By Ian Jobling • 1/2/08
As we saw in The Reality of Racial Differences, there are large, and almost certainly innate, differences between whites and blacks in intelligence and ability to defer gratification. Hispanics, America’s largest minority group, are much more similar to blacks than whites in these traits. Consequently, with the increasing size of the Hispanic population, America has every reason to expect higher rates of social failure, the inevitable consequence of low intelligence and low ability to defer gratification.
“Ability to defer gratification” is a bit of a mouthful. Social scientists use the more compact term “time preferences” to designate this attribute. People with little ability to defer gratification have high time preferences; those with more have lower time preferences. An even more compact, but less scientific term, is “provident,” which means “having or showing foresight; providing carefully for the future.” Since blacks and Hispanics are less likely to do these things than whites, we can refer to them as improvident races.
Hispanics are, of course, not a race, but a linguistic group; however, most of them do differ racially from whites. Sixty-six percent of Hispanics in the United States are from Mexico and another 17 percent from some other Central and South American nation. The large majority of the population of the nations in which most Hispanic immigrants originate is either Indian or mestizo, a mixture of white and Indian blood. Puerto Ricans, who make up nine percent of the Hispanic population are mostly mulatto, or a mixture of white and black. The characteristics of the Hispanic population thus reflect their Indian and black genetic heritage.
The average IQ in the mestizo and Indian-dominated countries of Latin America is about 86 versus the average white IQ of 99 and the average black IQ of 85. The average IQ of Puerto Ricans is 84, and that of American Hispanics, 89.1 Hispanics are thus marginally more intelligent than blacks, but substantially less intelligent than whites. Such large differences in intelligence are certainly in part due to genetic differences.
One consequence of low IQs is low educational attainment. Hispanic high school completion rates are lower than those of any other major racial/ethnic group in the country: 52 percent of Hispanics complete high school, against 78 percent of whites and 58 percent of blacks.2
Furthermore, even Hispanics whose families have been in the US for three generations or more are less likely than any other group to graduate from high school.3 The chart below shows how many times more likely than whites various groups are to drop out of high school, with the white bar set at one for the sake of comparison. Blacks are about 1.7 times more likely to be dropouts than whites and Hispanics about 3.7 times more likely. “First generation Hispanic” refers to American Hispanics who were born abroad, “second generation” to Hispanics whose parents were born in the US but whose grandparents were not, and “third generation+” to Hispanics whose grandparents were US-born. Even this last group is about twice as likely as whites not to complete high school; in fact, third-generation Hispanics are more likely than blacks to be high school dropouts.4
Such large differences in high school completion rates even among Hispanics whose families have been in the US for three generations or more suggest that it is unlikely that Hispanics will ever assimilate into American society.
Even those Hispanics who do stay in high school until the 12th grade do substantially worse on tests than whites. The chart below shows average scores for 12th graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math test. Scores on the NAEP verbal test show a similar pattern, with whites doing best by a wide margin and Hispanics doing slightly better than blacks.5
This deficit continues for college education. Hispanics are less likely to graduate from college than blacks and only about a third as likely as whites. Hispanics whose families have been in America three generations or more are only slightly more likely to graduate from college than the foreign-born.6
Their low educational attainment reflects not merely blacks’ and Hispanics’ low intelligence, but also their improvidence—earning a high school or college degree is hard work and requires the ability to defer gratification. Social scientists have found that high time preferences are a general characteristic of the poor, and particularly of the black and Hispanic poor. For example, University of California economist Emily C. Lawrence, examining preferences for unnecessary expenditures on food and for saving among different types of household, found that time preferences were higher for the poor than the wealthy and for the black and Hispanic poor than the white poor. Whites were more likely to save and invest their money rather than blowing it on the pleasures of the moment.7
Some of the best evidence of black and Hispanic improvidence comes from studies of their net worth. The average income of black households is 62 percent of the average white income, and that of Hispanics is 71 percent.8 Yet both black and Hispanic net worth is less than 10 percent of that of whites: Hispanic households have a median net worth of $7,932 and black households of $5,988 against whites’ $88,651. Hispanics’ net worth is thus just nine percent of whites’ and blacks’ just seven percent. It is clear then that blacks and Hispanics are less likely to save money than whites. Low Hispanic net worth is not due to their immigrant status. US-born Hispanics have a net worth of $10,425, which is still only 12 percent of the white net worth.9
Statistics on sexuality also reveal much about differences in time preferences among the races. It is in sexuality, after all, that the conflict between our desire for present gratification and our concern for our future well-being presents itself in the starkest form.
As expected, blacks and Hispanics show much lower providence when it comes to sex than whites do. Black births are more than twice as likely to take place out of wedlock than white births, and Hispanic births about 50 percent more likely.10
Sexual irresponsibility also leads Hispanics to be much more prone to sexual diseases than whites. Hispanics are 3.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than whites, and blacks 10 times more likely.11
The improvident are also more likely to be criminals than the provident. As I wrote in The Reality of Racial Differences, “Criminals are the best examples of people who favor present gratification at the expense of long-term rewards: a mugger is willing to sacrifice his whole future for the chance of stealing someone’s wallet.” It will come as no surprise then that Hispanic men are 3.5 times more likely to be in prison than whites and black men 7.8 times more likely.12
A sure sign of improvidence is the unwise use of credit. We are currently seeing the consequence of such improvidence in the increasing rate of mortgage defaults due to subprime home loans. The failure to repay debt has caused a wide-scale weakening of faith in the global financial markets that threatens to throw the American economy into recession. Many economists believe that our current difficulties are only the cusp of a tidal wave of defaults on bad debt.
Once again, the expected racial differences appear in incidence of subprime mortgages, with home loans to blacks being about 2.5 times more likely to be subprime and mortgages to Hispanics twice as likely.13 Nor can income disparities among the races account for the difference: the racial differences are even greater for affluent people, with affluent blacks and Hispanics more than three times more likely to have subprime mortgages than affluent whites.14 As the proportion of Hispanics in the American population rises, we can only expect to see further destabilization in our financial system.
Diversity, far from being a strength, means more home foreclosures, more prisons, more poor neighborhoods, and generally an increase in all that is nasty and depressing in our society. A healthy, prosperous nation requires a citizenry that meets minimum standards of intelligence and providence. If America ceases to do so, it will become more and more like Mexico as the years pass.