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I agree! Even if you multiply a number by .8 every decade, after 300 years .1% still remains. However, crucially, I don't think that a .1% - or even 7% - remaining difference in racial wealth or achievement gaps is a huge political issue. And then it's plausible again that the gap closes faster. How long closing the gap to that takes depends on how quickly someone who has average genes, but is poor, mixes into having average income.
I think trying to prove a black-white IQ gap just via the existing income gap is a mistake, anyway. There's just so much going on in society that it's quite hard to figure out cause and effect. The thing is, there are other much stronger lines of evidence, like the fraction of of black people in the top .1% of intelligence being so small, the gap in IQ or standardized test scores, etc. And once you believe that for other reasons, it's a simple explanation for existing income gaps. But I'll go through this first:
And yet, the absolute poverty rate has absolutely plummeted. All of our great-grandparents lived in conditions that, by today's standards, were truly horrific. Yet, here we are. The vast majority of Americans aren't in any sense poor. The relative costs of food, rent, transportation, etc are cheaper than they've ever been. And many of the people I know personally who are high-income or high-status had average income parents or grandparents.
And large-scale genome sequencing has demonstrated that intelligence and other cognitive and personality traits - things that contribute to income, life success - are quite (~50%) heritable. It makes sense that, over multiple generations in a deeply connected modern world, people would cluster along these lines. And that it'd be difficult to distinguish without careful looks this effect from 'poverty keeps people down'.
I think the material abundance of modern life sinks ideas like 'poverty rationally forces you to take on debt and short-term solutions' - you can just not spend much money on non-must-haves, save, work, etc. The poor people I know all attest that poor people are worse with their money than middle-class people, act less rationally, etc. Yeah, it's a distribution, there definitely are smart people who are poor for one reason or another, but not anywhere near enough to explain most poverty or even racial income gaps.
This is why there are so many (bad) papers to the effect of "poverty makes impulse control worse", "epigenetic effects of poverty", etc. Unfortunately, they're methodologically poor and don't replicate.
I mean ... universal education. Six hours a day, five days a week, being directly taught in every subject. This system has taught the vast majority of kids, smart and average and below average, rich and poor, over the past few centuries. Like, it's a significant component of why modern life works at all - the hyper-smart kid who's randomly born into a middle-class family does well on test scores, gets into a top college, specializes in something, and goes into industry from there and designs a chip or writes scripts for a movie or trades bonds or whatever. And even if the average person doesn't go to a good school, they can excel once they've gotten a job and then be promoted based on their competence and rise from there. Both of these have happened constantly, for any given successful person if you go between 0 and 3 generations back most paths terminate at someone whose parents weren't well off but did well in school or an occupation. Poor education mostly doesn't stick. Yeah, it sticks in some cases, but I don't think most. And even granting that, modern technology helps even more - a kid in a bad home can teach themselves english with TV, they gain knowledge and skills just by having fun on the internet, etc etc etc.
Or, quantitatively, take a look at this, a visualization from a paper (i'm not super confident that the data for this is correct, but I'd be surprised, but not terribly so, if it was wrong enough to affect the conclusion): https://viz.theinequalitylab.com/Animations/1-mobility-rates.html
Your theory would predict that being bottom 20%, or bottom 40%, is 'sticky'. Yet, 40% of children of whites in the bottom 20% made it out of the bottom 40% (and 27% of black children). In the second poorest quintile, 29% of white and 14% of black children make it to the top 40%. It seems like poverty is a lot stickier for blacks than whites. Being rich is a lot less sticky for blacks and whites though! Go look at the visualizations, it's quite striking. Curiously enough, the numbers for the 2nd top quintile seem a lot starker than for the poorer quintiles - i.e. in a relative sense poor blacks and whites have somewhat similar rates of existing poverty, but richer blacks drop out of the rich quintiles a lot faster than rich whites. This isn't at all what you'd guess if stickiness of poverty was what was driving racial income gap differences. And again this is where the multigenerational trauma or poverty habits or whatever research comes in, but that doesn't replicate.
I mean, this illustrates the other problem. If you've watched any popular media recently - there are ethnic minorities everywhere. Even Biden notices it. This is an explicit effort on the part of the progressive-leaning people who make up the media. If some sort of implicit bias in media makes it harder for minorities to get jobs, it's more than made up for by this. We're basically discussing black people specifically here, and:
And, despite this representation, the SAT score gaps aren't closing. The progressive arguments were a lot harder to rebut sixty years ago, when 'structural racism' and 'patriarchy' as described today were manifestly real and significant. But people with similar beliefs to you been hard at work dismantling them. And, you know, some of these gaps did close, especially for women. But the remaining gap is very difficult to explain along the same lines. I'm sure you've heard all about the test score gap before, so here's something:
But to demonstrate racial IQ differences, I think the clearest example is just that ... there are so few black people in high IQ professions. Like, nobel prize winners in math and science, top scientists in general, CEOs, and to a lesser extent anything intellectually demanding. And just anecdotally, any community that's very g-loaded just won't have a noticeable number of black people. I wonder what the rate here is. And the dual of this, of course, is that asians and especially jews are very overrepresented in those areas. And again anecdotally, any community around something that requires high intelligence has heaps of jews and asians. If you read around on wikipedia articles on pure research mathematics, there are jews (2% of US population, less internationally) everywhere, and barely a black to be found.
This can't be primarily explained as a poverty or racism effect. Plenty of these people were average income as kids, or had average income parents. There's clearly a strong race effect after you control for income. So many successful historical figures began their lives as poor or middle class Jews. And yet there are enough rich black families that you'd expect a lot more successful black pure mathematicians than there are.
And, to be clear, by my argument this is no inevitable somber fact of nature, but could be fixed by just modifying a small fraction of the nucleotides in the human genome of each (future) person. Or maybe large-scale selective sperm donation, but that's not really socially plausible in anything resembling today's environment.
(I think a better version of this post would have a lot more numbers and data, but w/e those are my thoughts)
This is not quite right. For one, adult intelligence is more like 70-80% heritable. But also, we know this from twin studies, not from genome sequencing. Due to insufficient data (partially due to the inherent difficulty of collecting reliable IQ and genetic data for millions of people, and partly due to ideologically motivated obstruction of such efforts), current GWAS models show only a fraction of the true heritability of IQ. IIRC the best models predict only about 15% of variance in IQ.
Twin studies are the gold standard for estimating heritability; the advantage of GWAS is that it can give us actual models to predict IQ from genetic sequences.
I changed your "~50%" to "roughly 50%" because the site interpreted a quoted tilde as markup for strikethrough.
Thanks!
The first thing was more of a composition error - I mean to imply that the whole basket of traits were somewhere around 50%.
The second mistake was just implying something incorrect though. I know that, I just wasn't paying enough attention while writing so broadly.
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