Lower and Higher Order Race Realism

Whites do not have a secret sauce for civilization

Imagine a world in which East Asians were both at the top and bottom of rankings in mathematical achievement. The countries where students scored highest on international math exams were biologically and culturally similar to those that scored the lowest.

Now imagine someone comes along and says, “You know, I think East Asians have a propensity to be good (or bad) at math based on some combination of biological and cultural factors. Policy doesn’t matter, we need to acknowledge group differences!” Such a person wouldn’t be taken seriously. The claim that Asians are good at math for biological or deep culture reasons requires that there be a pattern of consistent performance to explain.

In the real world, East Asians do in fact do well in terms of mathematical achievement wherever they are found. You may have seen figures like this from the PISA exams given to students across the world.

South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan are all high achievers in STEM. People with ancestries from these countries do well by the same measure in the United States. Look at test scores, patents per capita, large tech firms, or whatever measure you want to use, and the results are the same. Even North Korea, one of the poorest countries in the world and certainly the most isolated, somehow is a powerhouse in the Math Olympiads! It has had more gold medal winners on a per capita basis than most European countries.¹

The consistency of such performance, and also with regards to things like crime rates, leads people to argue for what we can refer to as “race realist theories.” These theories argue for group differences based in biology, some deep rooted cultural traits government can’t reach, or some combination of the two. I’m putting “biology” and “deep culture” in the same category here because they mostly imply the same thing from a policy perspective, which is that government can’t do much about group differences. Therefore, the differences between biology and deep culture theories are insignificant in practical terms, though people can feel free to take one position or the other out of theoretical interest.

Sometimes you’ll hear people argue, as Amy Wax does when I debate her, that Westerners have some strong propensity towards capitalism, freedom of speech, democracy, etc. Yet this seems to me to be little different than arguing Asians are good at math for race realist reasons in a universe in which Asian nations have some of the worst test scores in the world.