Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Liberal Duality on Lewontinism   posted by TangoMan @ 7/04/2006 03:19:00 PM
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The next time you encounter Lewontin's Fallacy in which someone is arguing that between groups differences are not important when compared to the variation within the group, one should discern how they feel about race and gender wage differentials, for:

It is important to recognize that most wage inequality occurs within and not between groups. The unweighted average Gini coefficient across all race, gender, and education groups was 0.256 in 1995, over 80 percent of the total Gini. Put another way, if all groups had identical mean wage rates (for example, black male dropouts had the same average wages as white male college graduates) but wages differed within groups as they do today, nearly all the inequality in wage rates would remain.

So, when it comes to genetic variation and the implications which arise from biology, the between group differences are minimized in comparison to the in-group differences and we see a full on embrace of Lewontin's outdated analysis, yet when the topic is a liberal touchstone, income inequality, then the small between group differences matter so much more than do the in-group differences.

Geez, can't they simply pick a position and stick to it.