Larry Summers Mischaracterized By CNBC

Unfortunately, Larry Summers will probably never live it down. A female anchor tonight on CNBC suggested his possible appointment to Treasury Secretary could be in jeopardy because of his statement at Harvard that “males are inherently more intelligent than females.”

Unfortunately, that is complete mis-characterization of what he actually said:

“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability - there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means - which can be debated - there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.”

Bottom Line: What Summers actually said is something like “male intelligence is inherently more variable than female intelligence,” which is significantly and distinctly different than saying that “males are inherently more intelligent than females.”

The chart above shows the possibility that the mean of male intelligence is equal to the mean of female intelligence, but the variance of male intelligence is greater than the variance of female intelligence, resulting in more male geniuses (3-4 standard deviations above the mean), and more male idiots (3-4 standard deviations below the mean).

Shame on the CNBC anchor for not knowing the difference between the mean and variance of a distribution, and continuing the mischaracterization of Larry Summers.

Posted in Categories: Contributor, Economy, External Research.

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Comment by jlounsbury59

2008-11-11 22:25:36

If the variance argument is valid, it is fortunate for the female anchor. It means that there are men more stupid than she is.

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