Unpublished Letter to the Driftwood

Dear Sir:

Your July 25 article attacked my expertise in psychology and anthropology. Due to space limitations let me deal with your charge only in regard to psychology. The latest official faculty publication listing in the UNO library is for 1994 (a good year for me). It showed I had published five articles on psychological topics in professional journals. I think my record is respectable, and know that many researchers in intelligence regard me as a serious psychologist.

I have been invited to attend professional meetings (at foundation's expenses) on psychological topics. For instance, one was on the Biological Basis of Sexual Orientation and Sex-Typical Behavior (with most of the worlds leading researchers on the biology of homosexuality) where I presented evidence from opposite sex twins for hormonal effects on attitudes and abilities (a topic key to understanding why women are concentrated in certain professions).

My differential paternal investment theory (Paternal Provisioning versus Mate Seeking in Human Populations in the 1994 Personality and Individual Differences) has become well known. The Sunday Telegraph (London, England) ran a nice article on it . Ideally, the Driftwood would not have been scooped by a London paper (circulation 400,000) in covering research done at UNO. Ideally, the UNO community too could have debated whether Byron had scooped me when he wrote "What men call gallantry, and gods adultery/ is much more common where the climate is sultry."

This original paper tries to explain why in the US, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa black women contribute a higher percentage of their family's support than white women do. The theory is tested by seeing if it can explain racial differences in such things as crime, life spans, sexual behavior, AIDS, prostate cancer rates, monamine oxidase levels, testosterone, lactase dehydrogenase metabolic paths, etc (it can). Later the theory was extended to explain racial differences in male clothing expenditure, and intelligence. While psychology journals avoid discussing the economic implications of intelligence, once one has explained racial differences in intelligence one can explain why blacks do worse than whites and Asians in school, why blacks are poorer than whites and Asians in the US, and why Africa is so poor. These papers and others can be found in the UNO library (a reserve set up under Miller) or at

Mainstream Opinion

You claimed those you talked to on the UNO campus did not agree with me that "blacks are less intelligent than whites." Given that all reported studies show higher test scores in whites than in blacks (over a thousand studies), this is surprising. Perhaps you talked to those who were not professionally interested in intelligence and who had not read the professional literature. However, the correct way to find out what the opinion of the experts is to read their works (I have put several standard sources on reserve under Miller) or to conduct a survey of them. Synderman & Rothman's 1987 article describes the survey they conducted of over a thousand experts. The most interesting finding was that three times as many thought the black/white difference were due to both genetic and environmental causes, as thought they were due to only environmental causes (virtually no professionals believe they are due to solely to genetic causes).

Unfortunately due to what is often called political correctness (and in many cases a sincere desire not to offend) this information is not known to most in fields such as education, anthropology, business, or some branches of psychology. It is certainly not known to most in the media.

The above survey was conducted in the late eighties and since then important new research has been conducted (none of which has been discussed in the popular press). The most persuasive to me is a comparison of black and white children adopted into middle class white families where the IQ difference (at age 17) was as large as that usually found between blacks raised in black homes and whites raised in white homes. There is also the head size research briefly mentioned in the Gambit. Not only were there racial differences in head size and in intelligence (which acted like they were genetic differences in that study), but it was found that once IQ was controlled for, blacks and whites had the same head sizes. Jensen has also recently reported that the mental tests most sensitive to head size are also the ones that most precisely measure g (what specialists mean by intelligence).

Professional Training

The Driftwood states that "his work in those fields is entirely unrelated to his professional training (which is economics)" This is false. As an economist I am very well trained in statistics, perhaps more so than most in anthropology, education, or psychology . To work on race differences (and why blacks are poorer than whites) one must be able to read in psychometrics, behavior genetics, and population genetics. These fields are highly mathematical and often use techniques beyond the training of most psychologists, education professors, anthropologists, etc. It is actually easier for a well trained economist to understand much of the literature in these fields (he merely has to learn a some vocabulary) than for a general purpose psychologist or anthropologist without a good mathematical training (who must learn some complex math). For instance, very few anthropologists have the statistical training needed to read the psychometric literature on racial differences in intelligence (and even fewer bother). Economists who spend their lives analyzing data (ours is usually already collected for us) are very comfortable with data analysis.

The logical structure of life cycle theory (a biology theory I have applied to humans), and evolutionary psychology involves optimization subject to constraints, a type of problem economists are taught to solve. This is one of the comparative advantages I have. A recent paper of mine on family size turned on understanding the theory of long run maximization with year to year environmental fluctuations. This used mathematical results that are well known to financial economists (and taught by me in courses here), but understood by fewer in other fields (which is probably one reason why I, rather than someone else, had the idea).

My professional training includes a MIT engineering degree as well as a bachelors in economics (both earned in the same three years, a feat few have achieved). At the time, the MIT tried to provide what was called a "liberal scientific" training. This was explained as equipping us to employ any techniques from any scientific field needed to solve the problem. They did not try to teach us what we needed to know during our career (much of which was yet undiscovered). Instead the goal was that we should have a sound enough grounding in mathematics, physics (I have had five terms), chemistry, and logical thinking to teach ourselves what we needed to know, and to read the relevant literature.

Thus, when I had to understand the implications for brain size differences of a difference in T2 relaxation times (found during magnetic resonance imaging) in the brain's white matter between the more and less intelligent subjects, and how this might be affected by changes in lipid composition, I was equipped. When I had to understand how this related to differences in glucose utilization found by positron imaging, and to the statistical nature of errors in the brain's processing of signals, I was equipped to learn the relevant science, and to integrate it into new theories. I am also equipped to understand how these technical findings related to intelligence, and hence to who gets educated, and who get ahead economically.

The Social Utility of Research on Genetics and Racial Differences

The Driftwood raises the question of the social utility of research in this area (which also relates to the role of this research in economics).

Because 50% of the variability in income is due to genetic causes (found by a twin study of twin military veterans), I feel it is important to understand genetics to understand poverty. Because of my MIT mathematics and science training, I could actually read the relevant original literature (and had to read the original articles because a desire to promote a political agenda, or to avoid offending, often led the media and textbooks into error).

The Driftwood article reflects an opinion which is widespread (often called political correctness) that the only scientific research that should be done and disseminated is that designed to promote a particular view of the causes of inequality. The Driftwood's Associate Editor's standard(and I assume the Driftwood's itself standard, since there is no disclaimer published) standard for whether to do research (and to disseminate the results) on the causes of black poverty and poor school performance appears to be whether it would provide ammunition for or against particular politicians and policies. In the area of the causes of poverty and poor black academic performance, the politically correct view is that black academic and economic problems are solely due to prejudice and actions by white people. This is an incorrect view, which encourages black hatred of white people. The view that there are no racial differences in abilities (refuted by the evidence in The Bell Curve, and in my professional writings) leads to the imposition of quotas and discrimination against whites and Asians.

Presumably, the Driftwood extends its understanding of ethics and scientific responsibility to its own choice of topics to cover and manner of coverage. It would follow that the Driftwood is only covering scientific stories that support its vision of racial relations and racial differences. However, if this is the case, the reader should be told of it, and should know enough not to take too seriously the Driftwood's coverage of issues. I would suggest that the Driftwood's coverage of my own research is an example of politically correct news coverage, and hence should not be taken too seriously by the more sophisticated readers who understand the scientific method and who are trained in critical thinking.

The evidence is that black poverty is primarily due to low intelligence. The Bell Curve showed that a black with the same IQ as a white of the same age and sex earns 101% of what the white earns. Understanding the genetics and biology of IQ is key to understanding and curing black low educational performance and poverty.

For a person of the same age and the average IQ for college graduates (114), 50% of the whites have finished college, but 68% of the blacks have. Of two people with same IQ in high school, the black is more likely to finish college than the white.

What about entering the high IQ occupations (The Bell Curve's list includes accountants, scientists, college professors, etc.)? There is constant publicity about black under-representation in such jobs. Blacks are indeed under-represented. Only 3% of them at age 29 had made it into these professions, while 5% of the whites had. However, for those of the average IQ for these professions (117), 10% of the whites had made it versus 26% of the blacks. For two individuals with the same ability, the black appeared 2 1/2 times as likely as the white to make it into these professions.

In contrast to political correctness, the official faculty manual which I was given upon hiring states "A professor's primary responsibility to the subject is to seek and state the truth as he/she see its, developing and improving scholarly competence to that end." It is unfortunate that the Driftwood did not state this part of UNO's written policy, and charged me (incorrectly) with a violation of a University regulation. I wrote within my area of professional expertise on personal letterhead, did not sign with my title, and included a statement that the views were my own, not UNO's. The Gambit erred in putting my title underneath the UNO name.

Racial hatred is not promoted by being aware that there is a difference in average intellectual abilities between members of races. Ideally UNO students planning to work in an economy with many races and ethnic groups would be informed of these differences in their academic courses. Racial hatred may be caused if students are incorrectly informed that their problems are due to discrimination against them by members of another race or ethnic group.

There is a scientific revolution going on in which the importance of genetics to human behavior, and the relative unimportance of shared experience within the family (which includes family upbringing, social class, etc.) is being recognized. Realizing this I have become familiar with behavior genetics and the relevant literature on intelligence, and its economic importance. I urge others to do so.

Sincerely yours,

Edward M. Miller
Research Professor of Economics and Finance