I blogged on tendency too the mean before, but I stumbled on some new data that expands the concept. In my original blog, I pointed out that if farmers stopped selective breeding of milk cows that their milk production would go down about 10% per generation. They have to keep up selective breeding just to maintain their current milk production. This is because of the principle of tendency to the mean. Given random breeding, a population tends back to the mean or Darwin's long term average. Now to the new angle on the subject.
Data shows that the children of very successful Black parents tend to do much worse in life than their parents. Don't get excited. I am talking about a trend, not 100% of Black children. Here is how it works. The farther the parents are from the mean, the greater the affect of the tendency to the mean. It means that parents who are near the mean tend to have children who are also not very far from the mean. For this group the affect of tendency to the mean is minimal, but the farther the parents are from the mean, the more the affect. This is why milk cows go down so much in milk production. Milk cows today are very far from the Darwin mean and thus the affect is very significant. With me so far on this?
Now back to the successful Black family and their children. I am not going to get into why, but it appears that those few Black families who are very successful are "far" from the Darwin mean. I think that Blacks are just as smart as any group, but those who are very successful are a special group that represents some of the smartest Blacks. As stated above, the farther the parents are from the Darwin long term mean, the greater the tendency too the mean affect is. This is the reason that we see in the data that the children of these very successful Blacks do significantly worse than their parents. It is not because of racism or any thing else. It has to do with who within the Black community tends to be the most successful.
In this day and age, there is a temptation to blame discrimination or racism for failures that are the result of the decisions made by the individual. What we need is an honest understanding of the facts and how things like tendency too the mean work. I think that I blogged about the Red Tails in WWII. They were the Black pilots who flew the P51 fighters. These were some of the very best pilots in WWII because they started out as the very best of the very best within the Black community. In the case of White pilots, the cut for who could become a pilot was much lower, so the average White pilot was not as good as the average of the Red Tails. Are you starting to see how all this works?
Here is another simple test. Take the ten or so most successful friends who you know and look at how successful they children are. Do the math and you will find that more than half of their children are not as successful as their parents. Don't rationalize these numbers to suit your preconceived notion. Let the numbers speak for themselves. What this boils down too is that the world is much more fair than most people think. Children of the poor do better than their parents and children of the rich do worse than their parents. It is all based on merit and today merit counts for more than it has every counted in human history. Merit is color blind and status blind. If you look at those who do not do well in life, it is normally not because anyone or any group prevented them from doing better. The sad part is that it is very difficult to help those who do not have "merit". As the saying goes, "You can't help those who do not help themselves."
PS----If any population has inadequate variance from the mean, it places the population at risk. We need variance to help a population survive changes. Take the Native Americans, almost 100% did not have any resistance to small pox and as a result they were almost wiped out. The same thing applies to human IQ. If we were all equal and had an IQ of 100, there would be very few humans here on Earth today. Bottom line, "equal may be a bad thing".
