While Andrew Sullivan, like Dubya, is taking a very French August vacation, there's still time on the Provincetown hammock to fire off one of those longer pieces for the Sunday Times of London. And it looks like he was trying to slip one past the Times readers in the summer torpor. The article opens with the classic hack trick, the bait-and-switch -- the reader thinks I'm talking about X, but I'm actually talking about the surprisingly relevant Y.
So he tries to hook his London readers with his bleak description of the present day city, and then reveals that he's actually talking about late 1970s New York City, justifying his teaser 'graf at the start:
It's a wonderful life
American society has rescued itself from what seemed to be terminal decline caused by family breakdown. Andrew Sullivan sees a lesson here for Britain
Now the overall analogy is already strained, not least because of the very different roles of gun violence in the two cities. But the real sleight of hand comes when he argues, recycling a David Brooks New York Times column from a few days ago, that the US is witnessing a significant improvement in socio-economic indicators:
From nadirs in the late 1970s most social indicators in the US have been solidly heading upward for a long, long while ... Educational standards? Judging by IQ scores, intelligence has been going up for much of the past century.
The sudden switch in time periods should alert the reader that something is up. It is indeed true that measured IQ has risen over the last century. But this is the basic fact that discredits the use of the IQ test as a measure of innate ability: how can it be that successive generations have higher innate ability on average than their biological forebears?
There's a bunch of web material on this puzzle under the rubric "the Flynn effect," and it collapses the intellectual underpinnings of anyone who would seek to draw conclusions about the link between IQ and, say, race -- just as The Bell Curve tried to do, an effort that Andrew Sullivan was sufficiently enamoured with to devote a special issue of The New Republic to it. This Atrios post usefully collects critiques of the book, emphasising that it has zero intellectual respectability amongst mainstream social scientists [Atrios concludes by asking: "Andrew Sullivan, bigot or fool or both?"]. And, building on Sullywatch, Sullivan has a history of using David Brooks columns as a Trojan horse for some fairly edgy genetics-based theories.
The one thing we have to give Sullivan a bit of credit for is intellectual consistency. Whereas most researchers view the fact of rising IQ scores as evidence of flaws in the whole IQ concept, Sully's sentence above clearly hitches his wagon to the view that intelligence is rising over time. Perhaps he'll use one of these longer ST pieces to flesh out the full implications of this line of thought for British readers?
UPDATE 16 August: The Bell Curve seems to undergoing a resurgence. Brad DeLong notes another example of an egregious cite, and provides copious critiques of the book. And (26 Aug), Sully is now explicit that the Bell Curve is ready for another go-round, linking to an article by its coauthor, Charles Murray:
One of my proudest moments in journalism was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter from "The Bell Curve" in the New Republic before anyone else dared touch it. I published it along with multiple critiques (hey, I believed magazines were supposed to open rather than close debates) - but the book held up, and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade ... And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence ... well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense. I'm still proud to claim that label - classical liberal. And I'm proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did. Pity [Larry] Summers hasn't been able to match their courage. But recalling the tidal wave of intolerance, scorn and ignorance that hit me at the time, I understand why.
Which has triggered a broad response. Matthew Yglesias and Atrios.
So he tries to hook his London readers with his bleak description of the present day city, and then reveals that he's actually talking about late 1970s New York City, justifying his teaser 'graf at the start:
It's a wonderful life
American society has rescued itself from what seemed to be terminal decline caused by family breakdown. Andrew Sullivan sees a lesson here for Britain
Now the overall analogy is already strained, not least because of the very different roles of gun violence in the two cities. But the real sleight of hand comes when he argues, recycling a David Brooks New York Times column from a few days ago, that the US is witnessing a significant improvement in socio-economic indicators:
From nadirs in the late 1970s most social indicators in the US have been solidly heading upward for a long, long while ... Educational standards? Judging by IQ scores, intelligence has been going up for much of the past century.
The sudden switch in time periods should alert the reader that something is up. It is indeed true that measured IQ has risen over the last century. But this is the basic fact that discredits the use of the IQ test as a measure of innate ability: how can it be that successive generations have higher innate ability on average than their biological forebears?
There's a bunch of web material on this puzzle under the rubric "the Flynn effect," and it collapses the intellectual underpinnings of anyone who would seek to draw conclusions about the link between IQ and, say, race -- just as The Bell Curve tried to do, an effort that Andrew Sullivan was sufficiently enamoured with to devote a special issue of The New Republic to it. This Atrios post usefully collects critiques of the book, emphasising that it has zero intellectual respectability amongst mainstream social scientists [Atrios concludes by asking: "Andrew Sullivan, bigot or fool or both?"]. And, building on Sullywatch, Sullivan has a history of using David Brooks columns as a Trojan horse for some fairly edgy genetics-based theories.
The one thing we have to give Sullivan a bit of credit for is intellectual consistency. Whereas most researchers view the fact of rising IQ scores as evidence of flaws in the whole IQ concept, Sully's sentence above clearly hitches his wagon to the view that intelligence is rising over time. Perhaps he'll use one of these longer ST pieces to flesh out the full implications of this line of thought for British readers?
UPDATE 16 August: The Bell Curve seems to undergoing a resurgence. Brad DeLong notes another example of an egregious cite, and provides copious critiques of the book. And (26 Aug), Sully is now explicit that the Bell Curve is ready for another go-round, linking to an article by its coauthor, Charles Murray:
One of my proudest moments in journalism was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter from "The Bell Curve" in the New Republic before anyone else dared touch it. I published it along with multiple critiques (hey, I believed magazines were supposed to open rather than close debates) - but the book held up, and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade ... And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence ... well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense. I'm still proud to claim that label - classical liberal. And I'm proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did. Pity [Larry] Summers hasn't been able to match their courage. But recalling the tidal wave of intolerance, scorn and ignorance that hit me at the time, I understand why.
Which has triggered a broad response. Matthew Yglesias and Atrios.
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