Smarty Pants

It seems that our good buddies at the AEI (American Enterprise Institute, AKA Mordor-on-the-Potomac) got together some good old boys (and girls) - Charles Murray of The Bell Curve fame, Jon Entine, who has a new book, Laurie Zoloth and the usual press flunkies. The topic: what's up with us Jews being so damn smart? Murray, it turns out, isn't actually Jewish, but got invited anyway because he's an AEI fellow, the grand old man of scientific racism, and because, as William Saletan puts it:

Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn't but talks as though he wishes he were.

After a few ritual paragraphs about how he and some of his Jewish relatives are embarassed by the topic, Saletan gets down to the meat:

Entine laid out the data. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100. This gap and the genetic theories surrounding it stirred discomfort in the room. Zoloth, speaking for many liberals, recalled a family member's revulsion at the idea of a Jewish race. Judaism is about faith and values, she argued. To reduce it to biology is to make it exclusive, denying its openness to all. Worse, to suggest that Jews are genetically smart is to imply that non-Jews are inherently inferior, in violation of Jewish commitments to equality and compassion. My friend Dana Milbank, who's a better (if I may use that word) Jew than I am, watched the discussion, went back to his office, and wrote a column in the Washington Post poking fun at all the talk of superior Jewish intellect. The column, as usual, was really smart.

Frequent commenter, and (I hope) friend, Arun, is a little itchy about that 107-115 range. Well, uh, yeah, what's up with that. More specifically, just what does that data say?

Wikipedia's Ashkenzi Intelligence page lists some test results and "estimates." The top estimate is 117 and the top test result is 112.8. The bottom test result is 1.2 points below US non-Jewish whites. The only tests with more than 150 subjects were one with 1236 subjects that got a score of 107.8 and one with 764 (the aforementioned 1.2 points below other US whites). I find it a bit bizarre that many of the studies are so small.

Studies with small numbers of subjects are especially suspect, like Herrnstein/Murray 1994, with 59 subjects. What was done to randomize or avoid selection effects, I wonder. There are many other confounding facts - Israel, about 50% Ashkenazi, reputedly has an average IQ of 94. So is the claim that Jews are especially smart bogus?

I don't think that the IQ data has a whole lot to say on the subject. Jewish achievement, though, is immense. Jews are only 1.3% of the US population, but are strongly overrepresented in almost every field of intellectual or professional life. Thirteen US Senators are Jewish, and 30 members of the House of Representatives. Comedy writing, literature, physics and math all have relatively large Jewish components, especially among the very best. So what accounts for that? I don't know of course, but if I had to place a bet I would put my money on a culture that values learning and education.

Asians are another group that fairly recently has been putting disproportionate numbers into the elite colleges, the professions, and the top ranks of science. Comedy writing - not so much. Could that just be because, as a comedy writing Chinese Caltech commencement speaker put it, when she left physics for liberal arts in graduate school: "to a Chinese father, that's like becoming a pole dancer."

Saletan, though, takes the menu more seriously:

But what if Judaism as a genetic inheritance is compatible with Judaism as a cultural inheritance? And what if the genes that make Jews smart also make them sick? ...

According to Entine, the rate of Jewish "outbreeding"—procreating with non-Jews—is half a percent. That's the lowest rate of any population in the world today.

For another opinion, check out Judaism Online, which laments:

Currently 72% of the Jewish people today are intermarrying. We lose approximately 100 Jews everyday to intermarriage and assimilation.

Pehaps Entine's statistic pertains not to "the world today" but to some time a bit past. That degree of endogamy is probably enough to support some genetic divergence.

I remember, though, that AEI, Mordor OTP, are the people who gave us this nice war in Iraq and ruinous economic policies, so I will consider all their works bullshit until proved otherwise.