Neurons
show more axonal growth when exposed to higher levels of sphingolipids (last
figure) (Cochran et al. 2006)
Jewish
achievement is a difficult topic. Recently, it has been addressed by Jordan
Peterson, as in this interview with the Forward:
"You can assume that they [Jews] are intelligent and have a culture of learning, or you can think that there's some kind of cabal," Peterson told the Forward. "So if I'm gonna hit the hornets nest, I might as well hit it on the side that takes the wind out of the sails of far-righters and their idiot anti-Semitism." (Feldman 2018)
That quote appeared under the headline "Is Jordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?" There was also a photo montage (since removed) juxtaposing his image with that of Hitler. It's hard to believe that this topic was freely discussed in the mainstream a mere decade ago. At that time Commentary ran an article by Charles Murray on "Jewish Genius":
From 1870 to 1950, Jewish representation in literature was four times the number one would expect. In music, five times. In the visual arts, five times. In biology, eight times. In chemistry, six times. In physics, nine times. In mathematics, twelve times. In philosophy, fourteen times.
[...] What accounts for this remarkable record? A full answer must call on many characteristics of Jewish culture, but intelligence has to be at the center of the answer. Jews have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested. (The widely repeated story that Jewish immigrants to this country in the early 20th century tested low on IQ is a canard.) Exactly how high has been difficult to pin down, because Jewish sub-samples in the available surveys are seldom perfectly representative. But it is currently accepted that the mean is somewhere in the range of 107 to 115, with 110 being a plausible compromise. (Murray 2007)
Murray then discussed a paper by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, likewise published in a mainstream journal. The authors argued that Ashkenazi Jews had historically worked in occupations that select for cognitive ability, i.e., sales, finance, and trade. Non-Jews usually worked in intellectually less demanding occupations, most often farming. Sephardic Jews were similarly selected, but not to the same extent. They tended to work in a wider range of occupations, with more emphasis on crafts than on finance. Furthermore, beginning in the 17th century, Ashkenazi craftsmen were more entrepreneurial than their Sephardic counterparts; they produced for a larger market, geographically and demographically, where the rewards for success were greater and where successful craftsmen had only one way of increasing their workforce to meet demand: marrying younger and having more children (Frost 2007).
This
theory is supported by a striking piece of evidence: the high incidence among
Ashkenazim of certain genetic disorders: Tay-Sachs, Gaucher, Niemann-Pick, and
mucolipidosis type IV (MLIV). All four of these disorders affect the same
metabolic pathway: the capacity to store sphingolipid compounds that promote
the growth and branching of axons in the brain. Although these disorders are
deleterious in the homozygote state, they're a net benefit in the much more
frequent heterozygote state. They provide the brain with higher levels of
sphingolipids without the adverse health effects (Cochran et al. 2006).
This
is not to say that only these four disorders explain the higher mean IQ of
Ashkenazim. They're simply witnesses to
a selection pressure that has probably acted on the many thousands of genes
that in one way another influence cognitive ability.
A strange collapse
If
Jewish achievement is genetically based, it should be relatively stable,
shouldn't it? Yet it has been far from stable over the past forty years. Ron
Unz (2012) has ably documented what he calls "the strange collapse of
Jewish achievement":
-
In the U.S. Math Olympiad, over 40% of the top students were Jewish during the
1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage averaged about one-third.
During the thirteen years since 2000, two names out of 78 or 2.5% appear to be
Jewish.
-
On the Putnam Exam (a mathematics competition for American college students)
over 40% of the winners were Jewish before 1950. Between that year and the
1990s, the percentage was 22-31%. Since 2000, it has been under 10%, without a
single likely Jewish name between 2005 and 2012.
-
Of the national finalists for the Science Talent Search, 22-23% were Jewish
from the 1950s to the 1980s. The percentage was 17% in the 1990s, 15% in the
2000s, and 7% from 2010 to 2012. Of the thirty top students over the last
period, only one seems to have been Jewish.
-
Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986
to 1997. During the 2000s the percentage was 5%.
-
From 2000 to 2012, only 8% of the top students in the Biology Olympiad were
Jewish, with none from 2010 to 2012.
-
Between 1992 and 2012, only 11% of the winners of the Computing Olympiad had
Jewish names, as did 8% of the Siemens AP Award winners.
-
From 2010 to 2012, none of the Chemistry Olympiad winners had a probable Jewish
name.
A
similar decline seems to be under way in Israel. Rindermann (2018, p. 148)
cites student assessment studies that indicate a decrease in that country's IQ from 101 in the 1960s to 95 today.
Yet the intervening years saw a large influx of Jewish immigrants from the
former Soviet Union—about 979,000 between 1989 and 2006 (Wikipedia 2018b). The
Ashkenazi proportion of Israel's population is consequently higher today than
it was in the 1960s.
So
what is driving this decline in academic performance? Ron Unz opts for a
social/cultural cause: "today's overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students
may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than
were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing
challenges of the immigrant experience."
Hmm
...It's a bit of a stretch to say that most Jewish American kids were still the children or grandchildren of immigrants as late as the 1970s. In this, Ron is
echoing the frequent claim that the immigrant experience has a transformative
effect, turning slackers into strivers or at least encouraging the slackers to
stay home.
Let's
take off the rose-tinted glasses and look reality in the face: most immigrants
are not high achievers. Either today or back in the challenging 1970s. As for
the minority who are, they typically come from groups that were already that
way in their countries of origin. So the immigrant experience, in itself, has
little explanatory value. The explanation is that certain cultures have
selected for mental and behavioral traits that make high achievement possible.
Unz
is on firmer ground when he says that over the last two decades up to half of
the Jewish winners of the Math Olympiad were recent immigrants from the former
Soviet Union. But why, then, did the mean IQ of Israel decline when that
country took in a similar influx of Soviet Jews? That influx was much larger
proportionately—almost a million in a country of eight and a half million.
Today, Russian Jews number 1.2 million in Israel, if one includes non-Jewish
household members (Wikipedia 2018a; Wikipedia 2018b).
Perhaps
Soviet Jews who went to the United States were somehow different from those who
went to Israel. In the U.S., about half
of them arrived under the Lautenberg
amendment (1990) which authorizes the entry of religious minorities
"with a credible, but not necessarily individual, fear of
persecution." In Israel, they arrived under the Law of Return, which lets in anyone with at least one Jewish
grandparent or a Jewish spouse.
Israel
is thus more open to immigrants from the former Soviet Union ... as long as
they have some sort of Jewish affiliation. The affiliation is often weak:
In 1988, a year before the immigration wave began, 58% of married Jewish men and 47% of married Jewish women in the Soviet Union had a non-Jewish spouse. Some 26%, or 240,000, of the immigrants had no Jewish mother, and were thus not considered Jewish under Halakha, or Jewish religious law, which stipulates one must have a Jewish mother to be considered Jewish. (Wikipedia 2018b)
Out-marriage has increased considerably in those countries that provide Israel with immigrants, not only the former Soviet Union but also the United States, Canada, and France. If Jews are becoming less and less Jewish by ancestry, it should be no surprise that anything specific to them genetically is likewise becoming less and less, whether they live in Israel or in the United States. This genetic change should be most noticeable on the right tail of the bell curve ... among the most gifted.
Conclusion
So
the decline in Jewish achievement may be both an argument for and an argument
against a genetic cause. Ron Unz sees an argument against: "the innate
potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly." Well, only if the
group has a closed membership. According to a 2013 American survey, the
intermarriage rate is now 58% among all Jews and 71% among non-Orthodox Jews.
Yet 81% of all Jews still raise their children as Jewish (Goodstein 2013). It
seems that "Jewishness" is increasingly self-defined and
self-ascribed.
Besides
out-marriage, something else may be going on. There are signs that fertility is
sharply declining among the most intelligent women (Kanazawa 2014). Jewish
Americans would be harder hit in this respect, but the problem may be a much larger
one, as indicated by the recent slowing down and reversal of the Flynn Effect
and by the steady increase in reaction time from about the year 1980 onward (Flynn 2007,
pp. 143; Frost 2014; Madison 2014; Teasdale and Owen 2005).
In
conclusion, the decline in Jewish achievement may have a genetic cause, a
social/cultural one, or both. It nonetheless looks real. Much has been written
about the bleak outlook for Jewish Americans due to their high out-marriage
rate and their low fertility rate. But what if, on top of this numerical
decline, there has also been a cognitive and intellectual one?
What
will happen when Jewish millennials and post-millennials pick up the torch,
move up in the world, and begin to make their mark? We may see another
collapse: that of the remarkable Jewish presence in American life and culture.
References
Cochran,
G., J. Hardy, and H. Harpending. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi
intelligence, Journal of Biosocial
Science 38: 659-693.
https://antville.org/static/sites/kratzbuerste/files/AshkenaziIQ.pdf
Feldman,
A. (2018). Is Jordan Peterson enabling Jew hatred? Forward. May 11
https://forward.com/news/national/400597/is-jordan-peterson-enabling-jew-hatred/
Flynn,
J.R. (2007). What is Intelligence? Beyond
the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=qvBipuypYUkC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Frost,
P. (2007). Natural selection in proto-industrial Europe. Evo and Proud, November 16.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2007/11/natural-selection-in-proto-industrial.html
Frost,
P. (2014). What happened in the 1980s to reaction time? Evo and Proud, May 3.
http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/05/what-happened-in-1980s-to-reaction-time.html
Goodstein,
L. (2013). Poll shows major shift in identity of U.S. Jews. The New York Times, October 1.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/us/poll-shows-major-shift-in-identity-of-us-jews.html
Kanazawa,
S. (2014). Intelligence and childlessness. Social
Science Research 48: 157-170.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Satoshi_Kanazawa/publication/263666009_Intelligence_and_childlessness/links/59dc1174458515e9ab45299c/Intelligence-and-childlessness.pdf
Madison,
G. (2014). Increasing simple reaction times demonstrate decreasing genetic
intelligence in Scotland and Sweden, London Conference on Intelligence, Psychological comments, April 25, #LCI14 Conference proceedings
http://www.unz.com/jthompson/lci14-questions-on-intelligence/
Murray,
C. (2007). Jewish Genius. Commentary,
April 1
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/jewish-genius/
Rindermann,
H. (2018). Cognitive Capitalism. Human
Capital and the Wellbeing of Nations. Cambridge University Press.
Teasdale,
T.W., and D.R. Owen. (2005). A long-term rise and recent decline in
intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse. Personality and Individual Differences
39(4): 837-843.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.01.029
Unz,
R. (2012). The myth of American meritocracy. The American Conservative, November 28
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Wikipedia (2018a). Russian
Jews in Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Jews_in_Israel
Wikipedia (2018b). 1990s
Post-Soviet Aliyah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah 
41 comments:
There is a decline in outstanding academic performance, but has there been a decline in young Jews at the cutting edge of quantum physics and similar fields (you make your mark young in such things)? I would assume the earlier decline in Jewish prostitutes, world champion Jewish boxers and Jewish gangsters was due to societal causes in the Jewish community not alterations in ability to succeed in those fields.
I very much doubt the average Jewish student nowadays has academic success as the Holy Grail in the same way that the average Chinese student does. The marriage practices encouraging the mating of the most intelligent Jews to each other that MacDonald described in APSTDA have long since ceased (apart from the large and growing Orthodox community) and probably it ha had an effect in the decline of the "homozygous fringe" genius Jews, but Jews are nonetheless still playing the American game of material success pretty successfully. I am not aware of Jews doing manually work to a greater extent than previous generations.
I don't expect that to change because Jews have an edge in qualities that enable them to rise in society. Comedians, journalists, tv hosts, trial lawyers, art critics, salesmen, political consultants public relations, scriptwriters, and film directors ect. They have the insight and ability to control and alter fashions and make the running in ideological trends (Freud is an obvious example because the ideas would not have flown without his tremendous power to convince.) Look at Hollywood, the Dream Factory, a very high stakes business that is extraordinarily Jewish, probably because Jews can more often make films that provide a satisfying story. The world most people want to live in does not have genetic causation of the important stuff.
What is the iq data for ultra-orthodox Jews in US and Israel? Or is there any?
My theory is Yashiva school gave the Jews an advantage and now that we live in the "information age" that advantage is gone. Almost all Jews are urban and undergo rigorous academic training. This a lot like an SAT prep course for IQ tests. A lot of gentiles are rural and until recently, were never exposed to and had to work with copious amounts of information. You'll notice this collapse follows the expansion of the internet almost perfectly.
I believe the Jews have an average IQ only a few points higher than gentiles and those points are in verbal intelligence. Today, even kids that grow up on farms read and process data constantly, thanks to the internet. I think the collapse is due to more gentiles simply reaching their full potential.
IQ doesn't explain, due to absolute size, and "Effort culture" doesn't explain either, it pales in face of East Asians.
The best explanation comes from Kevin McDonald, it's ethnic nepotism, nurtured by centuries of practice. Their fall today can be attributed to lost of strong social bonds and identities, which are affecting everyone.
https://imgur.com/a/ZH2SmnC
My reading of https://imgur.com/a/ZH2SmnC is the IQ advantage of Jews is real. I suppose stupid Jews marry stupid gentiles, and when clever Jews marry gentiles they often marry the more intelligent gentiles. Many intellects of Everest-like eminence were half Jewish such as Bobby Fischer (mother, as was Neils Bohr's). Gentile women taking more Jewish men may be having some effect now as social bonds loosen, but were such men going to father maths prodigies if they married in?
KMac says Social Identity theory and IQ explain the disproportionate representation. But for me Hollywood is the test case, because it's so Jewish and so competitive; Jews must run it because they are just very good at discerning what story people want to engage with. In Little man Tate a working-class woman of average intelligence has a child who studies quantum physics at 8 years old. In Good Will Hunting a South Boston hooligan is a fookin self-taught genius at calculus! It would be a waste of time to try and pitch a screenplay with a realistic background for a prodigy.
Gould and Pinker write commercially successful books. MacDonald doesn't. Richard Lewontin had considerable and wide ranging influence, A. W. F. Edwards didn't. Kevin MacDonald's APTSDA: "Patai (1971, 161ff) notes a pattern in which Jews tend to excel in just those fields that are were most highly regarded by the host country.".
Maybe because jews were since always a urban population in U$ while white europeans were not at the same extent at least the 70's.
I would imagine that the ever increasing Asian population in the United States has and will continue to make it difficult for Jews to dominate the academic and intellectual activities that they did in the past. In other words, there isn't a problem with Jewish genes or their upbringing. The problem is ever growing Asian competition.
Sean, looking at the numbers, even with higher IQ, it would be impossible to have Jews overrepresented against Whites due to sheer numbers.
The IQ question is all good when populations have the same size, but Jews are vastly outnumbered.
Sean,
The origins of Hollywood are much less respectable and meritocratic than you imagine. It involved organized crime, thuggery, and a willingness to subvert norms and exploit certain appetites. It's like citing the mafia's involvement in bootlegging or some other racket as evidence of Sicilian intellectual preeminence.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/11/thaddeus-russell/7-ways-the-mafia-made-the-u-s-a-betterplace-renegadehistory/
"Soon after he invented the motion picture camera and projector, Thomas Edison formed his own movie production and distribution company. In 1908, Edison joined with nine other film companies to form the Motion Picture Patents Company, a monopoly that attempted to control the making, distribution, and showing of all movies in the United States. Edison and "The Trust" pledged to make only movies that promoted wholesome, Christian, and "American" values. But on the Lower East Side, a group of entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants used Edison’s inventions to produce and screen their own films, which were shown in thousands of nickelodeons – five-cent movie theaters – in working-class neighborhoods all over the country. These "outlaw" filmmakers started out as vaudeville and burlesque promoters, and many of their movies were sexier, more violent, and far more entertaining than the bland fare put out by the Edison monopoly.
The great inventor was furious that "Jewish profiteers" were stealing his patent, getting rich from it, and using it to spread "smut" across America. So too were law enforcement officials. In 1907 a judge in Chicago wrote that the nickelodeons "caused, indirectly or directly, more juvenile crime coming into my court than all other causes combined." Shortly thereafter the Chicago city council passed an ordinance granting power to the chief of police to censor motion pictures played in the city. In New York in 1907, soon after the police commissioner recommended that nickel shows be wiped out entirely, Mayor George McClellan was so moved by the evidence of immoral motion pictures polluting the minds of his citizens that on Christmas Day he ordered that all of the illicit motion picture houses be shut down.
Moral condemnations and court injunctions didn’t stop the proliferation of nickelodeons that showed unseemly fare and violated Edison’s patent, so the inventor and his colleagues hired squads of thugs to shut them down. They seized film, beat up directors and actors, forced audiences out of theaters, smashed the nickelodeon arcades and set fire to entire city blocks where they were concentrated. But fortunately for the Jewish renegades, they lived and operated in neighborhoods where hundreds of soldiers stood ready and able to protect them – men like "Big" Jack Zelig, "Lefty Louie" Rosenberg, "Gyp the Blood" Horowitz, Joe "The Greaser" Rosenzweig, and the leaders of the notorious Yiddish Black Hand, Jacob "Johnny" Levinsky and "Charley the Cripple" Vitoffsky. There were even women ready for the fight – fierce, well-armed "gun-mols" like Bessie London, Tillie Finkelstein, Birdie Pomerantz, and Jennie "The Factory" Morris.
Cameras, projectors, film, and sound equipment disappeared from the storerooms of Edison companies and showed up on makeshift movie lots on the Lower East Side. Bullets rained down on the Trust’s enforcers from the rooftops of nickelodeons. And massive fires destroyed the Edison distributors’ warehouses in the Bronx, Philadelphia, and Chicago. By 1915 the Trust had disbanded and the outlaw filmmakers moved west, where they could make bigger and better movies. Who were the men who, with the help of their nicknamed friends, fought Thomas Edison and the law and won? They were Marcus Loew of Loews Theatres and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures, Adolph Zukor of Paramount Pictures, William Fox of Twentieth-Century Fox, and the brothers Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner."
But for me Hollywood is the test case, because it's so Jewish and so competitive; Jews must run it because they are just very good at discerning what story people want to engage with.
It's odd to cite De Vany here, since he argues the exact opposite, namely that nobody in Hollywood knows anything and that Hollywood has a terrible return on investment as an industry.
http://www.latimes.com/la-tm-spanked09feb29-story.html
"Not that conventional business analysis would do much good. Arthur De Vany, a former UC Irvine professor, industry consultant and author of the book "Hollywood Economics," points out that outsider-newcomers have three times the failure rate as veterans in any business, so it's not a total shock that they usually bomb in the movie biz. From an empirical point of view, though, an outsider would have to be totally insane to try the movie industry in particular, because the economic model is bizarrely different from just about any other business. The movie industry actually earns only a 3% to 4% return on investment, which is lousy when compared with steel-making or book publishing.
...
Instead, the Hollywood economy may be best understood in terms of chaos theory, a mind-numbingly complex discipline that De Vany explains as the equivalent of trying to figure out how tens of thousands of individual fans, moving independently, manage somehow to exit a football stadium much faster than a mathematician might calculate. "To quote the screenwriter William Goldman, when it comes to what works, 'Nobody knows anything,' " De Vany says."
The same article suggests another reason for Hollywood's demographics:
http://www.latimes.com/la-tm-spanked09feb29-story.html
"Daniel Fessler, an assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA, notes that Hollywood in many ways functions as a classic ethnic group. "Essentially, the movie business is a culture of its own in which members use common behavioral markers—their style of dress, various decorations, a distinctive dialect and so on. What these markers are telling you is that another person shares the same values and cultural understandings and expectations of what is appropriate. An out-group female may be allowed in, because from an evolutionary perspective the in-group males stand to benefit from the opportunity to mate. But an out-group male is merely a competitor for resources."
Instead of locking horns like real bulls, the in-group may resort to trickery and exploitation. "The in-group members may look at the outsider and think, 'I'm not going to have reciprocal relations with this person in the future, because he's not going to be allowed to stay.' So instead they go after whatever he's got that's of value.""
''In other words, there isn't a problem with Jewish genes or their upbringing. The problem is ever growing Asian competition.''
But how to explain vast jewish representation when east asian american population was considerably less than today*
I also BELIEVE that in the past this contests were more to high social classes.
"has there been a decline in young Jews at the cutting edge of quantum physics"
Yes, a very sharp decline. Jews were over one-quarter of the top students in the Physics Olympiad from 1986 to 1997. During the 2000s the percentage was 5%.
"I would assume the earlier decline in Jewish prostitutes, world champion Jewish boxers and Jewish gangsters was due to societal causes in the Jewish community not alterations in ability to succeed in those fields."
Crime is a social construct. The Jewish victims of the Valentine's Day Massacre were guilty of providing access to alcoholic beverages. That's no longer a crime. Bugsy Siegel made his money from gambling, which has been decriminalized in many jurisdictions. Prostitution has likewise been largely decriminalized. The relevant issue is not the legal status of a particular action, but the degree of cognitive ability that is needed to carry it out.
"What is the iq data for ultra-orthodox Jews"
I tried to find such data, but without success. There's nothing in any of my reference books.
"My theory is Yashiva school gave the Jews an advantage and now that we live in the "information age" that advantage is gone."
The decline in Jewish achievement seems to have begun in the 1980s, which were pre-Internet. I didn't get my first email account until 1994, and I was one of the first in my department. For most people, the Internet didn't exist until the late 1990s. In any case, we're looking at an absolute decline in both Jews and non-Jews, with Jews declining faster.
"There isn't a problem with Jewish genes or their upbringing. The problem is ever growing Asian competition."
Again, the timeline doesn't really fit your explanation. There were Asian-Americans back in the 1980s, but their numbers were a lot smaller. And how would that explain the IQ decline in Israel during the same period?
"Crime is a social construct. The Jewish victims of the Valentine's Day Massacre were guilty of providing access to alcoholic beverages. That's no longer a crime. Bugsy Siegel made his money from gambling, which has been decriminalized in many jurisdictions. Prostitution has likewise been largely decriminalized. The relevant issue is not the legal status of a particular action, but the degree of cognitive ability that is needed to carry it out."
When alcohol prohibition was lifted, abilities to bootleg were not under positive selection anymore. Does contemporary society value skills Jews are better at? High IQ isn't valued when illiterates can obtain college degrees.
Could the purported decline in Jewish intelligence be -- at least in part -- an artifact of what endeavors are looked at?
Obviously, science and math competitions require high IQ, but what about being a successful car dealer, for example, somebody like Martin Swig. Swig created the auto mall concept, founded the California Mille, and otherwise had a great influence in the automotive world. But who's heard of him? Who cites him as an example of high Jewish intelligence?
Or how about being a top fighter jock, somebody like Jeffrey Feinstein, who became one of the rare US Air Force fighter aces during the Viet Nam War, then became a fighter weapons instructor at Nellis, where he significantly influenced the direction of fighter weapons and tactics. Yet who's ever heard of him? Who cites him as an example of high Jewish intelligence?
Is anyone tracking the number of Jewish car dealers or Jewish fighter pilots, noting whether their numbers have risen or fallen over the decades? Does anybody care?
Maybe high IQ Jews are not as interested in the long, dull grind of scientific research as they once were, and would rather work in finance, law or the media. Is Jewish representation declining in these fields?
Peter, Well OK there is a real decline, yet the still have creative geniuses, and I don't think Gregory Cochran's explanation is a very good one for the high verbal IQ. Decline in liberal Jewish community's practice of marrying in would lead to a decline in intellectual superiority, but from 25 to 5 % suggests a factor in addition to genetic change. Take heavyweight boxing as a parallel, does anyone doubt that there are white athletes with the size and power to be world champ, although they have preferred to go into other pro sports?
UNZ_ For example, among Math Olympiad winners, white Gentiles scarcely outnumbered Jews during the 1970s, and held only a three-to-two edge during the 1980s and 1990s, but since 2000 have become over fifteen times as numerous.
Ron Unz's data uses names as a proxy for ethnicity, but given that there is a massive increase in intermarriage many top students pegged as white gentiles may have had Jewish mothers and thus the really intelligent half-Jews are hidden in the statistics. "THERE are at least 150 genes linked to intelligence on the X chromosome, and verbal IQ is definitely known to be X-linked."
Anonymous, Hearst Over Hollywood for a different perspective. In Elements of Surprise Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot there is an interesting story of how during the making of The Third Man, David O. Selznick (son of a producer) insisted that the effect of Harry Lime's dealings on sick children had to be shown somehow for the story to be satisfying. Jews understand these kind of things more easily than other people. Edward Bernays was the double uncle of Freud. Women didn't smoke in public and people did not have bacon for breakfast before Bernays.
Wanda, After Sputnik there was a lot of resources and prestige thrown at maths and physics, and I suppose "a pattern in which Jews tend to excel in just those fields that are were most highly regarded by the host country" would lead to a lot of Jewish mathematicians in the following decades. There is the money aspect too, Jordan Belfort left Dentist school because the Dean announced on the first day that it was the wrong place to be if you wanted to get rich.
Sean, you didn't address my point, which is that contrary to your claim that Hollywood was founded as and has been some sort of open meritocracy, historians and academics have shown that it was established through criminal means and has been maintained and operated as an ethnic group that excludes outsiders, particularly outside males. The fact that Jews were willing to put smut in films to be consumed largely by outgroup members unlike Thomas Edison did not mean that they were smarter than Edison or that Edison did not know that smut would sell. Edison knew, which is precisely why he wanted to exclude such content. The motivations were different; there wasn't a different degree of knowledge.
I don't think it's implausible that Jews are more aware of the power of mass media to influence people and more willing to exploit such media in host societies. I don't think that's the same thing as intelligence though. Steve Sailer and others have pointed out the ubiquity in Hollywood films of "blond bad guys". Maybe Jews are the only people intelligent enough to know that blond men are evil. Or maybe it's just an expression of hostility and a willingness to exploit one's position to promote such hostility.
Sean, was gay marriage something that Americans always wanted to have, but only Hollywood was intelligent enough to identify and articulate this deeply held desire of the American people?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/vice-president-biden-jewish-leaders-pop-culture-drove-gay-marriage-acceptance-article-1.1351817
"Vice President Biden praised Jewish leaders in the media Tuesday night, crediting them with helping change American attitudes on gay marriage with contributions to television and technology like “Will and Grace” and social media.
"I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America, are as much the culture and the arts as anything else," Biden said at a Democratic National Convention reception celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month.
"It wasn't anything we legislatively did. It was 'Will and Grace,' it was the social media. Literally. That's what changed peoples' attitudes. That's why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace" gay marriage, Biden said, referring to an NBC show, which ended seven years ago, about a gay man and his female best friend.
"I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it's in Hollywood or social media, are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry," the gaffe-prone Veep said. "The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good. "
Biden also praised Jewish contributions to civil rights, science and immigration reform.
"The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential part of who we are that it's fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage," he said. "The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me and all of those who went before you.""
Use links not long C&Ping and consolidate your argument into a single comment please.
Regarding Edison, the fight you are speaking of was on the East Coast and his rivals had to relocate to California to create Hollywood, thus leaving Edison to it. Like his fellow red baiter Hearst, Edison was no stranger to legalized thuggery, and the "Edison Trust,” was not gentle, gentile or aesthetically superior. Re "smut" well that isn't the best way to make money. Hollywood's relationship myths can wreak havoc on real-life romance. As it has evolved, the products of Hollywood seem to me to have progressively eschewed realism, and become more and more the product of Jews as a people without systems of representational quarantine and thus prone to absorb the myths of the society in concentrated form, which enables a spandrelish facility to give the public what they want. Lack of cognitive firewalls leads Jews to take ethereal ideas in the culture and reify them. One cannot help noticing that Jews take an unspoken idealistic ethos opposing genetic causation more seriously than the gentiles who invented it. As I think Peter has shown, the revival of antiracism was popularized by John B. Watson, and taken up with alacrity by Boas and company. I think that shows Jews are vulnerable to what Tooby called "false, unreliable, obsolete, out-of-context, deceptive, or scope-violating representations".
Sean, you have a habit of C&Ping long passages. The reason you're not doing so here is because you want to bombard your comments with links to give the impression of authority and support for your claims, but you can't really cite anything in them that does so.
Edison's patents were stolen and were used to operate illegal nickelodeons. Jewish organized crime ignored court injunctions ordering the nickelodeons to be shut down. The law wasn't being enforced. Edison's use of violence was wholly justified and was in response to the failure of the state to enforce the law. Are you suggesting Edison's actions to protect his property and uphold the law were equivalent to the activities of organized crime?
Hollywood's relationship myths aren't packaged in innocent romances. They're packaged in smut. They go together. Sex and the City being a prime example.
Hollywood certainly has no problem with genetic causation: blond men are evil, blondes are dumb, Jews are only heroic or oppressed, blacks are only noble, etc.
Wanda,
I agree that not everyone is a "geek" and that there are other domains of cognitive ability. I'm less convinced that, in the Jewish population, cognitive ability has migrated from math and science to some other field of endeavor. You mention sales, like selling cars. Is there evidence of an increase in Jewish achievement in that field? My impression, and it's only an impression, is that Jewish people are becoming less present in all fields. In some cases, their continuing presence is buoyed up by legacy positions, which Jewish millennials hold through family connections and not because of ability.
"Jews were willing to put smut in films to be consumed largely by outgroup members"
Porn consumption is probably just as high among Jews as among non-Jews.
"Ron Unz's data uses names as a proxy for ethnicity, but given that there is a massive increase in intermarriage many top students pegged as white gentiles may have had Jewish mothers and thus the really intelligent half-Jews are hidden in the statistics."
By the same reasoning, Unz's data includes people who only have Jewish fathers.
"Hollywood certainly has no problem with genetic causation: blond men are evil, blondes are dumb, Jews are only heroic or oppressed, blacks are only noble, etc."
This isn't specifically a Jewish thing. We live in a society where antiracism has become a dominant ideology, and antiracists argue that it's necessary to reverse stereotypes in order to abolish them. So in order to abolish the stereotype of black criminality, whites have to be overrepresented in movies as criminals. Once that kind of logic becomes established, it continues as a social rule that people follow without thinking.
Anony, I was recently chided by Peter for not citing (about the importance of maternal IQ among other things). NYC had Jews and gangsters, California had Pinkertons and cops who broke heads. Edison stayed in NYC. I've read the Hearst book and his interventions on movie plots were comparatively straightforward, eg, a cop in a movie should not be killed in the line of duty because that would discourage policemen who watched the film from doing their job properly. "The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies" and "The Beautiful Blond Viking God." was the way a young Sterling Hayden was described when he was given a contract by Paramount ( though Is eye color sex-linked? suggests a biological reason for the rarity of a blond hero). The Ma and Pa Kettle films saved Universal from bankruptcy, for decades Louis B. Mayer dominated the industry at MGM with "chaste romance, apple pie and Andy Hardy", and was eventually forced out for it.
Peter, Neurons show more axonal growth when exposed to higher levels of sphingolipids (last figure) (Cochran et al. 2006)
WE found that higher intelligence in healthy individuals is related to lower values of dendritic density and arborization. ...neuronal circuitry associated with higher intelligence is organized in a sparse and efficient manner"
Gregory Cochran says the Ashkenazi have certain biological disorders damaging to fitness but resulting in higher intelligence, but he never seems to have even considered the possibility that in addition to high IQ the thought processes of people with these disorders may be altered in peculiar and subtle ways that the bearers would be better off without. He just keeps complaining about how the advocates of behaviorism and anti-hereditarianism are deluded, eg "Do you really think that my life would have been improved in any way if I’d spent half an hour a day reading Freud? Or Judith Butler? I don’t think so.". He thinks the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth subjects should be half Ashkenazi Jewish, but never wonders why so many of the anti-hereditarians he animadverts are too. A second Descartes!
"higher intelligence in healthy individuals is related to lower values of dendritic density and arborisation"
The contradiction is only apparent. You need axonal growth to create new connections, but there is also a pruning process to ensure the new circuitry runs efficiently.
You're missing the point about those genetic disorders. They're simply witnesses to selection for increased intelligence. Cognitive ability is influenced by thousands of genes, and those genetic disorders involve only a handful of genes.
Intelligence is an instrument. It can be used to achieve all kinds of tasks, some of which are good and some not so good. You want to corner me into saying "Intelligence is good." But that would be like saying "Listening to music is good." Well, maybe.
You're missing the point about those genetic disorders. They're simply witnesses to selection for increased intelligence.Selection would presumably eliminate the fitness reducing effects if given enough time, but as there are still very large fitness reducing physical effects why assume that the mental aspect of these disorders are completely without even subtle bugs? I refreshed my memory with C&H's book, it says child patients with one of the Ashkenazi disorders exhibit extraordinary intelligence for their age (as do children with Williams Syndrome in much more limited social and verbal domains) and there is a very big cost in health similar to sickle cell anemia, so it cannot have been due to drift. There must have been a big pay off for higher intelligence in the ancestral environment of the Jews, who must have been practicing endogamy to benefit from IQenhansing mutations to the extent they did; now intermarriage is common so the average Ashkenazi IQ is going down. I accept all that, but I don't accept that the deleterious effects of the Ashkenazi genetic disorders are entirely physical, while the mental effect is simply to increase intelligence. As natural selection has not had enough time to debug the physical aspect, the boost in IQ probably was accompanied by subtle defects in Ashkenazi intellectual abilities. For example, Jews have a higher average level of verbal intelligence than non-Jewish whites, but they have below-average spatial intelligence. Why would social cognition be uneffected. "BECAUSEe of his gift for understanding the nature of stardom and the needs of the audience, it was claimed that 'Mayer's view of America became America's view of itself.'" He was forced out because he refused to make grittier films. Emma "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses" Lazarus took something in American culture and fed it back in a far more potent form.
At the time of the invasion of Iraq being touted as a neocon plot, a number of people were
quoted in Washington including prominent Jews and a Rabbi publicly citing Bush's top advisor "Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr." as a gentile. He wasn't and they were fooled by the name alone. If someone wants to choose a idiosyncratic name that sounds totally unJewish it can easily be done, and I wonder if that does not explain some of the apparent decline. Those with Jewish fathers are not Jews at all by Jewish law, and they cannot stand in for the much cleverer without Jewish names who are halachically 100%. I think intermarriage would definitely lead to a certain decline in the highest IQs among Jews, but the decline shown on Unz's data seems too precipitous for anything but a tendency for the cleverest Jews to be marrying out far more than the others.
"Porn consumption is probably just as high among Jews as among non-Jews."
That might be relevant if markets were segregated and Jews only produced and sold to other Jews, and non-Jews only produced and sold to non-Jews. But the case in question involves a group monopolizing the production and distribution of a particular product to out-groups. The cost of consumption incurred by the in-group is made up many times over by the gain the in-group makes from the monopoly it enjoys selling to the much larger markets of out-groups.
"This isn't specifically a Jewish thing. We live in a society where antiracism has become a dominant ideology, and antiracists argue that it's necessary to reverse stereotypes in order to abolish them. So in order to abolish the stereotype of black criminality, whites have to be overrepresented in movies as criminals. Once that kind of logic becomes established, it continues as a social rule that people follow without thinking."
To the extent that Jews have a disproportionate influence over Hollywood, the media, academia, etc., and have so for decades, it's certainly reasonable to describe it as a Jewish thing. Moreover, these Hollywood depictions predate the contemporary ideology of stereotype reversal.
Stereotype reversal is not something that's accepted and promoted by most white liberals and antiracists, who favor equal treatment for all in response to a legacy of older stereotypes, rather than reverse racism or stereotype reversal. This is why many white liberals and antiracists have become disillusioned with contemporary liberal ideology and have turned into lapsed liberals and conservatives. Stereotype reversal is largely something favored by blacks and other minorities, who have followed the minority template that was established by Jews.
"The Ma and Pa Kettle films saved Universal from bankruptcy, for decades Louis B. Mayer dominated the industry at MGM with "chaste romance, apple pie and Andy Hardy", and was eventually forced out for it."
Sean, read up on the Hays Code:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood
"Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the brief era in the American film industry between the widespread adoption of sound in pictures in 1929[1] and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines, popularly known as the "Hays Code", in mid-1934. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934, with the establishment of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion, than by strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.
As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included depictions of sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality. Strong female characters were ubiquitous in such pre-Code films as Female, Baby Face, and Red-Headed Woman. Gangsters in films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were seen by many as heroic rather than evil. Along with featuring stronger female characters, films examined female subject matters that would not be revisited until decades later in US films. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions, and drug use was a topic of several films."
Just as a side note: have we noticed that as cinema censorship declined, comic book censorship set in? And that cinema censorship was anti-Communist in scope, but concerns about comic books suggested they were fascist (seriously). Does today's pattern of censorship follow that pattern? At present, one of the most hated franchises in one of the most hated genres - the gore porn Saw - is ridiculing liberal ideas about crime and punishment, if you care to watch the series. When John Kramer got an unintended fanbase, Saw III anvilled that his methods do NOT change people's lives around. Another recent example might be Juno, which was condemned by conservatives in the US despite having, ultimately, a pro-life message if you bother to sit through it. There is a long tradition of this in the US, of conservative censors going after targets that critique not American values, but liberalism.
Was pre-code Hollywood really so Judeo-centric, or left-wing? As the Wikipedia notes, Hollywood at that time was pro-Mussolini and even sought the German dollar during the rise of Hitler. It might be true that Jews complained about this, but Jews were quietly part of it, so Jewish identity was not their top priority. Were the films so immoral? Characterizations of gay and lesbian characters were widespread but usually derogatory, promiscuous and adulterous women were shown to meet their downfall. I don't see any intent to corrupt in this.
Cecil B. DeMented was not Jewish. Nor breast man Howard Hughes or the rape-obsessed Sam Peckenpaw. Hollywood has always stayed within limits because is a business and with its high costs of production it always disliked to compete with cheap thrills. (Unlike LA, where child porn was being sold openly off Times Square by the mid 70's, LA Vice terrorized the porn industry) All this was for much the same reason as why the studio bosses were anti-union pals with Hearst. The big influential studios know the money is made by refining the essence of American culture and putting it in a film. Mayer, the most successful of Jewish producers in Hollywood kept smut out, Cost cutting Joseph P. Kennedy was a very successful Hollywood producer within the code, that is where he made most of his money. And you may want to bear in mind that Steve Bannon made most of his money in Hollywood, that is the Bannon who sidestepped the racial politics that MSM tried to tar him with, and instead advocated 'an economic nationalist agenda' because it would appeal to the masses. It did.
Second anon,but why are such tropes and others about the hero rescuing a pure maiden or standing by his friend despite extreme danger, so common. Surely the audience require those themes. Moreover, a good movie makes the filmic technique invisible and involves you in its plot, while it gives you clues without giving the game away so that the surprise at the end makes the twist and turns of the story coherent, and we suddenly understand earlier plot points and motivation in a new light and the resolution is satisfying. Jews understand these things more easily. They invented the comic book super hero to answer certain needs in the potential audience, and despite the absurdities of the genre it does that so well the Superheroes are taking over films. Jews have an enhanced perception of underlying cultural assumptions.
"Was pre-code Hollywood really so Judeo-centric, or left-wing? As the Wikipedia notes, Hollywood at that time was pro-Mussolini and even sought the German dollar during the rise of Hitler. It might be true that Jews complained about this, but Jews were quietly part of it, so Jewish identity was not their top priority."
Censorship authority over Hollywood films was held by Joseph Breen, an Irish Catholic who has been accused of anti-Semitism. Breen pressured Hollywood not to produce anti-German content:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Breen#1934%E2%80%941941
"William Dudley Pelley, founder of the anti-Semitic organization the Silver Legion of America, believed that Jews controlled the movie industry, which he thought to be the "most effective propaganda medium in America", during the 1930s. Hence he applauded the fact that Breen had assumed the power to censor Hollywood.[11] Breen, who fought for fair depictions of all races, was deeply worried that Jewish filmmakers would try to use Nazi mistreatment of Jews during the 1930s as a vehicle for propaganda.[12] He was concerned that Germans would be offended by harsh depiction of Nazis. He specifically warned Hollywood producers to avoid the topic altogether, saying that "[t]here is a strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country ... and while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise."[13] Breen claimed that plans to make such pictures were being coordinated through the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which he claimed was "conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews". As a result of Breen's anticommunist views, the censorship board pressured Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to drop plans to film Sinclair Lewis's anti-fascist novel, It Can't Happen Here.[12]"
"Were the films so immoral? Characterizations of gay and lesbian characters were widespread but usually derogatory, promiscuous and adulterous women were shown to meet their downfall. I don't see any intent to corrupt in this."
Conscious intent has nothing to do with it. I don't think conscious intent drives most behavior, and it's precisely the lack of conscious intent that makes, for example, disproportionate influence by a minority with a long history of conflict so insidious.
According to you, anything short of hardcore homosexual pornography and snuff films could not be characterized as "immoral."
Sean, we're not arguing about whether or not there were ever any gentile directors or producers in Hollywood.
Steve Bannon made his money in investment banking, advising on the sale of a production company to CNN. Instead of the usual investment banking adviser's fee, Bannon got a financial stake in some TV shows like Seinfeld. Bannon then sold his boutique investment bank to a large investment bank, Societe Generale. That's how he made his money. He then used the proceeds to get into film producing. He produced two Hollywood box office flops few people have heard of, before getting into producing a bunch of B-movie political documentaries about Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, Notre Dame football, immigration and the border, the Clintons, etc. that nobody's ever heard of.
Bannon is a winner in Hollywood and politics, and he did not do that by going on about Jews.
Gregory Cochran says the Ashkenazi have certain biological disorders damaging to fitness but resulting in higher intelligence, but he never seems to have even considered the possibility that in addition to high IQ the thought processes of people with these disorders may be altered in peculiar and subtle ways that the bearers would be better off without. He just keeps complaining about how the advocates of behaviorism and anti-hereditarianism are deluded, eg "Do you really think that my life would have been improved in any way if I’d spent half an hour a day reading Freud? Or Judith Butler? I don’t think so.". He thinks the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth subjects should be half Ashkenazi Jewish, but never wonders why so many of the anti-hereditarians he animadverts are too. A second Descartes!
Cochran doesn't really discuss Jews beyond the narrow topic of IQ, even when they're the topic of discussion or when he's asked about them. This is uncharacteristic of him, since he likes to pontificate on all sorts of matters and will censor views that challenge his pronouncements on things. But it's understandable. He's not independently wealthy or an academic with tenure. He's a public figure who posts under his real name. There's nothing to gain from commenting publicly on topics that are just too controversial.
"According to you, anything short of hardcore homosexual pornography and snuff films could not be characterized as "immoral." "
Well, where would you draw the line? Surely there can be no harm in fiction depicting real life, and no hope of social change without depicting social problems. May I draw one's attention to the Japanese literature and films of Shintaro Ishihara, and the rest of the Sun Tribe? Though they were despised by the strictest Japanese conservatives of the time, the intent was anti-invader. Perhaps they should've pretended none of that was going on.
Cecil B. DeMille was a Catholic: he had intent to draw the public to see Catholic martyrdom. That and he wanted provide a spectacle, but not an anti-Christian one. The villains were immoral, their victims were not - he was concerned Nero did not appear evil enough. The message of the film was Christian throughout, and people forget it was Catholics thronged to see their history, just as other Catholics disdained the merging of hallowed history with entertainment.
This is what annoys me about popular histories of censorship, which we all find first when we research the subject, before we dig a little deeper.
Just one point, while I can't edit or merge my replies. My point is the pro-censorship people on the right choose counterproductive targets, maybe willfully so. DeMille understood that by appealing to man's baser nature, was the only way to get audiences to see Christian history; and so on. Does anyone have a counterargument against this? Because I would like to debate it.
Because whilst its natural societies cycle through stricter and laxer approaches to censorship, right-wing censorship actually accelerates the shift/decline to liberalism: they can't produce an alternative message with popular appeal. DeMille was an outspoken anti-Communist and a Christian, ergo the Catholic patriot is singled out as a pervert and corrupter of youth. Its a familiar story.
Cochran doesn't discuss Jews as such, but is usually discussing them when he talks about antihereditarians and pro trans activists. For him there is just IQ, and anyone with high IQ should be able to see the truth. Jordan Peterson thinks the same way as Cochran and even Kevin MacDonald thinks that way, although he thinks there is some self-deception and ethnic stratigizing going on.
Cochran criticises Jews indirectly. I remember once Cochran talking about the idea parasites don't harm their hosts, and he implied who might stand to gain if people believe such nonsense.
Ashkenazi Jews are 40% more likely to get schizophrenia.
The European (Ashkenazi) chapter of the Jewish history is closing down but the Jewish people - different, less intellectual, browner - goes on to the future. It was not a happy chapter. Zionism is the rejection of the Galuth Jew, we wanted to be like everybody. We Jews are changing, even faster and more radically than Frost suggests, let's hope it is for better. Anyway, it is unavoidable.
The decline in Jewish achievement can very well be a consequence of assimilation into gentile white culture, which at best has an ambivalent attitude towards academic pursuits.
Post a Comment