Cultural evolution and testing (Part II)

There has been a growing feeling that something is wrong with the direction America is heading since the turn of the century. The idea that we live in a time of crisis has gained currency in recent times. America in Crisis is an analysis of the political and economic dynamics responsible for this feeling. I use a cyclical concept, not William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational cycle referred to in the previous link, but Peter Turchin’s secular cycle, with corrections that address some of the issues raised in the cited review. I believe a major driver of society is cultural evolution and talk about it a lot. There is also quite of bit of political, economic and financial discussion as I believe these disciplines are also very important to understanding what is going on. I wrote up my analysis in a book with the same name as this substack. I cover some of the material in the book here, plus new insights as they occur to me. For easier comprehension it may help to read posts in sequential order so that when an older post is referenced there is some familiarity.

This post is a continuation of my previous post about a new interpretation of differences in average IQ between groups.  It is best to read that post before proceeding with this one.

People achieve higher incomes and status through routes to success that require access to useful cultural information (i.e. the know-how to achieve success). Groups who possess pre-existing cultural structures that enable them to readily acquire this information will be more successful than (and have higher levels of C_G) than groups who do not. An example is provided by differential development trajectories of major Nigerian ethnic groups in response to colonization:

In Nigeria, the experiences of the Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba peoples provide a good example of this phenomenon. Igbo society before colonization had social structures than emphasized individual achievement, whereas the Hausa and Yoruba emphasized hereditary statuses with less of an emphasis on individual ambition. The growth of market economies during colonial and post-colonial times gave the traditionally more-entrepreneurial Igbo a head start in adapting to the change.¹

The Igbo head start allowed them to achieve greater success during the colonial period:

Great Britain took over Nigeria initially as part of its effort to outlaw the slave trade. Lagos was annexed in 1861 and a sphere of influence over the country was recognized in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, although a protectorate would not be proclaimed until 1901. This new political environment favored the Igbo, whose initiative, self-discipline, and future orientation predisposed them to succeed not only in their homeland but also elsewhere in Nigeria, where they soon became dominant as merchants and civil servants. They thus took on a role like that of middleman minorities elsewhere in the empire, such as the Parsis in western India, the Chinese in Malaya, and the South Asians in East Africa…This trend even affected the army. By independence, 24 of the 52 senior army officers of the rank of major and above were Igbos.

The Igbo show superior academic performance compared to the British mean (see Table 1). The high scores of Igbo, some other African ethnic groups, Chinese, and Indian immigrants relative to other immigrant groups and whites suggest higher levels of C_G. These differences suggest the presence of greater C_G-enhancing cultural structures in some groups relative to others.

One example of a pre-existing structure is an organic belief in the importance of education among parents in high-performing groups. For example, a teacher of African immigrants in the London borough of Lambeth remarks “Parents show respect for teachers–they defer to professionalism... they want to know what they can do to help, and this plays a big part in children’s success... it is backed by action.” Another example of this is the importance East Asian cultures place on education as a result of Confucian values, which likely plays a role in the academic success of Asian Americans.

Possession of the cultural beliefs and norms underlying a particular level of C_G is a consequence of a process of cultural evolution. Groups like the Igbo in Britian or Asian Americans with pre-existing cultural structures favoring education show a higher C_G than groups lacking these structures. A group like African Americans is descended from a collection of individuals forcibly removed from their cultures of origin and thrown into a new milieu surrounded by fellow slaves from many different cultural groups and subordinated to an alien culture of fearsome power. They developed a collective African American culture adapted to their environment. They were submerged in a white-created, white-dominated cultural environment from which they were excluded from participation. Though aware of many of the paths towards success that were available to other Americans, these were not available to them and dangerous to pursue. Cultural attributes that suppressed the “success drive” were adaptive. Attributes conducive to economic success, such as literacy, which could get you beaten or even killed, were not adaptive. Such attributes, though adaptive under slavery, and to a lesser extent under Jim Crow, are maladaptive today. One example of this might be the phenomenon of “Acting White”, a negative effect of academic success on popularity hypothesized to exist among African American students.

Figure 1. Black lynchings, HBCU formation, relative test scores and Educational Environment.

Emancipation ended some of the constraints on African American economic development. Evidence for this is shown by the explosive growth in the number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) after 1865 (see Figure 1). Also shown in the figure is a measure of the educational environment developed in a previous post which shows a sharp rise from emancipation, followed by a decline due to the onset of white suppressive actions proxied by the lynching series in Figure 1 and the onset of Jim Crow policies in the early 20^th century. The effect of Jim Crow racial suppression on the economic environment is shown by trends in black household wealth relative to whites. Relative wealth grew by only 0.5 percentage points per decade from 1904 to 1936, compared to 1.5 points from 1870 to 1904 and 1.6 points from 1936 to 1983. Since 1983, wealth growth has been essentially flat, likely a manifestation of the modern rise of SP culture. This economic effect, represented by wage trends, in incorporated into the environmental measure shown as the red line in Figure 1.

The environment characterized in Figure 1 made emancipated African Americans something like a “nation within a nation” with a GDPpc lower than that of the larger American nation, which would imply a lower C_G as seems to be the case for nations as shown in Figure 2. This figure shows a plot of national C_G estimates versus national per capita GDP for a number of countries. Shown as the bold symbols are values for average IQ (a proxy for C_G) versus average income (a proxy for cultural-evolutionary environment) for the four major racial groups in America. C_G for American racial groups shows the same sort of relation relative to income as does national C_G relative to GDPpc.

Figure 2. C_G of groups versus their economic environment, proxied by income or per capita GDP

The story told so far is the experience of slavery left African Americans at a serious disadvantage relative to whites, which they immediately began to address, as proxied by the HBCU founding rate measure in Figure 1. The rapid decline beginning with the end of Reconstruction in 1877 signals the end of the eight year experiment in multiracial democracy. But there was a core of resistance that lasted beyond the end of Reconstruction as shown by the two decades of steady African American progress as measured by HBCU formation and the growth in black/white wealth ratio mentioned earlier. This was too much progress for the white establishment in the South; the right of African Americans to vote was taken away and a program of racial Apartheid enacted though Jim Crow laws. The effect of these policies was to encourage the development of a Black Nation separate from the rest of the nation. This is the less-developed “nation within a nation” (inhabited by people with lower C_G) implied by Figure 2, which would pose no threat to the white power structure. The environment under Jim Crow was also one where aspirations to something higher seemed unwise. Author Richard Wright’s experiences in the Jim Crow South ca. 1926 as recounted in his autobiography Black Boy provide an illustration of this concept (quote from page 175):

No Negroes in my environment had ever thought of organizing, no matter in how orderly a fashion, and petitioning their white employers for higher wages. The very thought would have been terrifying to them, and they knew that the whites would have retaliated with swift brutality. So, pretending to conform to the laws of the whites, grinning, bowing, they let their fingers stick to what they could touch. And the whites seemed to like it.

But I, who stole nothing, who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspired fear in them. The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.

Another example, introduced in a previous post is woke:

{The] concept of “woke” was expressed by the Blues singer Leadbelly in the late 1930’s. After recording a protest song about the Scotsboro boys he said: “I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” The Scotsboro boys were nine black teenagers who served six years in prison for being insufficiently woke. As Leadbelly tells it, these boys were riding the rails and ending up in a boxcar with two white women who were also riding the rails. Being “along through there” meant being in the Deep South (Alabama), where simply being in the presence of a white woman meant the possibility of very bad things happening to you if you were a black male. That is, being “woke” to this state of affairs was a survival strategy for black men in the Deep South. This dynamic played out more tragically in the case of Emmet Till, a black teenager from Chicago who apparently whistled at a white woman, an edgy behavior for a 14 year-old black teenager in Chicago in 1955, but a much more serious thing in Mississippi. Not being woke could get you killed, as happened to Till.

Today, the modern version of woke and the acting white phenomenon are examples of once adaptive cultural attributes that have become maladaptive. These and other things may play a role in lower values of C_G. We can characterize change in African American C_G since slavery using the cultural evolution model previously used to model educational advancement (see discussion around Figure 3 here). The output of this model was scaled to this application (A zero model output corresponds to an IQ value around 75 (the intercept of the correlation in Figure 2), and a value of 100 corresponds IQ of 100). The result was used to produce estimates for evolving C_G. It is assumed that ex-slaves started out with a C_G corresponding to an IQ of about 75, (i.e. fully undeveloped) and by the end of the century it had risen to about 81. After this, Jim Crow suppressed further development and C_G was around 79 in 1940. By 1980 it had risen to about 84 due to a combination of wage growth reflecting SC culture and the gradual dismantling of the Jim Crow regime. Since then, under SP culture, progress has slowed, with the model forecasting a value of 86 today.

1.      Richerson, P.J and R. Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28.