Ezra Klein splutters in his inimitable fashion:
So what’s the point of all this? What’re the implications? So far as I can tell, there are none. We don’t deal with people in aggregate groups. We deal with them as individuals. If "individual IQ can’t be predicted from race," then none of this actually matters. One could argue that improving group IQ should be a societal goal and thus we need this data, but since Saletan is arguing for an immutable, racial, component to IQ, that obviously isn’t an option. If the various races were moving in opposite directions on IQ scales, we could get really worried about that, but instead, we’re seeing convergence, and everyone expects more as cultural/economic/educational disparities improve. So, again, what’s the implication here?
There is none.
Two words: affirmative action. That policy asserts as an irrefutable fact that any racial discrepancies in college selection are a function of either college-imposed or societal racism. Once the left put the blank slate on the table, and actively supported racial discrimination as public policy as a consequence, they begged the question of whether they had the empirical data to back up their social engineering. Over to Will. Abolish affirmative action and these questions can and will become less salient. How about it?
The Dish 