Monday, March 8, 2021

Book Review: The Cult of the Smart

This is the book that Jack Barnes wishes he'd written. Mr. Barnes is the long-time leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who penned a tome entitled Are They Rich Because They're Smart? .

In today's book, The Cult of the Smart, author Frederik deBoer declares

This book is my prayer for the untalented, an attempt to show how badly our society and its people are hurt by the obsessive focus on schooling and smarts.

He does answer Mr. Barnes' question: they are rich because they're smart! This is unjust in two ways:

  1. The emphasis on smart results in a meritocracy, namely a class of people that claim for themselves all the best jobs, and because they've done so well at school, they hold themselves morally superior to folks with low IQ scores. Mr. deBoer claims that most jobs don't require a high IQ, and sorting people by education is largely unjust.
  2. "Smarts," aka intelligence (measured as IQ), is substantially genetically inherited--that is at least 50% of a person's IQ score can be attributed to genes. In this it is very much like musical talent, aptitude for basketball, or good vision, among many other traits. And while those attributes can contribute to a better life, smarts looms vastly larger in future outcomes. Intelligent people earn substantially more than the less intelligent. In Mr. deBoer's world, this is grossly unfair.

    Mr. deBoer imagines himself a Marxist, and accordingly the real villains are the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the top 1%. But there not very many of them--only 1%--so while their economic importance is indisputable, their cultural influence is much weaker. For this they rely on the upper middle class--the top 20% of the population, and the best-educated people in the country. These are the folks who dominate academia, the media, politics, and the prestigious professions. They are, in a word, the meritocracy. This is also Mr. Barnes' point of view. 

    The claim of the education establishment is that school is the great leveler--it gets everybody up to speed so they can compete in the modern economy. Mr. deBoer disagrees.

    Because education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former. Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in college.

    He describes college as the "instrument of inequality." Students are tracked according to their IQ scores--those who are smart get ahead and eventually enroll at Harvard. The less gifted wind up at the local beauty school. It's deeply unfair.

    It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do students perform badly because they attend bad schools? Or are the schools bad because they enroll poorly performing students? The received wisdom on the Left is the former answer--if we just equalized the schools, or the curriculum, or the funding, then all students would excel equally and educational inequality would disappear. This is termed the blank slate hypothesis--the contention that all children are equally endowed with intelligence, and all can learn calculus if they just try hard enough.

    Mr. deBoer rejects the blank slate hypothesis. Summarizing current literature, he writes,

    The relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes. The degree to which genes assert themselves varies over the course of life. Profoundly unequal environments for children can drown out genetic effects. There is also what behavioral geneticists call the "unshared environment," ...--the influence of unpredictable events, random chance, the flux of life. But none of that changes the fact that our genetic heritage deeply influences our behavioral selves, including our academic selves and that we should recognize that individual exceptions are less important than larger trends when we are dealing with broad populations. Like, say, when we're considering educational policy.

    What Mr. deBoer writes about genes and behavioral traits corroborates the book Human Diversity, written by Charles Murray and which I regard as the leading textbook of the discipline. That Mr. deBoer and Mr. Murray mostly agree is something I find very reassuring.

    Mr. deBoer urges his fellow Leftists to reject the Blank Slate dogma--the evidence for genetic influence on personality is too strong. By insisting on a manifestly false principle, the Left discredits itself.

    In one important respect he disagrees with Mr. Murray--Mr. deBoer insists there are no racial or ethnic differences in IQ or other personality traits. He concedes that much is inherited--children tend to be as smart as their parents, who in turn take after their grandparents, and similarly are related to their cousins, nieces and nephews, and the whole clan. But to then claim that an ethnic group that practices endogamous marriage does not share on average a suite of personality traits is unreasonable. Of course they do--and in fact they must, as is amply and overwhelmingly demonstrated in Human Diversity.

    Scott Alexander, in his lengthy review of The Cult of the Smart, argues that this opinion is not just a concession to political correctness, but rather a deeply held belief by Mr. deBoer--which Scott describes as vaguely irrational. But I think I have some insight here, because like Mr. deBoer, I have spent my career as a college professor. And I can tell you that thinking about IQ in racial categories is deeply, deeply destructive.

    I used to teach general chemistry to a class of about 100 students--including a handful of Black students. It is horribly unfair to those students to walk into a classroom with the prejudice that Blacks aren't as smart as whites. For even if that is true on average, the students in my room are not average--they're not even close to average. For that matter, the white students aren't average, either--because anybody who enrolls in a general chemistry class is both smarter and more motivated than anything average. Conflating a half dozen individuals with an average over a large, and in this context irrelevant population is a huge category error. So big, in fact, that it's immoral. Anybody smart enough to read Charles Murray or Frederik deBoer should know better.

    I think Mr. deBoer, with his otherwise irrational rejection of racial similarities, is responding to that immorality--and for that I give him props. But he's still wrong.

    Mr. deBoer offers two lists of reforms--a list to be accomplished in the short-term, like under the Biden administration. And a more utopian list that might have to wait till after the revolution. Surprisingly, I agree with many items. I'll summarize in bullet points:

    • "Provide Universal Childcare and Afterschool Care"-- He rejects the argument that either of these improve educational outcomes, but he supports it...
    As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility for each of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.

    Needless to say, I don't support this objective.

    • "Lowering the Legal Dropout Age to 12"-- If the less-intelligent are forced to stay in school, then the obligation to graduate them requires the school to dramatically lower standards. Mr. deBoer documents this phenomenon at length. Among other things, it renders the high school diploma meaningless.

      I support this--our children spend waaaay too much time in school. An unmentioned corollary is that we need to let teenagers participate in the paid labor force--otherwise you have unsupervised kids out looking for trouble.

    • "Eliminating Charter Schools"-- Why? I mostly accept Mr. deBoer's argument that charter schools yield no net positive educational benefit, but that misses the point for two reasons. First, while not changing the statistical average, charter schools may be of significant benefit to individuals. It's very much like the Black students in my gen-chem class--the average is irrelevant. All that matters are the individuals. Why not let students choose the school where they will be most successful?

      The second reason--even if there is no educational benefit--there are surely other benefits. There are, for example, advantages to children wearing uniforms--it likely saves the parents money. Scott mentions that kids can escape bullies by moving to a charter school. For many kids and parents, they're just more fun. Besides, they're cheaper than the public schools. I see no benefit in banning them.

    • "Loosening Standards"-- I strongly agree with this one. We should abolish the absurd standards left over from the early 20th Century. My pet peeve--which Mr. deBoer also addresses--is the high school algebra requirement. Many kids will never pass it. Many more will pass it, but only at great cost in terms of time and misery. And to what end? If anything is less useful than high school algebra, I can't imagine what it is. Probably fewer than 1% of jobs in this country will require any facility in algebra, and computers can do it better than you can. The only people who should take algebra are people who are interested in mathematics for its own sake, or people who know they're headed for certain STEM careers.

      I feel the same way about long division. When was the last time any reader of this blog used long division? Likely not since the fourth grade. Waste of time.

    • "College is Unnecessary for Living a Satisfying Life"-- Amen, brother! In college we have something called a general education program that's designed to turn you into an educated man or woman. In this day of unlimited bandwidth and instant access to any information you want, it's completely unnecessary. Anybody can go on YouTube and learn about anything from introductory electrical engineering to the Bible as literature, and everything else in between. The notion that you have to study all that at age 18 (when, frankly, most people are not interested) is almost as silly as learning algebra.

      If we canned the gen-ed programs, college could be shortened by a whole year, saving everybody a lot of time and money.

      I disagree with Mr. deBoer's claim that general education is mostly about racial bigotry.

      He spends most of the chapter discussing the salary benefits that accrue to college graduates. He rightly points out that it's mostly about native aptitude, not anything learned in school.

      My view is that college is useful for those people who enjoy school and are good at it. Everybody else should stay away. The worst thing you can do for your career is to go to college and then not graduate. That's a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your life. Better not to go to college at all.
    The final chapter of the book lays out his idealistic perspective. It's complicated and I won't cover it here. Let me just pick out a snippet. 

    The modern meritocracy doesn't judge itself by its material well-being, but instead ranks itself by status symbols: where you went to school, where and how intensively you've traveled, how Woke you are, how much you feign concern for the environment, etc. Mr. Barnes cites a similar list.

    Mr. deBoer writes,

    The old version of middle-class success--a two-car garage, a well-mowed lawn, and a big-ass television--seems simpler and more accessible, as it placed far less emphasis on success in a scarce number of fields ... But of course the heyday of this type of success was riven by racial and gender exclusion...

    Like too many Leftists, Mr. deBoer grossly exaggerates the effects of racism. The problem was never racism as much as poverty--solve the poverty problem (which we've substantially done), and the "racism" mostly goes away.

    And so those old middle-class ambitions have made a comeback--now expressed as Make America Great Again. The Left, of course, interprets it as "racism", but then they interpret everything that way. It's not racism. It is instead a plea to return to middle-class, bourgeois values that are much more democratic than those of our current meritocracy.

    Mr. deBoer has written an excellent, very worthwhile book. Jack Barnes really needs to read it. 

    Further Reading:

     

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