George Rebane
To solve a problem, first you need to correctly define it.
The 1aug22 WSJ had an entire section that examined ‘Why Black and Hispanic Workers Get Stuck on the Lowest Rung’. In these pages we have covered related aspects of this issue over the years. Last year noted scholar and political scientist Charles Murray (reviled by progressives) published Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America (2021), which I reported on extensively in ‘Equity Denies Reality’.
The WSJ looked at the lowest rung problem from several angles, with lots of stats showing that the country’s 12.4% Black population is not matched in the 8% of entry level jobs held by Black workers. Apparently, in the literature these are called “front line workers”, a politically correct euphemism for those on the lowest rung of the employment ladder. And very few of our larger companies employ even 10% of Black workers. From there the record gets murkier with smaller shares of front line minorities being promoted to higher positions in mid-management and top slots in corporate leadership. The unstated thesis of this reportage is that we are falling short on the equity scale in America’s workplaces if we don’t achieve pro-rata population shares of Black and Hispanic workers at each level on the corporate ladders.
Unfortunately, these analyses all ignore some seminal factors needed to understand this employment issue – these being intellectual capacity and intellectual ability. All the articles in the section make the tacit but questionable assumption that all people have an equal intellectual capacity from which, through education and training, various intellectual abilities can be acquired. Everyone having equal intellectual abilities flies in the face of government data as reported by Charles Murray and others.
It should be clear that an individual’s capability to acquire intellectual abilities is determined by his intellectual capacity. Intellectual capacity, also known as ‘cognitive ability’, has various metrics, the most popular being IQ now suffering from bouts of political correctness. Over populations consisting of all racial and cultural cohorts, average IQ has been normed at the average value or mean of 100, with a standard deviation of 15. (In a bell curve 68% of the distribution lies between +/- one standard deviation of the mean. That means that 68% of humans have an IQ ranging from 85 to 115.)
The figure below is from Murray’s Facing Reality. As can be seen, there is a relative paucity of ‘Latin’ and ‘African’ people, i.e. workers overall, and of those even fewer in the higher cognitive ability (intellectual capacity) region.
This data says that if pro-rata equity is going to be enforced, then companies will need to hire and promote minorities who do not measure up to the existing intellectual standards required to fill upper-level jobs. The obvious result of that is an expected decline in corporate performance wherever such mandates are implemented.
The woke extremists will continue to claim that there is no difference between cognitive abilities based on race, that the government and academic data is somehow biased and deficient. But the reality is overwhelming when we take in the K-12 academic performance of the various races cum cultures. Blacks and Hispanics continue to perform significantly lower than the Asians and European, that happens to be an easily discernible fact also in the workplace. One can argue that all this is due to the minorities getting the short-end in our public schools, but that is not a factor in the present discussion.
However you come down on our public education and its delivery to, say, whites vs minorities, that is not the point. We are here discussing ONLY the existential results of the schools’ output as it enters and survives in the workforce. It would be beyond silly to presume that minority workers as a whole do not bring with them the deficits they demonstrated while in school. And so far, corporate and government post-school remediation programs have been an utter failure in both their acceptance by the minorities and their effectiveness.
Now that doesn’t mean we should give up and accept race-based promotions or keep the minorities on the low rungs of the workplace. But it does mean that continuing to do what we have been doing and expecting different results guarantees that we as a society are behaving insanely. And you can bet the farm that not acknowledging the real dimensions of the intellectual capacities vs abilities reality will continue to prevent us from correctly defining the problem which we as a country have to solve.
