Gini: A Review of a Review

Karl Muth reveals another side to the creator of the Gini coefficient.

Corrado Gini was a statistician who came up with something many are familiar with today, his eponymous coefficient. The Gini coefficient is a rough measure of inequality and is often tossed around by left-leaning economists and policymakers (I rarely hear those of more conservative political persuasions talking about Gini coefficients). The coefficient, normally applied to national-level (intranational) income inequality, shares its weaknesses with other measures that look solely at income distribution rather than other kinds of wealth (significant wealth, influence, and other characteristics are generally accumulated over generations, not over a few years).

In short, people who like to complain about the national income distribution politically (which has become astonishingly fashionable) or philosophically (which remains rather less fashionable) have embraced the Gini coefficient as a seemingly objective way to examine that question and make international comparisons. Gini, despite not having designed this ratio for this purpose, occupies a special place for the international western left, providing the appearance of quantitative rigor to a group of policymakers and advocates often grasping at shadows of objective measures.

But Corrado Gini also wrote many other things, including one that I’ve never seen anything written about. So I thought I’d write about it here, because I’ve for several years though it notable and can’t believe it has escaped mention in academic circles. To set the stage for this story, however, I must go backward in time.

When I was living in Detroit, I – and my friends, who were generally either American whites, Africans, or African-Americans (I met more Somalis in Detroit than I met anywhere in the world until I traveled to Somalia, a surprising number of whom had successfully navigated the increasingly-xenophobic American immigration system) – frequented a used bookstore in a run-down neighbourhood near 9 Mile Road. It was located on a corner and had various books in the windows, most of them selling for less than five dollars. One day, I was browsing with friends and ran across a book entitled “The Testing of Negro Intelligence” and I picked up the book, flipped through it, and paid fifty cents for it. I had, embarrassingly in retrospect, never heard of the book before. Two things struck me about the book: that it was seemingly empirical in its thrust and that it had a publication date of 1963 (I believe this was the second edition, it had a brown cover with gold lettering; there were later 1966 and 1969 editions, as well), only a year prior to the American legislature’s passage of the Civil Rights Act.

The book is filled with tables and figures, many of them focused on notoriously-useless IQ (intelligence quotient) testing. IQ tests, which were immensely popular post-World-War-II in America were enormously culturally-skewed, with many questions depending not upon reasoning, but upon knowledge of a certain kernel of trivia known to the mostly-upper-class, mostly-white, mostly-male, mostly-from-New-England test drafters (such skews persisted, leading to questions like the now-infamous “regatta question” on the SAT college admissions test in America).

Years later, I looked up the book and noticed that none other than Corrado Gini had written a book review for the American Journal of Psychiatry!

At the time of the review, Gini was already a recognised expert in the application of statistics in the social sciences. Surely Gini would debunk this nonsense and see through the ridiculous premise of the experiments themselves (that race could somehow be isolated by drawing white and black subjects from “adequately” similar environments), I thought. But I was wrong.

The United Nations had published a report (via UNESCO) quoted by Gini in the article, compiled by experts, stating that “Available scientific knowledge provides no basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development.” Gini examines the book as a rebuttal of this statement and those appurtenant to it.

Gini, after a series of disclaimers attempting (somewhat impotently) to draw lines between the illustration of innate differences and the attempt to justify racism, proceeds to raise a truly bizarre hypothesis: “one group finds itself inferior to another with respect to all the mental traits if it lives in an environment in which mental characteristics assume a minor, and physical characteristics assume a major, importance[.]” I’m going to stop there and look back at the history of Africa, because to doubt the role mental characteristics played in our history (and the history of Africa is our shared history, not simply the history of those of us who have a certain pigmentation in the modern day) demonstrates a very poor understanding of history.

Africa is the birthplace of some of the most important inventions in the history of our species. In the ancient world, Africa was the source of most of the important inventions in our shared history. The rudder, without which one cannot sail upwind, was invented more than half a dozen times in Africa by various seafaring tribes, nonnational orgnanisations of people, and so on. From pottery (including multi-layered lead glazing) to weaving (including six-strand weaving and the double-pivot loom) to the alluvial method for finding soft metals like tin to the contour "dry" system for gilding, all of these are African inventions.

The first system for finding the angle separating north from the North Star during times away from the solstice was an African invention and the African discovery of a relationship between the behaviour of the waters of the Nile's delta and the behaviour of the moon was one of the first attempts to explain the influence of the moon empirically (rather than through coincidences of fertility or explanations rooted in theology). The use of metals in a series of crucibles (the earliest attempts at two-stage alloys) was an African invention, as was the folding of lighter-weight metals into sheets of heavier metals (heterogeneous forgings). The Nilotic languages of Africa are among the most logically-organised, in that subject-verb agreement is uniform and tense is largely without exception.

One might argue that these were the exceptional Copernicuses and Michelangelos of Africa who came up with these inventions and discoveries. And that’s no doubt true. But to judge the brightest people in Europe against the average person in Africa is as absurd as The Testing of Negro Intelligence’s premise that a highly-subjective test designed by a tiny group of whites will be well-suited to everyone. For Gini to make this terrible blunder in his review – a line of argument far from his several areas of expertise – suggests he may not have been the right reviewer for the book. In fact, if he had not strayed from his core expertise, statistical analysis and design of metrics, he would have easily identified the flaws in the book rather than dwelling on its misguided, provocative conclusions.

If Gini had engaged in a more robust review of the relevant history, he would have realised that while brilliant people in Europe and Africa were inventing the building blocks of human progress, the illiterate peasants toiling in the fields of Italy and Spain and France were likely just as intelligent as those toiling in the fields of the places we now call Congo, Uganda, and Rwanda – neither had the opportunities Gini (and I and, likely, you, the reader) enjoyed to nurture that innate ability. Berman (then at Harvard, having concluded his early research at the London School of Economics) was well-known at the time (likely known to Gini or his colleagues) and had studied peasant life in Europe and shown that it was not radically different (aside from feudal legal structures) from other places in the world.

Instead of this rigorous review, Gini surprisingly – and uncharacteristically – gives in to the temptation to believe the book he has reviewed is a soapbox upon which he should proclaim his own beliefs about race. His comment late in the review that unusually high intelligence is negatively correlated with the disposition to conform in society seems out-of-place and, most of all, strangely autobiographical. He then gives a final, but brief, advocacy for a technocracy of meritocracy-by-intelligence (“A small group of persons of high intellectual capacity[] directing a mass of lesser ability but given to work and conformity[.]”), an argument entirely decoupled from the book’s arguments. Were one to apply Gini’s argument of technocratic comparative advantage to the book’s findings, it would suggest the ideally competitive society would be a bizarre “academic apartheid” (my words, not Gini’s) in which a group of slightly-smarter whites should lead a larger number of docile, slightly-less-smart, conforming non-whites.

I highly recommend this very brief book review to those interested in race relations, quantitative work on education and intelligence, statistical studies, research methodology, efforts to bolster or justify racism, Gini’s personal and professional history, and other related topics. For context, it may be helpful to also read Ashley Montagu’s review at p.956 in the same volume (which discusses heredity and illustrates what a trendy and explosive issue this was in the turbulent transition from the 1950’s to the 1960’s, in the social sciences, among psychiatrists and psychologists, and across society at large).

Today, there remains no evidence that skin colour or eye colour or one’s great-grandparents’ place of birth is a useful – let alone explanatory – indicator of intelligence. And that Gini looked so hard for this evidence in such an unlikely place is so strange it seems, at least in my view, noteworthy – even fifty years later. Perhaps especially fifty years later.

The book review referred to appears in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Am. J. Psychiatry, Vol. 117, pp.954-956 (1961).