Jewish Power and Fairness
Thursday, April 24, 2008 — John SavageSince I know many of my readers don’t enjoy this kind of thing, I left my thoughts about the reasons for Jewish power in America as a comment on Guy White’s post.
I think the real divide, though, is between the individualists who think that Jewish power is completely fair if obtained by means of outstanding ability, and the “tribalists” who don’t like to see an alienated minority have a great deal of power, regardless of its ability. Guy White quotes Fred Reed to the effect that 29% of Nobel Prize winners in the second half of the 20th century have been Jews, a group constituting .2% of the world’s population. The seven million American Jews constitute almost half of those in academia, the legal profession, and the media. If indeed their success in these areas were entirely due to high IQ (and I don’t think it is), would Guy White find this fair? It seems that he might. I would not.
In theory, our society is “one person, one vote”. Since we tend to think that some are more politically astute or have a greater stake in the success of society than others, we allow them to effectively have more political power by donating to campaigns, holding rallies for candidates, and so on. This is our substitute for property qualifications or similar voting restrictions. However, it is subject to the limitation that the groups receiving more voting power not have sharply divergent interests from the people as a whole. In particular, Jews have a strong interest in open borders and a “tolerant” society that most of us do not share. We can’t let that kind of group dictate policy just because they won their high position “fair and square”. (I would suggest, too, that Jews don’t think of fairness as requiring the same things – especially when involving inter-group relations – as white Christians do.)
At any rate, I think I will withhold further judgment on issues relating to the Jews until I have had a chance to read Kevin MacDonald’s books, not merely his online articles.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 8:52 am
I think the basic thought: a minority with distinct interests contrary to those of the majority should not have too much power, should have their power criticized, should be recognized as a group with a shared group set of values, and the like is valuable. We need not break out the phrenelogical calipers or support anti-Christian genocide to say something more moderate, “Hey, they’re different. They know it. We know it. And we’re pretending everything is normal and that these huge disparities don’t exist. These disparities matter because these folks are teaching our kids, changing our laws, and guiding our cultural and moral values through the mass media.” The American attitudes about Jews from, say, 1920-1960 were pretty healthy, not too hateful, but nowhere near as guilt-ridden and weak and suicidal as they are today.
I’d strongly recommend Slezkine’s Jewish Century book.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 10:05 am
Just another example of multiculturalism/multiracialism failing.
Judaism is largely a race.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 11:38 am
Nice post. I wonder about Jews making up half of academia, media and legal profession, though. Their numbers are disproportionate, no doubt, but half? In any case, the problem this poses to the nonJewish majority in Western countries seems pretty much unresolvable - much as is the problem posed by African minorities. That’s why Jews have been evicted from country after country. No other solution could be found.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Rick, I’m sure I read something from a mainstream source indicating that in the range of 30-50% of these professions are Jews. I can’t find the same data reproduced on the internet. This is about the closest I can find, but some of the numbers are not as high as I’d previously seen. It includes 60% for “Top Hollywood Positions”, 40% for “Partners at Best NY & DC Law Firms”, and 30% for “Faculty at elite college”.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Guy White quoted Fred Reed that “Six times as many Jews as others have an IQ of better than 140.” 140 is an awfully high IQ — almost 3 standard deviations above the mean. But let’s make a conservative assumption that a 140 IQ is what’s required for the positions just mentioned. If Jews are 2.5% of the population, then we should expect them to be 15% of those mentioned in my last comment. Obviously this could be skewed, though, if Jews are more likely to choose the careers mentioned, while Gentiles are more likely to decide to become, for example, business executives.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I can assure you, most lawyers are far below 140, more like 120-135. At top firms, though, 140+ abounds. I’d say 140 is probably like a 165 LSAT, top 4% or so of the pre-law population, itself likely exclusively 115+ IQ college grads with grad school ambitions.
Those numbers sound high, but not for the top ranks. At my law school–Chicago–something like 2/3 of professors and 45% of students were Jewish.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Roach, it only takes the top few to set the tone. I agree that most lawyers are not 140 IQ’s, but the quote I cited said 40% for “Partners at Best NY & DC Law Firms”. I was conjecturing that those positions would require about 140 IQ’s.
Of course, there are two different questions going here. One is how high the Jewish representation is, and the other is whether that’s to be considered “overrepresentation” if IQ were the sole explanation. I agree with you that it’s not fair even if IQ explains the Jewish domination of these fields all by itself, but Kevin MacDonald thinks that IQ alone does not explain that Jewish domination. I tend to agree with him.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 1:24 pm
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Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 3:44 pm
There’s undoubtedly networking. But it’s also a function of their former shutout from WASP firms. Catholics and Jews both responded in the 1940s to their exclusion from traditional “white shoe” firms by starting their own. Since businesses, even WASP businesses, are mostly about making money, the more sophisticated and highly aggressive Jewish firms became well known success stories, places like Skadden Arps in particular.
They’re all around now, and there’s undoubtdedly some good ol’ boy stuff among WASPs, Catholics, and Jews, but high IQ people of all types are now more efficiently sorted than ever into a few schools, a few careers, a few law firms, a few med schools, a few different paths that tend to coalesce around common, secular, meritocratic cum liberal do-gooder values. It’s a complicated story. The rise of IQ standards in the 1960s based on notions of fairness have unwittingly propelled many Jews to the upper echelon of society. The simultaneous and contradictory praise for ethnic cohesion among Jews and its denunciation among WASPs has destroyed WASP self-consciousness on the East Coast. There’s still some in the South, as I learned at a large Texas law firm where WASP pride, institutions, networking, and the like were alive and well (and to which I had almost no entree other than raw intellect and work ethic).
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 8:53 pm
“I agree that most lawyers are not 140 IQ’s, but the quote I cited said 40% for ‘Partners at Best NY & DC Law Firms’. I was conjecturing that those positions would require about 140 IQ’s.”
First, in New York the number must be considerably higher than 40% for partners at top firms. However, I wouldn’t ascribe especially high IQ’s to these partners. They make partner because they can bring in resources. In other words, they’re well-connected, and the best connection is a connection to the “Jewish neural network”. Howard Sachar’s “Farewell Espana” has a nifty quote from Joseph Addison’s 17th-c. “Essay on the Jews”: “They are … so disseminated through all the trading parts of the world, that they are become the instruments by which the most distant nations converse with one another, and by which mankind are knit together in a general correspondence.” Columbus, not a Siberian or Scandinavian, “discovered” America because he was plugged into the Jewish neural network.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 9:11 pm
“There’s still some [WASP self-consciousness] in the South, as I learned at a large Texas law firm where WASP pride, institutions, networking, and the like were alive and well….”
It sounds like you just passed through as a summer associate, but perhaps you are practicing here now. After my experience in Manhattan and Atlanta, it took me about a week at Baker & Botts to convince me I was in Texas for good.
Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Ben Tillman, I would think your conclusions are right, so I would be interested to see you dig up some data to that effect.
Friday, April 25, 2008 at 5:24 am
Thanks for linking that post John. Guy White seems to have an identity crisis.
Friday, April 25, 2008 at 7:26 am
Roach, the good ole boy system ain’t broke, but it’s shaky.
It orients more around friendship and close kinship rather than greater WASPdom though.
Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 12:48 pm
These issues are not being fought nor resolved at the rational level.
They are religious.
Just as the prior media revolution of the Gutenberg Press unleashed a decentralizing religious revolution, so the recentralizing innovations of the steam-driven “double-press”, motion pictures, radio and finally television unleashed a religious counter-revolution which is now, at last, giving way to a new decentralizing religious revolution based on the Internet.
Now that said, it is true that Jews played an important part in the decentralizing religious revolution triggered by the Gutenberg Press, but it was a “deal with the devil” so to speak — out of the frying pan of Catholic theocracy into the fire of the new state religion: Holocaustianity.
Friday, May 9, 2008 at 1:41 pm
[...] this week, a hit-and-run commenter left an obscene and snarky comment on my thread on “Jewish Power and Fairness”, which I deleted. Such an uncivil comment didn’t deserve to see the light of day, even if it [...]