Most important Americans

So, who should be the most famous Americans?

The most disinterested and careful attempt to measure the scholarly consensus regarding the most important individuals in history in the arts and sciences is Charles Murray's 2003 book Human Accomplishment. His methodology is described in my review in The American Conservative and in my interview with Murray, but basically he's measuring how much attention is paid each name in the leading scholarly reference works in each field.

There's an obvious high culture / academic orientation to the lists, but what scholars are basically interested in is how much somebody influenced subsequent major figures in his field.

To be eligible, you have to have been born by 1910 or died by 1950. Everybody is ranked relative to the immortal who ranks highest in his field. Murray stays away from ranking political and religious figures.

Murray kindly sent me a copy of his database. (And, no, I won't post it on the web without his permission.) I'll put up the most important Americans in science, math, and technology another day. (Briefly, the most impressive American figures in the lists are Thomas Edison, who ties with James Watt for the top ranking in Technology, and Benjamin Franklin, who is the only American on three lists: he's a major figure in Physics and Technology, and a minor eminence in Western Literature.)

I will start with the softer side and come back later to the sciences. Here are the top American names in each category:

Western Literature (Shakespeare = 100)

Name	Birth	Index
Poe, Edgar	1809	25
Whitman, Walt	1819	23
Faulkner, William	1897	15
Hemingway, Ernest	1898	15
Melville, Herman	1819	14
Twain, Mark (Clemens)	1835	12
Pound, Ezra	1885	12
Emerson, Ralph	1803	12
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	1804	10
Dreiser, Theodore	1871	10
Dos Passos, John	1896	8
Cooper, James	1789	8
O’Neill, Eugene	1888	8
Auden, W.H.	1907	6
Longfellow, Henry	1807	6
Irving, Washington	1783	6
Dickinson, Emily	1830	6
Steinbeck, John	1902	6
Thoreau, Henry	1817	6
Lewis, Sinclair	1885	6
Frost, Robert	1874	6

Americans account for 58 of the 835 writers who made the grade in Western Literature, or 7%.

Poe seems to be that rarity who reads better in translation (especially in French). Auden is classed as an American because he spent the majority of his career in America, while T.S. Eliot is grouped with the Brits.

Western Painting and Sculpture (Michelangelo = 100)

Name	Birth	Index
Rothko, Mark	1903	11
De Kooning, Willem	1904	10
Copley, John	1738	9
Newman, Barnett	1905	8
Ray, Man	1890	7
Calder, Alexander	1898	7
Smith, David	1906	7
Eakins, Thomas	1844	7
Gorky, Arshile	1904	6
Kline, Franz	1910	6
Cole, Thomas	1801	5
Bingham, George	1811	5
Homer, Winslow	1836	5
Muybridge, Eadweard	1830	5
Hopper, Edward	1882	5

Overall, Americans account for 29 of the 479 Western Artists, or 6%.

This list does not include architecture, so Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright are not eligible, nor decorative arts, so Louis Comfort Tiffany isn't either.

I suspect, in the long run, that Eakins will emerge at the top of American painters.

Western Classical Composers: (Mozart and Beethoven tied at 100)

Ives, Charles	1874	8
Copland, Aaron	1900	7
Gershwin, George	1898	6
Sessions, Roger	1896	4
Carter, Elliott	1908	4
Barber, Samuel	1910	4
Cowell, Henry	1897	4

Americans account for 21 of 522 Western Music composers, or 4%. I would imagine Americans do better in Murray's lists of writers than composers because there's not as much of a classical-pop division among writers, so Edgar Allan Poe could do very well in Murray's system, but Cole Porter can't.

Gershwin would no doubt rank in the top 10 popular composers as well.

Western Philosophers (Aristotle = 100)

James, William	1842	10
Dewey, John	1859	10
Pierce, Charles	1839	8
Quine, Willard	1908	2
Emerson, Ralph	1803	2
Santayana, George	1863	2

Americans account for 6 out of 155 Western philosophers, or 4%.

Americans aren't terribly philosophically inclined, but that's not a bad little bunch.

Overall, of the 115 Americans in these four categories, seven are women, with Emily Dickinson highest ranked. There are two blacks, Richard Wright and Duke Ellington.

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

Did Vicente Fox's foreign minister spy for Castro?

Former Mexican foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda Gutman has been a long-time interest of mine. (Here's my 2001 VDARE.com article about this slippery fellow: "Mexico's Talleyrand").

In 2006, Fredo Arias-King pointed out to me that Castaneda's Soviet mother was an employee of Stalin's government when his father, Mexico's UN ambassador, met her in New York City in the early 1950s, where she was a translator for Stalin's delegation. Castaneda's chief advisor while he was Foreign Minister (2001-2003) was his older half-brother, Ambassador-at-Large Andres Rozental Gutman, who is his mother's son by a previous marriage. Rozental personally advised Mexico's immigration negotiators with the Bush administration.

On Monday, the Mexico City newspaper El Universal has accused Castaneda of spying for Castro's intelligence service on his father, who was Mexico's foreign minister in the late 1970s and early 1980s: "Castañeda espió a México y a su padre."

Even though Castaneda is a frequent commentator in the American press, the American media, according to a Google News search, ignored the story -- after all, it's only a story about America's next-door neighbor -- except for the LA Times on Wednesday, which headlined Castaneda's denial of a story that nobody in America had been told about.

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

Demographics of The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans list

In The Atlantic's recent list of 100 most influential Americans, which was voted on mostly by historians who have written for The Atlantic, Ross Douthat does the math:

Still, certain patterns are evident. The list tells us, for instance, that though we may be a nation of immigrants, it’s the native-born who are likely to shake things up the most: just seven of the final 100 were born outside the continental United States. It tells us that the East Coast states have made the most of their head start: sixty-three of the 100 were born in the original thirteen colonies, and twenty-six in New England alone. It tells would-be influentials not to be afraid of family commitments: ninety-one of the 100 were married at least once, and two—Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—had more than fifty wives between them. The list also suggests that contemporaries are sometimes good judges of whose influence will last: nine of Time magazine’s “People of the Year” show up on the historians’ list.

A political career (or a legal one) is the surest ticket to a historical legacy (twenty-six of the 100 held a judgeship or high political office). Aspiring influentials might also consider trying to invent something (like the lightbulb, or the airplane, or the atomic bomb), or discover something (the polio vaccine, the double helix)—though Gordon S. Wood remarked, after the list was finished, “We put too much emphasis on inventors. Someone sooner or later would have come up with the cotton gin … the lure of profits was too great. The same was true with the airplane and the telephone.”

Founding a religion landed Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on the list, as well as Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy (86). Fomenting a revolution also leaves an impression, whether you succeed, as the Founders did, or fail, but with long-lasting repercussions, as Nat Turner and John Brown (78) did. And we at The Atlantic were pleased to see that twenty-one of the figures in the Top 100 are especially famous for their writing, from Walt Whitman (22) to Margaret Mead (81)—and that more than thirty (!) of the figures on the list have been published in this magazine.

The final 100 also suggests that men still rule, at least in many historians’ eyes—oh, and make that white men. Ten women are on the list (the highest-ranked is the feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at No. 30), and eight African Americans, but the Top 100 is heavily WASPish. Martin Luther King Jr. (8) was among the top vote getters, but there isn’t another African American on the list until Jackie Robinson (35). And there are no Hispanics, Asian Americans, or Native Americans.

“It’s fun and challenging,” Ellen Fitzpatrick said of the exercise, but she called the rank order “an exercise in absurdity.” Noting that Walt Disney (26) finished ahead of Stanton in the balloting, she wondered: “Does a cartoonist deserve a place above someone who most powerfully advanced the case that half the people deserved equality before the law?” [Yes.] Or again, “Are we to conclude that not a single Native American Indian influenced our past?”

By the way, James D. Watson was #68 on the list, which didn't keep him from getting Watsoned for heresy.

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

Heroes of accomplishment v. heroes of suffering

Greg Cochran points out a profound change in American culture: from celebrating and promoting heroes of accomplishment to doing the same for heroes of suffering. Consider two war heroes-turned politicians. Dwight Eisenhower got the 1952 GOP nomination because of his accomplishments even though he didn't suffer much for them -- he was never in combat in his life. But organizing D-Day and managing the Anglo-American coalition suggested he had what it takes to perform well the day-to-day work of the Presidency during a particularly scary part of the Cold War. In contrast, John McCain is likely to get the 2008 GOP nomination in large measure because of his tremendous suffering during the Vietnam War, although he never accomplished all that much in the military.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are granted Honorary Heroes of Suffering status because of their being non-white males. Moreover, Hillary attained Presidential Timberhood by suffering through her husband's public infidelity.

Similarly, Obama's autobiography is pure emo rock: Yes, I know, sitting on the beach in Hawaii smoking dope may sound like a pretty soft life to you, but it was hell to me because of my"story of race and inheritance." The drugs were just “something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . .”

So, he had to go Suffer with His People on the South Side of Chicago for four years. Sure, he didn't accomplish anything in those four years, other than once helping Mau-Mau the all-black Chicago Housing Authority into removing some asbestos from a housing project, but that's not the point. The point is that he suffered.

In contrast, Mitt Romney, who, among other accomplishments (none of them D-Day scale, of course), saved the 2002 Winter Olympics (which by the way, were much better run than the embarrassing 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta), proved so unpopular that he dropped out today.

Perhaps the turning point was John F. Kennedy, whose main wartime feat of command was the almost unique one of getting his PT boat sliced in half by a Japanese warship.

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

The 15% and 50% rule of black politicians

A reader writes in regards to Obama's performance:

The late Alan Baron used to have the "15 and 50% rule" for cities. If a city was at least 50% black, it would almost certainly have a black mayor (Detroit, DC, Atlanta, etc.). If a city was less than 15% black, it MIGHT have a black mayor because a small minority wouldn't create all that much tension. (LA [where Tom Bradley won five elections from 1973 onward] and Seattle fit this mold).

On the other hand, if a city was between 16 and 49% black, they probably would NOT have a black mayor. The reasons were simple: at say, 30% black, the community was big to stir up a backlash, but not strong enough to win a majority. New York is the classic example of this at 30% black. David Dinkins has been their first and only black mayor. [Similarly, Harold Washington, who died 20 years ago, was Chicago's first and last black mayor.]

Obama is winning the white voters in states where no one is scared of blacks (North Dakota!). He's also winning the Deep South states where black Democrats outnumber white Democrats. But in the big states where blacks are mixed in competition with Catholic labor voters, Asians and Hispanics, he's struggling.

Alan Baron would have predicted this!

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

The Jena 6: The gift that keeps on giving blog-worthy material

From The Smoking Gun:

One of the "Jena Six" defendants was arrested yesterday for allegedly assaulting a fellow student at a Texas high school. Bryant Purvis, 19, was busted on the misdemeanor charge following an 8:30 AM altercation at Hebron High School in Carrollton, where his family relocated from Louisiana. According to the below arrest warrant affidavit, Purvis assaulted a male student he apparently suspected of vandalizing his auto. Along with choking the 18-year-old victim, the 6' 6" Purvis allegedly slammed the teenager's head on a table.

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

A more cynical interpretation

I pointed out earlier that, according to the LA Times, Obama's pandering to the illegal alien vote flopped in California because ... illegal aliens can't vote.

A reader demurs:

As regards the notion that Obama's direct advocacy of driver's licenses for illegal aliens 'flopped', you are right in every detail, but missed the big picture.

Obama was not aiming at 'hispanics'. Obama was aiming at the elites who lust after cheap labor over all other things. And it paid off big time. Money and favorable corporate press coverage is raining down on Obama, and Hilary is starting to run out of resources...

Why do you think the big money fell over itself to bring McCain back from the dead? Because McAmnesty will keep labor cheap.

Follow the money. The balance of supply and demand for labor is the dominant factor in setting wages and profits. I think Obama just outsmarted Hilary.

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

Harriet Tubmania!

Vanishing American pointed me toward this USA Today story:

Here's a quiz: Get a pencil and paper and jot down the 10 most famous Americans in history. No presidents or first ladies allowed.

Who tops your list?

Ask teenagers, and they overwhelmingly choose African-Americans and women, a study shows. It suggests that the "cultural curriculum" that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.

Researchers gave blank paper and pencils to a diverse group of 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states and told them: "Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history."

Topping the list: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women.

Sam Wineburg, the Stanford University education and history professor who led the study along with Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Maryland, says the prominence of black Americans signals "a profound change" in how we see history.

"Over the course of about 44 years, we've had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story," Wineburg says.

"There's a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights," he says.

Yes, but how does he explain No. 7: Oprah Winfrey?

She has "a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin," Wineburg says. "These are people who have a kind of popularity and recognition because they're distinguished in so many venues."

Indeed. After all, both Ben Franklin and Oprah Winfrey were the world's leading physicists for a decade or so in the middle of their careers. And while Oprah hasn't yet carried out the most important diplomatic mission in America's history, maybe President Obama will appoint her Secretary of State.

Here's the list chosen by 2000 juniors and seniors, no Presidents allowed:

1. Martin Luther King Jr.: 67%

2. Rosa Parks: 60%

3. Harriet Tubman: 44%

4. Susan B. Anthony: 34%

5.Benjamin Franklin: 29%

6. Amelia Earhart: 25%

7. Oprah Winfrey: 22%

8. Marilyn Monroe: 19%

9. Thomas Edison: 18%

10. Albert Einstein: 16%

All I have to say is that Sojourner Truth must be feeling pretty ripped off not to make the list.

Seriously, the absence of Jackie Robinson on this list shows how feminized schools have gotten, which explains a lot about the much higher dropout rate among boys.

This list also might explain a bit about why Hispanics and Asians aren't getting excited over Obama's candidacy. They must be asking, "Black this and black that. Why aren't we getting our fair share of our own pseudo-heroes pounded into the brains of children?"

About 20 years ago, E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy survey revealed that more high school students could identify Harriet Tubman than Stalin or Churchill. I recall William F. Buckley wondering who in the world Harriet Tubman could be. If she was more important than Stalin, how could he have gone his whole life without ever hearing of her? And if she wasn't important, why was she famous?

How naive we all were back then!

I first heard about Harriet Tubman in my elementary school reader around 1969 or 1970. I was fascinated by the concept of her Underground Railroad and couldn't wait for the part where the slaves tunnel their way from the South to Canada, although, as I recall, the story turned out to be disappointingly lacking in detail about how they built the locomotives and laid the track.

In contrast, here's The Atlantic Monthly's recent list of "100 Most Influential Americans," as chosen by various experts in a survey overseen, I believe, by Ross Douthat. The top Americans who weren't Presidents on The Atlantic's list were:

5 Alexander Hamilton
6 Benjamin Franklin
7 John Marshall
8 Martin Luther King Jr.
9 Thomas Edison
11 John D. Rockefeller
14 Henry Ford
16 Mark Twain
19 Thomas Paine
20 Andrew Carnegie

So, three overlaps (Ben, MLK, and Thomas Alva) in the top 10 but only 2 more (Einstein and Susan B. Dollar) of the students' list showed up anywhere on The Atlantic's top 100.

On The Atlantic's list, there were 8 blacks and 10 women, but no black women, in contrast to the 3 in the high school students' top 10. White males fill 82 of the top 100 slots, and 28 of the top 29.

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

Obama's pro-illegal alien ploy flops

In the California primary, Hillary won big among Latinos in California by running as a tax and spend Democrat, while Obama ran as a pro-illegal immigrant. The LA Times article says:

The Obama campaign, by contrast, aired Spanish-language radio ads promoting his support for issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. That was a "classic Northeastern assumption" that licenses were the primary concern of Latinos, according to Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at USC.

"It's not. I think he would have had much more traction on issues like education, or the loss of jobs . . . issues that resonate with Latino homeowners," Pachon said.

Yes, Obama is from the Midwest not the Northeast, but in California, everything beyond Las Vegas is considered "back East."

The thing that people back East like Obama are always forgetting is that illegal immigrants aren't supposed to vote. Granted, a few do vote illegally, but most wouldn't vote even if it was legal. They have more than enough drama in their private lives.

Hispanics who can vote mostly don't really care much about illegal immigrants. They might want legal immigration expanded so they can sponsor more close relatives, but illegals are a pain in the neck -- some third cousin shows up and wants to sleep on your couch for a year until he gets settled.

But most politicians and journalists don't know that because the "experts" they talk to about Hispanics -- such as Hispanic political consultants -- all want more illegal immigrants because it makes them seem more important. They want to be the "voice" of not 45 million people but, of 90 million or 180 million. Think how much business they would get then!

On the other hand, maybe all this dissection of the California voting is premature. Do we even really know who won the California primaries? I noticed this rather disturbing paragraph in the Thursday morning LA Times article:

"Stephen Weir, head of the state association of elections officials, estimated Wednesday that up to 2 million ballots remained uncounted. An additional 450,000 provisional ballots, filed when there is a dispute at a polling place, were also uncounted, according to Weir, the clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County. Elections officials have until March 4 to complete their tally, on which rests the division of party delegates."

Up to two million uncounted votes?

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

"Juno"

From my review in the new issue of The American Conservative:

Last fall, I received a half-dozen invitations to screenings of a "quirky" comedy about a "whip-smart" pregnant teen hipsterette who plans to give her baby up for adoption by an affluent couple. With my finger planted firmly nowhere near the pulse of popular opinion, I tossed each one out, thinking: "To listen to teens with attitude, for this I need to leave the house?"

So, in the wake of "Juno's" Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director (Jason Reitman of "Thank You for Smoking"), Actress (petite 20-year-old Ellen Page), and Original Screenwriter ("Diablo Cody," which is the pole name of 29-year-old self-promoter Brook Busey, whose confessional blog became popular when she started working as a stripper), I ended up paying to see it.

Juno, a cute tomboy who dresses in flannel shirts like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and has a snarky reference ready for every situation, turned out to be just as insufferable as I had expected. If she's so whip-smart, why'd she get so pregnant after one evening with a bright but baffled cross-country runner (the subversively blond and bland Michael Cera from "Superbad") with whom she says she's just friends?

Fortunately, my wife, who admired "Juno" greatly, patiently explained to me the film's considerable subtleties until even my clueless male brain could begin to grasp them.

First, though, let's dispose of the controversy over the purported politics of "Juno." Is Juno betraying feminism by choosing adoption over abortion? Sure. Yet, there's no mystery why Hollywood heroines (as in the recent "Knocked Up" and "Waitress") almost never have abortions: because babies are adorable and abortions are hideous. Nobody -- including, and perhaps especially, pro-choice ideologues -- wants to think visually about abortion.

Well, that doesn't tell you much about the movie, now does it? Funny how the excerpts I post usually seem to be like that. It's almost as if I want you to subscribe to the magazine, isn't it?

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

Obama's Super Tuesday Demographics

A reader has made up a handy table of Democratic Demographics on Super Tuesday. For convenience, I'll excerpt just the Obama numbers, along with what % each minority makes up of the Democratic voters in that state:

	Obama's	Share	of Vote		% of Dem. Voters
State	White	Black	Hisp.		Black %	Hisp. %
Georgia	40	87			51
Alabama	25	84			51
Tennessee	26	77			29
Delaware	40	86			28
Illinois	57	93			24
New Jersey	31	82	30		23	12
Missouri	39	84			17
Arkansas	16	74			17
New York	37	61	26		16	10
Connecticut	48	74	53		9	6
Arizona	38	79	41		8	18
California	42	78	29		6	29
Massachusetts	40	66	36		6	5
Oklahoma	29				6
New Mexico	55		36		3	34
Utah	55				2	7
Simple Avg.	39	79	36

The "Simple Average" is the mean not weighted by size of state.

A reader points out that Obama's California exit poll numbers are inflated:

Unless I made a mistake with my calculator, these exit polling numbers for Obama aren't correct, i.e. they don't match his actual vote count, being a few points too high.

Normally, they'd be "adjusted" to tie-out with the final results (that included a huge number of mailed ballots), but I'd half suspect that the media was reluctant to lower the initial (inflated) non-black numbers which they'd shown.

Since his Hispanic and Asian numbers are already pretty low, I'll bet his white numbers are the inflated ones. They should probably be about 7 points lower.

Perhaps the other states are too?

Also, keep in mind that exit polls' figures for a demographic group's share of the vote are, by necessity, largely rigged. The polling company guesses ahead of time that Hispanics will cast X % of the vote, so they decide to hire Y Spanish-speaking pollsters and conduct interviews in Z Hispanic-dominant precincts.

For example, I doubt that Hispanic voters outnumber black voters 29% to 6% among Democrats in California. Perhaps Hispanics were less likely to use absentee ballots, which have become hugely popular, and more likely to show up at the polls and thus be exit poll-interviewed?

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

Is Mitt Romney the son George H.W. Bush wished he had?

From the Washington Post blog The Fix:

LOSERS

President Bush: In the nine states for which The Post purchased exit polling data (Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Tennessee), the president's disapproval rating was above 40 percent in five. That includes a 52 percent disapproval score in New York, a 49 percent disapproval rating in New Jersey and a 42 percent disapproval in California. Did we mention these include Republican primary voters? The other bit of bad news for Bush is that among those who disapproved of the job he has done, McCain won overwhelmingly -- meaning that the likely 2008 nominee will, in the minds of many GOP-leaning voters, be a repudiation of the current president.

Okay, except that McCain is just like Bush 43, only more so -- more invade the world, more invite the world, more in hoc to the world. And they have very similar nasty frat boy personalities.

Yesterday, I suggested that John McCain, with his cocky shoot-from-the-hip lack of preparation and thoroughness, is the the kind of man George W. Bush always wanted for a father. (The convoluted psychodynamics of the Bush family, I've long argued, are a key to understanding why we are in Iraq.)

It now occurs to me that Mitt Romney is the kind of son George H.W. Bush would have always wanted to have follow him in the White House. But the public tends to like the McCain / W types more than the Romney - H.W. types.

Of course, Bush 41 has a competent son, Jeb. And the dynastic plan was for him to get elected governor of Florida in 1994, re-elected in 1998, and elected President in 2000 and 2004. Instead, Jeb narrowly lost in 1994 while George W. pulled off an upset election in Texas, screwing everything up royally. Is George W. Bush the only President who would have lost an election unanimously if the candidates had been restricted to his own siblings and the electorate to his own parents?

Of course, America is now so brand-name crazy in its politics that Jeb's chances in 2012, 2016, 2020, or 2024 (when, amazingly enough, he'll be younger than either John McCain or Bob Dole were) can't be permanently ruled out.

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

Southern Poverty Law Center is anti-immigrant

The folks at the Southern Poverty Law Center have turned anti-immigrant ... well, at least against immigrants from a certain part of the world.

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

The "imaginary hip black friend" voting bloc

Shelby Steele argued that Obama can't win because he couldn't simultaneously be both a race man to black voters and an anti-race man to white voters tired of race. But Shelby is a lot smarter and more realistic than the average voter (or the average pundit, for that matter). Most people just believe whatever they want to believe about Obama. So, in reality, reality doesn't much matter.

So, what we've seen are blacks, after a long period of initial apathy, flocking to their tribal standard-bearer in large numbers; and whites voting for Obama as their "imaginary hip black friend." Obama thus does well in states with lots of blacks and in states with few blacks, like Idaho, (where he won 79% of the small number of Democrats), Alaska (75%), Kansas (74%), and Colorado (67%), but not so hot in-between. Audacious Epigone reports:

Blacks overwhelmingly backed Obama, Hispanics favored Clinton (with the anomaly of Connecticut, where, comprising 6% of the total, they apparently preferred Obama by a narrow margin [I presume that Obama looks like more like the typical Hispanic in Connecticut than the typical Hispanic in California), and the larger the black share of a state's voting population, the more likely whites in that state were to flock to Clinton. Looking at all the contests that have taken place so far, there has been an inverse correlation of .35 (confidence just a hair outside 90%) between the percentage of a state's voters who are black and the amount of support Obama garners among whites in that state.

That's quite rigorous actually, given that obliterations like Illinois are outliers that attenuate the statistical relationship. Further, the real relationship is likely stronger than that, as I computed the results of all contests thus far (including those before Super Tuesday) as though only Hillary and Obama were running--in reality, most of Edwards' (overwhelmingly white) supporters in the southern states would have gone to Hillary if it had been a two horse race at that point. And I gave all the white undecideds in Michigan to Obama (neither he nor Edwards was on the ballot there), so he looked better among whites in that 23% black state that he would've in reality.

In the eyes of whites, Obama is only the Black Candidate when there are lots of blacks rallying behind him.

Among Democrats, Hispanics and Asians appear so far to be resistant to Obama's mythos:

In California, the only state in either party with a sizable enough number of Asian voters to adequately report exit polling data on, Hillary outdid Obama by almost 3-to-1 (71%-25%). In New Jersey, extrapolating from the other racial categories, the best estimate for the Asian vote (which comprised 4% of the Democratic total) suggests 59%-41%, in Hillary's favor.

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

Where would Romney have been without the illegal immigration issue?

Here's the exit poll from the GOP race in California, which shows just how crucial Mitt Romney's public conversion in 2006-2007 to immigration restrictionism was to his having even a chance in this race. Man, people just don't like Plastic Fantastic Man. Without the 29% of the voters who called illegal immigration the most important issue, among whom Romney beat McCain 45%-25%, Romney wouldn't have finished second, he would have been tarred and feathered and run out of California on a rail.

Heck, among the 33% of voters who identified the economy as the most important issue (a not surprising choice on a day when the Dow dropped 370 points), McCain beat Romney 48%-27%, even though Yosemite Sam has seldom paid any attention to the economy. Overall, Romney beat McCain 35%-32% among voters who think "Issues" are most important in deciding their vote, while getting clobbered by McCain 49%-26% among those voting on "Personal Qualities."

Most Important Issue	Share of Voters	McCain	Romney	Huckabee	Paul	Giuliani
Illegal Immigration	29%	25%	45%	9%	6%	8%
Iraq	20%	49%	17%	14%	7%	9%
Economy	33%	48%	27%	10%	4%	3%
Terrorism	15%	42%	29%	17%	1%	10%
More Important to Your Vote		McCain	Romney	Huckabee	Paul	Giuliani
Issues	52%	32%	35%	16%	6%	6%
Personal Qualities	45%	49%	26%	8%	4%	7%

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

Good timing

The Dow Jones average drops 370 points on Tuesday on new evidence of a recession in the offing, and the Bush Administration announces a plan to "dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops." I was thinking that maybe some of those newly unemployed construction workers might want farm jobs, but, apparently, the eternal need for more foreign peasants comes first. Otherwise, we would all starve.

The LA Times reports:

The Bush administration today plans to announce the most significant overhaul in two decades of the nation's agricultural guest worker program, in a bid to dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops.

The revised regulations, many months in the works, would make it easier for growers to bring foreign workers to the United States and could alleviate the critical farmworker shortage largely caused by the U.S. crackdown on illegal border crossings. ...

The greatest effect would be in California, the nation's largest agricultural state. Some farmers have had to plow rotting crops back into their fields for lack of workers at harvest time. But lawmakers and growers said Tuesday that more than an administrative fix was needed to solve the state's chronic farm labor shortages.

Don't you love that phrase "chronic farm labor shortage"? It's like golf course owners complaining about the chronic daylight shortage that keeps golf courses closed an average of 12 hours per day and demanding that therefore the government must build them giant floodlights so they can stay open 24 hours per day. There is no farm labor shortage, chronic or otherwise, there's just a higher market wage than the wage the growers would prefer to pay (which, by the way, is $0.00 per hour).

And as for crops rotting in the fields, it's the nature of the agriculture business that each year a few of the many scores of different crops will grow in such abundance or at an inconvenient time or both that it's not worth harvesting some of them. In 2006, for example, it was pears. So, each fall, the growers' lobbyists issue press releases about how pears or brussels sprouts or avocados or whatever it is this year are "rotting in the fields" due to the horrible burden of having to pay stoop laborers in expensive California $8.50 an hour (or whatever it is) for seasonal work.

The more long-range appeal to growers of guest-worker plans is that it lets them bring in Asian peasants who are less able to sneak into the country than Mexican peasants, while allowing the Mexicans to continue to sneak in. (Did you know the population of Indonesia, for instance, is 235 million?) From the employers' standpoint, it's a double your pleasure, double your fun approach to the supply and demand determination of laborers' wages. And then once the flow of guest workers from, say, Indonesia gets started, their will be more illegal immigration from Indonesia too, since the guest workers' relatives will now have connections in America.

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

Investment idea

I never have any money-making ideas, but here's a vague concept that somebody might be able to profitably apply.

One reason cell phones are so popular around the world is because, unlike old-fashioned land line technology, they don't require the kind of disinterested organizational ability that Northwest Europeans and Northeast Asians have but that almost nobody else displays. Land-lines tend toward being a natural monopoly -- it's silly to string multiple phone lines into your house to choose among competitors -- so phone companies used to be either government agencies or regulated monopolies. And that meant that most of the world had bad phone service. It wasn't just the Third World -- Italy was notorious for the years you had to wait to get hooked up. Italians are terrific at small scale businesses that react instantly to the latest fashions, but their big bureaucracies are disastrous.

In contrast, cell phones aren't natural monopolies, so they thrive in less civic-minded cultures. The most extreme example was Somalia during the recent decade and a half when it didn't have any central government at all, but it had lots of prospering cell phone providers. (There are costs to anarchy, though -- one Somalian cell phone company I read about had 800 employees, 500 to do the work, 300 to carry guns to protect them.)

The point is that most of the world is a little closer to Somalia than to Sweden when it comes to the civic virtues, so products that don't require large scale cooperation and disinterested diligence will thrive more than those that do.

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

Taking dynasticism to a whole 'nother level

Do you ever get the impression that John McCain, who for some reason seems to be perceived as the anti-Bush candidate in the GOP race, is the cool, cocky dad George W. Bush wished he'd had instead of that wimpy, diplomatic, prudent father he has spent his life being annoyed that he got stuck with?

The classic problem with dynasticism is regression toward the mean: the formidable father has a less impressive son. Having already gone down that route with the Bushes, we're now embarking on a bizarre exercise in pseudo-dynasticism. Having witnessed the failure of the son, we're now enthroning the man who could be the failed son's crazy old coot of a favorite uncle.

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

Are Romney's caucus victories due to Mormon conspiracies?

Mitt Romney won big in a couple of purplish states with well-educated, civic-minded electorates: Colorado (59%-19%) and Minnesota (42%-22%-20%). Those are respectable wins.

But ... both were caucus states rather than primaries. And I'm starting to get suspicious.

That seems to be a pattern -- Romney does well in caucuses and loses in primaries. Before today, he won caucuses in Wyoming, Nevada, and Maine, and a primary in his "home" state of Michigan. Perhaps that's just because the more dedicated, public affairs-oriented individuals who show up at caucuses have carefully assessed each candidate's positions and resumes and made a responsible choice for Romney.

Or maybe ... it's because Mormons keep packing the caucuses.

Unfortunately, I can't find exit polls for Colorado and Minnesota, but we do know that Romney's victory in the Nevada caucus was boosted by Mormons making up 25% of the GOP caucusers and going close to 100% for Romney. So, I have my suspicions about his other caucus victories. If anybody has any evidence one way or another, let me know.

Oh, wait, Romney did do really, really well in one primary today, where he got 90% of the vote, so maybe my suspicions are paranoid.

Except ... that state was Utah.

Mormons -- they'd take over the world in a couple more generations ... if only they were allowed to drink caffeinated beverages!

This is not to say that Mormons can't be dedicated, public affairs-oriented individuals. In fact, I would expect that they are a little above average in this regard. It's just that the discreet charm of Mitt Romney just seems to be a little too discreet to win many elections where Mormons don't make up a sizable fraction of the voters.

In other states today, Romney won in caucuses in Alaska (44%) and in primaries in Montana (38%), North Dakota (36%), and in his "home" state of Massachusetts with 51%. That's a little better than McCain's 47% in his home state of Arizona, but not as good as Huckabee's 61% in Arkansas. In contrast, Obama won 64% in Illinois and Clinton 57% in New York. So, to know McCain and Romney is apparently not to love them.

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

Super Tuesday in Electoral College Perspective

Longtime reader Ben Franklin (since 1706) comments:

On Super Tuesday, McCain won almost exclusively in states that Republicans have almost no chance of winning in November. The only clear exceptions to that are Oklahoma and Missouri, the later where McCain has won with just 33 percent of the vote and with 3 or 4 percent separating McCain, Huckabee and Romney. In Oklahoma, McCain won in a state that has as its law one of the most stringent anti-illegal immigrant laws in the country. So, both of those wins are incongruous.

In the rest of the states McCain won, there is pretty much Zero chance for the Republican nominee to win in the general election in the fall.

As for Huckabee, he won in Southern states that just about ANY Republican candidate will win come November.

So however you look at the results, they mean less then they appear to mean. This also applies to Obama, who won in many states that the Democrat nominee has next to no chance to win, except for Illinois, which is in the bag for the Democrats (and is Obama's "home state"). So, Obama’s big delegate count on Super Tuesday is vastly overstated, what with his winning North Dakota, Utah, Idaho, etc.

I’d say that Hillary comes out of Super Tuesday looking like by far the strongest candidate in the field of either party.

The electoral college means that purple states are what matters: the Great Lakes Blue Collar States of Ohio, Pennyslvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Clean Green States of Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and New Mexico (okay, NM isn't green and it isn't clean in its politics, but I had to put it somewhere), and then there's Florida, which wasn't that close in 2004 but we all remember 2000.

Surprisingly few purple states participated in Super Tuesday. In Minnesota, Obama won big with 67% of the caucuses, while Romney beat McCain and Huckabee 42-22-20. Hillary won New Mexico 51-42, while the Republicans in that state didn't hold an election. (Getting off the topic here, don't you find it annoying when the parties in a state hold their primaries on different days?)

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

Where to find exit polls

One place to find exit poll data is to go here:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/

Then Control-F for "exit" then click on the state you want on the map. Then look for the link to "Full ... Exit Poll."

This is all part of my ongoing effort to get my readers to do my work for me.

Here, for example, are the race demographics of Democratic voters in California:

Vote by Race	% of voters	Clinton	Obama
White	53%	43%	49%
Black	7%	16%	81%
Latino	29%	66%	33%
Asian	8%	73%	25%
Other	3%	43%	47%
Race of Candidate Was...		Clinton	Obama
Most Important	6%	63%	35%
One of Several	11%	56%	43%
Not Important	82%	49%	46%
Was Race of Candidate Important to You		Clinton	Obama
Yes	17%	59%	40%
No	82%	49%	46%

Hillary won 80% of California's Democratic high school dropouts and 61% of the no-college high school grads. So, if Hillary wins California, it looks like it will be on the strength of the "Son of Aladdin" vote. In contrast, Obama did very well in California among the bloc of white voters who want an "imaginary hip black friend," in the immortal words of an anonymous Clinton advisor.

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

What should the nominating process look like?

Clearly, the Presidential nominating process is broken. Here it is February 5, a ridiculous 9 months before the election, and we're about to have 23 states vote at once.

I understand the rush to the front by states who were disenfranchised in 2004 by the absurd amount of momentum John Kerry developed by winning Iowa and New Hampshire, but there's got to be a better way.

The Comments section is open for your proposals.

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

What's not a conspiracy?

To call an observation a "conspiracy theory" is widely treated as an argument-winning move. Yet, which of the major historical events of the 20th Century did not have at least some aspect of conspiracy about them?

Start with the event that set in motion the main currents of the century, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. This was the result of a conspiracy right out of an Oliver Stone movie: Elements high up in the Serbian government and military, organized in a secret paramilitary society with the comic book name Black Hand, infiltrated nine assassins and their weapons into Sarajevo and had them sit around for a month waiting for the Archduke to show up so they could ambush him. (They proved incompetent and all missed, but then the Austrians proved incompetent too and made a wrong turn and then stalled the Archduke's car right in front of the despondent Princip.)

Next, the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the rest of the Bolshie boys were classic cafe conspirators who got lucky. Lenin's deal with the German high command to be transported from Switzerland to the Finland Station in order to undermine Germany's Russian enemy is straight out of the conspiracy nut's textbook.

The Depression, however, is the most striking exception to this tendency of major 20th Century events to in some way partake of the conspiratorial. It just sort of happened.

What about the rise of Hitler? You might call the political maneuverings by the conservative Weimar powerbrokers who gave Hitler the Chancellorship in January 1933 a conspiracy, although that's stretching the term. Hitler's manner of government -- midnight meetings to plan great crimes with a few henchmen where no notes were taken (a particularly un-German way of running a government) -- was that of a conspirator rather than a national leader.

Japan's path to Pearl Harbor was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s by conspiracies of Army officers who assassinated all the moderates in the Japanese government.

On a strategic level, the Cold War was not particularly conspiratorial -- it naturally grew out of the radically different interests of the two major victors of WWII. But -- probably fortunately -- both sides preferred to wage it largely by conspiratorial means rather than by tank battle in the Fulda Gap.

According to Paul Johnson's Modern Times,

"Eisenhower's chief fear, in the tense atmosphere engendered by the Cold War, was that the government would fall into the grip of a combination of bellicose senators, over-eager brass-hats and greedy arms-suppliers -- what he termed the 'military-industrial complex.'" [p. 464]

Eisenhower preferred to fight the Cold War using cheaper means -- building a nuclear deterrent and using CIA covert operations, as in Guatemala and Iran.

Finally, the fall of the Soviet Empire doesn't seem terribly conspiratorial at this point, but the history hasn't all been written. I'd be particularly interested in what promises, if any, were made by the American government to Saudi Arabia in 1985 to persuade the Saudis to pump so much oil that the world price plummeted and the Soviet Union, a major oil exporter, went broke.

Of course, this doesn't mean that most (or any) of the popular conspiracy theories are true. Most are obviously pretty stupid.

What it does show is that, like with predictions, people are easily bored and depressed by true conspiracy theories. For example, the fact that WWI, the catastrophe of catastrophes, was set in motion by a classic large-scale conspiracy is of almost no interest to anybody -- I was only vaguely aware of that fact myself until I looked up the history tonight.

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

Yosemite Sam versus Plastic Fantastic Man

My Super Tuesday enthusiasm knows no bounds.

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

Real Estate Week at iSteve

I've got a couple of big articles this week on how you can use your personal knowledge of what people look for when buying a house or renting an apartment to understand the big issues better than 99% of the pundits who don't act as if their private affairs has any relationship to everybody's public affairs.

First, now up on VDARE.com is my article "Real Estate, Race, and Immigration on Chicago's South Side" about Chicago neigbhorhoods inspired by sociologist William Julius Wilson's recent book There Goes the Neighborhood. Wilson's grad students spent three years studying four neighborhoods, which he referred to by pseudonyms. I explain what their real names are and then offer a theory to account for the complex relationship between real estate and race in big cities.

Then, in a day or two, the electronic version of the new issue of The American Conservative will contain my full-length exposition of my theory of how "affordable family formation" makes some states vote Republican in Presidential elections, while unaffordable family formation makes others vote Democratic.

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

Romney wins Maine; NYTimes.com doesn't mention it

With 68% of the Maine caucuses reporting after voting on Saturday, Mitt Romney holds an insurmountable 52% - 21% lead over GOP frontrunner Sen. John McMentum (with Ron Paul right behind him at 19%). Romney is on track to take all 18 Maine delegates.

This is the last voting before Super Tuesday, yet the New York Times, which largely sets the agenda for the rest of the news media, doesn't see fit to mention it on its website homepage as of 4:00 am Sunday. Campaign stories the NYT does feature prominently include these stop-the-presses barnburners:

Democrats Flood States With Ads as Tuesday Nears

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

A concentrated burst of advertising is putting the candidates’ strategies out in the open and is highlighting the diverging financial fortunes of the two parties.

Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate

By MIKE McINTIRE

An Illinois controversy pitting two important constituencies against each other put Barack Obama’s legislative skills to the test.

More Politics

• The Northeast Moves From Irrelevance to Influence
• Candidates Scrambling in States About to Vote
• Slide Show: Campaigning
• City Room: Primary Journal
• The Caucus: The Candidates’ Plans for the Super Bowl

Obviously, it's just Maine, but I don't recall the NYT not mentioning on its home page the result next door in New Hampshire. And it's just a caucus instead of a primary, but I don't believe the NYT skipped Iowa for that reason.

I guess some candidates' momentum is more equal than other candidates' momentum.

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

The American Conservative on McCain

From the February 11th issue of The American Conservative:

February 11, 2008 Issue

Paul for President

The Great Betrayal
The Arizona senator says our jobs are not coming back, the illegals are not going home, and we are going to have more wars.
by Patrick J. Buchanan

The Madness of John McCain
George W. Bush’s plan to remake the Middle East looked delusional—until his would-be successor began talking about his plan to reform the Middle East.
by Justin Raimondo

Presidential Pardon
Count on McCain to resurrect his amnesty advocacy as soon as the voters can be ignored.
by W. James Antle III

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

Theories about conspiracies theories

[Links fixed]
The Man Who Is Thursday offers "The Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies:"

Over the past couple years, Steve Sailer's writings on conspiracy theories (see below) have intrigued me. Like most educated Westerners I don't think much of conspiracy theorizing, but the examples Steve has given got me thinking. ...

More interesting though are some of Steve's other examples: the Mafia, the 90s Russian oligarchs, the Donmeh, the diamond business. What these all have in common is that they all involve closely knit ethnic groups or people with close family ties. To be precise, actual conspiracies tend to be found only among family members or, what amounts to the same thing, closely knit, endogamous ethnic groups. Therefore, in honour of Steve's abiding interest in family, I give your the Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies. So far as I know, Steve hasn't spelled this out explicitly, but I'll do it for him:

Click here to find out what Thursday proposes.

When you get back, I want to raise a related issue: the declining value of covert conspiracies relative to overt conspiracies.

Say we were sitting around in a dorm room in 1978 and I told you that each winter the world's richest men gather in an obscure village high in the Alps to discuss how to impose economic policies in their self-interest on the nations of the world.

You'd say I had seen too many paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View, and Winter Kills. Surely, if this conspiracy existed, enterprising journalists like Woodward and Bernstein would expose it.

Then, I'd say, no, you don't understand: the rich guys invite Woodward and Bernstein to the meetings (well, maybe not Bernstein, he's not really important enough anymore). Journalists all compete with each other to be big enough celebrities to get invited to this meeting, where they and the rich guys can all bask under the TV lights in their mutually-reinforcing celebrityhood.

The secret is that there is no secret. In fact, everybody invited immediately notifies his publicist to spread the word that he's going.

And, you'd say, that's crazy! A conspiracy in plain view? Who ever heard of such a thing?

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

My Super Bowl Prediction

I realize I've been remiss in not giving you my Super Bowl prediction, so I've created a computer model taking into account Tom Brady's ankle, Eli Manning's performance under various weather conditions, and Randy Moss's fluctuating ego.

I predict an upset! The New York Giants will beat the Boston Patriots 14-1.

I hope you are satisfied.

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

The Wind from the South

The Washington Post reports on the latest Latin American trend from El Alto, a poor suburb of 650,000 at 13,300 feet, well above Bolivia's capital, the whimsically named La Paz.

But first, I can't resist digressing on La Paz's social topography. In contrast to many cities, such as Los Angeles, where the rich live in the hills above the plains, the rich in La Paz live at the bottom of a deep canyon, with the wealthiest neighborhoods down at 10,200 feet. In Bolivia's capital, social climbers try to claw their way to the bottom. WikiTravel writes:

"La Paz' geography (in particular, altitude) reflects society: the lower you go, the more affluent. While many middle-class paceños live in high-rise condos near the center, the really rich houses are located in the lower neighborhoods southwest of the Prado. The reason for this division is that the lower you go in the city, the more oxygen there is in the air and the milder the weather is. And looking up from the center, the surrounding hills are plastered with makeshift brick houses of those struggling in the hope of one day reaching the bottom."

The fundamental reason for this is that white women miscarry frequently at very high altitudes -- a problem that is seen in a few places in Colorado as well, such as Leadville. Indian women are more likely to carry to term the higher about 10,000 feet you go.

This underlies the recent threat of the lowlying Bolivian lands north of Paraguay to secede. Their inhabitants tend to be white and mestizo, while the Altiplano is Indian and mestizo. The low country has the main natural resource, natural gas, but the Indians of the high plains have recently finally seized control of the government after 400+ years, and are trying to seize the natural gas wealth.

Anyway, lots of vibrant stuff is happening in Bolivia, which we ought to keep an eye on because these "principles, cultural values, norms and procedures" are slowly migrating here:

EL ALTO, Bolivia -- Tattered dummies look down on this city from street poles in barren squares, like scarecrows for anyone with bad intentions.

The dummies are meant to warn would-be thieves that if they try to rob anyone here, they could be hanged. Or lashed to a pulp. Or set on fire. Or buried alive.

"If there are cases in which people are caught in the act, why can't we take justice into our own hands?" asked El¿as Gomes, a community leader in an El Alto neighborhood where two accused thieves were burned alive by an angry crowd of residents in November. "We want the people of the neighborhood to be the ones to judge the crimes. Beyond the question of whether lynchings are good or bad, we want to be the ones to judge."

Determining who gets to judge criminals is a matter of national debate in Bolivia, where a draft constitution that has already won preliminary approval would make punishments doled out by indigenous leaders and tribal communities as legitimate as sentences handed down by the country's courts.

The proposal has invigorated communities such as this, where many residents maintain strong links to Aymara and Quechua indigenous traditions and few trust what they call the "ordinary justice" system of police, judges and courtrooms. ...

Valentin Ticona Colque, a vice minister in charge of communal justice in President Evo Morales's government, said such justice is less likely to be corrupt because it is administered by active members of the communities themselves, not by state-supported judges.

"When the community is involved and vigilant, it's difficult to corrupt the system -- almost impossible, in fact," he said.

According to one article of the draft constitution, decisions made under the communal justice system would be immune from challenge by any outside judicial system. The constitution does not spell out how justice should be dispensed but states that indigenous and campesino, or peasant, authorities "will apply their own principles, cultural values, norms and procedures."

Makes you want to book that lama trekking vacation through the Bolivian highlands, doesn't it?

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