objectively-well-defined; self-identification is probably close to the most nothing-up-my-sleeve-y identification methods can get.
I agree, I don't think those studies could have done much better. But we should keep self-identification biases in mind as another potential source of the effect they're studying.
You can look up in the "Early Life" section of Wikipedia and usually figure out pretty closely how Jewish somebody is. For example, the Forbes 100 plutocrat I had the hardest time with was Larry Page of Google. His mother is famously Jewish, but his father was very reticent about ethnicity other than to say he disapproved of religion. But, I'm now fairly sure, that Page's father was a standard WASP or Old American.
For the 31 of the Forbes 100, it appeared that both parents were Jewish and for 4 others, it appeared that one parent was Jewish. The latter figure will likely go up in the future, but there isn't that much ambiguity at present.
According to surveys, self-identification as Jewish among partly Jewish Americans seems to be growing. E.g., football player Julian Edelman is only 1/4th Jewish but self-identifies as Jewish. Amy Chua's conservative daughter is half-Jewish and self-identifies as Jewish.
People of conservative, loyalist personality (like most jocks) increasingly identify as Jewish if they can. Quarterback Tom Brady could probably get away with identifying as Irish in public, but if he were to announce that he tries to be a credit to the white race (which he is), he'd be in big trouble.
My impression (Jewish immigrant from FSU to USA here) is that, in the USA, among siblings who are half-Jewish half-non-Jewish, identifying as Jewish often feels correlated with assertiveness. Someone who sees themselves as politically extremist (whether hyper-woke or a reader of yours) is likelier to identify as Jewish than someone without any interest in the news, and a strong inclination toward sport among high schoolers is predictive of identification with Jewry. Maybe 2/3 of such people, in the US, do end up identifying as Jews. I have a vague impression that there is a "boiling-off" process, with the least ambitious part-Jews being least likely to identify as such.
Obviously the number of halakhic/"real" Jews in the US is decreasing, but identification as Jews is common enough among part-Jews that I think the number of self-identified Jews in the US is continuing to grow, and a very large part of this is because Jewishness seems attractive to people like Julian Edelman in a way that it certainly didn't more than 50 years ago.
"Hand-counting Jewish high-achievers" can be replicated. For example, here's my count of the top 50 political donors in the 2018 election cycle. I come up with 66% of the money given by the top 50 to be from Jews (counting half of half-Jewish/half-Episcopalian Tom Steyer's donations).
Please feel free to attempt to replicate my work and let me know if you get different numbers:
https://www.takimag.com/article/truth-or-trope/
UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine's 2004 book "The Jewish Century" talks about the three migrations of Eastern European Jews in the "Fiddler on the Roof" era: to America, to Palestine, and to the big cities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Slezkine's basic idea is that the world over time has come to reward more the kinds of bourgeois skills that Ashkenazis tended to have.
To take a post-2004 example, being a baseball executive has recently come to require a high level of statistical reasoning skills. So it's not surprising that many of the most successful baseball executives, like Andrew Friedman of the Dodgers, are now not old-time baseball lifers but financial analysts, often Jewish, who made a career change to baseball and brought their finance skills with them.
(Interestingly, Israel consciously tried to move in the opposite direction and reward old gentile skills like fighting and farming.)
>Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is vulnerable to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
I'm confused by the phrasing, it produces a kind of Necker-cube effect on me:
a) possible typo? intended to read : Really no source of data other than hand-counting Jewish high-achievers is immune to this problem, and we have lots of other sources of data.
b) not a typo, can be restated as : Any source of data that doesn't involve hand-counting Jewish high-achievers avoids this problem, and we have lots of sources of data.
I'm uncertain how to confidently tie either back to the train of thought, can someone please assist?
I'm fairly sure that the correct reading is b, and the underlying reason is that while it's easy for bias to enter into the process of identifying Jewish high-achievers on a a case-by-case basis, it's less likely for processes which count Jewish people by systematic criteria to be biased in a particular direction.
It wouldn't be surprising if some means of accounting of the success of Jewish people systematically biased the data in a particular direction, but it would be fairly surprising if all the different means of accounting biased the data in the same direction.
Thank you for your explanation, Desertopa, this is very helpful.
I definitely follow your second paragraph, it's a nice application of the basic theory of random errors. I'm still having trouble with the first paragraph, and by extension with Scott's original comment.
In general, don't people speak of "case-by-case" analysis as being more exacting than superficial surveys? Couldn't the process of "hand-counting Jewish high-achievers" be informed by validated systematic criteria as well?
In principle, couldn't a case-by-case analysis produce a tighter estimate (with smaller standard error) and then be held up as the gold standard study?
In theory, maybe, but it's hard to generate a systematic set of criteria for who counts as notably successful which isn't subject to potential bias. You can do it with objective, limited categories like "Nobel prize winners" which are small enough to go through all the individuals case by case with predefined criteria, but it's hard to do that with larger groups, which are very relevant to the question of whether Jewish people stand out as exceptionally successful overall.
Analyzing trends rather than hand picked cases is practically necessary to distinguish between the hypotheses of Jewish people having higher average achievement or a higher standard deviation, which could equally explain a high number of standout achievers.
Hypothetically, the problem with using Nobel prize winners as a metric is that it might have been chosen because it's the sort of thing Jews are good at.
Interesting that no one has mentioned this but I always just assumed the disproportionate success was analogous to a superbug that has become resistant to anti-biotics. For 2000 years Jews have remained a homogenous ethnic group exposed to multiple rounds of ethnic cleansing. Inevitably the most resilient of bunch survive to reproduce.
That would imply a bright future for the Shia Hazara of Afghanistan/Pakistan. And perhaps the Yezidi, who have long been accused of worshiping Satan.
Hazara actually do have high test scores in Afghanistan!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/world/asia/afghanistan-woman-university.html
The Hazara of Afghanistan claim to be descended from Genghis Khan and they may be right.
Culture, culture, culture. Until this comes to the forefront of the conversation about inequality, there will be no real progress on the issue. Other cultures (including my own- white Irish, which has historically been shamefully unsupportive of Jewish people) would do well to sit up and look to learn some lessons from Jewish and south-east-asian-American cultures instead of whining about supposed unfairness all the time. As Scott points out, there may be no barn-door cultural factors- they may be quite subtle or even latent- but that does not mean they do not exist. This is by far the most logical, and happily, hopeful explanation.
Why SOUTHeast asian cultures? I thought it was northeast asians who were the most accomplished.
Yes, fair point, I had Filipinos in mind as an example so I should’ve just said that. And of course Indian-Americans another good example, as per article.
My impression is that Filipino-Americans are less accomplished than Japanese/Chinese/Korean Americans.
Filipinos in California do quite well on the state school achievement test and make a fair amount of money. But they are kind of like Mexicans in not being super ambitious. A big Jewish advantage is that they seldom lack the confidence to try to make it big, whereas few Mexicans or Filipinos in North Hollywood think to themselves, "You know, I should try writing a screenplay/creating an app/making my shop into a national chain" or whatever.
You're reminding me of a thing I read by someone who started out anti-Semitic but was working for a Jew. Eventually, the anti-Semite came to realize that Jewish wanting to have a successful business wasn't some conspiratorial thing, it was wanting to take care of his family. I think the anti-Semite stopped being an anti-Semite.
This is like my point about the lack of Jewish anti-intellectuals-- it's not just that Jews support education, it's that Jews don't squelch their own abilities, or at least not as much as other groups.
> But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
Forgive me if I'm projecting my own Jewish anxiety here, but it was hard for me to watch people indiscriminately attack Jews on the streets of NYC and LA last month and not conclude that the inevitable conclusion of the "Standard Model"/wokeism/successor ideology/what have you is the new wave of anti-Semitism that we are currently witnessing. I imagine those same events were in the back of Scott's mind as he wrote this. The "achievement = oppressor" dogma was always woefully inadequate; it now risks becoming downright dangerous.
I don't think the mentally ill homeless people in NYC have paid much attention to elite ideology. I think it's a decline in policing that's making things more chaotic.
The decline in policing is definitely a contributor to the rise in violent crime across the board. But I also don't think that mentally ill homeless people in NYC are torching synagogues or waving Palestinian flags while assaulting Jews (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/us/anti-semitism-attacks-violence.html).
Israel seems to me to be a more salient factor than "wokeism".
Most of the speculation I've seen about a genetic explanation couples it with a higher incidence of genetic problems like demylanation (sp) to explain why these mutations aren't universal. Whether or not it's true genetic mod to make everyone a bit more smart/diligent mostly keeps everyone running in place. Far better to engineer hypomania in everyone.
Also I wouldn't discount the simple effect of being a small close knit community plus simple randomness. Many immigrant groups cluster in certain fields and Jews simply clustered in academic or intellectual ones.
And don't discount the cultural effects of all that rabbinical study increasing the standing of intellectuals in the community.
"Many immigrant groups cluster in certain fields and Jews simply clustered in academic or intellectual ones."
And Wall Street. And Hollywood. And Silicon Valley. And New York media. And big city real estate development.
Cambodians make donuts and Jews make Google and Facebook: same thing.
The genetic problems exist, but are they actually all that common?
Smarts can have significant positive externalities.
It made me sort of uncomfortable to read [the first part of] this, because it sounded a whole lot like "here's all the reasons why my race is superior to most other races" and that thought pattern sometimes goes to really bad places.
I agree that the conclusion is really interesting.
Racists do not generally feel the need to inquire into the reasons as to their race's supposed superiority. They are completely satisfied with the explanation that they're just better than everyone else.
Have you read any classical or Enlightenment philosophy? Western political or religious thought of the past four hundred years or so? How about texts from the early days of formal biology, or the first hundred years of anthropology? The Western canon takes a great deal of interest in explaining why some races are better than others.
The missing word here is bourgeois. Most Jewish immigrants were from bourgs, cities, towns, "stetls". The stetl has been reimagined as some awful place. Actually, it was the center of economic activity for the surrounding countryside, often with a legally enforced privilege over trade. Jews were already bourgeois. They already had educations. Most other immigrants were not. They were first generation city. That is a huge difference that meant access to different networks, different aspects of American life that were more likely to be profitable.
It's interesting that you mention bankruptcy. That's not a sign of poverty. It's a sign of someone who had enough money to have significant debts, and to have wiped the slate clean. Farmworkers of the 1800s didn't go bankrupt. They just ate less. Non-Jewish immigrants were overwhelmingly farmworkers before they came.
Exactly.
Here is a story on this theme:
The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, 42) by Maristella Botticini & Zvi Eckstein
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691163510/
How the Jewish people went from farmers to merchants
In 70 CE, the Jews were an agrarian and illiterate people living mostly in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia. By 1492 the Jewish people had become a small group of literate urbanites specializing in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine in hundreds of places across the Old World, from Seville to Mangalore. What caused this radical change? The Chosen Few presents a new answer to this question by applying the lens of economic analysis to the key facts of fifteen formative centuries of Jewish history. Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein offer a powerful new explanation of one of the most significant transformations in Jewish history while also providing fresh insights into the growing debate about the social and economic impact of religion.
Typo in Section 3: "Solvang Conference"
Scott, apropos of your recent concerns about motivations, what motivated you to write this piece?
Immigration stories: My mother and my grandparents fled Ukraine in 1935. It was good time to leave. They had no money themselves, but my grandmother's uncle who had emigrated before WWI had been a successful business man in small town Ohio. he started collecting junk on a horse drawn wagon in small mining towns out there, turned the wagon into a business wholesaling candy and cigarettes to little country stores, and bought some real estate. He paid for my grandparents to come over and sponsored their immigration. My grandfather worked for him in the candy & cigarettes business. The family had picked my grandparents to be the ones to leave because they thought he was too much of a capitalist and that he was going to get himself killed.
My wife's father left Vienna in 1938 a couple of days after Kristallnacht. He was young and single. He had been involved in Scouting and an American Scoutmaster got him a job in Denmark as a way station out. He too had relatives in the US who sponsored him. But, none of them were monied, although they were middle class people with jobs.
How about cultural attitudes towards literacy and education? Jewish men had to read from the Torah. It helped if mom was literate too. She could teach her sons. Presbyterians were expected to read their Bible. Scots had a relatively high literacy rate by the 18th century. Nations influenced by Confucius have had civil service exams since way when. Literacy was a path to a good job and possibly more. I’m less sure about India, but I know literacy was valued by the English running the place. They needed a native civil service as well as an army.
Jewish immigrants to the US were noted for spending a lot on education as opposed to physical goods. Knowledge is portable and hard to confiscate or destroy. Jews have a long history of getting kicked out of places, so this kind of thinking makes sense. The overseas Chinese share this, so there is a tendency to think of what happens after the next pogrom or edict. What can you take with you? Education packs lightly.
The secret of Jewish success is no secret at all. 1. Get an education. Read books, Go to college, go to graduate school. 2. Delay marriage until you have an education. Delay child bearing until you are married. 3. Avoid alcohol, drugs, and fooling around outside of your marriage. 4. Stay married. 5. Save money for your children's education and for your retirement. 6. Remember the Sabbath. On Friday night have a nice family dinner with prayers, candles, and wine.
Here is what it says in the Talmud: A father is obligated to circumcise his son, to redeem him by payment to a priest, if he is a firstborn, to teach him the Law, to find him a wife, and to teach him a trade. And some say: to teach him to swim.
Sounds dull and bourgeois? You bet. Wash rinse and repeat for 120 generations, and this is what you get.
By the way, none of that is conditional on the actions of outsiders.
I was wondering about this and for me this rises the same questions as Fussell's On Class (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class) No one taught me to be middle class because we were not middle class growing up. Plus my parents were not in a position to teach much (father gone and mother too busy making ends meet). And yet I instinctively disdain cruise ships and other stereotypical working-class attributes.
Similarly, no one taught me how to be a Jew because I didn't even know I was a Jew until the age of twenty one. Judaism is not a thing among Russian Jews and my (Jewish) father's real religion was communism. And yet I grew up to fit most of the Western Jewish stereotypes. I tried my hand at being a journalist/psychologist/mathematician before settling on software engineering. Those are the most Jewish trades period, aside from standup comedian (which I also am).
If I didn't pick it from Judaism or any secular Jewish culture, where did it come from? Is it just the result of the previous 120 generations of selection?
"Judaism is not a thing among Russian Jews and my (Jewish) father's real religion was communism."
Communism is not a religion, it is a political outlook. Most communists I have talked to are atheists.
Many forms of Buddhism are atheistic. Religion is a social phenomenon, not a theological structure.
Stereotypes are self-confirming; if you had ended up being a professional golf player, you would never have dreamt of explaining your choice in terms of your father's ancestry. That said, a habitus is something that can be transmitted, consciously or unconsciously, even when religion or big-C culture aren't. Of course, in the West, what happened (in my perception) was that (a) secular Jewish culture (big-C culture, in the sense of Yiddish literature, say) flowered and then went into a rapid decline already within the first half of the twentieth century, to the extent that (to judge with my experience talking to fellow students back in the 90s) it is seen by many observant young (and not so young) Jews as an anachronism, or something that was alien to them; (b) the habitus of upwardly mobile and sometimes intellectually ambitious lower-middle-class immigrants from Russia, Poland, etc., was transmitted to some extent for some a few generations, outlasting (a); it is now definitely on the decline, and has been on a clear decline for several decades, in part due to assimilation and acculturation but also (and this bears mentioning) in cases where there has been a return to religion; the values privileged by traditional Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, etc.) are simply not the same as the values of the immigrant population 140 to 100 years ago, just like Protestantism, let alone Evangelical Christianity, is not the same as the "Protestant ethic". I don't know what the time line was like in Russia; perhaps (a) happened a little sooner (partly under coercion - murdered poets and so forth) and (b) a little later?
PS. One reason why (b) could happen later in the Soviet Union: family wealth can *erode* both intellectualism and striving. I can't imagine Brenda Patimkin's family life having been intellectually stimulating. Of course most American Jews aren't wealthy, but some are, and many are very comfortably upper middle class. Jewish communities in many Latin American countries? Often fairly wealthy (particularly with respect to the rest of the local population) and almost completely unintellectual.
During the Soviet Regime, Jews in the Soviet Union were identified on their identity cards as Jews because the Soviets regarded it as a national identity, not a religion. So, they knew they were Jewish.
Before the 20th Century almost all of the Jews who lived in the Russian Empire lived outside of Russia proper in the Pale of Settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement. Today most of that area is outside of Russia in Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.
My mother was born in what was then and is now Ukraine. She learned Russian because that was what was taught in their schools. Her family spoke Yiddish at home. Most of their non-Jewish neighbors were Ukrainian, not Russian. She knew Russian and loved Russian literature, but she never regarded herself as Russian.
Sensible advice, applicable by and to (nearly) anyone at any time. I *think* you're coming down on the side of Jewish success being cultural. But then there's this: "Wash rinse and repeat for 120 generations, and this is what you get."
That's the rub, isn't it? How did the Jews keep that going for 120 generations? How did they avoid "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations"? Why did Generation 114 continue the pattern when so much of what we observe about human tendencies tell us that they should have rebelled against Generation 123, and blown the wealth left for them by Generation 112?
The answer cannot be that education and discipline resulted in a pile of resources that the subsequent generations could use to make themselves educated and disciplined. That's just... not the history of very poor European Jews, and very poor Jewish immigrants to America. Scott isn't a psychiatrist because his chicken-farmer great-grandfather left him money to go to med school.
What your comment illuminates is that the behaviors that Jews use to be successful are heritable. This isn't a cultural explanation at all.
How about Deep Culture with a theological sanction. I quoted the Talmud. The most basic prayer of Judaism is the Shema. It begins a proclamation the unity of God. It then reminds us of our obligation to love God and to obey his commandments. It then says that you shall teach them diligently to your children.
My assumption was always that it was combination of intelligence and tight communities.
There is enough written about the intelligence, but we can see even the letter from American Jews to European that they did consider helping the immigrants to be their natural obligation (in stronger sense than other minorities did). Intelligence combined with nepotism would seem like a powerful factor.
That said, with Jews becoming just a vague cultural group instead of the tight religious one, I expect regression to mean in the future.
RE: This isn't the way most American Jews remember their own history; family lore usually focuses on how our ancestors were the poorest of the poor.
For the record, this is also true of many Indian immigrants, the lore is often a story of extreme poverty and survival. The story tends to fall apart on closer examination, though.
Yes, they arrived with very little money, but maybe also a PhD.
Or, another version: yes, there was this weird time during partition when they were bankrupt and they were begging on street corners for a month and their siblings died of preventable disease, but if you go back one more generation, you find they were wealthy before partition started. The period of hardship was maybe 5 years and then they got back on their feet.
That is to say, the poverty and struggle is often real, but the struggle was happening to someone who was raised as an elite, with all of the soft social cues, skills, and cognitive aptitudes that this implies, so the struggle was in short order overcome.
Given what I have observed in the Indian case, I am not surprised if with subsequent retellings, the "overcoming poverty" story gets exaggerated in the Jewish case.
A lot of Jewish family stories of ancestors being oppressed in America involve great-grandpa having to start his own country club because he got blackballed by an existing club.
Underrated comment.
I remember Cao Dewang (Owner of Fuyao of "American Factory" fame) telling this sob story about how he grew up poor and a quick google search revealed he was full of it. Wealth more often than not comes from wealth.
Perhaps Jews have a disproportionate effect on what is considered "success" or "achievement" and thus skew the axis, so to speak, to disproportionately represent themselves within it. full disclosure: I am a jew and I am presently having a disproportionate effect on what is considered "achievement"--while representing myself within it. And so is Scott.
The Forbes 400 is a pretty objective measure of success.
This is incorrect. A much better measure of success is taking part (or even leading!) a communist revolution.
To say that "white people are somewhere around the middle" (in SES) is a stretch of the words "somewhere" and "middle."
I found the previous discussion of the jewish advantage in https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ to be very interesting and relevant to this topic.
Why would a man of sense take Noah Smith seriously. He's the guy who wrote that the "Explanation of Japan for Westerners" is, quote, "Japan is a collection of rocks with some human beings on it. That's the vast majority of what you need to know." That got Spandrell's goat, as you can imagine. The latter's response applies equally to the post you are responding to:
~~~
Let me translate this to you: Pattern Recognition is Bad. No, it's positively Evil. You should not try to use your brain and notice things. That may get you into trouble, and certainly prevent you from getting a job as an economics professor. What you need to do is ἐποχή squared; suspend all judgment, and if possible all cognitive function. Just do as you're told by your academic betters, i.e. me. [...] Which is not much because I myself do not judge, do not recognize patterns, and do not try to notice things. But I am en expert™ through living 3 years (on and off) [in Japan], during which my expertly trained non-noticing skills led me to not learn the language, not understand anything and certainly not noticing anything about the country. I did notice there were rocks and human beings; but that's probably safe to notice. Right? Right??
That's contemporary science for you.
Solvay conference, not Solvang, more physics and less pointy hats…
Ashkenazi Jews have one standard deviation higher average IQ thanks to Europe’s unintended selective breeding experiment on them spanning a millennium, and income is correlated with IQ. I wonder how much of the income gap is explained by this alone.
Solvang is a kitschy Danish tourist town in the Santa Ynez valley north of Santa Barbara.
>The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone (...)
I really want to discourage everyone from entertaining this kind of ideas. It cannot.
The ability to live a good life remains positional. Some people have it easier to get into those positions, and an individual intervention might help an individual, but the systemic problem is not ability, it's scarcity. We've already tried exactly this with mass education, and it turns out a diploma that guarantees a stable high-prestige job when held by 1% of the population has long ceased doing so at 50%. (We've apparently also tried it with making more Jews, there's a post upthread about how a population boom forced most of them down the economic ladder.)
Of course, maybe it might work in a roundabout way, by producing a population more likely to understand the need for, and demand, systemic changes. (Jews famously used to be overrepresented in socialist organizations, so there's that.) Then again - education, so far, didn't. Maybe 50% is too low of a number, maybe it merely encourages discrimination against the remaining 50%, maybe we'd need something like 80%. But then again, the cutoff line would probably simply move higher, like it once did from lite-/nume-racy to high school, then from high school to college.
The first paragraph from section 2 is a quote from Noah but not marked as such.
Three things:
1. Did you read the Ferguson response to NHAI? A PDF is here https://www.researchgate.net/profile/R_Brian_Ferguson/publication/273369474_How_Jews_Became_Smart_Anti-Natural_History_of_Ashkenazi_Intelligence/links/54ff28410cf2741b69f414f9/How-Jews-Became-Smart-Anti-Natural-History-of-Ashkenazi-Intelligence.pdf
When I first read it, I thought he raised more interesting objections than Smith did here. He focuses on the genetic condition explanation and notes that one of the authors distanced himself (I assume Cochran) from it in a review of his response.
2. Many of the cultural explanations focus on the Talmudic tradition. We know schooling has causal effects on intelligence, which Ritchie & Tucker-Drob estimate between 1-5 per year (depending on the design). Have you looked into how many American jews get some additional schooling for religious reasons and how much that time sums to? I have no idea myself, but it could shake out to plausibly add a few points, right?
3. You said you got a totally normal "cultural payload". I had thought you at least attended some after school cheder or so, but did I imagine that because I assumed there was no other way for you to have learned all the arcana embedded in Unsong?
Quote : <i>I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average</i> That is exactly my case and I cannot find anything special in myself or my environment, yet I mostly found myself successful. Having lived a long and varied life, I think we Ashkenazi Jews are normal while most of the people are somewhat defective and a little crazy.
I'd be very surprised if this effect turned out to be a blip. Looking at Portuguese History (the one I'm most familiar with), Jewish elites seem to have been filling high offices to the point where it fuelled attacks on the King at least as early as the 13th century. What's more, many of the leading figures of Portugal's Golden Age in the 15th century were Jewish and there's an interesting argument that the end of said Golden Age was triggered by the expulsion of the Jews. (It works chronologically. Of course there are all sorts of socio-political confounders, with persecutions elsewhere and whatnot; but the basic story seems the same as today. Of course I don't have an answer either, but whatever is going on seems to have been going on for a while.)
For me, the biggest question is this: Why are the Jews so succesful in so many diverse fileds?
In early 20th century, a few Jewish men, generally from humble backgrounds, moved to a certain place in California and started making movies. Somehow they became so successful, that Hollywood is in a sense the cultural center of the world since then. The big studios, Fox, Warner bros, Paramount, Columbia, Universal, were all founded by Jews in the early era of Hollywood. (Disney is a big counterexample here, he was not Jewish).
Some Jewish people started drawing comics about funnily dressed people punching villains. Somehow it became an important cornerstone of modern culture. The two creators of Batman were Jewish. The two creators of Superman were Jewish. Stan Lee, creator of lots of important Marvel heroes, was Jewish.
I once looked at a list of "the 13 greatest Broadway composers ever". 10 were Jewish. (In the same list, they were less successful, though still overrepresented in other categories: 4 out of 9 writers, 3 out of 8 the greatest directors in Broadway history.) As checking if they are generally good at music, I looked at BBC's "10 greatest compesers of the 20th century" list. 4 were Jewish.
At this point, I am confused what the general skill is that makes them successful in science, finance, producing the kind of intellectuels as Marx and Freud, making big in new fields (like early 20th century film industry), making good music and being lucky in creating popular superheroes.
I don't think IQ alone is enough to answer that, I don't expect it to correlate that strongly with success in the early film industry, or being a good composer. I think there must be some other secret ingredients too (enterpreneurship for example?), which might be cultural or genetic again.
> There...aren't a lot of European Jews left to survey, but a lot of pre-Holocaust Europe's greatest geniuses seemed to be Jewish.
On this point: I recently heard an argument that WWI was made possible by the Haber process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen in ammonia, invented a few years earlier. When Germany was cut off from foreign nitrate supplies by the British blockade, it depended on the Haber process for its supply of nitrogen-based explosives and nitrogen-based fertilisers. And - yes, Haber was Jewish.
Conversely, by WWII, political persecution in Germany and Italy had cost them a substantial fraction of their top scientific talent, who had left because they were Jewish (e.g. Einstein, Szilard, Franck), had Jewish wives (e.g. Hess, Fermi), or just had friends in those categories. Counterfactuals are always dangerous - but, if the Axis hadn't lost those strategic assets, it seems reasonable that the war would have gone a little more favourably for them.
USA and the world really missed a big chance when Bernie wasn't nominated by the Dems. He would've been the first Ashkenazi president, right? And as far as I know there aren't any other high profile Ashkenazi politicians that can be nominated soon. SMH.
As a Protestant grandfather who has attended numerous Jewish services and followed the Sunday school teachings at the Synagogue I believe that expectation and gratitude are far higher among Jews, but are invisible to them, since they permeate their lives and communities. The level of institutional gratitude is far above other demographics. Couple a high level of gratitude with expectation of general success, the bar and bat mitzvah expectations, and you have a winning human being. These cultural characteristics are invisible to Jews because they have always been part of their world from infancy and they project them on others without realizing that the others live in a different culture.
Gratitude is an incredibly powerful human belief, and rewards its believers in endless ways.
What do you mean by "institutional gratitude" and gratitude as a _belief_?
I mean that it is all throughout the Torah, the services are full of God's favor and expressions of gratitude for the things on earth. It is a default belief among Jews, but they don't see it as unique since it permeates their culture. They assume everyone is like them, but in this they are incorrect.
Being raised Reformed "Gratitude" was possibly the biggest religious meme I was raised with, so I question how unique this is to Judaism. (think "Amazing Grace)
As a mathematician, occasionally I read biographies of mathematicians for fun on Wikipedia. Usually I'm surprised when they *aren't* Jewish. It's really quite impressive, and a reason why Germany went from the place to be for mathematics (especially Göttingen) before WW2 to basically another mid-tier European mathematics location.
The ritual by whitch a Jewish boy becomes a man requires the boy to demonstrate their ability to read, by reading out loud to the community (at the bar mitzvah). I believe was the case even when been able to read was far less common in the general population.
I reckon that fact by itself provides a fair bit of weight to the claim that the difference is cultural.
Fun fact. Russia/Soviet Union had 9 world chess champions. 8 of them are Jewish. That's more world champions than the rest of the world combined (7).
On a more substantial note, this piece reminded me of the "triple package" book/hypothesis, which is summarised well here: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives-success.html.
The central thesis is that many recent-immigrant groups do better because of a peculiar combination of superiority complex and insecurity. As in "we need to show that our culture is better" and "we haven't quite settled yet, can't afford to relax". It lists many examples of immigrant groups that are supposed to be "victims", but instead do very well on average. (Cubans, Nigerians, people from East Asia)
The piece also states that by the third generation that immigrant advantage disappears and grandchildren of the newcomers do no better than any native-born roots-in-the-ground white person. I don't know how much data there is behind this claim, but it fits into my personal observations.
I think this theory also suggests why Jewish people have been doing better than average on some metrics for longer than the prescribed two generations: they haven't had the opportunity to relax. At least not until the last couple of decades. Because they remained consistently different from the majority population and many never quite assimilated, there was always a need to prove yourself and a possibility that the "locals" will turn on you. (Even if in practice you were often more local than them) And even a fully assimilated Jew is often easy to tell apart from his/her French or German neighbour.
That would also explain the experience of Chinese diaspora in South East Asia. From my limited knowledge, it seems that in many countries, like Malaysia and Philippines, Chinese people occupied a niche similar to Jews in the West, complete with their own local versions of pogroms and worse.
Full disclaimer: I am a fully-assimilated Australian Jewish software engineer from Russia who used to play chess like crazy.
"I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in."
Something indeed along those lines, after the Acts of Union in 1706/07, Scotland being brought in to form one parliament, and English markets being opened, the disadvantages that Scotland had previously laboured under were ameliorated to greater or lesser degrees.
But this sounds rather like Dr. Johnson, who seems to have either had a poor enough impression of Scotland and the Scots, or to have enjoyed teasing Boswell, a Scotsman himself: https://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html
"The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!"
And there certainly was, post-1707, the impression of 'the Scotsman on the make', as Scottish talent and ambition headed south. J.M. Barrie, born in Scotland: "There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make."
So perhaps the parallel does make more sense as, given access to wider and freer opportunities, the talented and ambitious Scots and Jews were successful out of proportion to their numbers?
The interesting examination there is the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, as to why the Eastern Europeans seem to have done much better than the Southern Europeans? Is that down to genetics as well?
When I was a kid, the explanation I was given by my WASP parents was that a) Jews did a better of job of in-group networking, and more importantly 2), Jews were much, much less likely to become dysfunctional, roaring alcoholics as adults. Are these things true?
That's interesting. 1) I'm pretty bad at any kind of networking, in-group or out-group. Not all Jews are super-nerds though. 2) We do seem to have considerably lower rates of alcoholism than general population. Which is at least partly genetic from what I understand. (Some people get serotonin/dopamine boost from drinking) High rates of many types of mental illness though.
Regarding Noah Smith's first point, it sure sounds to me like he was talking about World War 2 specifically, so your arguments about immigration decades before that aren't very applicable.
I can't remember where I read this, and a quick Google search didn't help, but I do remember reading somewhere (that I felt at the time I could believe, at least) that American Jews went from one of the lowest IQ groups in the country before WWII to one of the highest after. Their argument, which would match your claims, was that immigration to the US was all initially from the least capable, looking for a new life out of desperation. Then, when the build-up to the Holocaust happened, you had a flood of the most capable (and those with the most means) Jewish immigrants leaving Europe for the US. This could also maybe explain the disproportionate numbers in Russia.
Is there a possibility that (kind of as an inverse of the 'one-drop-rule') "unsuccessful" people of Jewish heritage are less likely to identify as Jews and pass on this heritage? Orphans, children born out of wedlock etc. might for example have had more incentives to assimilate to the mainstream culture, but similarly had worse socio-economic starting conditions?
I'm guessing its a combination of a good sense of community, strong culture of education, and a long history in America. Ultimately, there is not much difference between Asian and Indian Americans other than that Jewish people have a more cohesive culture (Jewish schools, Synagogue, etc.) and have been in America longer, meaning they have had more time to accrue wealth.
I thought it was common knowledge that successful people were less likely to emigrate? It wasn't the Duke of Buggeringham that was upping sticks to go be a pioneer in America, but at most the fifth son of some minor noble, who had no chance of inheriting the family estate and even that wasn't much.
And that is certainly not limited to Jews. Hell, the reason that Florida and Texas have famously debtor-friendly laws is because a lot of the first families of those states were folks fleeing their creditors.
Too fraught a topic for a Minnesotan? You betcha.
"People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes. But I would be pretty happy if it could just make everyone do as well as Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history, even before we started giving people the ability to shoot acid out of their eyes."
It seems likely that to engineer everyone to have the material success of the average Ashkenazim, you would need to engineer everyone to the specifications of the average Ashkenazim. There are obvious trade-offs: How many guys named "Cohen" can slam-dunk? The NBA would soon be unwatchable.
I imagine that we would be willing to sacrifice professional basketball to eliminate poverty, but the unprovent assumption here is that the successes of 2% of the population will scale. At some point we have all the lawyers, psychiatrists, and movie producers that we need, and all those smart engineered Ashkenazim clones will need to find something else to do. Somebody needs to deliver the mail and do oil changes. My conception of intelligence is that (most of) those types of non-intellectual tasks (not slam-dunking) can be done at least as well by someone with a 130 IQ, but I doubt that this person will be satisfied with his lot in life. He knows he's just as smart as the neurosurgeons, but he's stuck delivering mail because there just weren't enough neurosurgeon jobs. On the other hand, I know of a lower-class white guy who was ecstatic (to the point of bragging to women) that he was earning $800 a week as a roofer.
>How many guys named "Cohen" can slam-dunk? The NBA would soon be unwatchable.
The NBA would be very different, but I'm not sure it would be unwatchable. Remember when Jews dominated professional basketball, and the thing that everyone thought mattered most was being a tricky, artful, fast little guy?
https://psmag.com/social-justice/remember-jews-dominated-professional-basketball-70957
Focusing solely on Ashkenazim from the 1800s onwards seems iffy. Sephardim we’re doing fairly well in England, France, and the Ottoman lands beforehand and early American Jews were Sephardic or German Ashkenazim (which is partly why they were so critical of the shtetl folks in East, who they considered to be rabble). Figures like Josef Nasi the Duke of Naxos or the Sassoon family of Baghdad (later dubbed the Rothschilds of the East as they expanded enterprises to Bombay and Shanghai - akin to Rothschild sending his sons to the various great European financial centers - and even helping to found HSBC) we’re doing their thing separate from the Ashkenazic world.
The simpler answer is that there’s something (or a bundle of somethings) about Jews generally which tends towards them having significant capacity once you take down the structural constraints preventing their success. The bulk of Jews taking off in the 1800s and 1900s (whereas previously it was a few elites who represented the community as a whole who did quite well) correlates well with Jewish emancipation.
Scott, you once wrote (or maybe i'm confusing you with EY, but i dont think so) that Jewish families seem to get a little more secular with every generation. Is anything similar happening culturally? Are religious traditions kept as belief fades? I've heard Jewish families usually start a religious preschool earlier than others, is that being maintained?
>I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be
I would speculate that you dont spend large amounts of time with lower-achieving groups, and that it would be more obvious if you did.
When considering the success of a Jew, shouldn't we adjust for the success of their parents, which gave them a better starting point? i.e. compare their success only to gentiles with similarly successful parents?
I think this will eliminate most of the gap, leaving only the generation which made the jump up the social ladder. The conditions for that generation were more unique, so might be easier to explain
I agree with the comments I'm seeing about Scott nor fully addressing Cochran's views. It's been a little while since I read the 10,000 Year Explosion but my brief summary from the time suggests that Cochran and Harpending say Ashkenazi intellectual achievement is a recent change that arose because of:
1. Jews' careers in cognitively demanding jobs (traders, then financiers/moneylenders, then management)
2. Wealthier people reproducing more (and living in less crowded - which I suppose implies less dangerous / unhealthy? - conditions)
3. Stable rules against intermarriage
4. Intellectual ability being highly heritable
Non-Ashkenazi Jewish achievement doesn't track in the same way, they argue, because Jews in the Islamic world had less intellectually-demanding jobs.
P.S. - Sorry for reposts; having technical issues
I enjoyed this comment because it does what very few others do: assumes the heritability of intelligence. At this point, that shouldn't be controversial. Yet most folks, it seems, don't want to come out and say "intelligence is heritable; Jews are intelligent; children of Jews therefore tend to be intelligent." Perhaps this explanation is regarded as facile. I tend to think this is a manifestation of Westerners (via indoctrination into Liberalism) reflexively resisting challenges to the Dogma of Zero Group Differences. But this community doesn't strike me as one that is resistent to heterodox thought.
The cultural explanations offered in this discussion (including your #1 through #3) tell us *how* genes for intelligence propogate. In short: use intelligence to gather resources, use resources to have and protect offspring. And: Judaism requires more of an intellectual commitment than most faiths, so the Jews who didn't have the intellect for it stopped being Jews. But without #4, a lot of these explanations are Lamarckian: Dad read the Talmud and debated with his brothers, therefore Dad's children were smart.
I'm hearing more these days about non-Jews with some Jewish ancestry. If you're right, there should be some influence on intelligence stats.
Not a scientist and probably not as smart as most of the people reading this blog or writing these comments--as well, my comment will be entirely informed by the headlines of two-bit science-y websites:
if epigenetics can "prove" that trauma is inherited, why wouldn't "propensity to study and learn" be considered one of the potential causes that works towards explaining Jewish "success" (as a failure Jew, my use of scare quotes is meant to imply deep resentment).
It seems, then, like it wouldn't be just the culture of learning which contributes to success, but a cumulative genetic effect of such cultural values.
two cent hypothesis.
> But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the [sic] benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
This sentence has me so confused. The first part means, I think, 'in the standard model, there are only two options for high achieving minorities. Either they are not really high achieving or they are creating structures which entrench their power, and therefore Smith et al must explain away high achievement in ethical minorities because to accept their success is to accept their pernicious power structures. This is bad and ought be avoided as a strategy.'
But then the second part eludes me. Who is 'they'? Smith and the other Standard Modelers? 'This' must be the strategy of explaining away high achievement as uninteresting. Why is there a benefit to not-yet-having-applied said strategy? Is 'us' some given minority? Is there a benefit for a given minority to still being considered interestingly successful? If so, what is it? And how does one weigh these together? Why would the benefit only exist under the standard model? Shouldn't the view that a certain minority is successful be moreso outside the standard model? I'm very lost.
Well the most successful group in the last graph is "Belarusian", and this word breaks down into two roots meaning "White" and "Rus' ". I'm not sure how you can get more literal with the Whites being the richest group.
The sphingolipid diseases are illustrative of the selective pressures, not necessarily the major or dominant effects of selection. The key point is the prevalence of childhood-lethal recessive alleles in the population. Now, some level of these will be present simply from de novo mutation, but in the Ashkenazi population you have individual mutations that are common, and are at anomalously high frequencies.
We can do the population genetics math. Suppose you have an allele of prevalence p in your population, and it does very bad things to those who inherit two copies, like causing major neurodegenerative disorders in childhood, to the point where homozygotes have no children. All things equal, the prevalence will go down, though not to zero, since the selective pressure against it drops quadratically as the prevalence drops. So if it's not very close to zero, then some compensating advantage is bringing it up: those carrying a single allele must do better than average. We can estimate about how much.
If the fraction of carriers in the population is f, then the necessary selective advantage in heterozygotes must be about f/2(1-f) in order for the prevalence to stay static. At that level, the advantage in heterozygotes balances the disadvantage in homozygotes and it stops changing frequency.
So. There are several neurological diseases distinct to Ashkenazi Jews. Tay-Sachs is the most well-known. About 1 in 27 Ashkenazi are carriers, and about 1 in 3,600 babies die of really sad neurological disorders from it. It's caused by a mutation in HEXA, linked to a shared haplotype across all Ashkenazim, looks to be ~40 generations old. Running the math, that requires a selective advantage of ~2% for heterozygotes. Niemann-Pick type A is caused by a mutation in SMPD1. About 1 in 200 Ashkenazi are carriers, and about 1 in 40K of their babies die terribly of it. Selective advantage of ~0.2%. Gaucher's disease has a carrier frequency of ~9%, with 1 in 450 with it. It is not deadly to children, and causes problems including decreased lifespan, but those affected can have children. As such it's hard to estimate the selective advantage in heterozygotes. It would be ~5% if those affected had no children, but must be less than that to some extent. We also have torsion dystonia, which is not a recessive but instead variably penetrant dominant: those affected have only 1 copy of the gene, but don't always get the disease. Rate of about 1 in 2,000 to 1 in 6,000. That one is hard! How else do you drive up the frequency of a dominant mutation that high other than with some positive effects?
These are all strong evidence of selective pressure on the population. They are rare enough that they are unlikely to be major contributors to total heritable variance in the population, in the same way that Marfan's is not responsible for a large fraction of the variance in height. If there were strong selective pressures for intelligence that caused these alleles to go to high prevalence, then it would have also caused less destructive changes: small changes in prevalence of many low-impact alleles.
I emphatically agree with this,
" . . . figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!). Far from trying to make this sound "less interesting", we should be recognizing it as one of the most interesting (and potentially socially useful) problems in the world."
In addition to other factors mentioned in the conversation (e.g. valuing education, bourgeois values, etc.) I suggest a greater focus on the distinctive characteristics of intellectual dialogue in Jewish culture.
The distinctiveness of intellectual dialogue as a cultural trait may be invisible to people here because it is the water in which we all swim: everyone involved in the conversation on this blog (and all other intellectual blogs) is ipso facto immersed in the world of discussing ideas. But "discussing ideas" is not normal human behavior in most cultures around the world.
Insofar as Jewish culture has long been based on arguing Talmudic ideas as a foundational aspect of their religion, it has had an unusual focus both on textual analysis but also the normalization of disagreeing about the meaning of the ideas in texts. While there have been limited intellectual classes who discussed ideas in many cultures (priestly classes), my impression is that these sorts of textual discussions have been unusually prominent in Jewish culture at the level of every day life.
For a hint at complementary evidence on the importance of the nature of conversation in the home, the "30 million word gap" in the speech environments of young children that results in dramatic differences in educational outcomes later on has spawned an increasingly nuanced body of research focused on differing species of household talk. For a sample of the debate,
"“There is some evidence that the sheer amount of language input affects language growth (Huttenlocher et al. 1991), whereas other studies suggest that the quality of language input, such as the diversity and complexity of vocabulary and grammar (Huttenlocher et al. 2010, Rowe 2012), the contingency of language addressed to children (Bornstein et al. 2008), the use of questions (Aram et al. 2013), and language that goes beyond the here-and-now (decontextualized language; Rowe 2012), is also important. Recent research examining both quantity and quality simultaneously suggested that quality might be the primary predictor of language outcome (Rowe 2012, Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2015a), and different qualitative characteristics might play a role in different developmental periods (Rowe 2012, Tamis-LeMonda et al. 2014). For example, the diversity and sophistication of vocabulary facilitate toddlers’ lexical growth, whereas decontextualized language is more beneficial for later vocabulary growth in preschool (Rowe 2012).”
Rather than accept this dated summary as definitive, I would just note that:
1). The role of different kinds of dialogue in the home might have a significant impact on the intelligence of children and
2). Jewish patterns of dialogue might be distinct from the patterns of verbal interaction practiced in other cultures.
This hypothesis doesn't differentiate Ashkenazi from Sephardic Jewish outcomes (unless there are differing relationships to dialogue in the home among the two). But insofar as both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews outperform other cultural groups and insofar as both feature Talmudic debate as a cultural foundation, there is at least a hypothesis worth exploring here.
Insofar as I've been able to identify verbal vs. mathematical comparisons of Jewish vs. Chinese intelligence, it appears to be the case that Jews tend to score comparatively higher on verbal metrics and Chinese comparatively higher on mathematical metrics. This differential would be consistent with a distinctive Jewish verbal culture contributing to a distinctive species of intelligence.
Insofar as it is de facto forbidden to discuss the root causes of cultural discrepancies in outcomes, we are prevented from a frank and open discussion of underlying cultural foundations of success. One might have imagined that concerns about genetic root causes might have redoubled interest in researching cultural root causes, but instead both have been rendered off limits.
My vested interest: I believe intellectual dialogue, led by intelligent people who are interested in debating ideas (i.e. not most K12 teachers, who have low average SAT scores) should be a foundational experience in both elementary and secondary schools. It could be that exposure to intellectual dialogue is only valuable in the sensitive period of early childhood. But it could also be that ongoing immersion within a culture in which intellectual dialogue is actively practiced, nurtured, and respected is essential to the preservation and development of intellectual gains. It could also be that later immersion in intellectual dialogue can result in intellectual gains even among those who did not receive it as children (this is my belief based on my experience but I only have evidence based on tiny sample sizes).
I come from a white Lutheran working class culture which did a great job of inculcating a "Lake Wobegon" work ethic but in which intellectual dialogue was entirely alien. When I visited home after college, I found my Socratic mode of inquiry was actively unwelcomed by my family as an inappropriate form of social interaction. In essence, learning intellectual dialogue was like learning a foreign language for me. I've seen countless working class kids in public schools who had a similar experience - often they found that when I was working to engage them in intellectual dialogue they needed to violate familiar norms of interaction. Some knew they would get in trouble at home for interacting in such a manner. My sense is most Jewish families welcome discussions of ideas (so much so that Scott is unaware that this is not universally "American.")
More broadly, I believe that K12's focus on curriculum, assessment, etc. is the wrong model for education. Instead, it should be the design and deployment of subcultures that transmit the real habits and attitudes of success, with Joseph Henrich and Judith Rich Harris serving as key influences on my thinking here, see "Cultural Design as Educational Innovation,"
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2019/07/29/michael-strong/cultural-design-educational-innovation
It should not be controversial to note that the insights of Henrich and Harris are not even on the map with respect to educational policy debates.
With respect to Harris, her "No Two Alike," which analyzes the causes of personality differences between identical twins, provides several distinct mechanisms through which significant differences in personality can develop even when the genetic material is identical. She refers to the components of her explanation as a relationship system, a socialization system, and a status system,
https://fs.blog/2016/06/no-two-people-alike-part-2/
Again, if we are interested in how human beings vary beyond genetics, one might have thought that Harris' schema here might have received more attention.
Another data point for the notion that the transmission of cultural norms should be the focus of education: Utah has the highest rate of social mobility in the U.S. despite having the lowest per capita expenditures in K12 education. The most likely hypothesis is that Mormon social technology (i.e. culture) has a greater impact than does curriculum, assessment, etc.
Nothing about our current K12 model is focused on the consistent development of habits and attitudes for success through immersion in a distinctive subculture. Nothing about how we think about education is focused on the deliberate design of subcultures. The notion that the "playbooks" of Duckworth's Character Lab could have a serious impact in light of Henrich's analysis of culture and Harris's analysis of personality development strikes me as laughable,
https://characterlab.org/playbooks/
Replied.
As a linguist, it's sort of disheartening to see Chomsky mentioned alongside Einstein...
Why? As a non-linguist, I'm intrigued by this comment. Is Chomsky not well regarded among linguists?
Well it somewhat depends who you ask, of course. But I think it's fair to say that he's far from being universally loved. I'd even go as far as to say that his fans are in a minority, but I don't have hard data to back that up, so it may be skewed by my particular outlook on the linguistics community (discipline- and geography-wise -- I'm based in Europe). In particular, the consensus in the US might be different.
Still, I'm firmly in the camp that finds it unfortunate that Chomsky of all modern linguists has become a household name. I think linguistics should strive to be an empirical science, examining real-world language data, conducting experiments etc. But Chomsky has always been an armchair linguist, preferring speculation and introspection, trying to justify this approach on a philosophical level by references to Descartes and 17th c. rationalism.
And he's *really* good at introspecting and speculating without letting any real-world data seep into his mind and -- God forbid -- moderate any of that in any way. For instance, I was really surprised when I learned that he actually has kids. His intuitions on how language acquisition should work (or rather must work -- he's persuaded he's rationally proven there's no other way) are so bizarre that I'd always thought he'd never spent a more than negligible amount of time in the company of a child.
(Then again, I guess having kids doesn't necessarily mean you've spent time with them.)
In a nutshell, Chomsky spawned a tradition in linguistics and psychology which is obsessed with trying to prove that a lot of language can't be learned because of "poverty of stimulus", so it must therefore be innate. There's a paper I really like (http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~mramscar/papers/Ramscar%20Dye%20McCauley%202013.pdf) which has this to say about it:
> Strikingly, psychologists studying rats have found it impossible to explain the behavior of their subjects without acknowledging that rats are capable of learning in ways that are far more subtle and sophisticated than many researchers studying language tend to countenance in human children.
This is rather veiled, but some people really hold a grudge against him. I mean I do too, but not to the point of spending time and energy to vent it in peer-reviewed publications. This review (https://www.grsampson.net/ARsy.pdf) is a good and entertaining sample of that end of the spectrum.
It has an interesting explanation for Chomsky's penchant for the arcane -- that he's basically a charlatan. He heard some exciting buzzwords in the corridors at MIT in the 1950s, applied them in a slapdash way to linguistics, and when the boat started leaking, retreated to increasingly abstract and abstruse ground. (Is the argument, which I find plausible, but YMMV.)
If you're interested, I wrote a more extended take on Chomsky here: https://dlukes.github.io/cathedral-and-bazaar.html. Fair warning: the text is five years old at this point and I've come across really exciting research in the meantime that would play a central role in the article if I were to rewrite it today (here's a link to one of the papers, for anyone interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.03991; or google for Michael Ramscar).
I also don't have Scott's knack for effortless writing about complex subjects, plus it was for a grad school assignment, so it might not be the most digestible of reads :)
I suspect, with low confidence, that the key to (obviously real) Jewish overperformance is "don´t be a peasant". Medieval Jews had largely urban or at least other nonagricultural occupations, and it is easy to construct a story when this situation led to both cultural and genetic skew towards traits that would be more useful in nonpeasant dominated world than those of their agricultural neighbors
1-I get the feeling there are a disproportionate number of Jews in the rationalist community as well. For what it’s worth that includes me. I’m not sure if I’m even right but I’ve wondered why this is.
2-I wonder how, if it all, extensive Talmud study affects a person. I personally feel it has majorly shaped the way I think. I could definitely imagine it making the rationalist way of thinking more appealing.
I’m a bit surprised you don’t extend this to psychological data, which seems like a better way to explore root causes of behavior than personal anecdote or a theory about intelligence alleles. Surely there are relevant ethnic differences on Big Five personality traits for Jewish Americans, and those could easily influence things like income, wealth, and educational achievement.
I’m not sure they’re all things I would wish upon my (Jewish!) children though.
Noah Smith also points out that other minority religious groups, such as Quakers, Mormons, Jains, Christian Arabs etc. also do very well.
Is it possible that perhaps if a minority religion is not optimized for producing generations financially successful, family supporting and fertile followers it will quickly die out, and therefore the observed success is just survivorship bias?
non-successful religious minorities include: Roma, Uyghurs in China, Muslims in Europe, Palestinians in Israel, Aboriginals in Australia, Natives in North America, tribal religions in Africa, Taiwanese indigenous animists.
Seems unlikely that there's any big benefit to being a religious minority per se. It's more like a publication bias than a survivorship bias.
Evangelical Christians in the US aren’tgenerally rolling in dough,either.
In the 1995 book "Jews and the New American Scene," the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp. 26-27]
I assume Jews were about 3% of the US population in 1965-1995, so these are impressive proportions.
There might have been something intellectually important going on with Jews pretty early. The Talmud was created and preserved, and I don't know of anyone else who has something like that.
Agreed; the idea that the Jews only prospered from the 19th century onwards seems a bit strange as well. Even during the most Jew-oppresive times of the early middle ages, during the Crusades, many, if not most, of the European monarchs had Jewish advisors and financiers.
There could have been something intellectually important happening pretty early-- I don't think any other group produced something like the Talmud, or at least if they did, it wasn't preserved.
You overlook another political motive to downplay or "erase" Jewish success. We'd like to believe that the presence of massive historical trauma (e.g., slavery, holocaust) means centuries of group underperformance that can only be fixed by government intervention.
It's the cork effect! When you hold a cork under water, it needs to "work harder to barely reach the surface". Take away the oppression and it shoots up out of the water.
The observed slope downwards fits perfectly with that model, since you don't need to work hard at the very top, a cork will come back down soon after, too.
This has a variation, the "soaked sponge", where if you hold down a sponge for many generations, it soaks up water and sinks, no matter whether the oppression is lifted.
One of the issues with statistics is that if you take data and try to find statistically significant irregularities, YOU WILL. This is why the parameters of a study must be decided before the study is done(You have a 37% chance of 1 of 1000 tests to a set of data being true if each test has a 0.1% chance of being randomly true on its own)
As a result, we should expect some outliers in terms of performance merely due to random factors. Additionally, we know high achieving (HA) parents create high achieving kids. Accordingly, we expect noise in the form of HA to propagate through multiple generations.
I would expect this to not merely be true at the family unit level but also at the cultural level and for some cultures to share child-rearing strategies which impact level-of-achievement.
Obviously, Jews or US Jews don't really share a culture per se but this would still thicken the tail of the per-culture achievement histogram.
Edward Luttwak argues it's due to Jewish education: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-misunderstanding-about-anti-semitism
Great piece but he surely cannot believe what he is writing. Maybe we need to go Straussian here and analyse what he's not allowed to tell us. Prevent Jewish education by "marrying non-jews", lol it's clear what his solution is. (Interesting to note that he too is a jew)
What do you think he really believes?
Scott, the answers to virtually all the group difference questions are pretty straightforward: information technology. The rise of the Jews is closely connected to requiring universal male literacy, i.e., adopting books before everyone else. The rise of Western Europe relative to others is not difficult to connect to the printing press.
Highly recommend checking out this link: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanati
Typo:
"But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet""
The "than" seems out of place. Someone quoted you down in the comments section and it seems like this sentence used to be:
"is greater than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”
When I was in grad school (in the USA), in the mid 2000s, a professor from China was asking me questions about my family and said, "You're Jewish, right?" I told him no, and he looked startled. "I thought all the smart Americans were Jews," he explained. I didn't try to correct him, as it seemed like a reasonable mistake for him to make, but it wasn't like he had a secret racist or non-racist agenda or really thought much about American ethnicities at all. He, or his colleagues, had simply observed that all the smart Americans they knew were Jews and made an induction accordingly.
Can you add a title to the crossposted graph from Zach Goldberg? I had to go to the original source to confirm what it was talking about.
Of course, I don't think you can actually double income by making everyone after/whatever, because income is largely positional, and jobs are based on supply and demand.
If the average IQ became 130, burger flippers wouldn't suddenly become middle management, nor would burger flippers get paid twice as much for the same work. It would just mean that burger flippers have an IQ of 125 now, and possibly suffer more from the tedium and frustration of wasted potential than they did before.
I think the idea is that if everyone gets smarter, then every job where intelligence matters gets done better. And if lots of jobs are getting done better, then society as a whole runs better and everyone prospers.
And there will be more automation of routine work.
Automation also makes work more routine.
You could just as easily make the case that if everyone is smarter and better educated then more workers will argue with their bosses, join unions, read Marxist theory and devise revolutionary strategies.
Sure, we could definitely increase productivity and get other benefits, I'm not saying it wouldn't be a huge boon to society .
Just that the language of 'double your income' was used twice, and it's not that simple.
People talk a lot about IQ, but they seldom talk about level of motivation. Seems to me that motivation is far more important. IQ tells us 'if you can'. Motivation tells us 'if you want to'. The world is full of people with all sorts of talents, including high IQ, who are unreliable-- and unsuccessful.
People with Jewish backgrounds have, on average, much higher rates of anxiety than people with non-Jewish backgrounds. Anxiety-- about bad outcomes in the future, either specific, well visualized bad outcomes, or just generalized bad outcomes-- is a very, very strong motivator to try and avoid those bad outcomes.
Students who are more anxious about the future, study longer and harder, and try harder to do well on tests. Adults who are more anxious about the future, work longer and harder, try to please the boss or their customers by being helpful and reliable, and save more money as a cushion against the future. It just makes sense that group of people who are, on average, more anxious, are also going to, on average, end up in jobs that are better paying, and more economically secure--regardless of their average IQ.
In my personal experience, anxiety hurts performance pretty badly. It's a big part of why I didn't make it through college on my first try. (For what it's worth, I'm half Jewish, and neither of my parents had this problem.)
No doubt anxiety is one of those things where you need to be in the right range-- enough to motivate, but not enough to paralyse.
There's probably something to look at in whether people believe there's something which will take the edge off the anxiety. If you believe education/achievement will make you feel at least a little better, there can be a positive effect on your life, even if you would be happier if you were calmer.
If effort/success makes you feel more anxious, you have a problem.
I would agree with this, and add that when we talk about people with "anxiety" we tend to look at people who have enough of it to destabilize them. I doubt we have good measures of anxiety in most of the population (i.e. those that are not so anxious as to seek medical help), to verify the hypothesis of "right range" levels. That said, we may have code words that we use to talk about either anxiety or related concepts - "Type A personality" - that may be a decent proxy for what we are considering.
"There aren't a lot of European Jews left to survey" ... huh, 1.3 million?
So complicated, but probably includes something to do with the Jewish emphasis on education that others have mentioned. (Even if you belief there is a metaphysical component- and I am an Orthodox Jew myself- it's still necessary to have a temporal context in which Providence can take shape.) Although it's true that some very religious Jews are skeptical of secular education, this tends to be limited to knowledge that isn't "necessary" to live a successful lifestyle, e.g. classics, abstract math, certain sciences, but doesn't include those disciplines which are practical.
It's also definitely not the case that religious Jews are brainless fundamentalists who spend all their time in prayer and memorizing lengthy catechisms. Traditional Jewish study is intensely rigorous and exceedingly intellectual in many regards. Scholarship is prized and rewarded socially and the most advanced students will be sought out for rabbinic positions.
In the secular or less Orthodox Jewish worlds, the primacy of erudition has been at most displaced on, or at least, shared with secular disciplines. Interestingly, however, I don't know to what extend secular Jews share the pragmatism of their highly religious peers. Non religious Jews, for instance, are much more likely to value attending a prestigious college, whereas many religious Jews would choose to attend schools with lower tuition costs.
This one I'm not as sure about, but there may be some relevance to Judaism's emphasis on practice, as opposed to belief, for which it is often contrasted with Christianity (perhaps unfairly so). The highlighting of this world, as opposed to the next, may feed the pragmatic impulse, at least in part. A person very focused on the perfect existence of heaven, may feel less inclined to exert themselves more than necessary and that extra push might've gone a long way.
Finally, there's definitely a component of the Jewish emphasis on community. Largely due to the prevalence of anti-semitism, Jews formed strong communal organizations and high levels of trust between coreligionists. Although Jews from around the globe have varying customs, they are also more or less similar, in contrast with the heritage differential between Philippine and Argentine Catholics, for instance. Even today, if I call up an Orthodox synagogue anywhere on Earth and explain that I'll be in town for the Sabbath and need a place to stay, I'll be given accommodations almost immediately.
Curious what others think about this.
How has the term "sexual selection" not been mentioned yet? If there are proximal cultural causes ("likes books") then presumably mate selection strategies would be one of the more ultimate of those ("likes wo/men who like books", or more realistically, "blessing of parents/friends/etc. is important and also rather contingent on candidate-mate intellect").
It might not be intellect per se, but I think a culturally-mediated sexual-selection bias has to be concerned with a (more) intrinsic factor like intelligence, to produce resilience against short-term environmental effects. This is basically to say choosing a mate who's rich is not as good a strategy long-term as choosing a mate who is capable.
"the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview"
I expect that this statement is highly incorrect. Just considering how niche of a cultural group you wound up in, whether rationalist, or people who write highly controversial blogs for other people who are more interested in truth than group acceptance, what have you. When you get your own show on CNN with millions of viewers, then maybe you can be considered closer to the mainstream.
More pointedly in favor of the cultural view is that point about black students trying to do well in school "acting white". The mistake made there is claiming that race is the distinctive marker; those students are not acting white, they are acting successful. When I taught I saw the difference frequently, and it had little to do with race. In fact, native born college students were often worse about it than foreign or first generation immigrant students. Responsibility, taking charge of their education, etc. was engrained in some students and not in others. Some students would email questions if they didn't understand the homework, some would only ask after they handed it in. Or they wouldn't hand it in at all and cite some confusion as an excuse, having never contacted me despite having ample time.
What seems strange to me is that social scientists always focus on differences between ethnic groups then dither about genetics vs culture instead of looking at homogenous ethnic groups and then considering the differences between performances. The in-group differences are pretty broad for US groups, so why not see if the same things that make some of group X more successful than others in group X also make some of group Y more successful than others in group Y?
It is not surprising that John Ogbu, the Nigerian sociologist who first called attention to the phenomenon of black students trying to do well in school being accused of "acting white" is not only Nigerian, but Igbo, the tribe often described as the Jews of Africa because of their disproportionate success both intellectually and entrepreneurially,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ogbu
It is estimated that 75% of black medical doctors in the U.S. are Nigerian and most of those are probably Igbo.
Nigerian universities have differing admissions standards designed to prevent Igbos from dominating those universities just as elite U.S. universities have different standards designed to prevent Jews and Asians from taking up "too many" spots. Anambra state, in the account below, is predominantly Igbo,
"The cut-off mark for a male pupil from Yobe State in the 2018/2019 session is two. It is four points for the male candidate from Zamfara while the male candidate from Taraba State only needs three points out of 300 to be a proud student of any of the federal government colleges he so chooses. But the minimum score is 139 for any male or female pupil from Anambra State nursing the hope of getting place in a unity college."
https://guardian.ng/features/how-discriminatory-admission-criteria-poor-performance-haunt-unity-schools/
What might be a good location for a no-ethnic-limits university?
Well, the Nigerians are indeed princes among men, so one would expect them to have much higher levels of success! Probably the highest level of princes per capita than anywhere else in the world.
That is a great point to bring up relative to the Igbo especially. A comparatively small subculture being far more common in a particular field than others is remarkably common across the world. Almost as though genetics and culture can combine to make some groups more effective at certain jobs than others. I prefer to focus on culture, as genetics is tricky to shift and seemingly throws up a lot of randomness, but both do seem to be important.
I think your discussion of Scots sort of dances around the point Noah is making with it. His point I take it, is that if Scots can have been disproportionately successful relative to the English, to whom we are basically genetically identical (goes the assumption; no idea if it's true) then the edgy Cochran-style genetic race science explanation for the success of Ashkenazim is ruled out. I don't think he's actually really saying that it means that there is nothing further to explain, just that 'hey, Jews sure do value education' or other plausible sociological explanations are less interesting in the "will start a big fight' way.
Also, I think there's a mistake here: ' On the other, I'm not sure that the Scottish Golden Age is really appropriate. I'm not an expert in this period, but it sounds like the kind of thing that had something to do with increased economic growth, trade, and an improving intellectual climate in Scotland. Just to randomly speculate, Scotland had just joined in a Union with England, right as England was inventing industrialization - surely a good climate for a Golden Age to start in
Also, I think this bit is just a mistake: ' I took Noah's point about the Scots to be that we were disproportionately successful *compared* to the English who also enjoyed all the same advantages, but that no one really cares about this or dreams of thinking it's genetic. No idea if that's actually true, but it's not a rebuttal of that point to bring up advantages we shared with the English relative to the rest of the world
Well "ruled out" is an exaggeration. His claim is just that it would look less likely.
'But maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that's true, I think it would be even more interesting - it would mean there's some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery. I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be - as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. But if I'm wrong, figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!).'
I think the kind of reasoning here of 'hey, Jews make double the average income because they have X traits, so if everyone has X traits-high IQ etc.-they'd all be making that money' is very dubious in a way that I'm surprised someone as sharp as you didn't pick up on. (Unless I'm misreading you? Which I guess is not that unlikely, and I apologize if I am). Some of the extra income Jews earn, perhaps even most of it, comes from their *relative* advantage next to everyone else in the labour market, and would go away if everyone was average IQ 115 or whatever, but the badly paid jobs still had to be filled. Obviously, it is more complicated than that, since likely everyone being more intelligent would raise productivity and hence raise real incomes, but its certainly not as simple as 'hey, if we made everyone like Jews, they'd automatically earn the same money!"
I think there's a few important differences in the narratives about white people controlling everything and creating structures that favor whites vs Jews doing that.
1. White people factually *did* do that in the past, whereas as far as I know, Jews never did. Saying there are remnants of that structure/control isn't really controversial; it's just a matter of degree.
2. Whereas STEM fields feature plenty of other ethnic groups doing better than whites, politicians, CEOs, and other groups that *actually* control structures/institutions are overwhelmingly white (and have not ever been overwhelmingly Jewish). Frankly, those groups are also much easier to bullshit your way into than STEM fields (where you're more often measured in objective skill), so they're more likely to indicate actual bias.
1. Exactly whom the controlling whites were controlling matters, right? The barriers erected by American whites to Jewish success are trivial compared to the roadblocks thrown in the way of blacks. To the extent that Jews were considered white (or at least non-black), they benefitted from the structures that favored whites. Simple example: some whites would not have qualified for Major League Baseball if superior players had not been relegated to the Negro Leagues. That's almost certainly true for Jews, too, as they were in the league from its earliest days.
2. I don't have hard numbers for the percentage of Jews in STEM vs. Bullshit. Could be higher, could be lower, and complicated by the difficulty in identifying the Bullshit careers. Whatever those are (law, finance, CEOs, journalism, entertainment, politics), certainly there are a lot of Jews earning a nice living in Bullshit. You're correct in saying that these fields are not "overwhelmingly Jewish" (exception: entertainment executives? Biden's cabinet?), but they're punching well above their 2% weight. However, there aren't many Indians or east Asians in Bullshit. Perhaps whites are able to bias the Patels and Changs of the world out of Bullshit careers. But it would seem that Jews are on the Oppressor side of the equation along with the (rest of the) whites, because they thrive in the Bullshit fields.
I think I understand what you're trying to say, and there is some truth to it. But can we find a better term than "bullshit" for "not-STEM"?
I'd like to see a historical comparison between European Jews and Romani. A general explanation from the circumstances of the Jews (which of course this isn't) would also have to explain the lack of Romani Nobel Prize winners, as the Romani faced very similar discrimination, which you'd expect would cause broadly similar outcomes. I've seen a few hints at "you can explain Jewish success just from circumstances" ideas, but none that have answered the question of where my Romani scientists are.
Zvi is hereozygous for Gaucher's, and I'm heterozygous for Tay-Sachs - just FYI. Might be interesting for you to add genetic mutations to your survey.
It's all about the chutzpah.
"...figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems..."
1) There's a single lab in Europe that produced 13 Nobel Prize winners. This argues strongly for this kind of success being at least partly cultural. https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2011/07/nobel-prize-winning-culture
2) A neuroscientist told me (in conversation, no reference, sorry) that human language got a lot more complex (recursive) when literacy developed. This speaks to the culture idea. Others have made related points - for example, that intellectual discussion is not the norm in most cultures, but probably is among the Ashkenazim.
3) My wife and I are both very verbally intelligent (one was a classics major and reads 6 languages; the other repeatedly scored 800 on the verbal SAT and GRE). Regression to the mean implies that our kids should be noticeably less smart as we are. But at 2.5 years old, my kid asked for help when a tower fell over: "Daddy, give it stability." And at 3.25 years old, casually said: "Bedroom is a metaphorical word for a living room with a baby sleeping in it."
To demonstrate and analyze cultural transmission of intelligence, it would be worth looking at the intelligence of children of intelligent parents. In families where the kids are as intelligent as the parents, figure out what cultural or behavioral factors are adding to the portion of intelligence that's not genetic.
4) Even the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that intelligence will be strongly influenced by language structure. Not the textbook version of the language, but the version spoken by the individual. There are many versions of English, varying in important ways - for example, whether double negation means negative or positive. I suspect that when studied through this lens, languages spoken in high-intelligence families will turn out to be more highly structured and more reflective of logic than the versions spoken in the general population.
5) In another post, Scott wrote: "many studies show that smarter teachers make students learn more (though this specifically means high-IQ teachers; making teachers get more credentials has no effect)." https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
There's clearly no genetic effect here, but there is apparently an effect clear enough to imply a mechanism. Whatever that mechanism is, it likely works in families as well - which makes yet another argument for the "payload" hypothesis.
Scott, if you read this, I'm very curious whether you agree that this intelligent-teacher effect is relevant to the plausibility of a cultural-payload effect.
6) I recently wrote and taught a 9-week class on computer fundamentals, 2 hours per week, no homework. The students were high schoolers in a program aimed at getting students of color into tech. Some of the students were unfamiliar with spreadsheets; some weren't comfortable with multi-column add-with-carry-by-hand; some couldn't balance parentheses.
For 80% of the classes, by self-report, the students were in the "Learning zone" (as opposed to the "Panic zone" or the "Comfort zone") and only 2 out of 65 felt panicked for more than 2 of the 9 classes.
In those 18 hours, we covered rigorously a sequence of about 20 closely-linked conceptual frameworks from MOSFET transistors, through CPU architecture, through hash tables and execution contexts, to how object oriented inheritance and async/await programming are implemented in JavaScript. By the ninth week they could all understand statements like "The function creates an execution context and puts it into the "then" data structure of the local Promise so it will be loaded and run when that Promise is satisfied, then returns the function Promise so that whatever called this function can await on it."
Actually, I only taught 41 of the students; another volunteer teacher used my material in a 24-student class with equal success. Whatever was responsible for this level of student learning, it wasn't my teaching; it was something - some payload - in the material.
My strategy was to demystify every concept and provide complete rigor at every step; to leave no student behind at any point, going as slowly as necessary to answer every question fully; to make no assumptions about their prior knowledge, giving them every concept needed for all future topics; to demonstrate from the start that every topic was fundamentally simple and comprehensible. Somehow, that payload got 65 high schoolers through college level material at college speed.
7) If 18 hours of "payload" can instill advanced computer science topics, what might be the effect of an entire childhood in the company of parents from a Talmud-studying culture - or for that matter, a parent who reads classical Greek for fun and another who writes software professionally?
Can this kind of "payload" be distilled and made available to every person and family that would benefit from it, pan-culturally? It seems that some useful fraction of it can be delivered to young adults in 18 hours. For example, could a set of simple language exercises be developed that would broaden and/or augment people's structure of thinking?
Even if it's the result of selective immigration, that it persists two generations later poses the same interesting cultural/genetic quandary of how to replicate it for all.
It's a fact that Jews were vastly overrepresented in STEM throughout the 20th century in every place that had a large Jewish population, it's not just USA.
Evolutionary speaking, Jews in both Russia and Europe were for many generations living under special rules and subjected to a different kind of selective pressure than the rest of the population. Excluded from military and law enforcement, prohibited from owning land, forcefully converted to Christianity (those who accepted the conversion were effectively removed from the modern Jewish gene pool), and so on. Different selective pressure -> different traits. This is one strong candidate for the "why".
I have to go with Noah Smith in rating the topic a qualified "uninteresting." Factors in the causal path of exceptional behavior of any form are interesting but, as framed, the discussion shares attributes with conversations I can imagine among early rationalists attempting to explain planetary motion while holding Earth as the unquestioned center of those motions (for theological reasons, even).
It seems certain that we will soon identify specific genetic profiles that predispose those who possess them to excel in specific types of human endeavors and perhaps in possessing them to be unlikely to excel in others. Based on what we know about genetic diversity, it seems even more certain that none of our historically antiquated family resemblance constructs, Jew included for there is no single non-trivial criterion for "Jew" that runs through all cases of those we call Jews, will demonstrate discriminant validity for the profile.
Separately, portions of this discussion are permeated with a sense of pride or superiority for attributes that are inherently accidents of birth and thus are not logically subject to praise or blame.
And if the cultural trait is "a sense of alienation from mainstream society" (incentivizing reflection and an analytical approach to he world)? If it is that, it will be impossible to apply in large scale.
christians made its high iq people into monks that had no kids, hebrews made its high iq people into rabbis that had 10 kids, this isn't overly complicated
Source of the soviet scientists chart is an official publication "Statistical material for the 250th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences" here: https://history-russia.livejournal.com/45339.html
I think a larger piece of overlooked dark matter here is the substantially lower rates of alcohol use and abuse in Jewish populations across both time and geographies. One of many studies here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095014
Ashkenazi jews are smart because they are the result of the original hebs mixing with petite roman royalty and then when they had enough of hellenization, they developed a complex mechanism of conversion to keep themselves separate.
Not any goyische idiot could convert to judaism, it was a proto-IQ test of sorts.
Rereading your piece about Hungarian-Jewish scientific achievement and mentally replacing the Budapest high schools with Bronx Sci and Stuyvesant in the 20s-60s
I think there are two secret sauces here.
One is education: Jewish culture has valued education more, and valued it for much longer, than mainstream culture. This started for religious reasons, with the belief that Jews needed to study Jewish law carefully and extensively in order to fully understand and properly obey it. This built a pro-study attitude that later carried over to secular intellectual pursuits.
The second is social support: Jewish culture places a high value on Jews helping other Jews. Anti-Semites tend to cast this as a source of malign conspiracy, but more often it just means helping each other with the ordinary burdens of life. This is an underrated factor in helping people to accomplish more without burning out, and it does a lot to help kids succeed in school, get into good colleges, get good jobs, and succeed in those jobs.
I'm not Jewish, but I read a lot, and this is my best guess based on the information I have. I also suspect that these two factors reinforce each other: lots of social support from a network of highly educated and accomplished people does a lot to help kids grow up to be highly educated and accomplished themselves.
I think it would be interesting to do these comparisons adjusted for IQ. Like how do gentiles (of which I am one) with a 115-130 IQ do compared to Jews with a 115-130 IQ. I remember seeing somewhere that Episcopalians at some point in the past (probably '60s) had a comparable IQ to Jews.
If the 115-130 gentile cohort performed (however you want to define it - income , level of education, etc.) comparably to the 115-130 Jewish cohort, then the case could be made that Jewish outperformance is IQ based. If the Jewish cohort outperformed the gentile cohort, then Jewish outperformance may be culturaly based.
I tend to think its a combination of the two (maybe they are interelated - higher IQ leads to a "better" culture).
A while ago, I did a simple statistical analysis. I looked at the number of white people in the US, assumed a 100 mean IQ/15 standard deviation and used the normal distribution to estimate how many white gentiles have an IQ over 115. I then did the same analysis on the US Jewish population with a 115 mean IQ to get the number of Jews with an IQ > 115.
The result was that the number of gentiles with a 115+ IQ was a multiple of the number of Jews with a 115 IQ (simply because there are some many more gentiles). To me, this pointed to there being a meaningful cultural component of Jewish outperformance.
The anti-semite might say that is because of some nefarious clanninish or cunning that isn't captured in IQ. Others might say it due to a focus on education, achievement, family, etc.
Not that I'll be around, but it'll be interesting to see if Jewish (and Asian, for that matter) outperformance continues in 200 years. The Scottish Enlightenment is a good example, but so is the relative performance of Greeks in the US in the '60s. They were the super immigrant group for a while, but seem to have blended in with the broader population.
I also think the trend of Jewish excellence goes back much further than Noah Smith allows for, especially when you control for how few Jews there were in Europe and the Middle East compared to the majority populations, and the sheer level of disadvantage and suspicion they faced. Before 1800 there were certain periods in certain countries when they weren't relentlessly harassed and persecuted, and those periods always coincided with impressive achievements:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-in-amsterdam/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_under_Muslim_rule#During_the_Caliphates
And even in the really anti-Semitic countries you had Jews who were barred from doing virtually everything else becoming highly successful in the financial sector, culminating in the phenomenon of the powerful and influential "court Jew":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_Jew
https://twitter.com/jonathan_amit/status/1507432714072375299