美国犹太人的智力退化？

晨枫

东湖转贴了一篇于时语的文章。我对于时语很佩服。文章及时，有深度。转贴一篇他的老文，有点意思。

http://www.caogen.com/blog/Infor_detail/45126.html

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美国犹太人的智力退化？
2013-01-26
字号： 小中大

　　虽然亲以色列势力群起反对，奥巴马依然提名有“反犹”之名的越战老兵哈格尔出任国防部长。这不仅证实奥巴马有意报复去年总统选举时以色列政府公开力挺罗姆尼，也再次凸显美国犹太人势力这个令人谈虎色变的题目。

　　以色列以数百万犹太人口，能够在中东屡屡击败和长期抗衡三亿多阿拉伯人的敌视围攻，美国的全力支持是个关键因素。这不能不归功于美国犹太人的巨大影响力，以致有美国国会乃是以色列占领区的说法（哈格尔的“反犹”言论之一，便是胆敢在国会宣布他是代表内布拉斯加州的参议员，而不是以色列的参议员）。

　　一般人的解释，总是归结于美国犹太人掌握的巨大金钱财富。但是欧洲犹太人也曾经有过类似的财富，却丝毫未能阻止欧洲的反犹主义，以及纳粹德国的种族灭绝。犹太人在新大陆成功的真正关键，在于他们征服了美国“上层建筑”。

　　以三权分立的重镇美国最高法院为例，犹太人在九名大法官里就占了三分之一。再看把握美国经济命脉的联储局，1970年至今五名主席中四名是犹太人，按在任年数计算更超过95％。比较一下犹太人只占美国人口2.2％。

　　这些犹太裔大法官和联储局主席的个人经历，充分表明征服美国上层建筑的必经之路，是哈佛、耶鲁等常春藤名校代表的美国精英教育。而犹太人传奇的超常智力，是他们得以征服常春藤校园的本钱。查看一下美国各项诺贝尔奖的得主，可以看到同样超高比例的犹太人士。尤其是诺贝尔经济奖，几乎成为犹太学者的禁脔。常春藤校园里的犹太教授、院长乃至校长，更比比皆是，展示美国犹太人的巨大智力优势。

　　亚洲移民后代挑战犹太人智力优势

　　然而近十多年来，亚洲移民后代开始挑战犹太人的智力优势。如同上一世纪前半犹太新移民挑战基督教白人一样，亚裔的智力挑战首先展示在中学教育界。新近一期《美国保守主义者》月刊登载发行人恩兹（Ron Unz，犹太人）关于常春藤大学招生政策排斥亚裔的长篇论文，得到《纽约时报》的引用。恩兹的分析引用了大量数据，证实犹太学生在与亚裔学生的竞争中明显落后。以下是若干例证。

　　美国每年通过竞赛选拔六名中学生组队参加国际数学奥赛。1970年代，美国数学奥赛队中犹太学生占44％，亚裔学生为零。到2000年代，这一比例逆转为3％比53％。2010年以来，美国数学奥赛队中尚未出现犹太学生，而亚裔占了72％的绝大多数。

　　美国每年的中学生物理奥赛优胜者，1980年代犹太与亚裔学生的比例分别是28％和23％。2000年代的比例是9％和46％。2010年以来，优胜者中81％是亚裔，犹太人只占5％。

　　由西屋公司发起、现归英特尔公司主持的中学生科学奖，历来获奖者中有七位后来获得诺贝尔科学奖，所以有小诺贝尔奖之称，是全美最精英的高中科学竞赛。从1950到1970年代，大奖获得者中犹太学生一直在20％以上。2010年以来，亚裔占了大奖的64％，犹太人只占了7％。

　　据2010年美国人口普查，亚裔比例是4.8％，大约是犹太人的两倍略多，而上述中学学业尖子的亚裔与犹太人的比例，远远超过两倍。

　　最有说服力的是美国高中11年级PSAT（预备学术评估测试）统考，每个州得分属于最高半个百分点的考生获得全国荣誉奖学金入围提名（NMS semifinalist）。有25个州公布这些入围名单，据此统计，近年来入围者中亚裔占28％，而犹太学生只有6％。

　　对比三四十年前犹太学生的压倒性优势，恩兹形容近年来的趋势是“犹太学业成就的崩溃”。很难说犹太人的“先天智力”开始弱化，更有说服力的解释，是上世纪早期到达美国的大批犹太新移民，他们第三、四代后裔的“工作伦理”和学习动力开始退化。

　　正如《纽约时报》新近的有关讨论指出，虽然亚裔中学生的学业成就明显高出了犹太人，在美国“上层建筑”的上升通道──常春藤校园里，犹太学生的比例还是高出亚裔许多。这一不公平的情况，显然与犹太人目前在美国上层尤其舆论传媒界的优势有关。

　　但是只要美国精英教育坚持“凭才取人”（meritocracy）的原则，犹太人的学业成就退化迟早会牵累到他们在美国上层的影响力，并威胁到以色列的未来。而亚裔在美国上层社会的作用只会越来越大。

　　最后如《纽约时报》一年前特别报道：主导美国上层建筑是律师和经济学家，而不是科学家（国会400多名众议员中只有一名物理学家和一名化学家，其他大多律师出身）。亚裔需要急起直追犹太人在这两方面的优势。

四处张望

很有意思的文章

冰寒神魄

美联储情况可否简单展开说说？

晨枫

冰寒神魄 发表于 2013-10-9 21:37
美联储情况可否简单展开说说？

这不是我的文章，是引用的。美联储的事情要于时语来说了。

猫元帅

美国人和欧洲人一般说的“亚裔”是主要指东亚黄种人还是也包括印巴和东南亚？

晨枫

猫元帅 发表于 2013-10-9 21:50
美国人和欧洲人一般说的“亚裔”是主要指东亚黄种人还是也包括印巴和东南亚？ ...

主要指大中华圈子和韩国人、东南亚人。

东湖珞珈

我想忽悠我儿子以后去做律师，然后从政。但是这小子自己有主意，要做医生，结果自己报名考了医学院的附中，还居然一路过关斩将，过了关。
这娃还小，以后充满了变数。其实我还是希望他以后做了好医生攒了RP之后再从政。跟荣炮Ron Paul一样。
华人需要政客，我看这小子有做政客的天赋。
我要接着忽悠他

江淮客

我想解读这些统计数字的关键应该是犹太人的定义。

索伦

看来，只要一个群体样本足够大，时间跨度超过三代，其工作伦理和对待学业的群体看法，文化观念就一定会产生效果。
华人群体对教育投入堪称执着，汉文化圈好像都是这样，科举“遗毒”？

heinsect

很怀疑米国的 meritocracy 还能坚持多少年？以中国古代历史看，每每坚持70年后就漏洞百出了

晨枫

东湖珞珈 发表于 2013-10-9 22:26
我想忽悠我儿子以后去做律师，然后从政。但是这小子自己有主意，要做医生，结果自己报名考了医学院的附中， ...

坚决支持！以后看小东张的啦！

Pipilu

晨枫 发表于 2013-10-10 13:06
坚决支持！以后看小东张的啦！

小东张不是熊三吗？小东湖吧？

晨池

亚裔的比例好恐怖

2000年代的比例是9％和46％。2010年以来，优胜者中81％是亚裔，犹太人只占5％。

2010年以来，亚裔占了大奖的64％，犹太人只占了7％。

近年来入围者中亚裔占28％，而犹太学生只有6％。

那美国原来的白人、西裔白人应该是占人口比例最大的吧，怎么会那么少，尤其是第一项，几乎是被忽略了
这亚裔中间，不知道几分印度，几分华裔，几分日韩呢，华裔恐怕还是不如日韩的多吧，我觉得日韩考试题海玩的比中国还玩命些呢

Dracula

Ron Unz原文很长但是值得一读。同于时语这篇文章主题相关的还有几段挺有意思我摘下来。另外我读过的20世纪30年代纳粹崛起前，犹太人在德国大学教授，诺贝尔奖得主，其他文化圈里的比例也极其高，不过我暂时手里没书，没有具体的数字可以引用，因此征服上层建筑和政治上的成功没什么必然关系。

Yet even while all these specific Asian-American academic achievement trends were rising at such an impressive pace, the relative enrollment of Asians at Harvard was plummeting, dropping by over half during the last twenty years, with a range of similar declines also occurring at Yale, Cornell, and most other Ivy League universities. Columbia, in the heart of heavily Asian New York City, showed the steepest decline of all.

There may even be a logical connection between these two contradictory trends. On the one hand, America over the last two decades has produced a rapidly increasing population of college-age Asians, whose families are increasingly affluent, well-educated, and eager to secure an elite education for their children. But on the other hand, it appears that these leading academic institutions have placed a rather strict upper limit on actual Asian enrollments, forcing these Asian students to compete more and more fiercely for a very restricted number of openings. This has sparked a massive Asian-American arms-race in academic performance at high schools throughout the country, as seen above in the skyrocketing math and science competition results. When a far greater volume of applicants is squeezed into a pipeline of fixed size, the pressure can grow enormously.

...

Several possible explanations for this empirical result seem reasonably plausible. Although the innate potential of a group is unlikely to drop so suddenly, achievement is a function of both ability and effort, and today’s overwhelmingly affluent Jewish students may be far less diligent in their work habits or driven in their studies than were their parents or grandparents, who lived much closer to the bracing challenges of the immigrant experience. In support of this hypothesis, roughly half of the Jewish Math Olympiad winners from the last two decades have had the sort of highly distinctive names which would tend to mark them as recent immigrants from the Soviet Union or elsewhere, and such names were also very common among the top Jewish science students of the same period, even though this group represents only about 10 percent of current American Jews. Indeed, it seems quite possible that this large sudden influx of very high performing immigrant Jews from the late 1980s onward served to partially mask the rapid concurrent decline of high academic achievement among native American Jews, which otherwise would have become much more clearly evident a decade or so earlier.

This pattern of third or fourth generation American students lacking the academic drive or intensity of their forefathers is hardly surprising, nor unique to Jews. Consider the case of Japanese-Americans, who mostly arrived in America during roughly the same era. America’s Japanese have always been a high-performing group, with a strong academic tradition, and Japan’s international PISA academic scores are today among the highest in the world. But when we examine the list of California’s NMS semifinalists, less than 1 percent of the names are Japanese, roughly in line with their share of the California population.62 Meanwhile, Chinese, Koreans, and South Asians are 6 percent of California but contribute 50 percent of the top scoring students, an eight-fold better result, with a major likely difference being that they are overwhelmingly of recent immigrant origin. In fact, although ongoing Japanese immigration has been trivial in size, a significant fraction of the top Japanese students have the unassimilated Japanese first names that would tend to indicate they are probably drawn from that tiny group.

In his 1966 book The Creative Elite in America, Weyl used last name analysis to document a similarly remarkable collapse in achievement among America’s Puritan-descended population, which had once provided a hugely disproportionate fraction of our intellectual leadership, but for various reasons went into rapid decline from about 1900 onward. He also mentions the disappearance of the remarkable Scottish intellectual contribution to British life after about 1800. Although the evidence for both these historical parallels seems very strong, the causal factors are not entirely clear, though Weyl does provide some possible explanations.

...

Finally, in the case of Jews, these assimilation- or environment-related declines in relative academic performance may have been reinforced by powerful demographic trends. For the last generation or two, typical Jewish women from successful or even ordinary families have married very late and averaged little more than a single child, while the small fraction of Jewish women who are ultra-Orthodox often marry in their teens and then produce seven or eight children.69 As a consequence, this extremely religious subpopulation has been doubling in size every twenty years, and now easily exceeds 10 percent of the total, including a far higher percentage of younger Jews. But ultra-Orthodox Jews have generally been academically mediocre, often with enormously high rates of poverty and government dependency.70 Therefore, the combination of these two radically different trends of Jewish reproduction has acted to stabilize the total number of Jewish youngsters, while probably producing a sharp drop in their average academic achievement.

longpaijiao

生活优越后，学习进取的动力不足呀

晨枫

江淮客 发表于 2013-10-9 22:37
我想解读这些统计数字的关键应该是犹太人的定义。

那犹太人都有哪些定义呢？

晨枫

Pipilu 发表于 2013-10-9 23:31
小东张不是熊三吗？小东湖吧？

啊，搞错了，应该是小东湖！小东张也有潜力，言语之间那叫充满睿智啊，以后竞选中国国家主席吧！
@东张西望 @东湖珞珈  

晨枫

晨池 发表于 2013-10-10 00:03
亚裔的比例好恐怖

根据Edmonton和Calgary“精英中学”的数据，这个数据不夸张。Old Scona、Winston Churchill和Western Canada都成Asian school了。白人是绝对少数。

晨枫

Dracula 发表于 2013-10-10 02:22
Ron Unz原文很长但是值得一读。同于时语这篇文章主题相关的还有几段挺有意思我摘下来。另外我读过的20世纪3 ...

多谢引荐，很有意思。看来应该把Ron Unz的原文照出来读一下了。常春藤学校认为限制亚裔入学人数的做法在加拿大“精英中学”中也实行过，后来被迫取消了。原因不清楚。估计是“硬挤”进去的亚裔与白人“主流”差距太大，领先过多，校方自己也觉得不妥？这样的情况最终会在常春藤发生吗？现在还远没有到这个地步，以后呢？常春藤有一个校友子弟优先制度，这可能也是原因？

个人认为他对几代人之后学习动力下降的说法很有道理。个人的观察也是这样。三代人以后，北美中国人的子弟是否会学习上超常优秀，个人不看好。这个熔炉不是吹的。

东湖珞珈

晨池 发表于 2013-10-10 14:03
亚裔的比例好恐怖

我没有严格的数据，就凭自己的记忆，因为我常拿那些名单来给儿子压力，激励他好好学习，天天向上。
那名单里面没有日本名字，疑是韩国人的“KIM"好像也没有，100%是中国人名字拼写方法的不少。