With all of the attention given to the Ph.D. dissertation of the junior officer, why has nobody mentioned the record of the senior author, Robert Rector, of Bell Curve fame?
Michael Perelman ------------- This reference was so laconic that I had to go find the news story, read it, look up some background, and then laugh. That's a lot of work just for a sneering laugh. Here is the punchline for me: ``The study's lead author, Robert Rector, told people during briefings that he was modeling the 2013 study on the one from 2007.* Richwine wrote in his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 2009 that there are deep-seated and likely genetic IQ differences between the races and that low-IQ immigrants should be kept out of the country. *A similar Heritage study, published in 2007, helped sink a comprehensive immigration reform bill in the Senate by asserting that the plan would cost $2.7 trillion, alarming Republican lawmakers.'' http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/co-author-of-immigration-study-resigns-from-heritage-foundation/2013/05/10/128147f8-b97f-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_story.html I have a question here. What department at Harvard passed a PhD thesis that `there are deep-seated and likely genetic IQ differences between the races...'? At a guess it was Economics or Public Policy. Those are the only fields I can think of that retained the high social and biological science standards of the 19thC. Okay a further search revealed: The dissertation, uncovered by Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post, titled "IQ and Immigration Policy," was accepted in 2009 by the Kennedy School of Public Policy. In it, Richwine argued that there are genetic differences in intelligence between races, and that they will persist for generations to come. He's a disciple of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, whose book The Bell Curve made a similar argument back in 1994. http://www.thenation.com/blog/174291/harvard-phd-and-hispanics-iq-how-jason-richwines-dissertation-got-him-fired-heritage-fou The beyond doubt the prestigious Kennedy School of Public Policy. Yes! Evidently an academic cesspool, who knew? ``The dissertation was approved, as all dissertations are, by a committee of three. The chair was George Borjas, an conservative economist who writes about immigration for the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. Borjas told Slate's David Weigel, I have never worked on anything even remotely related to IQ, so don't really know what to think about the relation between IQ, immigration, etc. . . . In fact, as I know I told Jason early on since I've long believed this, I don't find the IQ academic work all that interesting. -- not exactly an endorsement of the dissertation. The second person on the committee was Richard Zeckhauser. He studies investing, not immigration, and his Harvard faculty website describes him as a Senior Principal at Equity Resource Investments (ERI), a special situations real estate firm. He told Wiegel that Jason's empirical work was careful, but that he was too eager to extrapolate his empirical results to inferences for policy. The third member of the committee is the big surprise, and the big problem: Christopher Jencks, for decades a leading figure among liberals who did serious research on inequality-a contributor to the New York Review, the author of important books including Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?; The Homeless; and The Black White Test Score Gap. Christopher Jencks knows exactly what's wrong with the studies purporting to link race with IQ.... I asked Jencks whether he would comment. He replied Nope. But thanks for asking.'' _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
