Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a book in 2011 titled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Not incidentally, Caplan is also keenly aware of IQ and its valid, predictive properties.
See here: “I’m an IQ realist, all the way. IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.” A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success. Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.”
I respect him far more for daring to even address the topic of intelligence, despite how crucical it is to an academic discipline like economics, where financial success is predicated on selection for talent (for the vast majority of jobs, cognitive ability is being selected.) Stultifying political correctness plagues our universities, though economics is perhaps the most conservative field- and this isn’t saying much, with the proportion of liberals narrowly edging out the conservatives (I read this somewhere on Razib’s page, I think.) Also, the individual institution matters as well; the proportion of conservatives or merely tolerance for right wing views could be above the mean. At any rate, this signifies intellectual honesty to some tangible degree.
Still, some maneuvering has to occur if he is to balance his political views with his knowledge regarding IQ. What follows as a corollary from IQ as an independent property is mean differences among different populations. Caplan understands this. He’ll never explicitly say it, because at the end of the day he’s affiliated with a university and there is a political threshold that even the most ape-shit reactionary can’t cross when one is affiliated with higher learning in the United States.
A brief overview of notable populations in the United States and their associated IQ scores:
- Ashkenazi Jews: 112
- East Asians: 104
- Gentile Whites: 100
- Hispanics: 95
- African Americans: 85
Hispanics are rapidly growing as a population in the United States and they reproduce far more quickly than Whites do. This is uncontroversial. However, the associated effects of lower intelligence, but not exclusively lower intelligence, is the lack of assimilation and its political implications.
Caplan is an anarcho-capitalist. Essentially, anarcho-capitalism is the political philosophy of society with no government, steered solely through voluntary transactions. I harbor many sympatheties for anarcho-capitalism. I’m libertarian, and I advocate for the most freedom that is palpable in society. But it is difficult to reconcile IQ literature with a notable tenet of anarcho capitalism; namely, open borders. With Caplan’s book, I feel he is attempting to ameliorate the relatively sterile white population into reproducing more to counteract the rapidly growing Hispanic population. Now, I know even with a white majority in the United States we have nothing remotely close to anarcho-capitalist society. But we have rights. We have a constitution. And we have significantly more liberty than any other country on Earth. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but Caplan likely feels the mass immigration of Hispanics could potentially spark a reverse trend in the state of our liberty. One need only look at the many failed socialist Latin American states for evidence of this.
Credit: The Audacious Epigone
He doesn’t explicitly say this, but as I said before, Caplan is a university affiliate, so there are intrinsic limitations on what he can publish. Caplan doesn’t need to cater to the white population of society by cat-calling them with a title like the one of this blog post. His readers are primarily white already, by virtue of self selection. Those that read consistently have higher IQ’s on average than those who don’t (this is obviously true intuitively, though I don’t know of any research on it) and those that are familiar with Bryan Caplan are also selected for higher intelligence- he’s a relatively obscure economist, who advocates for a fringe political ideology. Whites account for >65% of society, and also have a fairly high mean intelligence.
The counter argument would be that Caplan can’t reasonably expect his book to make a palpable difference in the political tides of the United States with such a limited reader pool. My qualm with this is humans are irrational creatures, and we want to believe our work has an effect beyond what it truly does. For Caplan, this may be the case, as this book isn’t centered primarily on economics and as a result is more accessible to the general population.
Brutal 