Making Sense of Memphis
Facing Reality there and elsewhere.
Tadarrius Bean and Demetrius Haley, two of the Memphis cops charged with murder over the beating death of Tyre Nichols.
Facing Reality in Memphis
A couple of years ago, the social scientist Charles Murray published a book called Facing Reality, which highlighted two politically incorrect truths that explain much of American life:
Different racial groups have different average IQs.
Different racial groups have different average crime rates.
A related point Murray and his co-author, the late Harvard Psychologist Richard Herrnstein, made in their 1990s book The Bell Curve, is that the general cognitive ability as measured by IQ and similarly rigorous tests doesn't just predict academic ability: it also predicts performance in all kinds of jobs. The obvious part of this is you need a certain level of cognitive ability to work in certain professional jobs.
But the less obvious part of this is that cognitive ability predicts performance for blue collar jobs too: smarter mechanics make fewer mistakes, for example. There's a reason why you need to take the AFQT if you want to be a mechanic (or anything else) in the U.S. military.
When the Memphis Police Department released the video footage of five of its officers beating Tyre Nichols to death, an African American gentleman I follow on Twitter, Ed Asante, speculated that the cause was that black people tended to treat each other "viciously"; my speculation, based on knowing the information above, was that these cops were lower quality recruits:
Ed initially disagreed, but to his credit, later pointed out that I was right:
A More Humane Approach
If you know that African Americans, on average, score lower on cognitively demanding tests (including those given to potential police recruits) than other groups, then you know that departments have to lower standards to hire more of them. And of course the reason they want to hire more black cops is to avoid accusations of racism (which they've gotten anyway in the wake of the Memphis video).
The Memphis video brought to mind an opposite example of police restraining an African American suspect. In 2015, four Swedish cops vacationing in New York were on their way to see a Broadway musical when they responded to a subway conductor's call for help. One man was mercilessly beating another, and the Swedish cops restrained the attacker without hurting him.
If your sole goal is to hire the best cops to more humanely detain suspects, that's achievable, but America's problem is that we have conflicting goals.
Facing Reality Elsewhere
The ability to cut through false claims and get to the reality of an issue is useful not just in understanding news events like the Memphis police killing case, but in investing as well. It's something I try to do in my own trading. A recent example was the rally in meme stocks like Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) earlier this month. By seeing through the claims of Wall Street Bets types to the reality of the company's bankruptcy risk, my paid subscribers and I were able to bet against it at the top of that rally.
On Friday, the stock was down more than 50% from where we bet against it on the (unsurprising to us) news that the company had received a default notice from JPMorgan.