-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 when you consider 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).
+[
+TODO: talk up front about the lameness of the causality-blindness as a response to steelmanned charges of systemic racism
+(The aim of the book is to argue that intelligence and crime differences _exist_ as not _trivially_ mutable facts of our world, as contrasted to the theory that outcome differences are solely due to direct discrimination by employers, schools, and the justice system; the strawman of "And this is 100% genetic" is not implied—not that "And this seems likely to be somewhere between 40–80% genetic" would be more than 40–80% less unpalatable.) [TODO: "Causes are irrelevant" (!) p. 47]
+]
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+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. In such a small book, there's not much room to defend the _interpretation_ of the statistics in enough detail to satisfy skeptics: for example, Murray casually mentions Arthur Jensen's 1980 _Bias In Mental Testing_ as "documenting that the major [IQ] tests were not biased against minorities", without summarizing the detailed evidence and arguments by which one could claim to document such a thing; the distrustful reader is going to have to [read Jensen for themselves](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Bias-in-Mental-Testing-Arthur-R.-Jensen.pdf). [TODO: revise/delete/reconcile with later interpretation discussion]
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+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_](http://unremediatedgender.space/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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+Of course, one can't just point to test scores and say "Those are the facts" without addressing what test scores _mean_. A vast space of "objective" procedures can come up with a number, without giving anyone a reason to care about that particular number. (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!) In this matter of cognitive ability scores by race, Murray briefly addresses two popular (but mutually in tension) classes of objection: that the gaps will vanish with better education, and that the tests are biased. [TODO: ... finish summary]
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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—even while, simultaneously, I find his arguments and data convincing!
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+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.