+After this overview, let me summarize the content of this pretty-short-for-a-book in the form of a pretty-long-for-a-blog-post. After introducing our topic, Chapter 2 covers the stats on American demographics. At present, the country is about 60% white, 18% Latino, 13% black, and 6% Asian, but the, um, black-and-white framing of American racial discourse makes more sense in this historical context that there were a lot fewer Latinos and Asians before a [1965 immigration reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965): in 1960, the figures were 87% white, 11% black. Big cities have become much more multiracial, whereas smaller cities and towns remain either monoracially white or biracial (the two races being white/black in the South, or white/Latino in the southwest and southern California).
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+Here and through the remaining chapters up until the conclusion, Murray elects to switch to the nomenclature "European"/"African"/"Latin" rather than white/black/Latino (respectively, with "Asian" remaining unaltered), on the grounds that using less familiar terms for these groups will drag along less cultural and political baggage without resorting to outright obfuscation ("populations A, B, C, and D"). It doesn't feel that effective to my ear, and I kind expect it to backfire for a lot of readers, to whom the continental African/European/Asian terms probably sound _more_ racially essentialist than I think Murray wants to come off as!
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+The next four chapters follow a formula: "Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", "Race Differences in Violent Crime", "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Cognitive Ability", and "First-Order Effects of Race Differences in Violent Crime." (Those chapter titles felt awful just to type!! Am I really doing this?) Much of the value of these chapters is in the graphs and tables documenting statistics that many readers will be unfamiliar with. The scatterplots of nationally-representative test scores are interesting. The black–white gap _did_ shrink between '70s when it was about 1.3 standard deviations, until about the 1990s, but has been stubbornly stable since then at about 0.85 standard deviations (a.k.a. [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)). Murray estimates the current white–Latino difference at 0.62 standard deviations, and the current white–Asian difference at 0.3 standard deviations (favoring Asians).
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+Murray briefly addresses two popular (but mutually in tension) classes of objection: that the gaps will vanish with better (more equitable) education policy, and that the tests are biased. The response to the we-can-fix-it objection is basically, "We tried that and it didn't work": a lot of money and effort has been poured into attempts to narrow the racial achievement gap over the past thirty years of its stability, but we just don't know of any interventions that lastingly increase cognitive ability for _anyone_. The response to the tests-are-biased objection is basically, "We checked for that and it doesn't work": psychometricians have all sorts of technical measures to verify that their tests are doing what they think, but beyond that, if the tests were biased, you would expect them to underpredict school and workplace performance, and that's not what we see: for example, black people get worse college grades than their SAT and ACT scores would predict, not better.
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+Perhaps you could argue both that the tests are racist and that teachers are _even more_ racist?—but you'd want to be specific about what alternative metric of "merit" you think they're being racist _with respect to_. The thing about tests is, a vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number; if you care about group rank orderings, you _could_ come up with a measurement that gets the the group rank ordering you want. (Black people have more melanin than white people, on average! People with more letters in their name take longer to say their name out loud, on average! Cats do better than humans on a test of scratching, on average! "Hispanic" comes before "White" in alphabetical order!) The problem is that it looks like the "cognitive ability" thing that psychometricians are trying to measure is actually a pretty robust abstraction that summarizes variation _in individuals_ that people care about (like the ability to master a profession); if it were just a tool of racial oppression, it's hard to see why it would work so well _within_ groups.
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+[TODO: mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Intelligence_Test_of_Cultural_Homogeneity ]
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+In the chapter on violent crime, Murray presents a table of black/white and Latino/white ratios of arrests for violent crimes in thirteen cities for which data was available. The median black/white ratio was 9.0 (that is, 9 black people arrested for violent crimes per 1 white person so arrested) and the median Latino/white ratio was 2.4.
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+To argue that these ratios are driven by real differences in behavior rather than biased police, Murray attempts to "triangulate" the true crime rate with other data. For example, arrests for murder specifically are going to be less biased by selective enforcement or fraud: even evil and corrupt cops who don't consider themselves above, say, planting evidence of drugs, seem less likely or able to fake a human corpse. So if racial differences in murder charges match differences in violent-crime arrests more generally, that's probabilistic evidence that arrests are tracking a real difference in criminal behavior.
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+Interestingly, Murray argues that this is true even if you don't think police are generally getting the right suspect (!!), as long as the suspect who is arrested is of the same race as the actual perpetrator, which will usually be the case given how many murders are crimes of passion where the victim and perpetrator knew each other (in highly segregated communities), or tied to gang activity (where gangs are almost always monoracial). The scenario most prone to racist police falsely accusing a black person—non-gang-related murders where the alleged perp is black and didn't know the victim—only accounted for 4% of all homocides. Meanwhile, the group ratios for murder arrests are more stark than for violent crimes more generally: a median black/white ratio of 18.1, and a median Latino/white ratio of 4.7, which is not the pattern we would expect to see if cops were using their discretionary powers to falsely imprison blacks and Latinos on lesser charges. Another source of data for triangulation is in reports of crimes _to_ the police: if crime _victims_ aren't racist in the same way the police themselves might be, then that would show up in the numbers—and it turns out that even black and Latino victims also report more black and Latino perpretrators, even in neighborhoods where they are a minority.
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+As an argument about patterns of behavior in our own world, I find this quite convincing, but again, Murray's agnosticism about the causes of behavior limits its applicability; I expect the sophisticated advocate of structural-racism theories to be entirely unmoved. Even if the police sometimes getting the wrong man can't change the conclusion about which races do how many murders, a world in which the police sometimes get the wrong man of the same race is _exactly_ the kind of factor that would contribute to structural racism—if the System is going to treat members of your racial caste interchangeably anyway, that changes your _incentives_ to commit crime, relative to the world where people were [literally raceblind](/2021/Mar/link-see-color/). We don't know what other equilibria might be possible for a civilization with a discipline of Actual Social Science, even if there's no obvious way to jump out of our own equilibrium with the crude "policy" levers available to actualy-existing governments.
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+(Note, "We don't know what's possible (given the exact right conditions)" is _not_ the same thing as "Anything is possible (if we all just believe in a better world)". Ignorance may be conducive to hope, but does not constitute any _specific_ hope.)
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+At times, Murray's inability in his commentary to consider flaws in the _status quo_ seems like a blindness bordering on complicity. Of the criminal justice system, he writes:
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+> The social scientist's view of who commits crimes is a set of snapshots—the report of a crime, an arrest, the decision to prosecute, the charge on which the suspect is tried, the outcome of the prosecution, and the sentence for a guilty plea or verdict. At each step, the authorities are usually trying to get it right, but "getting it right" means different things. Decisions to prosecute depend on many factors besides the likelihood that the arrested person committed the crime (e.g., whether these is evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt if it goes to trial). The decision about the charges that will be filed is a main bargaining chip in a plea bargain negotiation.
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+This is all very "reasonable" by the methods and epistemology of Murray's world, and I'm afraid—not a figure of speech, really afraid—that there's nothing I could say, no words I could possibly type to explain the cruel capriciousness of that world's "reasonableness" to those who haven't personally been on the other side, who have never been abused by a total institution like the "justice" system. Two three-day stints in the psych ward are [what did it to me](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/). Going to school might not be bad enough if you went to a good school.
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+_The authorities are usually trying to get it right._ I mean, yes—_by the Authority's own corrupt standards_. The authorities are ordinary men and women trying to do their jobs as best they can. "Getting it right" means doing what's expected of people in your position by the power structure around you, which usually has _some_ connection with the written rules which are ostensibly supposed to prevent abuses of power. If the rules say that the police can't just kidnap people arbitrarily—there's paperwork to be filled out documenting _why_ an arrest was made—then, yes, the paperwork will tend to be filled out. That doesn't mean the things written on the paperwork are actually _true_.
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+[TODO: I have paperwork from being in psych prison—yes, I know, they call it a "hospital"—that says I self-presented due to thoughts of sucide. That isn't true.]
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+[TODO: https://archive.is/HUkzY public defender
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+The racist magazine _American Renaissance_ once published [an article by a public defender](https://archive.is/HUkzY) complaining about the behavior of his black clients.
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+The lawyer
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+> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
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+I feel a lot of sympathy for the defendant