Last Summers Post (before 1pm Pacific today)

Trackback is fun. Check out the trackback links to Brad Delong’s post on the Summers fiasco. I’ll not grant the courtesy of a link, but this is what we have:

* The Libertarian Man of Mystery explaining that the diffences in racial performance were caused, of course, by inherent racial characteristics. When you can no longer defend one appalling form of discrimination, find another.

*Bitsblog declaring that Brad Delong is a racist for mentioning that SAT scores vary across racial groups, and bemoaning the fact that no one is ever willing to call liberals racists.

*Villainous Company not so much arguing directly as implying that variance is explained by inherent racial characteristics, and suggesting that the liberal academic elite is unwilling to deal with this issue. Villainous links approvingly to a Steve Sailer article. . .

This is what you get. I wonder why anyone up to a moderate Democrat can get away with suggesting that women are inferior, while you need genuine conservative wackos to bring up race. Still, it’s a useful point, because it should serve to remind people who find Summers argument appealing of the company that they’ll be having to keep.

For the record, Delong’s point is clear even without mentioning the fact that men score better in all racial groups. When you drink the “inherent differences” Kool Aid, you have to go all the way. If you assert that men are inherent better at math, you MUST be prepared to answer the question of why Asian women are, in fact, better at math than white men. If you go that far down the inherent road, it can be hard to return to the social variables, particularly since they a)do an excellent job of explaining racial variance, and b)do an even better job of explaining gender variance. In other words, you have to explain why racial inequality is social, and gender inequality is genetic.