The Role of IQ in Black-White Income Differences in the US

The Role of IQ in Black-White Income Differences in the US

“I have a dream,” exclaimed Martin Luther King in his fateful 1963 speech. “…when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Nearly half a century later, our country can pride itself on having realized Reverend King’s dream. Black Americans today are completely equal before the law, and indeed in the hearts of most Americans. However, while the majority of black Americans have attained a semblance of the American dream of middle-class affluence, a persistent minority of inner-city blacks remain mired in poverty and social pathology. Why is this, and what can be done about it?

Many of the facts are clear, although obfuscated in public discourse by the distortions of right and left. Discrimination by employers does not explain the condition of inner-city blacks. While this is the favored explanation of American liberals, and still is taught in Intro Sociology courses in colleges throughout America, there is little support for this position. For careful treatment of this issue by sympathetic researchers, see papers by G. Farkas and K Vicknair in the American Sociological Review, 1996, and the same authors plus P.England and K Kilbourne in the 1997 Social Forces.

Economists came to the same conclusion even earlier. In a symposium published in the leading American Economic Association journal, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, in 1990, distinguished Professor Henry J. Aaron’s opening remarks included the following: “…measurable characteristics-including region ofresidence, years of schooling, potential and actual work experience, scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test [a widely used IQ test], industry of employment, and skill associatedwith the reported occupation-explain essentially all of the variationbetween hourly wages of black and white workers in 1987. This evidencesuggests that clear-cut wage rate discrimination has been largely eliminated.”

What, then, is the source of the problem? A major clue is that black women in American have for many years achieved virtual wage and employment parity with non-black women, whereas black male wages end employment status remains far behind the comparable status for non-black men. For this reason, we can almost surely reject the standard right-wing claim that black labor market inferiority is due to some inherent mental deficiency of American blacks. This is because there is no known biological mechanisms that lead to more than the most minor differences in the brain functioning of human males and females, and certainly no evidence of systematic IQ differences between men and women.

This suggests that it is the culture of poor inner-city males that accounts for their poor integration into the mainstream of American economic life. The culture of poverty explanation has many supporters, including Oscar Lewis and William Julius Wilson, so I will not expound on this here. See, however, the dynamite analysis in Amy Wax’s Race, Wrongs, and Remedies for the policy implications.

Why does such a culture of poverty persist? It is worth remembering that there are only two ethnic/racial groups in America that did not come here voluntarily to join in the making of a new nation based on the principles of enlightened republicanism: Native American and African Americans. Both stagnate economically and both have a culture of poverty and high levels of social pathology. These two groups are outliers in a society of immigrants. I love America in part because she took my people in when they were ghettoized and gassed in Europe. I, and my group, are not alone. This is a deep truth about the United States of America: “"Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" It is reasonable to hold that the pathological culture of Afro-American males remains a hold-over of their forced relocation to an alien society. This would naturally affect males more than females, because in traditional patriarchal cultures, men are supposed to be strong and protective, a condition denied to slaves and the victims of apartheid-like social structures.

While I have discounted IQ differences as a source of black-non-black inequality, this does not mean that cognitive differences are unimportant in explaining the black-non-black income gap. I would guess that non-cognitive and cognitive personal attributes are about equally important in explaining the wage and employment gap between blacks and non-blacks. For a justification of this position, see the various papers of Nobel prize recipient James Heckman, a University of Chicago economist.

What, then, about the papers in professional journals that claim that IQ differences explain the black-non-black wage and employment gap? I will comment only on the most prominent recent one, Satoshi Kanazawa’s “The Myth of Racial Discrimination in Pay in the United States” (Heckman and many others have commented on and destroyed the arguments of such earlier writers as Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, and William Shockley). Kanazawa uses the General Social Surveys (GSS), which are of very high quality. While the number of observations in the GSS is rather small (about 2700 in recent years), it is sufficiently large that statistical significance of variables and the explanatory value of these variables are quite distinct. It is important to keep this in mind in assessing Kanazawa’s main result, which is that when “Verbal IQ” is not used in the regression, “Race” is significant to the 1% level; i.e., blacks appear to be discriminated against. When “Verbal IQ” is added to the regression, “Race” becomes insignificant. Thus, claims, Kanazawa, IQ, not race, explains black-non-black wage differences.

In fact, “Race” is the weakest of the predictors of wages in his regressions, a hundred times less significant than any other predictor. This is not surprising, given my above remarks. When “Verbal IQ” is added to the regression, “Race” becomes in significant, but it was unimportant before as well! More telling, the addition of “Verbal I Q” actually reduces the corrected R-squared of the regression, meaning that “Verbal IQ” is so interdependent with the other variables (education, union membership, occupational prestige, etc.) that it is futile to try to tease apart the causal relations. Kanazawa also runs his regressions controlling for job tenure and work experience. In this case neither Race nor Verbal IQ is significant.

I conclude that only right-wing ideology might influence someone to hold IQ difference responsible for the black-non-black income gap, and only left-wing ideology might influence someone to blame racism. The case for a culture of poverty is not 100% proven, but I think it is the appropriate candidate.