I know John already posted on this, but I’ve a few things to get off my chest following the news that I got via Dave Weigel, that Dr. Jason Richwine, our favorite race(ist)/IQ/no-Latino-immigrants need apply scholar aca-hack, has “resigned” from the Heritage Foundation. Richwine, recall, was the co-author of Heritage’s now roundly ridiculed immigration study released earlier this week.
Weigel asked what Heritage knew and when they knew it about Richwine’s dissertation and public statements asserting his race-IQ connection. Heritage declined to reply, but earlier in the week, Heritage vice president of communications Mike Gonzalez posted a disclaimer that read, in part, like this (via):
The dissertation was written while Dr. Richwine was a student at Harvard, supervised and approved by a committee of respected scholars. The Harvard paper is not a work product of The Heritage Foundation. Its findings do not reflect the positions of The Heritage Foundation…
It falls to Heritage to answer (to itself, perhaps?) the degree to which Richwine’s views were the reason he was hired…but as to whether they knew about them before they brought him on board?
There really are only two choices here. Either they didn’t, and the folks that hire over there are so incompetent that it might be wise to remove all silverware more dangerous than spoons from the staff lunchroom.
Or they did…and to the limits of inference, they sure did know what was behind door number one. Why do I say this? Because of what Richwine tells us in the acknowledgements to his dissertation:
I am indebted to the American Enterprise Institute for the its generous support, without which this dissertation could not have been completed. In particular, I must thank Henry Olsen, vice president of AEI’s National Research Initiative for bringing me to AEI and supporting my research. The substance of my work was positively influenced by many people, but no one was more influential than Charles Murray, whose detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism have made the final draft vastly superior to the first. I could not have asked for a better primary advisor.
I take two things from that passage. First, it reminds us of the degree to which AEI is a dog-whistling race shop — as Charles Murray himself confirms in his reaction to Richwine’s firing decision to resign:
Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.
Second, in the real world, anyone who’s done any hiring knows that the person doing the intake finds out what the potential employee did in his last job(s).
Richwine may have been getting his degree through Harvard (and that’s a post for another day) but the attempt to hide behind that institutional affiliation is a text-book baffle-with-bullshit moment. His diploma may read Harvard, but the work was, by his own admission, essentially part of the AEI pipeline advised intensively by one of AEI’s best known members.
And here’s the thing: the Potemkin village of wingnut DC policy shops is not exactly some humongous impersonal word factory. It’s a village. If AEI has some hot shot graduate student breaking old ground on the inherent wonderfulness of white people, then the folks at Heritage had to have known about all that when the newly elevated Herr Doktor comes calling for a job.
I mean, you can believe otherwise, and I can’t say for sure…but in my decade or so as a small businessman, I called the last couple of places would-be interns had worked for just to see what I might be getting into. It strains waaaay past my willingness to suspend disbelief that name-brand purveyors of right wing propaganalysis wouldn’t have done at least as much.
So, is the Heritage Foundation a racist shop? Maybe. Perhaps. Maybe not — there could be more economical explanations for the determined comforting of the comfortable that is the constant theme of the right-wing policy racket. And wondering whether the whole place, or Jim DeMint, or even Jason Richwine — excuse me, Harvard Dr. Jason Richwine — is personally a bigot is on some level the wrong issue.
Rather, the proper question is what to do with an institution and a movement who can muster no better arguments, and no better arguers to advance their radical agenda?
At a minimum: Scorn, ridicule and public humiliation is my prescription…repeat as necessary.
Oh — and serious mobiliation for 2014 and beyond.
Image: George Romney, Refugee Group, undated (before 1802).
sm*t cl*de
They obviously didn’t realise the guy was a white supremacist when they hired him to recycle his interns’ research as white-supremacist boilerplate for the puke funnel.
Yatsuno
My brain boggled for a moment there. Then I looked at the date.
The worst part about all of this is what this says about Harvard as an institution. It’s well-known to be a place where legacies can get undergrads on Daddy’s dime, but this is cutting deep into their research trust bank and putting a huge deficit. If there is this much rot in one department, where else in the school is rotten? And it can take decades to repair that kind of damage.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Yatsuno: It can take decades, but when there are legacy students who need a place to get degrees, what’s a little rot among bigots?
BArry
“…where else in the school is rotten? And it can take decades to repair that kind of damage. ”
See ‘Inside Job’. The better question is where Harvard is *not* rotten.
Cacti
Given that the Heritage Foundation has nothing in its history to earn it any benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume that Dr. Richwine’s views on eugenics were a point in his favor.
Warren Terra
You mention that his dissertation work was funded by AEI, and that he’s greatly indebted to AEI scholar Charles Murray, who appears to have acted as a sort of informal second thesis advisor. But I didn’t notice any mention that the AEI actually did the research, too: the Acknowledgments page thanks four interns from the AEI who apparently did a lot of the scutwork. As has been said elsewhere, the Kennedy School should have awarded the PhD to the AEI, not to Richwine.
smintheus
It’s hard to recognize the right wing extremist, you see. You have to judge them by their acts, rather than what’s in their hearts. This, for instance:
Ronald Reagan on Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt: He’s “a man of great personal integrity.”
Guatemalan court today on dictator Rios Montt: He’s guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
schrodinger's cat
Isn’t Richwine’s thesis advisor, Borjas a well known anti-immigrant labor economist?
ETA: His work is quoted by many restrictionist and anti-immigrant organizations like CIS and NumbersUSA.
Punchy
The better Q is how and why Hahvahd gave this clown a FUD for such a incendiary and seemingly ridiculous thesis.
El Cid
There is a deep, deep degree to which the anti-modernist, anti-rationalist, anti-laborist, feudalist, fundamentalist, anti-leftist, anti-liberal movement is always, always racist, chauvinist, ethno-nationalist.
It’s inseparable. There’s some level at which that semi- or pseudo-biological identity functions so much more effectively than any higher level operation that they can’t resist it.
Bruce S
Young Dr. Richwine getting the opportunity to draft this immigration policy paper is actually one of the Heritage Foundation’s more responsible hires.
If you recall, Heritage picked several hundred young right-wing enthusiasts just out of college who had posted resumes on the Foundation’s website and sent them to Baghdad to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority to oversee re-construction of Iraq in the wake of the US invasion. That worked out as one might have expected.
Punchy
I’d like to attend Harvard and have Penthouse fund my thesis on why chicks look hotter but become harder to bed after a 3 hour pre-bar session and then 4 hours in the midst of a dark nightclub.
Tim F.
You could ask: if Richwine was not hired for his racist manifesto, then on what did they hire him for?*
“A dangling participle is something up with which I will not put” – Churchill
sm*t cl*de
The guy had a job waiting for him at Heritage as soon as he’d signed off on his dissertation… his first Publication Output for Heritage was simply a repetition of the Public Policy part of his results (i.e. “no immigration reform because Hispanics are genetically inferior”)… and Heritage have stated that they stand by that self-plagiarised Study, even if they would rather not be associated with the stink coming off its author.
A cynic would conclude that Richwine was hired because of his dissertation and not in spite of it.
sm*t cl*de
he’s greatly indebted to AEI scholar Charles Murray, who appears to have acted as a sort of informal second thesis advisor.
“Advisor”? When Murray is acknowledged for “detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism”, some better title is required, like “ghostwriter”.
aimai
I wish people would stop talking about how Universities work if they don’t know. This has nothing to do with Harvard “Legacies” among the undergraduates and everything to do with the independent fiefdoms that are individual departments or, in the case of the Kennedy School, separate “schools.” There have always been right wing assholes in every department and they continue to accept students, teach students (at the graduate level) and dish out degrees (at the graduate level). This is done largely independently of “the University” in the sense that you can’t tell a Full Professor who gets his own funding for his own graduate students what constitutes “good work.” If AEI was fully supporting this jerk, which it sounds like it was, and he was really being supervised by Murray and a few stooges at Harvard most Harvard Professors in any place other than the K school probably had zero idea the guy was even at Harvard, much less were in a position to somehow stand athwart his Dissertation comittee shouting “Stop.”
Mr Stagger Lee
Rachel Maddow,just showed a clip televised on C-Span where Dr. Richwine happily discusses his racial IQ rankings(for those of you keeping score, it was 1. Jews, 2. Asians 3. Non Jewish Whites 4. Hispanics and 5. Blacks). The camera pans to David Frum who looks like hes thinking “WTF is he doing there and trying to look for an exit” Of course Dr. Richwine continues to opine on why we can’t wish these things away. The only thing missing some music from the group Skrewdriver or the Hammerskins.
rda909
As I learned here from a BJ frontpager, this is clearly another “fuck-up” of the Obomba Administration, just like BenGayzi!
JWL
At the very least, Harvard has inflicted as much harm on the nation for all the good its alumni have accomplished on its behalf.
Warren Terra
@Tim F.:
Your Churchill quote is two levels of incorrect:
Firstly, the correct quote is some version of “This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put”. Churchill was actually rebuking a civil servant who’d presumed to edit something Churchill had written to remove a dangling preposition.
Secondly, apparently the story is apocryphal. It’s been floating around for more than sixty years, and I’ve told it myself, but Wikiquote says it can’t be substantiated.
RSA
@Tim F.:
Here’s Richwine’s work for AEI; here’s what he wrote for Heritage. He’s written, for example, about public school teachers and federal employees being overpaid–typical wingnut welfare topics.
(What I also notice is a distinct lack of peer reviewed publications. That’s always bothered me about some kinds of “academic” arguments about economics and policy; there are no built-in checks for the quality of output.)
Eric U.
@Mr Stagger Lee: the interesting thing is the Murray doesn’t seem to have learned anything. And Richwine should have noted that he’s bringing down the average IQ of group number 3
I should be thankful that I’m still able to be surprised by this stuff.
I guess this is why most schools require someone from outside the department be on the doctoral committee, but I guess it’s easy to find stooges everywhere
Mike in NC
Weep not for ‘Doctor’ Richwine, who’ll quickly line up another gig on the sweet wingnut welfare gravy train.
Chris
@El Cid:
I think identity politics is simply the most effective way by far for authoritarian/elitist movements to draw in a ton of regular people who, if they were looking at things strictly in terms of material self-interest, would be voting for more populist movements. The Hahvahd-educated 1%ers don’t necessarily buy it, but it’s how they get the popular following that they badly need in order to stay competitive in the age of mass politics.
ninedragonspot
Richwine: too toxic for the Heritage Institute but okay for a Harvard PhD program.
Scamp Dog
@Yatsuno: If you go to the Wiki page on the artist, it turns out that his cousin converted to Mormonism in England and moved to the US. The cousin’s descendants include Mitt Romney.
Comrade Jake
@aimai: thanks for that.
Harvard is far from perfect, but there are A TON of really good people there folks. Don’t be so quick to crap on it as an institution.
El Cid
@efgoldman: It’s funny — among white supremacists, suggesting Jews & Asians as the smartest is the equivalent of ‘multiculturalism’.
It’s like a little bit of curry sprinkled on top of a mayonnaise sandwich.
Steve J.
Either they didn’t, and the folks that hire over there are so incompetent that it might be wise to remove all silverware more dangerous than spoons from the staff lunchroom.
It’s always hard to rule out conservative incompetence, e.g., Project ORCA.
schrodinger's cat
@aimai: Why does Harvard (or the constituent schools) recruit the likes of Ferguson and Borjas and give them the stamp of approval by giving them named Professorships and the like? Give their research which clearly has a political agenda, the Harvard seal of approval.
Warren Terra
@El Cid: It’s also their way of saying “I can’t be racist because …”. They “can’t be racist”, because they are according greater honors to another race than to their own, even though all the policy implications they derive from their “insights” amount to “lets turn all the dusky folks into third-class citizens or into nonpeople entirely”.
Bruce S
@aimai:
No we don’t want to paint everyone at Harvard with a too-broad brush because there are some great scholars there, but in a two-week period we’ve gotten the collapse of Reinhardt & Rogoff, Niall Ferguson’s homophobic sputtering against Keynes and Richwine’s thesis with Heritage, Murray and AEI playing into the mix. Seems like any ridicule tossed in Harvard’s direction in this context has been earned. The point is that Harvard’s brand isn’t a guarantee that the product or the professor isn’t dubious or perhaps totally worthless. That’s a problem. It’s like an epidemic of food-poisoning at a five-star restaurant. It heightens the “WTF” factor?
Higgs Boson's Mate
Interesting; the Heritage Foundation has apparently forgotten why it hired Richwine. Reminds me of Alberto Gonzales failing to recall what he did or why he did it in relation to the U.S. Attorney purges but nonetheless standing behind whateveritwas.
maya
Well, at least Harvard football coaches aren’t getting into any trouble, so that’s good.
ulee
I wish Wyatt Earp was alive to enforce gun laws. And Virgil and Doc Holiday. They’d say disarm or leave town. And if these idiots objected, they’d be arrested, shot, hung, and done.
Downpuppy
A weird pairing – Brad DeLong & Jennifer Rubin – tore Borjas limb from limb & danced on the bones.
It’s been a really bad year for Massachusetts triumphalism – the NECC meningitis outbreak, Annie Duggan, Niall Ferguson, the Tsarneavs, Ken Rogoff, and now this clownshow of a thesis committee.
schrodinger's cat
@Bruce S: Harvard poaches rising and/or controversial academic stars, the stars use the Harvard name to gain notoriety and their two minutes of fame. When she was at the University of Maryland, Reinhart was not so well known, except among other economists, her profile increased quite a bit after her move to Harvard.
ulee
I’m just tired of seeing toddlers killed because Papa thinks it’s manly to keep a loaded gun in the house. Give me Virgil, Wyatt, and Doc. Sorry, just disgusted. Another story, another dead kid.
beltane
This reflects more poorly on the Kennedy School than on the Heritage Foundation, which was already beneath contempt in the eyes of many. I guess if you have rich parents but don’t have what it takes to get into Harvard Law, a PhD in
basket weavingeugenics studies from the Kennedy School will have to do.brendanyc
@Tim F.: there is no dangling participle involved here. There IS a sentence ending in a preposition, the prohibition of which is the ‘rule’ Churchill was making fun of.
raven
Well, the reunion was fun. Dudes sure are old but I filled in some holes I’ve had about places and missions for 40+ years. Now I have to figure out what to do on a windy and rainy day in Rhode Island before I got out fishing Sunday. Ideas?
ulee
Or Little Bill kicking English Bob’s ass for bringing firearms into his town. That would work. Something. Anything. (though that cowboy shouldn’t have cut up that whore. He had it coming)
We all have it coming, kid.
Whose the proprieter of this shithole?
You just shot an unarmed man.
Well, he should have armed himself he’s going to decorate his saloon with my dead friend.
ulee
@raven: Watch Unforgiven and drink Jim Beam, then invest in a dry goods store.
raven
@ulee: Ah, if only. 20 years sober and I don’t think I’ll flip now. I’m thinking about just touring the coast and taking pictures.
rda909
You know who else went to Hah-vahd!!?!!? Barack Obomb-us, that’s who!!! Yes though, it’s reasonable to ask if Heritage – an organization that picks Jim DeMint as its leader – is a racist organization, since we don’t really know for sure, since they’re so interesting on so many other issues, so we can’t be sure that they’re motivated by an insane hatred for America’s first Black President, no sir-ee, bob. We can’t “say for sure” now, can we? This will be such an illuminating and forward-moving debate, I’m sure.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: Visit the mansions of the gilded age robber barons in Newport?
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: I just pulled up a “Rhode Trip site and that looks good.
Suffern ACE
@Downpuppy: ok. What the hell is going on here? We’ve got a dissertation (or maybe it’s just a thesis) paid for by a think tank that the chairman of the dissertation committee has decided he didn’t really have much to do with. The heritage foundation fired a guy based on complaints from whom? No one seemed to notice that a papers policy prescription is based on social engineering ideas and concerns from 1910 (updated so that Jews and Asians are now on top) until it is released to great fanfare with a gazillion dollar cost estimate that no one can explain. Brad Delong hearts Jennifer Rubin?
Ashley Judd went to this school. Now that she’s not running maybe we can ask her what were to think about this whole mess.
But since when does heritage fire people because politically correct thought police types start complaining. My pony that shits gold must be coming soon.
karen marie
@Warren Terra: I’d like to hear Harvard’s excuse for granting him a PhD based on his racist dissertation.
rda909
@Warren Terra: Reminds me of one I heard for years from financial types, who often are republican/libertarians (same thing), from Albert Einstein. I was approx 20 years old and would hear them make this supposed quote from from Einstein about “compound interest” and how “powerful a force” it was and so on. I remember thinking when I first started hearing this, “Uh, what’s so complicated about compound interest? Plus it’s ‘interest’ is a made up thing by bankers anyway, so it’s just a big scam and I’m sure Einstein would understand this…” and so on.
So looked into it, and it seems it was a creation of an advertiser in some small town paper a long time ago, and put into a newspaper ad, then people just took it as truth, and then a hundred years later, people are still quoting it as truth!
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/31/compound-interest/
Historical “fact” is an interesting topic in itself.
Suffern ACE
@Warren Terra: and that’s another thing. Why did this take four interns? There doesn’t seem to be much research here. Did they conduct field studies? Give iq tests?
smintheus
@raven: If you’re in Providence, Benefit St. is worth checking out, as is the old (19th cent) indoor arcade on Weybosset St. Those are some things you won’t see many other places in the US.
There are some interesting and lovely small towns and villages in the west of the state, especially East Greenwich, Foster, and Glocester.
Bubblegum Tate
@El Cid:
OK, this cracked me up.
TG Chicago
Michelle Malkin actually included this in her rantings on why Richwine’s freedom of expression was squelched:
https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/332951634831351808
Heh. That’s John McCain’s Hispanic National co-chair, who previously tweeted “Hasta la vista, racista.”
And now Malkin is actually whining about how Richwine has a wife and two kids to support. Do we actually live in a country where you can’t make a living spouting pseudo-academic racist nonsense? Is this America????
Bubblegum Tate
@TG Chicago:
Oh my god, this reply is amazing:
Malkin is a titan. Do you hear me? A TITAN!
Chris
@Suffern ACE:
Firing people because political correctness police types complain is the best of both worlds. When conservatives ask you why you fired the guy, you tell them the politically correct oppressive Obammunists forced you to do it. When moderates ask you why you were funding a racist, you say “hey, we fired the guy as soon as we realized!” All around win.
Downpuppy
@Suffern ACE: Another weird thing is the extent Weigel buys into the bull:
What. The. Fuck?
JGabriel
Tom Levenson @ Top:
I think the better portmanteau here might have been analaganda.
I like that analaganda suggests anal in its first two syllables, because, given the right’s preoccupations, the right-wing certainly seems to be anally fixated.
.
JGabriel
@TG Chicago:
Unfortunately, I’m sure Richwine will soon find a job in the world of wingnut welfare — probably clerking for Aryan Nations or the Koch brothers or someone like that.
.
jl
Warren Terra gave a link to a scan of the dissertation in an earlier thread, which is reposted below, along with the title of the post (which I think is odd and inaccurate)
Jason Richwine Dissertation On Low Hispanic IQ Puts Heritage On Defensive
Jon Ward, Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/jason-richwine-dissertation_n_3240168.html
So, I know it is irresponsible not to speculate, but people can read it for free now if they want. I think it would wise to evaluate the dissertation on its own merits (let the chips fall where they may), and evaluate the Heritage report on its own merits.
I hate to be old fogey with a baseball bat up my ass, but the research is available for a look see.
El Caganer
@Downpuppy: On the plus side for MA, the folks who debunked Reinhart/Rogoff are at UMass.
peggy
Skimming through 60 pages (out of 150)of Richwine’s thesis, what is most striking is how thin the argument is. Richwine thesis
So far it’s just a literature review from a quite skewed perspective. When I wanted to make a controversial point, I would write “this is my opinion (references 1-4), others disagree (references 5-8)”. He just dives into spectacularly controversial areas like IQ and genetics and is perfectly content to cite the one study that he agrees with from 1996, as if no further research had been done. Racists with intellectual integrity at least read the opposition. The thesis has many charts with data (obtained by other people) that is marginally manipulated by something resembling Excel. No intensive scholarly application (outside of cherry picking the data with no covering explanation) is apparent. This is much less work than I expended just writing the introduction to my biology dissertation.
Harvard should not have given this guy a PhD, not for the obnoxious ideas, but because it is a small pile of rubbish. Right wingers should offer their naked emperors fancier duds.
sm*t cl*de
Skimming through 60 pages (out of 150)of Richwine’s thesis, what is most striking is how thin the argument is.
I started backwards with a look at the References section, but it did not impress me with its grasp of contemporary cognitive research.
Eight references to supervisor Borjas, which was probably politic. Other than that, the thesis is dominated by the Bell Curve cheerleader squad. Five citations to Gottfredson; six to Rushton, notorious for his preoccupation with the size of black dicks. Two to Sowell, three to Jensen; one Herrnstein and eight to the oeuvre of Charles Murray (also source of “detailed editing and relentless constructive criticism”).
All future references to Dr J. Richwine should be followed by his full title, “Charles Murray Sock-puppet”.
sm*t cl*de
Here’s Richwine’s work for AEI; here’s what he wrote for Heritage.
The AEI’s list reveals the extent to which Richwine’s outputs for Heritage have been stovepiped to the WSJ, WashPost and Real Clear Policy.
But Heritage Foundation policy is in favour of “workforce mobility” so Richwine should be grateful for the opportunity to experience it.
danah gaz
“Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.”
For some reason, I interpreted that statement the way a Brit might. Particularly, the final three words.
Jacobi
Two things:
1. It’s not Hah-vahrd, it’s Hah-vid.
2. Chris Hayes showed the frontispiece of Richwine’s dissertation and it was approved by GSAS, not by the Kennedy School of Government. As a GSAS alum I’m pretty disappointed in that.
kerFuFFler
@brendanyc:
Exactly! Reminds me of this old joke. A man goes up to a stuffy librarian and asks, “Where’s the bathroom at?” The librarian draws himself up, looks down his nose and replies, “I don’t answer questions that end with a preposition.”
“OK then, where’s the bathroom at, asshole?”
aimai
@Bruce S: I don’t have any problem with ridicule but I think its important to know what factors at a place like Harvard lead to the hiring of these assholes, and which don’t. I think people confuse some kind of vague notion of “elitism” with what is going on. All US universities have been in the business of recruiting “stars” for quite some time–a star is someone with a lot of publications, a lot of name recognition outside their own field, a lot of high voltage. Harvard almost never hires or tenures from inside–that is, if you were junior faculty there they make you leave and come back with appropriately stellar recommednations from somewhere else. My old department at Yale did the same thing–only they choose to hire people (in the old days) who were on the verge of retirement: so famous that they were legendary in the field but absolutely lousy with age and indifference to their role as professors supervising graduate students.
When a search committee is formed it happens at the departmental level and there’s a scramble to fill a certain slot (some courses need to be filled) to attract a certain quality of applicant (some fields are hot, some aren’t) to raise the profile of the department w/r/t connections for grad students, hiring later, publications, name recognition etc..etc..etc..What there probably isn’t is a overall leftward tilt that prevents some guy in one field (e.g. econ or government) from misusing their own or anyone else’s data to push a political viewpoint. For one thing not every field (and politics is especially like this) has the moral integrity not to poach in Psychology or Medicine or anything else without bringing in an actual specialist from that field. Richwine’s committee did not include anyone with any actual expertise in Psychology or history of Psychology/science because neither he nor his professors wanted to do more than use a now discredited form of data to bolster their political viewpoints.
This is not specific to Harvard qua Harvard at all. This has nothing to do with Harvard not taking seriously some bizarre notion that its better than other schools and has a more important duty not to fuck up. Harvard is composed of small, autonomous fiefdoms which, famously, are often left alone to fundraise (every tub on their own bottom is the phrase used to describe this). This means that any school or department that can get funding for its graduate students from outside is going to have to go that route. My own department at Yale took an astonishing number of Korean students at one point. Why? because the Korean government was willing to pay for them.
aimai
@Downpuppy:
Another jaw dropper from the article, right above the part you quote:
Its like a round up of everything wrong with Richwine and his goals: Richwine himself caveats the supposed data with “at least in America”–what does he think happens when people transit to America? Does he think it solidifies something in their genetics that freezes them at some point w/r/t IQ that doesn’t happen in other countries? That’s the whole point of research–you have an obvious problem with the data: its country specific and time bound and yet you keep using it to make your point without reflecting on that fact. Then you stumble across something that doesn’t comport with your personal kin network and friendship/political issues (My other racist friend has a black wife) and you simply say “here’s an exception which I won’t deal with.”