Africans Need Aid Because They Don’t Have Money
Foreign aid has a lot of critics in part because it has a lot of problems. In particular, in the first couple of post-colonial decades there was enormous overpromising and people thought that foreign aid could really spark economic growth. Hasn’t worked. And while many countries have made progress in terms of sparking increased growth rates, nobody’s figured out a reliable path for external actors to really make that happen. That said, aid critics have a bad habit of terribly overstating their claims and neglecting the fact that, for example, aid aimed at curing disease saves people lives.
At any rate, Peter Robinson seems unduly impressed with Dambisa Moyo:
Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid responds to her critics — including former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson. “Surely,” Gerson has written, “Moyo should recognize the difference between aid provided to oppressive kleptocrats and aid given to faith-based organizations distributing AIDS drugs.”
Moyo’s reply?
I’m not going to sit here and say the fact that 2 million Africans are on HIV drugs is a bad thing. Of course that’s a good thing. But whose responsibility is it to provide those HIV drugs? American society does not operate by sitting around and waiting for handouts. Why should we as Africans?
For one thing, in the developed world we clearly do offer financial assistance (”handouts”) to indigent people suffering from illness. Even in the United States there’s Medicaid and people get treated at emergency rooms regardless of their ability to pay. Meanwhile, in terms of HIV drugs obviously the reason Africans find themselves needing to rely on handouts is that the continent is so full of poor people. Ultimately, obviously, the ideal solution would be for Africans to get richer. But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth. Meanwhile, people with HIV will die really soon unless someone gives them medicine. And even better, the marginal cost of producing extra HIV medication is really low. There’s just no getting around the fact that giving poor people medicine is a useful and important way of making the world a better place.
44 Responses to “Africans Need Aid Because They Don’t Have Money”
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June 25th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I’ve seen Moyo advance her arguments before; she acts as though practical issues (about corrupt governments, developing the economy, etc.) and moral ones (whose responsibility is it?) are interchangeable. But of course they’re not. You need to provide some justification for the idea that it’s more important that Africa “take responsibility” for providing medication, than for people with AIDS to have a decent lifespan and stay productive members of society. Just the common sense argument—”people should buy their own medicine”—doesn’t get us anywhere.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
It’s pretty easy to preach this message if you don’t, in fact, have AIDS.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Two things:
1) This woman is a know-nothing. She’s more interested in developing a provocative argument (”End all aid to Africa!”) then doing any kind of serious research. Cheap platidues that no one really disagrees with (”Africa should support itself!”) are really all she has to offer.
2) Naturally, this makes her attractive to the cornerites, they of the “More Guns, Less Crime!” crowd. I’m surprised Slate isn’t running an article on her next to its “Why Smoking is Actually Good For You!” and “More Pollution Will Clean the Ocean!” features. The fact that she’s actually from Africa makes her all the more attractive. See also, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth. Meanwhile, people with HIV will die really soon unless someone gives them medicine.
You could rephrase this.
Africa will never see strong growth until the HIV pandemic is battered into submission, until Malaria no longer forces a huge percentage of the continent into the status of walking wounded, and so on.
I always wonder whether people recognize that if they themselves can barely get their work done with a cold, then how on earth can Africans work with fevers, chills, seizures, and all the myriad side effects of these diseases?
June 25th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
And while many countries have made progress in terms of sparking increased growth rates, nobody’s figured out a reliable path for external actors to really make that happen.
Nobody? Practically everybody who has anything to do with developmental policies knows that the best path is to reject the neoliberal mandates of the IMF, like China and Indonesia did. The Eastern European countries that followed the IMF precepts are all tanking.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Moyo’s larger argument – that handouts and loans and grants to kleptocracies and Fabian socialist governments – is sound. Obviously people suffering from HIV/AIDs need medical help, not moralizing from Moyo or from the anti-condom police. In the 1950s Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and southern African countries had higher GDP’s per capita than did almost all Asian countries. What went wrong with Africa – well screwed up government policies and venal elites and thei ability to shakedown the West for handouts. Rigth now we are living through the third decade of Paris Club debt forgiveness where the West forgives the loans it made African countries for development which either were wasted on Western consultants and contractors, went to corrupt Africans or were invested in inappropriate industrial and infrastuructre projects. Stop patronizing Africans. That is the gist of Moyo’s argument.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
The only country I know of that has developed due to foreign aid is Israel. If your country gets $10 billion/year and thousands of college educated immigrants every year, you have a chance, otherwise you probably need to rely on your own citizens.
The other foreign aid is mostly charity, and does not contribute much to real development (although it can make a huge difference for individuals, like a Fullbright scholarship). It doesn’t make a moral difference to me if the kid next door gets my tax dollar funded AIDS drugs, or some kid in Africa gets them. They both need them and they don’t cost me much.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
I will say this for her, she is kind of hot.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
But the per capita GDP of Africa isn’t going to magically reach American (or even Mexican or even Chinese) levels overnight even if Africa does start seeing strong growth.
GDP per capita isn’t really higher in China. The problem is that the African elites are extraordinarily corrupt and the population gets very little of this “product”.
There’s just no getting around the fact that giving poor people medicine is a useful and important way of making the world a better place.
If nothing else is done, it can lead to over-population and self-perpetuating poverty. Sexual education has to be part of the solution in Africa.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Moyo had no trouble turning towards other countries for her education and career.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Implementation matters. See Laurie Garrett’s piece (I think it was in Foreign Affairs) on the Gates foundation inadvertently decimating the public health infrastructure in some African countries, hiring away a large portion of the qualified health workers by paying way above local wages. The idea “we’ll get around the problem of government corruption by building our own delivery infrastructure” sounds nice in theory, but in practice it’s caused some problems. AIDS is not the only health issue in Africa.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
The HIV/AIDS example is not a great one because there really only is one solution there.
A better example of Moyo’s point might be seen in something like Paul Theroux’s discussion of his return to Malawi (in _Dark Star Safari_). He returned to the school where he’d taught as a Peace Corp volunteer in the 60s to find it falling down, with unkempt grounds and mess everywhere. Maintaining small buildings, collecting trash, keeping grounds clean; these are not tasks that require outside assistance, government aid, high levels of education. They simply require a certain mindset — a pride in one’s society, a concern for the future, and, yes, a willingness to work. This is the type of thing that drives Moyo (and plenty of other observers) ballistic about Africa.
I felt much the same way when I visited South Africa a few years ago. An obvious issue was the crazy out-of-control growth of plant life on the university grounds where I’d been educated twenty years earlier. In a society with 25% unemployment, apparently no-one is willing to cut down plants at a wage that someone else is willing to pay, which strikes me as very strange.
I felt much the same with respect to discussions regarding AIDS (which takes as back to where we started). Contrast — in the US when the AIDS epidemic started, there was massive organization within the gay community (with precious little help from the Reagan government) to figure out what was going on, to educate people, to do whatever could be done, from shutting down bath houses to changing porn stereotypes, to cut down the epidemic.
In South Africa the impression I got regarding AIDS was nothing but apathy from the black community — no excitement and energy regarding education, no willingness to try the unthinkable. And when whites valiantly do try to suggest that certain community practices (we all know what they are — multiple simultaneous sexual partners, older men raping younger girls, “dry” sex) be condemned and reduced, they are accused of cultural insensitivity and racism.
Fine, you want to enable Africa to continue the path it is on, go for it. But don’t be surprised when, like any enabler, nothing much ever changes.
As for
“This woman is a know-nothing.”
Right. She grew up in Zambia. She has degrees in government, economics, an MBA, and in chemistry, from Oxford, Harvard, and American University. She worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. But she knows nothing of the issues of Africa, whereas Francisco the Man (who I suspect has never even set foot on African soil) has all the answers.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I’ve seen Moyo advance her arguments before; she acts as though practical issues (about corrupt governments, developing the economy, etc.) and moral ones (whose responsibility is it?) are interchangeable.
I am a white nationalist, but I will defend the black woman from the (presumably from what we know about blog demographics) white idiots here.
Moyo’s case is that it is the very taking of responsibility — moral and practical — that is necessary for Africans to develop. It is through governing themselves, including providing public goods , that Africans will get better at it. It is not that the issues are interchangeable, it is that they are correlated, indeed intertwined.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Clearly, she knows less about this than Matt and the Oxford guy. After all, they’ve studied; she’s just lived the problem.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Clearly, she knows less about this than Matt and the Oxford guy. After all, they’ve studied; she’s just lived the problem.
To be fair, some people live on Earth yet refuse to believe that global warming is a huge problem.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
… and that would be because we know a small bit about history, and know that it’s been way, way warmer in the past, and also way, way colder in the past.
Variability is the norm – what the global warming crowd seems to believe is that the situation circa some magical perfection point can and should be maintained forever. I’d call it hubris, but I think stupidity fits better.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
“I am a white nationalist, but I will defend the black woman from the (presumably from what we know about blog demographics) white idiots here.”
Man, she has good luck in her allies.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
I think what Moyo disdains is what I would call the aid mentality — the expectation that other people have better solutions than you do for your own problems. HIV is a complex problem in one sense, when you have it, but not in another — how to avoid getting it. And it does seem to me that there are countries in Africa that have successfully focused on prevention using means of their own creation, even if they also received funding from outside sources.
It also seems to me that aid groups, to some extent, are offering real solutions that are not necessarily culturally accessible: education and equal treatment of women being the most obvious.
She’s over the top in some of her pronouncements, but I find her thesis overall hard to argue with.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Matt’s quote from Moyo is not at all the best articulation of this argument, and the trouble with the “should poor people have AIDS drugs or not” line is that it’s a false choice. When foreign governments take on active responsibility for solving all such problems, it lets corrupt governments off the hook in a way that actually encourages them to do less, and *this* is the problem. Since foreign aid is never going to be a permanent solution to the kinds of problems Africa faces (however much aid agencies might massage the statistics to make their work seem more substantial), the drop in the bucket that it *does* produce comes at the cost of reinforcing structural inequity. Maybe Moyo goes into greater detail about this elsewhere, but for me Alex de Waal’s Famine Crimes is the best explication of this dynamic (with reference to hunger rather than disease, but the point is analogous): his point is that in countries where governments are held responsible by their people for things going wrong (India’s “no famine” policy, for example), those governments actually try to prevent such problems from happening. But in Africa, by and large, AFrican governments have long ago given up any pretense of being able to do such things.
My point isn’t that it’s a simple issue, but the opposite: Matt’s use of that Moyo quote lets him make stirring rhetoric without having to engage with how complex the problem is.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Semi-OT, but is Matt planning to review A Farewell to Alms? Having recently started reading it on his recommendation I’ve been struck by it apparent argument that these kind of improvements don’t help in Africa long term, because every improvement is swallowed up by the resulting population growth, leading to more people at a lower living standard. (I haven’t got to the detailed section on how Europe got rich because rich people had more kids, but I’m going to need a lot of persuading on that part).
June 25th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Aaron, keep in mind that Matt didn’t select the Moyo quote. Peter Robinson did, and he chose it because he approves of Moyo’s free-market ideology. Which ideology is part of why a lot of us are extremely skeptical of Moyo’s conclusions.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Fine. But the trouble then is that anyone arguing about the perniciousness of the aid cycle gets tarred as a free market dupe, and the *actual* arguments against aid to Africa disappear. There are legitimate reasons to be skeptical about whether aid is worth it, and having an argument about free market vs. the new deal (it seems to me) just grafts a very American political argument onto a political terrain that simply works differently. If you want to argue about the free market, do so; but if one wants to make claims like “There’s just no getting around the fact that giving poor people medicine is a useful and important way of making the world a better place.” then you might want to actually address a very cogent argument (like de Waal’s) for why doing so is exactly not a useful thing to do.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
The point, in other words, is that this feels to me very much like a left wing American blogger arguing with a right wing American blogger about Africa, but only to the extent that they can score points about American issues (free market vs. liberalism), and both do so by ignoring all that makes Africa different than the US. So we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that this is a good faith discussion about Africa itself (if it were, that Moyo quote wouldn;t even be part of the discussion).
June 25th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
It also reinforces the notion that Africa is a single monolithic place instead of a continent with a lot of different countries with different problems.
I helped a woman from a west African country that I won’t name, whose sister told me how much she despised France, because it was so determined to keep a French speaking government in place that it more or less enabled the French speaking president in his human rights violations. It did this through trade deals, arms deals, etc., though it did hold in check his worst impulses. I don’t know if that’s quite true, but it was obvious that the president of that nation spent a lot more effort refining his own power than he did in building up infrastructure in his country, going so far as to destroy businesses of his political rivals and, with or without the assistance of France, did not feel accountable to his people, who were themselves riven along tribal and lingtuistic lines.
And I thought, this country doesn’t need Bono, it needs its own Henri IV: willing to force peace among the competing factions and to pursue the good of everyone. I have no insight whatsoever as to how that could happen.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Aid is not an approach to development. If you’d taken all the money spent on aid in Africa, and you’d invested it Africa would be much better off today. Africa has, for decades offered higher ROI than anywhere else in the world, and so the several hundreds of billions given as aid (most of which ended in the Western bank accounts of Western bureaucrats and African dictators) could actually have generated trillions of dollars in economic activity by now. Charity has never solved a problem in any country.
Also Matt’s claim that Africa gets aid because there are lots of people there. Well Matt, there are more poor people in Asia, even today, than there are poor Africans. And aid is not the only way the world engages with Asia.
June 25th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
The problem with Moyo’s fundamental argument, I think, is that she assumes state, and even NGO or faith-based aid, is crowding out free markets. Whatever the merits of arguments predicated on a crowding out effect may be in advanced economies with relatively attractive investment climates, they simply don’t apply to the overwhelming majority of Africa. The choice is often not between foreign aid or the invisible hand, but between foreign aide and even more massive deprivation.
Moyo’s criticisms of foreign aid are more often accurate than not, but her market uber alles analysis is simplistic and unpersuasive. A free market ain’t gonna get millions of Africans on anti-retrovirals soon.
As for Mr. James Robertson, I’m proudly in the “global warming crowd,” as well as the “evolution” crowd and the “gravity” crowd. I’ll leave others to bicker with you, but know that your opinions are as fact-free as the folks who think their grandfathers rode to work on a stegosaurus.
June 25th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
The problem with Moyo’s fundamental argument, I think, is that she assumes state, and even NGO or faith-based aid, is crowding out free markets.
Obviously you didn’t even listen to the interview, let alone read her book (I did the former, not the latter). She is not some silly globatarian like Kelley Howley and her wife Will. She recognizes that governments provide public goods, and the way they do that is by doing it. Relying on the ‘international community’ to do it for you is like living at your folks house until 40.
We in the white nationalist community salute Dambisa Moyo and her fight for self-determination for Africans. We reject the paternalism of traditional leftists and ‘conservatives’; Africa for Africans , Europe for Europeans, we can negotiate about the ’settler countries’.
June 25th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
TapirBoy1,
It really does happen. Even the popular notion in the mind of the average Westerner that Africa is aid-dependent crowds out investment.
What I never understood about aid is the following. If you’re willing to give the money away for nothing, why not then invest the money. Investment is superior to charity by any means.
Giving people free sandwiches would not cure hunger. Investing in people’s livelihoods would at least increase the chances that people would have food.
And I have to warn Western liberals. You can’t keep seeing it within the prisms of domestic politics and ideological struggles.
USAID is not a government. It is a non-local agenda that dictates what local priorities should be.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Seye–
If you think that foreign aid is all that’s keeping entrepreneurs out of say, Niger, Burkina Faso, or Tanzania, you’re free to do so. That’s a much more comforting notion than the stark reality of life in a disease and war ravaged continent.
I’d also point out this belief is far more “ideological” than the post this “Western liberal” posted.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I felt much the same way when I visited South Africa a few years ago. An obvious issue was the crazy out-of-control growth of plant life on the university grounds where I’d been educated twenty years earlier.
Gosh, what possibly could have changed in Southg Africa during that time?
June 25th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
That should have been “South Africa,” not “Southg Africa.”
June 25th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
TapirBoy1,
No aid’s not all that’s keeping enterpreneurs out of Niger. But you’re missing the point.
Aid does crowd out investment. But even that is not the point. It’s that aid is not an approach to development, and should not be.
Aid is much less likely to solve African problems than mobilising African actors acting in their normal roles in civil society. e.g. Helping the farmer with credit so he can acquire means to store more of his produce. The farmer is already productive, we just need to make him more productive. But doing that without charity and ill-designed aid programmes is the challenge. And there are ways to do it. Kiva.org does just that.
I mean, aid is less than 1% of African GDP. So, somehow Africans are managing to generate economic activity. The key is to support the activities that generate the 99% of African economic activity that has nothing to do with aid.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:10 am
I wish some Africans would come over here and solve all of our problems.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:40 am
At the macro-social level cognitive competence is more important than economic liberty for the economic growth of nations (Rindermann, 2008a) and it is more important than wealth for the democratic development of countries (Rindermann, 2008b). And intelligence seems to be a sensible measure of development up to indicating failing societies.
Rindermann, H. (2007a). The g-factor of international cognitive ability comparisons: The homogeneity of results in PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS and IQ-tests across nations. European Journal of Personality, 21, 667-706.
Rindermann, H. (2007b). The big G-factor of national cognitive ability (author‘s response on open peer commentary). European Journal of Personality, 21, 767-787.
Rindermann, H. (2008a). Relevance of education and intelligence at the national level for the economic welfare of people. Intelligence, 36, 127-142.
Rindermann, H. (2008b). Relevance of education and intelligence for the political development of nations: Democracy, rule of law and political liberty. Intelligence, 36, 306-322.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:41 am
AIDS probably gets more funding than it needs to (it draws the lion’s share of charitable contributions), but there’s no denying that it has been one of the more effective aid programs in Africa and the World. Probably because, like all good programs, it has a specific mission, specific set of tools, and it’s easy to constrain the organization to that area.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:42 am
I should add, this appears to be one of the fundamental reasons why mid 20th century predictions that Asia would stagnate and resource rich Africa would flourish have proved so badly wrong. They have significantly different levels of average cognitive ability.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:45 am
Here is a far bigger crisis than global warming. Say good bye to Africa’s wildlife as Sub-Saharan Africa’s population doubles or more to between 1.5 and 2 billion by 2050.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing phenomenal population growth…
11 countries have fertility above 6 babies per woman and 9 of them are in Africa. Some Panglossians argue that the problem of human population growth will be solved naturally by declining fertility. Well, maybe in Japan and South Korea. But the top two high fertility countries in the world have seen their fertility rise from 2000 to 2007. Mali rose from 6.89 to 7.38. Niger rose from 7.16 to 7.37. They aren’t alone. 5th place Afghanistan rose from 5.87 to 6.64 and 7th place Burundi rose from 6.25 to 6.48. This is a huge tragedy for our environment.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004914.html
June 26th, 2009 at 5:08 am
de Long,
Race science is hocus pocus. Why do black African immigrants have the highest rate of educational attainment in the United States?
June 26th, 2009 at 7:10 am
If Tom Friedman can be cited as a world authority because he talks to cab drivers everywhere, I can be cited as an authority on Africa ’cause I dated an African girl.
To whit, a few comments from what I could tell from getting to know a few Africans as well as from what I know about how “aid” works in general:
(1) Africa doesn’t have any problems with entrepreneurship. The culture in much of Africa is extremely entrepreneurial: everyone is out to make something for themselves. In spite of lefty and (American) Africanist talk about African communal values, what Africa needs is more communal values: people need to be willing to work with each other. Being a good professional or mid-level employee at a large firm needs to be as culturally valued as being your own boss. While much growth is fueled by small business, ultimately the US is not where it is economically because it stuck to a Jeffersonian vision of being a nation of small shopkeepers. Africa suffers from being a continent of chefs with nobody being willing to be sous-chefs, line cooks, etc. And the broth gets spoiled that way.
(2) Corruption is indeed a huge problem: any job that does involve interactions with officials (be they government or private — governments aren’t the only organizations which can be corrupt!) involves not only bribery and quid pro quo but also a dose of politics that makes your office politics seem like a walk in the park (which also fuels the disdain for being other than your own boss).
(3) There is no respect within Africa for African goods and services, or for even the tastes of fellow Africans (which relates to my prev. two points). My ex-gf’s husband makes good money importing surplus shoes from the USA: why? because Nigerians are willing to pay $$$ for shoes merely because they are shoes that Americans would wear (not even made in America … just that they are marketed in America!). I generally think of, e.g. “Buy American” campaigns as naive and misguided. But in Africa, it would be a good start to actually build economies by having Africans, well, buy African products! Remember, in general, developed economies developed behind walls of tarrifs!
(4) Money always has strings attached, and some of those strings are not even conscious. Bill Gates may really sincerely want to do good in Africa. But he didn’t get rich because he is unaware of on which side his bread is buttered. At some subconscious level Bill Gates’ charity is still (as has been documented extensively) what is best for Bill Gates and the companies in which he has extensive stock holdings.
The real problem with aid is not necessarily the aid itself but the nature of the attached strings. Private aid often benefits the aid giver at the expense of the intended recipients. Government aid has an agenda. And international aid (IMF, World Bank) comes with very explicit and very odious strings. In theory those strings should be good — linking aid toward reduction in corruption, etc. But in practice the IMF/World Bank have actually supported corruption (requiring that countries not break contracts made by bribed officials, etc.). Additionally, the conditions attached to World Bank/IMF aid (e.g. lower tarrifs) are precisely the opposite of those under which developed countries like the USA developed (e.g. behind a wall of tarrifs).
For aid to be effective three things need to happen: (1) aid must be given with good strings rather than bad strings attached and (2) it needs to be transformative: it needs to teach Africans to fish rather than fishing for themselves and (3) it needs to not act as if (and thus re-enforce an image of) Africans are helpless — which they are certainly not.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:47 am
@28: One of the major drivers of low cognitive ability is childhood malnutrition, and another is lack of education. Therefore, you think we should feed and educate the children of Africa so they will grow up to build themselves some better institutions and more productive economies?
Seems worth a shot. It’s clear that giving *money* to African *governments* (or corporations, or probably even individuals) is useless or worse – it is only trapped by, or even contributes to, the culture of corruption that afflicts much of the continent – but aid given directly to the people, particularly in kind rather than in cash, is more likely to actually achieve its intended purpose.
I do think it’s important to acknowledge that better African governments can only be built by Africans. Non-Africans can talk about what governments should do, but only Africans can make them *do* what they should do, without creating foreign puppet governments with no legitimacy. That being said, a generation of healthier, better-fed, better-educated Africans would go a long way toward institutional reform, I bet.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Money for primary healthcare, nutrition, clean water, and mosquito nets would save far more African lives than ARVs. It’s a band-aid solution to a much deeper, infrastructural problem that will never get solved as long as the debate continues to be dominated by HIV/AIDS. In fact, I could go so far as to say that money for ARVs isn’t substantial “help” at all.
June 26th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
“Race science is hocus pocus. Why do black African immigrants have the highest rate of educational attainment in the United States?”
If you consider that there are no group differences on average then I’d say you must be a creationist. Have you read the Snyderman/Rothman survey? Out of the 661 members of the American Psychological Association & Behavioural Genetic Association respondents, 3 times as many felt that group differences were due to hereditary and environmental factors, as those who felt they were only due to environmental factors.
Groups differ in the distribution of observable physical characteristics–that, after all, is the main way we recognize them. That is pretty strong evidence that their ancestors adapted to at least somewhat different environments.
There is no a priori reason to suppose that the optimal physical characteristics were different in those different environments but the optimal mental characteristics were the same.
Genetic changes have sped up over the past 10,000 years (note that groups left Africa about 50,000 years ago).
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030090
Johnathan Haidt, has written about some possible things to watch out for in the years ahead:
“A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
But the writing is on the wall. Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others. It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide “races”) adapted to local circumstances by a process known as “co-evolution” in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other. The best documented example of this process is the co-evolution of genetic mutations that maintain the ability to fully digest lactose in adulthood with the cultural innovation of keeping cattle and drinking their milk. This process has happened several times in the last 10,000 years, not to whole “races” but to tribes or larger groups that domesticated cattle.
Recent “sweeps” of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates.
The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event. (By “ethnic” I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.)
I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.
There are reasons to hope that we’ll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism. I expect that dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found, so that any group — like any person — can be said to have many strengths and a few weaknesses, all of which are context-dependent. Furthermore, these cross-group differences are likely to be small when compared to the enormous variation within ethnic groups and the enormous and obvious effects of cultural learning. But whatever consensus we ultimately reach, the ways in which we now think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project. ”
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_4.html#haidt
June 27th, 2009 at 9:37 am
de Long,
Your racse science is complete nonsense. The one thing g measures is the ability of a person to function in modern society. It’s seen as a proxy for intelligence, and can be in a modern industrialised society. But there are serious problems with g testing in African countries.
The studies have shown that 1 in a billion Africans will have an IQ greater than 120. Well it turns out to be very wrong as one study identified 100s of Africans with IQs greater than that index number.
The one common-sense stat that ridicules your entire hocus pocus is that “African immigrants” is the most educationally-accomplished demographic group in America. If Africans are genetically or (for whatever ridiculous reason you’re giving) cognitively inferior, that should never be the case.
June 29th, 2009 at 2:42 am
Junk,
You are aware that groups followed divergent evolutionary paths right? And that pretty much every gene variant identified varies in frequency of distribution between populations? Particularly, I note that the rate of genetic change has increased over the past 10,000 years. Some of these changes appear to affect neurological function, for instance, there is a a new version of a gene, DBA1 that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia. http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0030090
In terms of studies, which are you referring to? If you are making a claim about educational attainment this seems very imprecise. From what institutions were these degrees conferred? In what subjects?
In actual psychometric testing there are well documented group differences on average going back over 80 years (with Ashkenazi Jews averaging about 2/3 of a std dev above other whites, while East Asians have a slightly higher group average than whites).
A recent meta-analytic review by Roth et al. yielded a 1.1 SD difference, with a range of from 0.38 to 1.46 for a total sample of 6,246,729 from corporate, military, and higher education samples.
Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer III, F. S., & Tyler, P. (2001). Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 54, 297-330.