Topic category:  Other/General

Libertarian economist Walter Block teaches at New Orleans’ Loyola University. He gave a guest lecture (I couldn’t find out what the topic was), at Baltimore’s Loyola College in Maryland last week, and during the Q&A afterwards made the mistake of either forgetting or refusing to lie, in response to a question on the economics of race, sex, and IQ. Baltimore Sun columnist Laura Vozzella writes,

College officials have declined to elaborate on just what Block said. Apparently it was so offensive that they can't even bear to say why they're offended.

But on the phone with me, Block filled in the hot-button blank: “Sociobiology.”He said he'd told the audience that differences in IQ might account for why blacks and women earn about 30 percent less than their white, male counterparts.

Block observed at the beginning of his lecture that the Jesuits have been "hijacked by a bunch of Marxists and liberation theologians."

Actually, my understanding of the research is that IQ explains the black-white differential—though much of it could be explained via comparative racial crime rates—but not the male-female differential.

(Note 1: Academia has for over 40 years promoted the myth that white racism causes black poverty, and black poverty in turn causes black crime. The truth is more like this: Black racism causes black crime, and black crime in turn causes black poverty. Note 2: College-educated black women earn more than college-educated white women.)

About a generation ago, economists determined that 99 percent of the male-female wage differential could be explained by reference to the different choices men and women made, often in concert. Given the same educational level, the average man works more hours per week, and has worked more years at his job than his average female colleague. That is because when people marry, the woman typically takes time off from work each time she gives birth, and works fewer hours when she returns, so as to have more time to devote to her child. Likewise, in the average family, the husband never takes paternity leave, and works additional hours, in order to compensate for the wife’s wages lost due to childbearing and rearing.

(And for selflessly doing his duty, the man gets the business from lying feminist “scholars” and, if his wife decides to divorce him, from “sensitized” judges and family court social workers, as well.)

Where sex and IQ come in is regarding jobs requiring extremely high IQs, such as engineers, mathematicians, and physicists. Only a fraction as many white and Asian women inhabit such rare climes as do white and Asian men, and virtually no black women do. Women average just about the same IQ as men, but are clustered more at the middle of the bell curve, while men tend more to the extremes. Thus, a higher percentage of men are at both the mentally retarded and genius levels. (Some group IQ averages: Ashkenazi Jews: 110-115; Northeast Asians: 105; whites 100; Hispanics in the U.S.: 89; American blacks: 85; Indians in India: 84; Sub-Saharan African blacks: 67. Source: Richard Lynn. Race Differences in Intelligence, 2006.)

However, while the sexual IQ extremes explain the “disparities” of Nobel Prizes in the sciences, they don’t play much of a role in general income disparities between the sexes. Due to industry’s corruption of H-1B visas, there are few jobs for white American engineers and computer scientists, and a black female VP for minority affairs with an IQ of at most 110 will get paid at least 50 percent more than a white man professor of engineering with an IQ of 145. Well, we can’t have any outbreaks of the truth, and so Loyola College in Maryland President Brian Linnane apologized to all offended blacks and women, as did the school’s Adam Smith Society and Economics Department.

The economics professors and ASS made you-know-whats of themselves, and lied about economics, in the bargain:

The officials and members of the Adam Smith Society and the Economics faculty wish to apologize for the insensitive and incorrect remarks made Thursday, November 6 by invited speaker Professor Walter Block of Loyola University New Orleans.

Professor Block's response to a question about the differences between average earnings of African-Americans and whites in America, which maintained that the disparity could be explained by differences in average productivity, was offensive, and we are sincerely sorry for it.

It is important to note that the remark was offensive not just because it was racially insensitive, but because it was erroneous and indicated poor-quality scholarship. There is ample scholarly evidence that, after adjusting for productivity-related characteristics (e.g., years of schooling, work experience, union and industry status, etc.) a considerable wage gap remains. This gap is likely explained by employment discrimination. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see J. Gwartney and R. Stroup, Microeconomics, 12th Edition (2009), pp. 292-4.

Professor Block's remarks also included offensive comments regarding the source of wage disparities between men and women. We are deeply sorry for these remarks and the harm they have caused.

In short, economists are well aware of the existing gender and racial injustice in America and are conducting much useful research to help overcome it. Furthermore, we are united as a department in refusing to tolerate or sympathize with gender or racial prejudice in any form.

We appreciate the thoughtful questions and responses we've received from members of the Loyola community, particularly its students, and we look forward to continued dialogue on topics of great importance such as this one.

The Loyola College Economics Department

(Someone responded at the Loyola message board with appropriate mockery.)

Someone needs to get on the phone to the Baltimore PD. Someone has kidnapped or done away with all of Loyola in Maryland’s economists, and replaced them with imposters!

The first college I taught at was a Jesuit school. My remedial composition supervisor was a middle-aged Irishwoman who had short-cropped, red or strawberry blonde hair, who wore army boots and dark green English officers’ sweaters with shoulder patches, and who had a feminist calendar open at all times to the month (likely September) displaying a picture of the eugenicist and founder of the movement for unlimited access to abortion for females of all ages, Margaret Sanger.

That’s when I learned that I have more respect for the Mother Church than today’s “Jesuits.” And I’m a Jew!

Admitting woefully unqualified people to college based on their race, and then permitting them and other people who are hostile to science to shut down scientific debate is reason #1,179,832 why affirmative action is a bad thing.

Loyola College in Maryland is equally hostile towards Catholicism and science, but its Economics Department is hardly unique. Economics is just one more discipline to be rendered worthless in the almost trillion-dollar scam that American higher education has become.

(A tip ‘o’ the hat to VDARE.com’s James Fulford.)

Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

Biography - Nicholas Stix

Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.