Ron Unz – Writings and Perspectives

Although the vast majority of the angry responses greeting my Race/IQ article focused on a few of the ethnicities I had examined—Irish, Mexicans, Italians—my coverage had actually been quite broad, and I presented a large number of IQ gaps whose existence seemed inexplicible from a strictly genetic perspective.

Indeed, the first example I cited was the case of Germany, which showed a consistent IQ gap of 5-10 points between East and West, despite the two populations being genetically indistinguishable. Since Communist East Germany was dreary but hardly suffered from Third World levels of malnutrition or physical deprivation, I argued that a biological cause was unlikely, and that the difference was therefore almost certainly due to socio-economic or cultural factors.   Naturally, my critics either ignored or ridiculed my analysis. The central argument of my piece had been that although GDP and IQ were highly correlated, the direction of causality might well be from the former to the latter, and this attracted much derision. Continue reading →

Although the claims regarding Irish IQ had unexpectedly attracted so many of the angry attacks on my recent Race/IQ series, it seemed quite obvious to me that this represented merely a stalking-horse for the related question of Mexican IQ. Continue reading →

One of the many surprises I’ve encountered when reading the dozens of web pages and many hundreds of comments attacking my Race/IQ analysis is the overwhelming focus of these critics upon my Irish data. Although I discuss similar ethnic IQ evidence regarding the Greeks, Balkan Slavs, Southern Italians, Dutch, Germans, and various other European peoples, it sometimes seems like the attacks on my Irish analysis are more numerous than those against all these other cases combined, perhaps even if we also throw in all the examples dealing with East Asians and every other non-Irish race on the planet.

One obvious explanation might be the possible ethnic origins of many of these anonymous racialist bloggers and commenters. For example, when I pointed out that Lynn had devoted many years of personal research in Ireland and eventually concluded that they were clearly a low-IQ race, several commenters angrily denounced Lynn, one going so far as to call him an anti-Irish bigot of KKK- or Nazi-like proportions. But if so many people want to attack the Irish Front of my analysis, and suggest I’m just dishonestly cherry-picking the data to fabricate a fraudulent case, perhaps we should indeed take a closer look at the Great Irish IQ Question. Continue reading →

Given the vast outpouring of agitated and angry remarks by those bloggers and commenters whose long-cherished beliefs have been challenged by my Race/IQ article, it’s always very nice to discover a supportive voice, even if I might not necessary agree with absolutely every single point made.

For example, Jason Antrosio’s popular academic blog “Living Anthropologically” just yesterday published a lengthy analysis of my article and the controversy it had generated under the very flattering title “Race IQ—Game Over.” The author, a professor of anthropology on the East Coast whose blog has accumulated a remarkable 8,800 Likes, suggested that my analysis might constitute a far more effective refutation of the “strong hereditarian IQ position” than those previously made by such notable academics as Jared Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould, whose “extremely weak rebuttals…would be dismissed, in a kind of ‘that’s all you have?’ sort of way.” He now suggests that individuals seriously challenged by racialists on the topic “can declare game over on Race/IQ—see Unz 2012.” Continue reading →

Richard Lynn has now produced a lengthy and detailed rebuttal to my article Race, IQ & Wealth questioning his theories, as has Helmuth Nyborg, another leading IQ expert and strong supporter of Lynn.  Their analyses have been published or highlighted on several prominent racialist websites, and I am herein providing my own rejoinder.

First, I will admit to being a bit confused about Lynn’s overall position.  Although he often seems to be endorsing my viewpoint in its generality, he seems to strongly dispute nearly all the specific details. Continue reading →

As I’ve often told my friends over the years, the careful investigation of racial and ethnic differences presents huge difficulties in present-day American society.

On the one hand, the topic is a very interesting and important one, especially in a society with America’s enormous diversity, but the powerful social taboos surrounding such discussions have dissuaded the vast majority of skilled and objective academics from dipping more than a toe into these treacherous waters.

Therefore, this vacuum of discussion has been filled by a considerable number of small but energetic racialist websites and bloggers, usually maintaining anonymity, whose research competence tends to be very mixed and whose analysis is usually molded by a gripping ideological framework. But with neutral academics being AWOL, the data collected by this racialist community is often the only game in town. Continue reading →

If New York is America’s finance capital, with Los Angeles filling the same role for entertainment and Silicon Valley for technology, then surely the Boston area constitutes our center of academic and intellectual life, being home to a host of top universities such as Harvard, MIT, BU, Tufts, and many others. Partly for this reason, most estimates of average educational levels and “intelligence” have placed the Bay State at or near the very top of the rankings.

Thus, with Boston making much of its living from the intellect-processing industry, it is hardly surprising that the first major media discussion of my article Race, IQ, and Wealth should appear in the Boston Globe, these days owned by the New York Times Company. The piece provided an excellent (and quite favorable) summary of my major points, and featured a large photo of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the grandfather of modern intelligence testing, with a version of the piece also running in the print edition of the Sunday Globe.  I very much hope this is an early indication that coverage of my analysis will gradually begin extending beyond the hostile racialist websites which have so far represented its primary audience.

What Do IQ Differences Really Mean?, Josh Rothman, The Boston Globe Continue reading →

As I have recently mentioned to several people, I had been aware of the large anomalies and logical inconsistencies in the Lynn/Vanhanen IQ model for nearly a decade, and had repeatedly pointed them out on various Internet discussion forums. But since nobody ever paid the slightest attention to what I was saying, I finally decided to write up and publish my Race, IQ, and Wealth.

However, although 80% of my piece consisted merely of setting down in print what I already had long known, I did make some fascinating additional discoveries, the most significant being the seemingly enormous impact of rural/urban conditions upon the tested IQ of white European populations. Continue reading →

The central finding of my recent article “Race, IQ, and Wealth” was a simple one.