Interesting NLSY Analysis

The Inductivist links to this analysis of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth(NLSY) data that analyzes income, wealth, and education by race, sex and IQ. The authors of this simple analysis have a particular point of view but their results are consistent with some more complex analyses performed by researchers with a different point of view that I discussed earlier .

Of course, I have a few technical quibbles. They analyze a Jewish cohort separately from other whites but they do not give sample sizes or standard errors. Since I doubt there are more than 500 Jews in the NLSY data set I can not make much of these results.

Their analysis on black/white differences, however, replicate the findings that blacks enjoy a higher return on IQ than whites and that this difference varies by gender. Technically, there is a gender by race by IQ interaction. Unlike the earlier analyses, the authors show that in males the black vs. white return on IQ varies by IQ level. Smart black males considerably out earn equivalent gentile white males but whites with average intelligence earn about the same as average black males. This variation in return to IQ supports the conclusions that this difference is due to affirmative action and not to test bias or measurement error if you would expect the bias to be the same at all IQ levels. This interaction is not present in females; black women enjoy a consistently higher return on IQ than do white females. This may be confounded by hours worked or other variables.

There are also some interesting analyses on wealth and education. Read the whole thing.