Obfuscating ideologically unacceptable research findings

Woof. I am pretty well educated and test pretty highly on reading comprehension. I still had to work hard to interpret the results of Long live your ancestors’ American dream: The self-selection and multigenerational mobility of American immigrants by Joakim Ruist. The abstract is:

This paper aims to explain the high intergenerational persistence of inequality between groups of different ancestries in the US. Initial inequality between immigrant groups is interpreted as largely due to differently strong self-selection on unobservable productive characteristics that are also highly persistent across generations. If these characteristics are responsible for a larger share of total inequality between immigrant groups than between individuals generally, the former inequality will be more persistent. This explanation implies the additional testable hypothesis that the correlation between home country characteristics that influence the self- selection pattern – such as the distance to the US – and migrants’ and their descendants’ outcomes will increase with every new generation of descendants. This prediction receives strong empirical support: The migration distance of those who moved to the US around the turn of the 20th century has risen from explaining only 14% of inequality between ancestry groups in the immigrant generation itself, to a full 49% in the generation of their great-grandchildren today.

Perhaps I am dense but it is not crystal clear what Ruist is saying. Academic obfuscation tends to occur under any one of three cases - when the academic is in a complex field (philosophy or physics), when the academic's findings are socially or ideologically unacceptable, or when the academic is in a bereft field (gender studies or ethnic studies).

Given that Ruist's native tongue is likely Swedish, this is an impressive level of structured obfuscation. But is it due to A) complexity, B) unacceptability, or c) mediocrity? I am going with B.

Ruist is testing a hypothesis I first heard from my father (a chemical engineer with an inquiring mind in all fields) sometime in the 1970s.

The hypothesis is that American exceptionalism was in part based on the how expensive and dangerous it has always been to immigrate to America. Only those who were the brightest and most motivated would elect to undertake the expense of immigration and the risk of death and/or destitution. This natural process of self-selection ensured that the US immigrant population constituted the best and the brightest. The corollary hypothesis was that the cultural attributes and behavioral motivation which brought such self-selected immigrants to the US would also persist through familial culture over time. We got the best people and their values persist over time.

I think this is what Ruist is testing and it is what he is finding support for. Interestingly, I did some research on this a few years ago using Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The results are at US Education: Expensive and ineffective? Not so fast. I found the same thing as the Ruist and consistent with the hypothesis above: American cultural/ethnic groups outperform all their cultural peers. White Americans outscored Europeans, Asian Americans outscored everyone in Asia, Hispanic Americans outscored everyone in Central and South America, and African Americans outscored everyone with large Black populations.

Why do I suspect that this finding is unacceptable and therefore needs to be cloaked in obfuscating language? The implication is that culture matters, that some cultures are superior to others, and that culture is persistent over time. The dominant (and violently insistent) belief in academia is postmodernist critical theory blank slatism. That no culture is better than another, that all people can be engineered to be identically gifted, and that the state policy is better than familial behaviors.

Ruist's research, and the PISA numbers, stand in support of the hypothesis that life outcomes are heavily influenced by cultural values, that there is a founder effect related to the self-selection of immigrants and that the cultural values of those immigrants persist over time.