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The fact that this is such a common reaction is part of why I think that (absent other incentives) middle managers would be undersupplied.
I agree, though of course wealth distribution is a continuous variable, not a discrete one. My view is that as societies become richer they become more and more capable of providing poor people with welfare. This is one of the benefits of being a rich society and part of the argument for why we shouldn't jeopardize the things that drive our societal wealth (though I realize that increasing welfare benefits can hurt that goal; there's some tradeoff and it's not always easy to decide what exactly the best path is).
Good point.
I don't think deBoer believes in HBD per se, but he clearly believes that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability and he has believed this for a while (it's a major part of the premise of his first book). I don't think he's trying to retroactively justify his egalitarian beliefs; I think he really just sincerely thinks it's unfair that people who are kind but stupid will not do great in a meritocratic society and has somehow failed to see the reasons why a meritocratic society might be good despite that.
Fair. It's very important to have good management. But don't you think there's an excess of managers, many of whom aren't good? There are graphs circulating showing 400% or higher growth in administrators in universities and medicine, while growth of teaching staff and practitioners is much lower.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/policy-ten-administrators-for-every-one-us-doctor-092813
I think there's a gross oversupply of managers and an enormous undersupply of management.
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A rose by any other name.
Add in a bit of population-level inheritable disparities and you're there. Of course thoughtful upstanding deBoer will not be taking that final and obvious step into vile wrongthink. He will merely state all the relevant and true facts leading to that point and then not acknowledge it. And he's much better off not publicly destroying his public image in this manner.
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I thought that believing that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability is believing in HBD, at least insofar as HBD is what people who use the term generally claim it to be and not just a euphemism for emotion-driven racism.
The way that HBD is used around here seems to imply some amount of believing that racial differences in traits like intelligence (1) exist and (2) are significantly heritable. This is an idea that deBoer clearly rejects while still agreeing that on an individual level such differences exist and are significantly heritable. But perhaps I've misunderstood the term.
Would he really disagree with this? It's basic statistics. The sketchy part is attempting to map a distinct population onto some kind of "race". Since our populations are not as isolated as they were five hundred or five thousand years ago, race is a muddy lens today.
It may not be a top-level Zeiss, but it's still got plenty of clarity even if there is some vignetting around the edges. And self-identified race correlates well and robustly to objective measurements.
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Ah I see, no you're right. I forgot about the difference between small-scale heritability and race-level heritability.
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I always put a second requirement on HBD: there is significant heritibility of socially important traits, and the distribution of those traits is significantly uneven. IMO, if someone believes that notable genetic differences only happen at the level of the family, then they don't believe in HBD.
I am not sure that anyone actually believes this. I can see them getting to that point and stopping because if you go any further explicitly you get evicted from polite society, but I can't even imagine what kind of epicycle would be required to claim that these differences happen at a family level and then just immediately stop when you zoom out and look at extended families.
Really? I think it's the most common position.
I'm not confident about the hows and whys of that, but my guess is that people just don't think about the topic, or at least they don't think of that pair of stances at the same time using the same framework.
Its only the most common position because most people have never really confronted the evidence. The average person on the street doesn't even know that races have different average IQs or if they do they think they disappear by accounting for simple cofounders
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