The 2013 American Renaissance Conference.
Byron Roth is professor emeritus of psychology at Dowling College and author of "The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature." His presentation covers the complex tangle of misfortunes that have befallen the white working-class. He notes that before the Second World War, a man did not have to have much education to get a job that could support a family. Farm, factory, and other low-skilled work was abundant and well paid.
Prof. Roth argues that there are three main reasons why things have changed dramatically. One, of course, is the influx of low-skilled immigrants who put downward pressure on wages. The second is the offshoring of jobs, which has the practical effect of making Americans compete in the labor market with people who live on twenty dollars a day. The third is the opening of markets to products from Third-World countries, which has exactly the same effect. Prof. Roth points out that the results of these policies—low wages and cheap foreign goods—benefit the elites but are a callous betrayal of unskilled Americans.
The Left always argues that “education” will lift the working class into the middle class, but Prof. Roth shows that this is a delusion. This theory fails to recognize that there are inherent differences in ability that mean certain people simply cannot benefit very much from additional education.
Forty percent of all high school students are now black or Hispanic, and many cannot absorb education past the seventh or eighth grade. Prof. Roth argued that they would be much better served by vocational training, but that would be impossible in America: classes of that kind would be largely non-white, resulting in cries of “discrimination” and “institutional racism.” In a homogeneous society, it is much easier to track students into instruction suitable to their ability.
Prof. Roth shows how racial differences in average IQ are an almost perfect predictor of how much people from different groups will achieve in school and in professional life. People with IQs below 80 cannot really handle a high school curriculum and people with IQs under 105 do not benefit from a four-year college. Yet, we have a tremendously powerful education lobby that persuades young people to waste years and to go deeply into debt for training that will do little practical good.
Prof. Roth notes that all societies must provide for their less able members, but that the combination of free trade, open borders, off-shoring, and the fraud of “college for all” proves that “our elites have lost any sense of noblesse oblige.”
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