Commenting on the findings shown on the Government website, the Prime Minister said: “What this audit shows is there isn’t anywhere to hide. That’s not just for Government, it’s for society as a whole. Britain has come a long way in promoting equality and opportunity but what the data we’ve published today shows is that we still have a way to go if we are going to truly have a country that works for everyone.” She added: Organisations will be forced to “explain or change” over the report’s findings, admitting the “findings will be uncomfortable” for public services.

I had a look at this much-trailed UK Government website on racial differences. It follows the well-known pattern, of treating race as a “now you see it, now you don’t” variable. That is, you are allowed to see differences in outcomes, but not differences in ability or character. For the opinion-forming, chattering classes, the tone was set by the required-listening Radio 4 news program, The World at One, in which the invited guests did not dream of mentioning ability, but competed to say how quickly the Government should institute policies to overcome the revealed disparities.

For example of “now you see it, now you don’t”, as regards education, there are many tables on scholastic differences between races, but absolutely nothing on any intelligence differences, despite the Cognitive Abilities Test being given to all schoolchildren, providing verbal, quantitative and non-verbal test scores. Hamlet without the Prince. I have asked the officials where I can find them on the site. In fact, some of the data can be dug up elsewhere, and I show it later on.

For example, as regards crime and punishment, there are many tables on racial differences in stop-and-search, arrest rates and so on, but absolutely nothing on racial classification of perpetrators as described by victims and witnesses. One cannot evaluate arrest rates without knowing who needs to be arrested. If victims and witnesses say the assailant was Chinese, the Police should be searching for Chinese persons. Indeed, the effectiveness of the Police in that instance would depend on them stopping and searching many Chinese people.

For example, there are many tables on standards of housing, but nothing I can find on savings rates, which is relevant to later wealth, quality of housing, and particularly of home ownership.

Do you need to know any more? The website is a question-begging selection which insinuates bias without providing fair benchmarks. Look at the collection of findings to see if I have missed anything, or judged it too harshly:

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk

Despite the short-comings of the official website, I assume you expect some comment from me, so here are a few points.

Government interventions are going to have to be early, very early. By 21 weeks differences in head circumference are apparent. Not 21 weeks of life, 21 weeks of gestation.

Buck et al. (2015) “significant differences in HC (head circumference) were detected at 21 weeks (in descending order): Whites, Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks (all pairwise comparisons were highly significant except between Asians and Hispanic groups).” Mothers had been selected as being in good health, and were dropped from the study if there were any complications, which means that the strongest of the presumed social and environmental variables which might affect the developing foetuses have been reduced. Since environmental variables have an ineffable X factor, they can never be totally removed, environmentalists assert.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584427/

In the first few days of life racial differences are apparent in motor development and tolerance of restriction.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/are-academics-open-to-hypotheses

Somewhere between 3 and 4 years of age, tests detect racial differences in intelligence between black and white children.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/thank-you-to-my-readers

By 7 years of life, the differences are stark. Here, from the website, are the percentages of children, by racial group, who can do Maths to the expected standard, and also to the higher standard. Maths can be defined logically, and so has an inherent measure of difficulty. Because of possible manipulation of basic pass rates, I have ranked the racial groups by the higher standard. To give you an idea of how feeble the “expected” standard is, note how long it holds up while the percentage of “higher standard” students collapses. The expected standard shows a 3-fold range, the higher standard a 20-fold range. “Expected” is a cop-out, “higher standard” the real thing which will determine employability.

If teachers were trying to treat children badly according to their race, is this demonstrated outcome likely? In terms of racial purity, Black Africans are the real thing, being indubitably both Black and African, and so if teachers were strongly racist against Black Africans they would treat them the worst. But the (presumably mostly white) teachers allow them to excel as much as the local White British, all of these groups getting 18% of their number into the higher achieving category. Black Caribbeans, though Black and much more likely to have lived in Britain for a generation, if not two, and talking with local accents which should ingratiate them even with racism-inclined teachers, do less well, with only 12% excelling. Also, why are teachers so in love with the Chinese and Indians, clearly visible as genetic intruders? Why do they turn against White Irish Travellers (2% excel) having previously loved White Irish (20% excel). Mysterious are the ways of stereotypes. In the UK, teachers are not showing racial solidarity, or not in a consistent pattern, as required by racial supremacy. It is almost as if teachers did their best with all their students, regardless of their race. The results would be consistent with the observation that education in all well-organized countries contributes no more than 10% of the variance in scholastic outcomes, 90% being determined by the students themselves.

Immigrant scholastic results in each host country are mostly predictable from country of origin scholastic results, but there is variation according to immigration histories, such as whether skilled or unskilled labour was required at any particular time. UK Indians and Africans may not be representative of those groups in their home countries, and Indian province data shows enormous variation in scholastic ability. We cannot be sure that such regional, national and tribal differences exist in Africa, but further research may reveal cognitive elites.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-heterogeneous-states-of-india

Some groups are bimodal in terms of socio-economic status, such as Black Africans. The social profile of African immigrants is probably bimodal. They have almost as many parents in the professional ranks as the UK average, but also a very large number of unemployed persons. It is an odd distribution, suggestive of at least two different sources of immigrants as regards social status.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/chanda-chisala-african-hereditarian

The scholastic results at 16 are of a piece. The results at 18, just prior to going to tertiary education, or starting work, show that 24% of Chinese students achieve 3 or more A grades in their leaving examination, 14% of Indians, 11% of Whites, 5% of Black Africans, 3% of Black Caribbeans. Income, home ownership, and wealth will follow from these figures, so long as jobs are given on merit.

A similar picture is shown by employment rates. In fact, these latter figures give the game away. Some ethnic groups contribute relatively little. Indeed, compared with the locals, immigration has been an overall failure, if only from the point of view of benefitting the locals, the supposed justification for the experiment in the first place. UK Indians do well, UK Blacks less so, and further down the ethnic groups the disappointment deepens. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis contribute weakly.

The Chinese don’t figure on this table, presumably because there aren’t enough of them. Pity. By the way, if these groups are really being shunned because of white prejudice, the wide world should be their oyster, because they would be selling their labour into a buyer’s market, like my ancestors who left Britain over a century ago looking for, and obtaining work abroad, and better prospects, though not their fortunes.

How are these groups valued in the UK employment marketplace? Here the picture changes somewhat.

Title Average hourly pay by ethnicity

Now the heroes are the Indians and the indeterminate Mixed category, substantially outperforming the White locals. Blacks earn relatively little, Pakistani/Bangladeshis even less.

That standby of inflation calculations, an 800 gram loaf of white bread, costs about £1, so all working persons can keep body and soul together with 4 and a half minutes of exertion, thus living better than most humans throughout history, kings included, since the loaf comes already pre-sliced.

It is hard to spin this actual wealth as being poverty, unless one moves to the concept of relative poverty, an endless source of resentment.

We can do a racial group wages calculation:

Whites earn £13.75 per hour, for 8 hours a day, 240 working days a year= £26,400

Indians earn £15.81 per hour, for 8 hours a day, 240 working days a year= £30,355

Blacks earn £11.88 per hour, for 8 hours a day, 240 working days a year= £22,810

Pa/Ba earn £11.42 per hour, for 8 hours a day, 240 working days a year= £21,926

The contribution per member of each racial group, adjusted for percentage employed, is:

Whites 76% of 26,400 = £20,064

Indians 73% of 30,355 = £22,195

Blacks 67% of 22,810 = £15,283

Pa/Ba 54% of 21,926 = £11,840

These are very big differences, particularly for the Pakistani/Bangladeshi group. Lots of other indicators, such as housing, will be a result of these low earnings, and should not require extra explanations.

As discussed, this collection of findings makes no mention of the CAT scores already on each student file. Here are the overall results, showing the link between intelligence at age 11 and scholastic attainment at age 16.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/measurement-errors

Here are the racial group scores for 2009

This is a fascinating Table. Apart from the Traveller Irish and Gypsy Roma the sample sizes are reasonable, and often very large. The standard deviations for ethnic minorities are often much smaller than for White British, perhaps because of immigration selection pressures. Pakistani and Bangladeshis have a narrower standard deviation. The scores and the higher standard Maths results go a long way to explaining the observed scholastic attainments.

For IQ tests, there is a reasonable sample of the different racial groups for 5 year olds from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, though there may have been differential sample attrition by racial group.

https://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-uk

Lynn (2006) in Table 4.5 shows 22 studies of cognitive ability in Africans (mostly Carribeans) in Britain (the most studied group because of early immigration) dating from 1966 to 2002, with median IQ 86. Table 6.2 shows 12 studies for Indians and Pakistanis in Britain from 1967 to 1989 with a joint median IQ of 89

Summary

The idea of having a repository of national race difference statistics could be a good thing, if it contained the relevant statistics, and at least flagged up what was missing before any conclusions could be drawn. However, in its current form it is the apotheosis of silliness: trying to account for racial differences without being able to mention racial differences. How can anyone see that Chinese students do better than Pakistani/Bangladeshi students, without considering that one group might be faster to learn than the other? Surely any assessment of the effects of education should look at infants’ ability before they go to school? Why are cognitive assessments not given, when in fact they are routinely assessed in schools, and are present in student records?

To add silliness, they then compare regions across the country, and highlight things like different arrest rates between immigrant heavy and immigrant light areas, insinuating bias against Police in the latter, because arrest rates for racial minorities are higher in rural locations. Absent data on victim and witness descriptions of perpetrators, this is misleading.

In the midst of all these major omissions, a few gripes about the tables and charts. The tables they provide are just fractionally too wide for the viewing window. A minor issue, but irritating as hell, because they could have sorted it out beforehand. Also, they display the chart results by racial groups in alphabetical order. I find it easier to re-order the groups by the variable in question, such as total maths passes, so as to understand the overall pattern. I used the spreadsheets to generate those lists, and suggest you use the spreadsheets for your own analyses.

Finally, those of you better versed than me in understanding conspiracies (about 98% of the population, it would seem) may argue that the Government intends to turn local people against immigrants, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in particular. Perhaps so, but it seems a convoluted way of doing it. All part of the plot, you may say, but the Government seems to be saying to the public: “I dare you to point out that races differ in their achievements because they differ in their qualities. A curse on you if you even think it. You have nowhere to hide.”

Refs

Lynn, R. Race differences in intelligence. Washington Summit Publishers, 2006.