In a controversial discussion of affirmative action, Judge Richard Posner writes:

As discrimination declines, replaced by affirmative action, explanations for lagging achievement that are based on discrimination lose their plausibility. They were never entirely plausible, given Jewish achievement in the face of fierce discrimination, though it is argued by Stephen Pinker in a recent issue of the New Republic that discrimination against Jews in the Middle Ages, by forcing them into middleman occupations where intelligence is a more valued asset than in farming or soldiering, resulted in the more intelligent Jews having a higher birth rate (because they were better off) than the less intelligent Jews and so, through the operation of natural selection, discrimination can be "credited" with some of the responsibility for the high average IQ of Jews today--even its genetic component. (Hitler may have had something to do with this as well, as it is plausible that the most intelligent European Jews saw the handwriting on the wall earliest and left Europe in the 1930s before it was too late.)

I think it is fair to say that I disagree with much of this analysis. It isn't just that the evolutionary science of intelligence is extremely complicated, which should lead us to doubt claims about the effect of time-limited selection pressures on economic outcomes. Nor is it just that Posner has violated Godwin's Law.

Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir! Amen.

Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me! Amen.

Martin Luther before the Diet of Worms, 1520