April 1, 2005

In search of Protestant sculptors

My statement that a characteristic Catholic sculpture is Bernini's astonishing "Ecstasy of St. Theresa," while a characteristic Protestant sculpture is a Jello mold caused one reader to write: "Off hand, I can't think of a great Protestant sculptor, although I'm sure they exist."

Googling on "Protestant sculptor" brings up the name "Bertel Thorvaldsen." Case closed!

No, honestly, there are plenty of Protestant sculptors, like Gutzon Borglum of Mr. Rushmore fame. And I wrote about Malvina Hoffman, America's excellent sculptress of human biodiversity here.

Still, Protestantism's Islamic-like objection to "idol-worship" obviously short-changed the development of sculpture in Protestant countries. Compare Pieter Saenredam's almost abstract paintings of the interiors of post-Reformation Dutch churches stripped of their statues with Panini's famous painting of St. Peter's lavish interior.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Boring but Right

More nominees for Correct yet Uncharismatic:

Better at being right than personally imposing: Edward Westermarck.

Westermarck argued in the early 20th century for what is called (not by him) the "Westermarck effect": individuals raised together from infancy display a lack of erotic interest in one another when they reach sexual maturity. Westermarck argued that the effect is an adaptation to prevent the harmful genetic effects of close inbreeding -- since those raised together are commonly siblings -- but that it incidentally reduces sexual activity even among non-siblings raised together. He had evidence for this from fieldwork in Morocco, from cousin marriages that didn't work out. All sorts of evidence, both human and non-human, now supports both the harmful effects of inbreeding and the "negative imprinting" proposed by Westermarck,. And Westermarck also did a huge amount of what is basically evolutionary psychology both on human marriage and sexuality, and on morality.

Yet, although he provided the correct explanation for incest avoidance, a big part of what kinship is about (altruism is another big part, of course, covered by Hamilton and successors),Westermarck was completely overshadowed in the 20th century by various sociological style theories and by Freud. The sociological theories aren't completely crazy, and might even be at least part right, but Freud's Oedipus Complex story is so off-the-wall that you have to suspect that its real appeal is not those in search of serious scientific explanations, but to folks with an unadmitted hunger for vivid counterintuitive narratives -- i.e. mythology. Chesterton says something like "Those who leave the Church don't end up believing in nothing; they end up believing in anything."

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My choice for the substance over style intellectual in political science would never be James Burnham--who was endowed with both--but Ferdinand Hermens who, in a series of books (Democracy or Anarchy, the Representative Republic, etc.) in the forties and fifties destroyed proportional representation for its contribution to the political catastrophe of the 1930s. (Not even a sexy topic then!) After the war, several European countries either dropped PR or modified its bad effects and henceforth became stable democracies. (Germany is the prime example.) Hermens critique of PR has in my view never been refuted--just ignored. Recently the UN and the US foisted it on Iraq. Hermens would not have been surprised that no government has formed yet.

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I'm surprised nobody mentioned Kant in philosophy. The man never bothered to leave Konigsberg his entire life, and was considered a bust until he published the First Critique in his mid-50s. Housewives, it is said, set their clocks to his daily walks. Yet, nearly all 19th and 20th century philosophy can be traced in large part back to Kant's ideas.

On the opposite extreme, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the two most celebrated 20th century philosophers, had a mesmerizing effect on their followers, which probably accounts in large part for their continued fame today. In Wittgenstein's case, his followers even adopted his eccentric mannerisms, so that for almost a half century after his death one could instantly recognize any Wittgensteinians walking the halls of academe.

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My hazy assumption is that 19th Century Germans developed an outsized respect for Herr Professors. For example, in Germany to this day, a man with two doctorates is a double doctor by title. Jerry Pournelle, for example, would be "Dr. Dr. Pournelle" in Germany.

This got intermingled with traditional Jewish esteem for charismatic rabbinical scholars who could exegete esoteric texts more cleverly than anybody else in town. Thus, the small number of German Jews. combining the two traditions, led the world in the production of intellectual cult figures like Marx and Freud.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Constantine"

I finally saw the ponderously delirious Catholic fantasy film with Keanu Reeves as a Philip Marlowe-style hard-boiled detective/exorcist who battles demons on the mean streets of noir LA.

A lot of people hated it. As a horror film, it's a failure since it lacks scary moments. Its pacing is stately at best, and its script is too congested with ideas to be intellectually interesting (although it's got some great hardbitten theological one-liners like, "God's a kid with an ant farm. There is no plan."

And it's fashionable to put down Keanu these days because of the failure of the last two "Matrix" movies, although that was hardly his fault.

But, for all its flaws, "Constantine" has style.

Catholicism just has more visual style than Protestantism. When you think of a Catholic sculpture, you think of, oh, say, Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Theresa." In contrast, the leading Protestant contribution to the art of sculpture is the Jello mold.

Everybody compares "Constantine" to "The Matrix," but it's much more in the tradition of "Blade Runner," another visually extravagant fantasy LA detective film noir. In contrast to "Constantine," "Blade Runner's" theological underpinnings were kept mostly under wraps until the climactic scene where Rutger Hauer's Christ-figure replicant drives a nail through his palm and then, as he dies, releases a white dove that flies up to a patch of heavenly blue sky. Not too subtle, but a lot of people still didn't get it. (Like me, the first time I saw it.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Unsung intellectuals in the human sciences

Yesterday, I complained that many of the intellectual heavyweights of Western civilization are known not for being right but for being charismatic and asked for suggestions for people who are famous now for being right despite non-charismatic personalities.

My son suggests Mendel, the discoverer of genetics, who is probably the ultimate choice since he was unknown until after his death. Science would have benefited from him having a more forceful personality.

Readers write:

In management theory: surely Demming deserves more limelight?

In philosophy: I think that Hume has been overshadowed by those German metaphysicians who were always, unsuccessfuly, trying to outwit him. A special mention to David Stove who could never resist a joke. Bad move in dull but worthy fields.

In economics: The Keynsian economic scientists models and analyses were crucial in organising and administering the War Effort. Leontieff, who invented input-output analysis, and Jan Tinbergen, who introduced mathematical modelling, Kuznets for decising national accounts, Milton Friedman for designing the witholding income tax (Ha X 3) they alll deserve a guernsey.

In sociology: Weber can never get enough credit. Schumpeter was a polymath in the same league as the other Mettle European emigres.

In pol-sci: James Burnham.

Really, the interesting thing is how little social sciences have done to contribute to social technology. The big names in social science, apart from Keynes of course, have usually been flops when running government and business enterprises (eg Hayek). It looks like motivated and intelligent people can run teams without the help of egg-head advisors. Although egg-heads have their uses in summing things up for the on-lookers.

The big names in social ideology have been, both intellectually and socially, an unmitigaged disaster. We have had to spend almost the whole century unlearning what just ain't so.

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In the hard sciences, strict standards of proof make harder for a charlatan to arise. Still, this sometimes happens as in the case of an obscurantist like the late Stephen Jay Gould being far better known among the general public than Hamilton or Trivers. But you can't keep a lie forever, so I think Gould's reputation will sorely fall (it already has) in the future.

What the human or social "sciences" sorely need is a good BS detector. Still, if I were to name good and underappreciated work in social science I would say that Paul Romer's work in growth theory is very good in explaining issues like the failure of depletion of resources to occur, yet he is far less known than other more prominent, less accomplished economists like Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz.

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John Bardeen, the only person to win the Nobel twice in physics, was a completely normal, friendly, bland mid-westerner who liked to play golf. No "Feynmanisms" whatsover. [Okay, he was a hard scientist, but he was a famously nice guy.]

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If one holds that communism was the biggest disaster of last century, then the only guy who predicted it wouldn't work seems pretty important, Ludwig von Mises. He wasn't appreciated by the Nazis and then no one would give him a job in the United States. Given his predictions and body of work he has to be one of the most under appreciated intellectuals ever.

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Claude Shannon, who came up with the idea of using binary numbers in computers in 1937, and invented digital communications in 1948 was a cheerful, whimsical soul who invented a juggling robot. A reader notes, "He built the original black box with one switch: when you turned it on, an arm came out of it and turned the switch back off. My kind of guy."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 31, 2005

Desperately Seeking Susan

Here's a long but hilarious article called "Desperately Seeking Susan" by a lesbian English professor at Stanford named Terry Castle exposing her former idol, the late Susan Sontag, as a massive egomaniac.

Yet, egomania provides confidence and confidence is essential to charisma, and, clearly, Sontag's fame in the intellectual world didn't depend on her writings -- what did she ever write that was memorable besides "The white race is the cancer of human history?" -- but on her personal charisma.

Indeed, much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example, a charlatan who befuddled two generations via his implacable self-esteem. Marx was similar, and Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth but fortunately never had as deleteriously wide an impact as Marx or Freud.

I'd like to make up an honor role of thinkers who were better at being right than being personally imposing. Adam Smith, a classic nerd whose best known anecdote is his falling in a tanning pit in a fit of abstraction while showing Edmund Burke around a leather factory, and the retiring Charles Darwin come first to mind. Until the publications of big books by Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins publicizing his theories when he was approaching 40, the great William D. Hamilton was known only to a few dozen evolutionary theorists. I've never heard anything at all about the personality of Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs engineer who pretty much invented information theory in 1948.

Other suggestions? Lots of mathematician and physicists fall in this mold, but what about in the more politicized human sciences?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Heather MacDonald on "Diversity Mongers Target the Web" on NRO:

Bad move, guys. The "diversity" mongers have just brought up the one thing that they should have stayed far far away from: the web. Newsweek's technology columnist Steven Levy has declared that the lack of "diversity" among the web's most popular blogs requires corrective action. The goal? A blogosphere whose elite tier "reflects the actual population" — i.e., where female- and minority-written blogs are found among the top 100 blogs in the same proportion as females and minorities are found in the general population.

Levy's complaint comes on the heels of Susan Estrich's campaign against the Los Angeles Times for allegedly refusing to publish female op-ed writers, a campaign that has caused widespread wringing of editorial hands about male-dominated op-ed pages.

Heather certainly doesn't need any quotas tainting her accomplishments -- she just won a $250,000 prize from the Bradley Foundation. (How do I sign up for one of those? Is there, like, an on-line form to fill in, like there is for unemployment compensation?)

What's striking is that while everybody recognizes that Estrich's hysterical (in both meanings of the term) attack on Michael Kinsley was pure menopausal hot flash, the Axiom of Equality -- the assumption that any inequality disfavoring non-white males is the product of discrimination and must be alleviated -- is so engrained in public discourse that you just know Estrich is going to win in the end. We're going to end up with disguised quotas for opinion-mongers anyway, just like there are quotas for reporters right now. Look at the Washington Monthly blog, where Kevin Drum, who knows perfectly well that this is pure stupidity, still turned his blog over for some time to brainless smear artists like Garance Franke-Ruta just because they are women.

By the way, one of the first things I noticed when I started writing op-eds for newspapers back in 1990 as a hobby was that the majority of op-ed editors I dealt with were women. Men like to get paid peanuts for the opportunity to spout off, while women like to get paid a regular salary to choose which men get to spout off.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Florida Lawyer is validated

"The legal case to keep Terri Schiavo alive failed because of ineptitude" writes bioethicist Michael Cook down under in the Melbourne Age.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

I'm Baaaaack!

The Boston Globe runs a long article by Drake Bennett on sociobiologist Robert Trivers, who was one of the world's most brilliant thinkers from 1970-1975, but has been mostly AWOL for the last 30 years. Now, he's feeling smart again and promises lots of hot new ideas.

What the article fails to mention is why Trivers' career has been so erratic: manic-depression. Edward O. Wilson wrote in his fine autobiography Naturalist:

Trivers both benefited and suffered from a case of manic-depressive syndrome (now cured). When he was up he was dazzling, when he was down he was terrifying.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why the Terri Schiavo case is a big story

I keep reading nonsense about how people who side with Schiavo's parents want to turn America into a theocracy. That's a complete misreading of why this case has generated so much interest. Vast ideological principles are not behind the controversy so much as small idiosyncratic details.

In short, a lot of people smell a rat. Michael Schiavo's story strikes them as sounding fishy. This is all straight out of Evolutionary Psychology 101: humans supposedly come equipped with "cheater detection modules" that make us particularly interested in, and suspicious of, other people's motives.

Personally, if I had to bet, I would bet that the husband's motivations aren't terribly sinister. But I could be wrong.

And that, more than anything, is why this is a big story -- because it's a small story, a human scale story. Different people can identify with the various characters and are suspicious of the others.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Terri Schiavo: We wouldn't treat a dog this way

Thrasymachus raises the uncomfortable issue that we wouldn't let a faithful old dog die of thirst. We'd have her put to sleep:

Why is she being killed through neglect though? Starvation and dehydration in fact?

Simple enough. Because euphemisms matter. It's important, for our own moral well-being, that we be able to lie to ourselves that this is a matter of "not prolonging her life."

It would be more humane to Schiavo to use lethal injection to end her life. But its effect upon us would be warping. [More]

Tough questions ... But is this really a stable sticking point? Or will there be an inevitable slide toward state-sanctioned killing of the infirm, once the logic of the current system sinks in?

One thing I've wanted to mention is that I've always thought that there was something not quite right about using doctors to execute murderers via lethal injection. I think that's a job for professional executioners, perhaps one single family like in England over a few generations. (I don't think the job requires a doctor's professional expertise. What's the worst that could happen if the executioner screws up? The patient dies. Perhaps a veterinarian would be the appropriate professional to carry out a lethal injection execution.)

I'm not crazy about doctors killing people, in prisons or in hospitals, lest they grow too fond of it, to paraphrase Robert E. Lee on war.

I would rather that doctors focus just on making you better, just as when you hire a defense attorney, his professional ethics require him to do what he can to get you off even if he thinks you're guilty.

The Dutch system where doctors are supposed to heal some people and kill others, to play both defense attorney and executioner, strikes me as presupposing a degree of moral strength that not all doctors are likely to have. Killing is a psychologically fraught act and some doctors who feel uncertain about past killings they've carried out might well respond by lowering the bar against medical killings even further and trying to persuade their fellow doctors to lower it too. That way they can assuage their consciences by saying to themselves, "Everybody is doing it. It's standard operating procedure."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 29, 2005

Why the Jews Rejected Jesus

is the new book by my old editor when I used to review books for National Review, David Klinghoffer. A devout Jew, David says:

The Jewish rejection of Jesus was the founding act of Western civilization. Had the Jews welcomed the Christian message, at any stage prior to the crucial council of Jerusalem at which Peter and James accepted Paul's belief that it was time to drop Jewish law from the requirements placed on Christians, the Jesus movement would have remained a Jewish sect with all the handicaps that implies. Unlike Christianity, and also unlike Islam, Judaism was never intended or suited to be a mass religion. Had the Jews embraced the Gospel of Jesus Christ in greater numbers, there would be no Christian Europe.

When Islam, that other daughter faith of Judaism, arose in the seventh century, its armies would have confronted a Europe that was a spiritual vaccum, which Muhammad's teachings would likely have filled..

If the historian Rodney Stark is correct in attributing the progress of Western science to the belief system of the Bible, then our world would be a poorer, less scientifically advanced one, not unlike the Muslim nations today would be, were it not for the technology they import from the nations of Europe and North America, cultures nourished on the Bible.


Interesting speculations...


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Terri Schiavo: We wouldn't treat a dog this way

Thrasymachus raises the uncomfortable issue that we wouldn't let a faithful old dog die of thirst. We'd have her put to sleep:

Why is she being killed through neglect though? Starvation and dehydration in fact?

Simple enough. Because euphemisms matter. It's important, for our own moral well-being, that we be able to lie to ourselves that this is a matter of "not prolonging her life."

It would be more humane to Schiavo to use lethal injection to end her life. But its effect upon us would be warping. [More]

Tough questions ... But is this really a stable sticking point? Or will there be an inevitable slide toward state-sanctioned killing of the infirm, once the logic of the current system sinks in?

One thing I've wanted to mention is that I've always thought that there was something not quite right about using doctors to execute murderers via lethal injection. I think that's a job for professional executioners, perhaps one single family like in England over a few generations. (I don't think the job requires a doctor's professional expertise. What's the worst that could happen if the executioner screws up? The patient dies. Perhaps a veterinarian would be the appropriate professional to carry out a lethal injection execution.)

I'm not crazy about doctors killing people, in prisons or in hospitals, lest they grow too fond of it, to paraphrase Robert E. Lee on war.

I would rather that doctors focus just on making you better, just as when you hire a defense attorney, his professional ethics require him to do what he can to get you off even if he thinks you're guilty.

The Dutch system where doctors are supposed to heal some people and kill others, to play both defense attorney and executioner, strikes me as presupposing a degree of moral strength that not all doctors are likely to have. Killing is a psychologically fraught act and some doctors who feel uncertain about past killings they've carried out might well respond by lowering the bar against medical killings even further and trying to persuade their fellow doctors to lower it too. That way they can assuage their consciences by saying to themselves, "Everybody is doing it. It's standard operating procedure."



My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gary Brecher on Lebanon

War Nerd: "War is just demographics in a hurry." The War Nerd is back after a layoff (I hope his health is all right -- he mentioned some problem awhile ago) with an overview of Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon:

War is just demographics in a hurry. And Lebanon's demographics are as wobbly as the San Andreas Fault. A hundred years ago, the majority in Lebanon was a bunch of diehard Christian Arabs who called themselves "Maronites." But their majority was shrinking fast. A lot of Maronite families had emigrated (to run cheap menswear stores in the US, mostly), and a lot of Muslims had moved in.

The Muslims didn't emigrate as much; they just didn't have the money. So they did what poor folks do: stayed home and had babies. Pretty soon the Muslims were the majority.

Nobody knows exactly how big a majority, because nobody's taken a census in Lebanon for fifty years [73 to be precise, I believe]. For one thing it's too dangerous-you wouldn't want to go knocking on doors in Beirut, asking total strangers touchy ethnic and religious questions for minimum wage, would you?

For another, the Christians don't want anybody counting noses because they know most of those noses would be Muslim.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Death Taxes and Death

Under current federal law, the inheritance tax will drop from 45% to 0% of the estate's value on January 1, 2010, then rise from 0% to 55% on January 1, 2011. Our Congressmen, being pure and trusting souls, apparently didn't notice that this provided incentives for shenanigans, such as, oh, suicide and murder. But two economists have investigated whether the more minor changes of the past had any effect on the death rate:

"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns
on the Death Elasticity" by Wojciech Kopczuk and Joel B. Slemrod:

Abstract: This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could significantly affect estate tax liability. We find some evidence that there is a small death elasticity, although we cannot rule out that what we have uncovered is ex post doctoring of the reported date of death. However, the fact that we find that postponement, rather than acceleration, of death is more likely to occur suggests that this phenomenon is at last partly a real (albeit timing) response to taxation.

So, that's good news -- people tend to stay alive longer to take advantage of upcoming tax cuts (or their loved ones forget to report their deaths) rather than "Kind Hearts and Coronets"-style murders.

On the other hand, I suspect that this one year suspension of the estate tax is unprecedented in magnitude of the effect.

(Of course, the drafters of the legislation weren't as naive as I claimed above -- I'm sure Karl Rove has a complicated plan to make the suspension permanent. The GOP will argue that the suspension must be made or permanent or it will provide an incentive to murder Granny.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Economics of Immigration

A reader writes:

I quite agree with you that immigration is not a source of prosperity, except perhaps when the immigrants are superior in technical skills and economic virtues to the natives.

The immigrationists got it backwards. Countries aren't prosperous because they take in immigrants, but they take in immigrants because they are prosperous. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are there to prove that countries can become prosperous fast without benefit of immigration.

Brazil and Argentina demonstrate that countries can take in a lot of immigrants without attaining great prosperity. Between 1880 and 1960, Brazil received about 4 million immigrants. (Two of those immigrants were my Dutch parents who emigrated from the Netherlands to Brazil in 1953.)

In fact, as you pointed out, countries can grow economically while exporting people. Between 1840 and 1965, there was both a lot of emigration from Europe and rapid economic growth there. ...

One historical fact overlooked by the immigration enthusiasts is that before 1914 the main immigrant-receiving countries were also big importers of capital. Canada, the US, Brazil, Argentina and Australia were all big recipients of foreign investment before 1914. Moreover, in many of these countries there were untapped natural resources. One example of that were the pampas in Argentina. In the later decades of the 19th century, Argentina started to open these pampas for cattle-raising. The cattle was slaughtered in plants often financed by British capital and transported on railroads also often financed by British capital. The simultaneous arrival of immigrants and foreign investors meant that wages were going up as immigrants were streaming in. The Argentinian population went from 1.8 million in 1870 to 7.8 million in 1914, but people were richer on average in 1914 than in 1870.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that today's situation is quite different. True, the US is the worlds biggest borrower, but this borrowing is not used to finance capital accumulation but to pay for the consumption of imported goods. It is happening because American households save so little and because the plutocratic Republicans are unwilling to tax the rich more heavily and at the same time unable to slash social programs for electoral reasons. The low savings rate of the US may have something to do with the stagnant wages of so many Americans, which in turn may be caused by competition from immigrants.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 27, 2005

Baby Names and Inheritances

The Unified Field Theory: Combining my two obsessions of the last week, let me suggest that somebody should do a study to see whether naming your kid after a rich relative pays off in a larger slice of the inheritance pie or in nepotistic jobs in the rich relative's business.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Annotations for my "Golf Courses as Art" article

If you have received in the mail by now the April 11th issue of The American Conservative (article not online - subscribe here) with my long article on golf course architecture, here are links to people and places I referred to in the text. You can read along in the magazine and look up pictures of everything I refer to in writing. (First, though, let me mention that the best all-around website on golf design is www.GolfClubAtlas.com.) Here are the references in order as they appear in my essay:

Augusta National

Augusta National - 15th Hole

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty

Christo's Gates in Central Park

Christo's Running Fence

Frederick Law Olmstead -- Central Park

A.W. Tillinghast -- Bethpage Black

Pete Dye

Tom Doak

Trent Jones Family:

- Robert Trent Jones Sr.

- Rees Jones

- Robert Trent Jones II

Alister MacKenzie -- Cypress Point Golf Club

Capability Brown -- Blenheim Castle landscaping

LPGA Nabisco Championship

Alice Dye

Jack Nicklaus

Ben Crenshaw -- Sand Hills

Tom Fazio

P.G. Wodehouse

John Updike

Bernard Darwin

Alister MacKensie's design of Augusta National

Ballybunion New (Cashen) Course

RTJ's Firestone South

Shadow Creek

St. Andrews Old Course

- 17th Green

Old Tom Morris

Willie Park Jr.

Huntercombe

Sunningdale

Charles Blair MacDonald -- National Golf Links of America

Louis Sullivan

Frank Lloyd Wright

Arts and Crafts Movement

Chrysler Building

William Flynn

Donald Ross

Pine Valley

Victorian furniture

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair

Augusta National

- Robert Trent Jones' 11th

- Robert Trent Jones' 16th

- MacKenzie's last bunker at Augusta National

Lever House

Modernist Office Buildings

Pinehurst #2

Robert Venturi

Tournament Players' Club

Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim museum

Whistling Straits

Pacific Dunes


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Does naming your son DeAndre rather than David doom him?

Richard Morin writes in the Washington Post about a study of Florida students by economist David Figlio that found:

Here's a reason to think twice before naming your newborn Ashlee, Da'Quan or LaQuisha: Economist David Figlio says his research shows that children with such names fare worse in school than siblings with more typical first names.

And it's not the children's fault, says Figlio, a professor at the University of Florida. He argues that teachers subconsciously expect less from students with first names that have unusual spellings and punctuation. As a consequence, he says, these boys and girls suffer in terms of the quality of the attention and instruction they get in the classroom -- differences that show up on test day.

Figlio said these kids also pay a price for their names when teachers and administrators make decisions about who gets promoted to the next grade level or selected to participate in "gifted" student programs: "Drews" are slightly more likely to be recommended for enrichment classes while "Damarcuses" are rejected, even when they have identical test scores.

"I find that teachers tend to treat children differently depending on their names, and that these same patterns apparently translate into large differences in test scores," Figlio asserts in a working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. "These results are consistent with the notion that teachers and school administrators may subconsciously expect less of students with names associated with low socio-economic status . . . and these expectations may possibly become a self-fulfilling prophesy."

Figlio first attempted to quantify names that connote low socioeconomic status. He used birth certificate data from all children born in Florida between 1989 and 1996 to identify first names that had a high probability of being associated with a mother who was unmarried or a teenager at the time when her child was born, was a high school dropout and came from an impoverished family, independent of the mother's race. He then computed what he dubbed the "Scrabble" score of each name, giving points for infrequently appearing consonants, an apostrophe or names formed by multiple syllables. "These names, empirically, are given most frequently by blacks, but they are also given by white and Hispanic parents as well" -- with similarly debilitating effects for children of all races, he found. (Exotic names popular with less affluent white families included "Jazzmyn" and "Chlo'e," he wrote in an e-mail.)

Looking at siblings is a good methodology, but I'd like to know more about the effect size. (Newspaper write-ups of social science studies almost never tell you the effect size -- reporters generally believe that if the effect is "statistically significant" it is also significant in real life, which often is not the case with a large enough study.) I suspect the intra-family difference between brothers named Jalen and Jacob is small compared to the inter-family difference between families that have any Jalens in them and families that have any Jacobs. So, the answer is, no, it probably won't doom your little D'Andre, but it likely won't do him any good.

It's reasonable that names can influence a child's attitude toward "acting white." Giving your child a lower class black name is announcing your solidarity with lower class black values. Naming your kid Jamal instead of James sends him a message about how you expect him to act, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that individual Jamals act, on average, more like the average Jamal than do individual Jameses.

The economist's explanation about teacher bias sounds not implausible, although I would like to know whether he is measuring just full siblings or, more likely, full and half siblings. There could be substantial underlying average differences even between siblings depending on their names. The kind of woman who names one of her kids D'Shawn or Trevon is more likely to have children by more than one man than the kind of woman who names one of her kids Benjamin or Ansel. If she gives one son a super-black name and another son a more mainstream name, it might mean they had different baby-daddies with different tastes ... and different child-rearing styles and different genes.

Also, a lot of the names of the Aaliyah and Imani type are examples of schoolgirl whimsy. Perhaps when the mother becomes older and wiser she'll choose a less stereotyped named, and that may have some impact on how she raises her child.

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By the way, regarding the name "Ansel," which ranks very high among boys names in average education level of parents (Dov is #1), if you are going to name your kid after a celebrity in the hopes, probably forlorn, that he takes after him, it strikes me that Ansel Adams stood for an awfully fine combination of qualities you'd wish for your child to enjoy: nature and art, outdoors and indoors, national parks and museums, strenuousness and long life, aesthetic dedication and monetary success...


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer