What's the government to do about Missing Heritabiity?

What kind of new government programs would somehow sidestep the Missing Malleability of the last 60 years?

To follow up today’s post on Missing Heritability, it could turn out that the last century of twin and adoption studies all had some fatal flaw that led them to report overly high heritabilities, when instead there were complex interactions going on with the environment that nobody has noticed yet.

For example, one suggestion was, what if your IQ is determined not by your genes but by how people treat you based on your looks? That way, of course, fraternal twins will have more disparate IQs than identical twins. But, you see, it’s not the the fraternal twins’ brain genes that differ, it’s their face genes being reflected back from their environments.

Or something.

OK, assuming all that is true (improbable as it sounds), what’s the government supposed to do about it?

At least, when the Coleman Report was commissioned in 1964, the assumption was that results would support raising taxes to spend more on blacks which would Narrow the Gap.

Everybody in The Great Society believed blacks scored worse on school achievement tests because less money was being spent on black schools in the South. True, but it turned out that in the North that spending on black students was the same as on white students and Coleman still found sizable gaps in achievement. And over the last 60 years, we’ve experimented a lot with spending more on black students than on white students without too much in the way of positive results after two generations.

But, at least there was a plan: raise taxes and spend more.

But if IQ gaps are caused instead by, say, your looks and how your parents and the other kids on the playground involuntarily and subtly respond to your face, what’s the government supposed to do about it? Plastic surgery for everybody like in some “Harrison Bergeron” dystopia? Struggle Sessions over changing your reactions to other kids’ faces?

It’s like the underwear gnomes business plan:

1. Point to Missing Heritability

2. Assume some subtle effect of environment that nobody noticed before is the real cause of IQ disparities.

3. ???

4. Raise taxes to pay for all the vast new spending to equalize the subtle but pervasive difference in the environment.

For example, let’s consider a really expensive actual program to alter the environment of poor black students. Washington DC runs the country’s only public boarding school. The teachers report that they make a lot of progress with their students from Monday through Friday. But then they go home to their families for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, and return to boarding school on Monday morning just as ghetto as on every Monday morning. So teachers were asking for a budget increase to add a fifth night of boarding per week.

If the teachers are right, the ideal budget would pay for 7 nights of boarding, 52 weeks per year. Get them 100% away from the bad influence of their blood relatives!

But you are soon getting into Stolen Generation territory like with boarding schools in Australia for Aboriginals and in Canada for Indians. All the nice white teachers working in this DC public boarding school might well be demonized by future nice white people, as happened to the nice white people in 1920s Australia and Canada.

The Nice White Liberals who run social and educational policy in America have been obsessed with Closing the Gap for 60 years. So far, they keep running into the Missing Malleability problem: they can’t come up with replicable ways to raise black test scores relative to white and Asian test scores.

The best they can do is get more serious about education overall and raise everybody’s scores a little. But that is considered unacceptable because it makes the people suggesting that maybe genetics plays a role in the racial gaps and thus we should focus more on improving everybody’s performance rather than on narrowing racial gaps seem reasonable and public-spirited. But, we know, those race realists are The Enemy, the Worst People in the World.

So, it’s been a two-generation long conundrum with no solution in sight.