Tom Wolfe's lack of Southern White Guilt

David Denby, the lesser of the two New Yorker movie reviewers, has written a short book entitled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation.

The book doesn't sound terribly interesting, but part of Michael C. Moynihan's review in Reason caught my eye:

Denby tags the Fox News screamer Bill O’Reilly as a boorish knuckle-dragger, but his liberal counterpart Keith Olbermann is something else entirely: “One can’t help but noticing...that Olbermann’s tirades are voluminously factual, astoundingly syntactical...and always logically organized.” The leftist writer Gore Vidal is a “master of high snark,” while his conservative counterpart Tom Wolfe is an overrated racist. If you agree with the snark, it probably isn’t snark.

Denby identifies Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” as a progenitor of today’s snarky style, but it fails, he says, because the writer’s teasing of haute-liberal infatuation with the Black Panthers “now seems more fatuous than the assembled partygoers.” How so? Because according to Denby, “In the end, [Wolfe’s trademark] white suit may have been less an ironic joke than the heraldic uniform of a man born in Richmond, Virginia, who entertained fancies of a distinguished Old South in which blacks kept their mouths shut, a conservative who had never accustomed himself to the new money in the Northeast.” While denouncing bloggers for rumor-mongering and for besmirching reputations with nothing but conjecture, Denby nevertheless finds it appropriate to imply that Wolfe’s writing is steeped in white supremacy.

Nonetheless, I think Denby's New York Jewish liberal irritation at Wolfe is not wholly without basis. It's been little mentioned, but one of Wolfe's strengths is his complete lack of Southern White Guilt.

Because Wolfe emerged so dazzlingly in the mid-1960s, it took the literary world a long time to figure out he was not one of them, that his political feelings were self-confidently conservative. After all, they reasoned, how could any artistic innovator be a conservative?

And yet, few societies in human history before 19th Century Europe would be surprised that a leading member of the artistic and intellectual classes would be an unalienated offspring of the gentry.

Thomas Wolfe Jr. was born in the Shenandoah Valley in 1931 (or 1930, sources differ), where his father was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Tech. A few years later, the family moved to Richmond when his father became the editor of The Southern Planter, a how-to journal for the rural squirearchy. The family spent their summers on their two farms. (Seeing Look Homeward, Angel and other novels by North Carolina novelist Thomas Wolfe on his father's bookshelf as a small boy, little Tom naturally assumed his dad had written them.) He attended the traditionalist Washington and Lee College.

What little Wolfe has mentioned of his upbringing has been appreciative and loyal. In 1966, Elaine Dundy of Vogue asked him:

Do you feel that you had an important childhood -- i.e., very disturbed, or unhappy, or ecstatic -- in short, one that your find you keep constantly referring back to in your mind?

I was lucky, I guess, in my family in that they had very firm ideas of roles: Father, Mother, Child. Nothing was ever allowed to bog down into those morass-like personal hangups. And there was no rebellion. ...

The first girl I ever fell in love with came from divorced parents. That was her status symbol to me. I was so envious of her because I thought, what dramatic lives they're all having -- real material to write about.

As the loyal, successful offspring of people of a deserved status in American society, Wolfe, who is hypersensitive to questions of status, upon his arrival in New York City always tended to be alienated from the alienated who dominated artistic and intellectual life. Thus, it's hardly surprising that one of the great themes of Wolfe's satire has been their transparent strategies to "Épater la bourgeoisie."

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

Why the Tech Bubble wasn't as bad for us as the Housing Bubble

Vernon L. Smith, the Chapman U. Nobel Laureate behavioral economist, argues in the Wall Street Journal what I've been saying for awhile: the Dot.Com bubble wasn't as disastrous for us because day traders blowing a wad on Pets.com didn't have as many ramifications as drywallers defaulting on California mortgages:

Earlier, during the downturn in the equities market between December 1999 and September 2002, approximately $10 trillion of equity was erased. But a measure of financial system performance, the Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods BKX index of financial firms, fell less than 6% during that period. In the current downturn, the value of residential real estate has fallen by approximately $3 trillion, but the BKX index has now fallen 75% from its peak of January 2007. The financial sector has been devastated in this crisis, whereas it was almost completely unaffected by the downturn in the equities market early in this decade.

How can one crash that wipes out $10 trillion in assets cause no damage to the financial system and another that causes $3 trillion in losses devastate the financial system?

In the equities-market downturn early in this decade, declining assets were held by institutional and individual investors that either owned the assets outright, or held only a small fraction on margin, so losses were absorbed by their owners. In the current crisis, declining housing assets were often, in effect, purchased between 90% and 100% on margin. In some of the cities hit hardest, borrowers who purchased in the low-price tier at the peak of the bubble have seen their home value decline 50% or more. Over the past 18 months as housing prices have fallen, millions of homes became worth less than the loans on them, huge losses have been transmitted to lending institutions, investment banks, investors in mortgage-backed securities, sellers of credit default swaps, and the insurer of last resort, the U.S. Treasury. ...

Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system.

For example, the biggest decline home prices in Los Angeles County is seen in the lowest priced zip code: the fabulous 93591, the Lake Los Angeles part of eastern Palmdale in the high desert. In February, 21 homes sold there. The median price was $55,000, down 78% from February 2008. In contrast, in the worst zip code in Compton in the 'hood, 25 homes sold, with a median price of $140,000, down 52%.

By the way, I drove through both Palmdale and Compton last week, and I have to say ... they look marvelous. Practically every residential street in SoCal looks great in early Spring. (The commercial streets not so much). Slums in SoCal just don't look like slums on The Wire. I wonder if Countrywide and Fannie Mae arranged to take Chinese bankers interested in buying their cruddy mortgage-backed securities and stock through Palmdale and Compton in late March?

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

My new VDARE column: Grad School Test Scores on GMAT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, and DAT

Here's my new VDARE.com column in which I invent a simple, usable format for comparing average scores on five major standardized tests for postgrads.

All across the country, applicants to graduate and professional schools have been receiving fat letters of acceptance or thin letters of rejection.

They have a right to feel nervous. They’ve sweated through college and through rigorous standardized exams, which they hope will open the door to their chosen professions. But the prestigious postgrad programs are ruthless about selecting the best candidates (at least if they are white or Asian). So, applicants obsess over whether their 165 LSATK-12 education or 680 GMAT is good enough to get in.

But, paradoxically, professors at the top schools seldom preach what they practice when it comes to K-12 education or immigration. They are fiercely selectionist about whom they let in to their institutions. Yet they lecture American citizens about how we should be lax about whom we let in to our country.

There is much that can be learned from the study of average test scores from the major postgrad exams. The idiosyncratic scoring systems do make them seem impenetrable to outsiders, but fortunately, they are all graded on the bell curve, so I’ve come up with a handy table that makes them easy to understand.

I’ve accumulated recent data on the average scores by race for five exams: the GRE for grad school, the LSAT for law school, the MCAT for medical school, the GMAT for business school, and the DAT for dental school.

To make all the numbers comprehensible, I’ve converted them to show where the mean for each race would fall in percentile terms relative to the distribution of scores among non-Hispanic white Americans. Most of us have some sense of what the distribution of talent is among whites—political correctness doesn’t demand we avert our eyes when it comes to whites—so I’ll use whites as benchmarks:

		Mean Score as Percentile of White Distribution
Test	Degree	White	Black	Asian	Tot Hisp	Mex-Am
GMAT	M.B.A.	50%	13%	55%	27%	24%
GRE-Verbal	Ph.D./M.A.	50%	18%	47%	29%	28%
GRE-Quant		50%	14%	66%	29%	28%
LSAT	J.D.	50%	12%	47%	19%	29%
MCAT-Verbal	M.D.	50%	10%	36%	19%	21%
MCAT-Phys Sci		50%	14%	61%	24%	25%
MCAT-Biol Sci		50%	10%	54%	24%	25%
DAT	D.D.S.	50%	16%	60%	27%	NA

Thus, for example, on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the gatekeeper for the M.B.A. degree, the mean score for whites falls, by definition, at the 50th percentile of the white distribution of scores. The mean score for black test-takers would rank at the 13th percentile among whites. Asians average a little better than the typical white, scoring at the 55th percentile.

Most of these tests break out separate nationalities among Hispanics. Thus, my table has columns both for “Total Hispanics” (27th percentile on the GMAT) and “Mexican-Americans” (24th percentile). In the 2000 Census, Mexicans made up 58 percent of the Total Hispanic population.

MORE

As you know, I like social statistics the way Bill James likes baseball statistics.

I noticed that the New York Times ran another long, intelligent article about baseball statistics today. How much brainpower does America devote to solid thinking about baseball statistics compared to social statistics?

For example, here's a featured article in the Washington Post today that would been ripped to shreds for obvious methodological flaws before ever being published in a baseball statistics journal:

Research Links Poor Kids' Stress, Brain Impairment
by Rob Stein

Now, research is providing what could be crucial clues to explain how childhood poverty translates into dimmer chances of success: Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area -- working memory.

"There's been lots of evidence that low-income families are under tremendous amounts of stress, and we know that stress has many implications," said Gary W. Evans, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who led the research. "What this data raises is the possibility that it's also related to cognitive development."

With the economic crisis threatening to plunge more children into poverty, other researchers said the work offers insight into how poverty affects long-term achievement and underscores the potential ramifications of chronic stress early in life.

"This is a significant advance," said Bruce S. McEwen, who heads the laboratory of neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University in New York. "It's part of a growing pattern of understanding how early life experiences can have an influence on the brain and the body."

Previous research into the possible causes of the achievement gap between poor and well-off children has focused on genetic factors that influence intelligence, on environmental exposure to toxins such as lead, and on the idea that disadvantaged children tend to grow up with less intellectual stimulation.

"People have hypothesized both genetic and environmental factors play a role in why poor children don't do as well in school," said Martha Farah, director of the center for cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. "Experiential factors can include things like having fewer trips to museums, having fewer toys, having parents who don't have as much time or energy to engage with them intellectually -- to read to them or talk to them."

But Evans, who has been gathering detailed data about 195 children from households above and below the poverty line for 14 years, decided to examine whether chronic stress might also be playing a role.

"We know low-socioeconomic-status families are under a lot of stress -- all kinds of stress. When you are poor, when it rains it pours. You may have housing problems. You may have more conflict in the family. There's a lot more pressure in paying the bills. You'll probably end up moving more often. There's a lot more demands on low-income families. We know that produces stress in families, including on the children," Evans said.

For the new study, Evans and a colleague rated the level of stress each child experienced using a scale known as "allostatic load." The score was based on the results of tests the children were given when they were ages 9 and 13 to measure their levels of the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine, as well as their blood pressure and body mass index.

"These are all physiological indicators of stress," said Evans, whose findings were published online last week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The basic idea is this allows you to look at dysregulation resulting from stress across multiple physiological systems."

The subjects also underwent tests at age 17 to measure their working memory, which is the ability to remember information in the short term. Working memory is crucial for everyday activities as well as for forming long-term memories.

"It's critical for learning," Evans said. "If you don't have good working memory, you can't do things like hold a phone number in your head or develop a vocabulary."

When the researchers analyzed the relationships among how long the children lived in poverty, their allostatic load and their later working memory, they found a clear relationship: The longer they lived in poverty, the higher their allostatic load and the lower they tended to score on working-memory tests. Those who spent their entire childhood in poverty scored about 20 percent lower on working memory than those who were never poor, Evans said.

"The greater proportion of your childhood that your family spent in poverty, the poorer your working memory, and that link is largely explained by this chronic physiologic stress," Evans said. "We put these things together and can say the reason we get this link between poverty and deficits in working memory is this chronic elevated stress."

If they had given the working memory IQ subtest first at age 9 and then again at age 17 and shown that those under more stress had seen bigger IQ declines, then it would be suggestive that stress might lower IQ. But by waiting until age 17 to give the IQ subtest for the first time, the study is of almost no use. How do we know that individuals who are exposed to a lot of stress because they and/or their families made a lot of stupid decisions are stupid because of the stress or were they exposed to a lot of stress because they were always stupid?

And, are we so sure that upper middle class Korean families are all that stress free when the scion brings home a 700 instead of an 800 on his SAT? Judging from Portnoy's Complaint, I would say that Philip Roth did not grow up in a low stress environment, but he seems pretty smart. I volunteer to lead an expedition to a low stress culture, such as Maui, and tabulate all the brilliant intellectual achievements the local kids have come up with.

By the way, why did they just use one IQ subtest, on working memory, instead of an entire IQ test? First, it's probably quicker and easier, especially for giving it to kids who speak exotic languages. Second, by just giving one IQ subtest, you don't have to mention the dread letters IQ. Third, blacks do relatively better on average on working memory than most other subtests -- Jensen says the white-black gap is only half a standard deviation on working memory.

Also, blood tests of hormones tied to emotions can give very different responses depending upon the current emotional state of the patient. For example, a medical clinic with people in lab coats walking around holding clipboards and discussing things in muted tones would be a fairly nonstressful environment for me (assuming I'm just being asked to give a sample for a scientific study, not for a personal diagnosis). But for some homeboy, well, it seems like a long way from home.

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

Yosemite Sam McCain blows his stack at Hispanics

From "McCain Rebukes Hispanic Voters" by Kirk Victor in the National Journal, via Larry Auster:

John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.

The meeting in the Capitol's Strom Thurmond Room on March 11 was a Republican effort led by Sens. McCain of Arizona, John Thune of South Dakota, and Mel Martinez of Florida to reach out to Hispanics. But two people who attended the session say they were taken aback by McCain's anger.

What began as a collegial airing of views abruptly changed when McCain spoke about immigration" ... He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."

McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people -- you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that."

In 2006 and 2007, McCain was a leader on immigration, but his efforts ran aground largely because his legislation included what many Republicans derisively characterized as "amnesty," a pathway to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants if they took a series of steps to earn legal status.

Having stuck his neck out in the past, McCain apparently is in no mood to do so again for an ethnic group he seems to view as ungrateful. ... Asked on the show whether he would work with Obama on the issue, McCain said, "At any time, I stand ready. But the president has to lead." ...

[Sen.] Martinez, who is Hispanic, continued, "John is John. Sometimes when he talks, he talks forcefully. He wasn't ranting or raving or anything. I have seen John rant and rave. I don't think this was one of those moments."

This almost sounds like Martinez is talking about Dodger slugger Manny Ramirez ("That's just Manny being Manny"), who is a lot of fun, but not what most people consider Presidential Timber.

But one person's straight talk is another person's vitriol. "My hands were shaking," one source said. "I was nervous as no-end." The senator's comments went on for several minutes at least. And by the end of the meeting, another participant, who had supported McCain in last year's presidential election, was so shaken by the display of temper that he decided it is good that McCain isn't in the White House.

McCain has become irate over immigration legislation before. During negotiations over a bill two years ago, he was so enraged by the comments of Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, that he got in Cornyn's face and said, "F-- you!" ...

Going forward, some of McCain's allies question whether Obama will be willing to lead on immigration, especially given what they saw as his failure to take risks to advance immigration reform when he was a senator. "He was AWOL most of the time," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said of Obama in an interview in July. "I learned a lot about Obama on immigration, and it wasn't good. I learned that to talk about bipartisan change and to stick by a bipartisan deal are two different things. He came by several times, more [for] the photo ops. The only time he came by, he wanted to re-litigate something that had already been decided."

Asked recently whether he would be surprised that McCain's feelings about Hispanic voters and immigration legislation sound very raw, Graham, who also took risks in backing the legislation, which was very unpopular in South Carolina, said: "John understands politics. But he is a human being, like all of us, and it is disappointing because he really was the driving force on the Republican side... to produce a bill that would solve this problem. And the groups that were cheering him on were gone when he needed them."

Hispanics gave Obama a whopping 67 percent of their votes, more than double the 31 percent they gave to McCain. A former colleague of McCain's, Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who opposed immigration reform, told National Journal, "John risked a lot to go out there and do what he did. They basically turned their back on him, a guy who had done a lot more for them than Barack Obama ever would. So I can understand his anger, but I also know that John doesn't get over things easily." ...

Remind me again how the Republican Party came to nominate this guy for President?

By the way, I've been explaining for nine years that amnesty is not the royal road to Hispanic voters' hearts. With the exception of the Cubans and the born-agains, they tend to be natural Democrats for both tax-and-spend and racial reasons. But why should anybody listen to a crazed extremist like me when the statesmanlike Sen. McCain is assuring you of the exact opposite? Who you gonna believe, a wild-eyed nut like me with all my hatefacts and hatestats and hategraphs, or a thoughtful, judicious cross between Pericles and King Solomon like Sen. McCain?

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

The Water Park of Doom

This is the new $242 million arts high school in downtown Los Angeles. I don't know what the giant spiral thing-a-mabob is supposed to be: to me, it looks like a nightmare water slide that will send children plummeting out of its airborne bottom end to their deaths:

Whhhheeeeeeeee ... Splat.

Designed by the award-winning Austrian architecture firm of Coop Himmelb(l)au, this public high school is alongside the Hollywood Freeway. It's right across from the Roman Catholic LA Cathedral that was erected a decade ago by an award-winning Spanish architect in the style of a secret police headquarters. From the east, the new high school (unsurprisingly, billionaire busybody Eli Broad was intimately involved in its creation) looks like an invading robot from Planet Japania that's aiming to torch the Cathedral with its flamethrower:

Not surprisingly, the new $242 million high school is a political football. At a time when LAUSD is laying off math teachers, race is getting in the way of doing anything with this expensive boondoggle. The LA Times reports:

A tug of war erupted last week over L.A.'s new downtown arts high school, with some of its biggest supporters declaring that they had given up on the Los Angeles Unified School District and wanted the $242-million campus turned over to a charter school organization. In response to the critics, who included philanthropist Eli Broad, Supt. Ramon C. Cortines shot back: "There is not a for-sale sign on it."

The tension had been building for months, fueled in part by the district's plan to reserve most of the school's seats for students from the surrounding neighborhood rather than open it up to the most talented students districtwide. It bubbled over after two star principals from the East Coast turned down offers to take charge, leaving the school leaderless less than six months before it opens in September.

It's been totally forgotten in the mania for starchitects, but Southern California has a 200-year-old indigenous architecture style that would make its heavily Hispanic population feel much more at home than these theory-laden monstrosities by cutting edge European architects. Here, for example, is the Santa Barbara Mission, built 189 years ago:

Personally, I would like to see more public buildings in the Spanish Mission style than in that high school's Piranesi's Handicap-Accessible Wheelchair Ramp of Death mode.

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

AP: Insensitivity toward immigrants caused Binghamton Massacre

The Associated Press reports:

The man who police say killed 13 people in a shooting rampage inside an immigrant community center was depressed and angry over losing his job and about his poor English skills, the Binghamton mayor and police said Saturday.

Police Chief Joseph Zikuski told NBC's "Today" that people "degraded and disrespected" the gunman over his poor English. Mayor Matthew Ryan, speaking on ABC's "Good Morning America," said the man, believed to be 42-year-old Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Voong, was angry about his language issues and his lack of employment.

You know, you gotta give credit where it's due: this one was a real challenge to give the proper anti-anti-immigration spin to, but let them have a day to work on it, and they're now starting to get some English on the ball.

P.S. The LA Times reports that the 42-year-old shooter worked for nearly seven years as a sushi deliveryman in the LA area, and by the end of his sushi delivery career in 2007, he'd worked himself all the way up to $9 per hour.

It's just swell to be an unskilled laborer in LA.

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

Award-winning economist: I'm ignorant about my purported specialty and I intend to stay that way

From the NY Times's Freakonomist blog:

Last week, we solicited your questions for award-winning Oxford University economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and the just-published Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places.

In his answers below, Collier talks about why the impact of colonialism on Africa is exaggerated, how African countries are “too big to be nations, yet too small to be states,” and his belief that the I.Q. of a country’s citizens is “not closely related to the performance of an economy.”

Collier received one unwelcome question:

Q. What do you think of Richard Lynn’s findings about race differences in intelligence and their relatedness to Africa’s continuing state of underdevelopment? In his work, Mr. Lynn compiled the results of numerous studies which appear to show fairly unambiguously that average I.Q.’s in sub-Saharan Africa are below 70. Studies furthermore show that this disadvantage is almost certainly inherited genetically. — Denis Bider

A. I don’t know this stuff and don’t want to. But I am just about prepared to believe that the average Chinese person is smarter than the average Englishman. Despite this, the average Englishman is more than 10 times richer than the average Chinese person — so intelligence is manifestly not closely related to the performance of an economy.

In other words, "Please don't Watson me! I'll be however stupid I have to be in order to keep my nice job at Oxford."

Ironically, the very low average IQs found in Africa can't all be genetic in origin because the gap between Africans (mean IQ of 70 according to dozens of studies) and African-Americans (mean IQ of 85 according to hundreds of studies) is as large as the gap between African-Americans and white Americans (100). Yet, African-Americans are no more than 20% white by genealogy.

Richard Lynn himself has repeatedly pointed to poor nutrition as one cause of low average IQs in some poor countries. We know of two micronutrients -- iodine and iron -- that can lower your IQ when not in sufficient supply in your diet. That's why in America salt is fortified with iodine and flour with iron. Extending these fortification programs to the Third World as a way to raise average IQ would probably give more bang for the buck than anything else.

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

Binghamton Immigration Massacre

You can imagine how the Mainstream Media was itching to start typing denunciations of hate-filled white male anti-immigration rednecks when the news came in today that 13 people had been shot dead at an immigration center.

Just like JFK's assassination set off the 1960s triumph of the Left because of the media's instant assumption that some rightwing redneck in Dallas had done it. (It eventually turned out that the shooter had defected to the Soviet Union, where he met his wife, who was then living with her uncle, a colonel in the secret police, but who remembers that?)

Well, it turns out that today's shooter was named Jiverly Voong. So, it's just another immigrant mass murder story that will disappear down the memory hole after some ritual calls for gun control. The VDARE.com blog has the details.

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

Shaming South Carolina

From an article in the New York Times, "Education Secretary Says Aid Hinges on New Data," about how Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants more data on school performance so he can shame states into performing better:

Speaking with reporters in a conference call, Mr. Duncan inadvertently demonstrated how the information collected from states could be used to try to shame educators and public officials into making changes.

Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a Republican who advocates issuing taxpayer-financed vouchers that parents can use to send their children to private schools, has told the Obama administration that he would not accept some $577 million in educational stimulus money for South Carolina unless he could use it to pay down state debt.

Mr. Duncan unleashed a barrage of dismal statistics about the South Carolina schools, noting that only 15 percent of the state’s black students are proficient in math ...

Oh, my gosh -- only 15% of black students in South Carolina are Proficient in math! Obviously, that's the fault of that racist Republican governor.

The funny thing is, though, that if you go look up the data for yourself on the handy federal National Assessment of Education Progress website, it says for black 8th graders:

"The percentage at or above Proficient in South Carolina (15) is higher than the National Public (11)."

South Carolina's black 8th graders rank 7th in the country at percent proficient in math -- a rather good performance for what's not a wealthy state.

In contrast, in Illinois, where Arne Duncan was in charge until very recently of many of the state's black 8th graders as Chicago Schools boss, only 7% are Proficient at Math, which is less than half South Carolina's figure. Illinois ranks 10th from the bottom on this measure that the Chicagoan data wizard chose to use to shame South Carolina.

Do you get the feeling that Duncan's not really going to make good use of additional data?

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

Do musicians tend to be skinny?

Martin Regnen wonders why musicians tend to be skinny:

I got talked into playing a last-minute sub gig yesterday which much to my surprise turned out to be a battle of the bands. That turned out to be an opportunity to do some amateur anthropological fieldwork. A dozen bands were competing, and I haven't seen that many non-orchestra musicians in one room at the same time. There were over 40 of them there, which suddenly made me realize just how different musicians are from non-musicians. I'm not counting myself as part of the sample, of course. Aside from the high frequency of black clothing (there was no band without at least one black shirt) and lots of hair (apparently 5 cm is very short for a male musician), the most striking thing was how skinny the guys were. The sample of women numbered only seven so there's not really much data there - too bad that I couldn't really test the pretty songbird hypothesis. ...

I have no idea why this is, but it's interesting that so many skinny guys were there. Steve Sailer has proposed that rock musicians might be thin because it's easier on their knees in the long run, but only a few of the bands played rock and just about everyone was much too young to have to deal with wearing their knees down. So the explanation has to lie elsewhere. It can't be just that guys who are no good at sports are attracted to music to boost their social standing - if that were it, there should be plenty of fatasses as well. Maybe young guys who spend money on instruments and amps just don't have much left for food? Then again, symphonies aren't really full of fat guys, either.

Does music somehow attract men with faster metabolisms? Or does anyone else have any ideas?

Was it always like this? Or did it change at some point? Was there some first role model of skinniness? Sinatra? The young Elvis? The British Invasion? Perhaps English lads born in the 1940s were undernourished as youths, so they stayed scrawny as young men, and that set a stereotype that has endured.

Or, perhaps there is something deeper here than mere fashion?

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

Teaser rate mortgage loans

Can anybody think of any reason why "teaser rate mortgages" where the borrower pays an extremely low interest rate for the first two to five years shouldn't be banned? Aren't these just ways to lure people who aren't good with Excel in over their heads into debt? Isn't home buying too massively serious for the kind of marketing gimmicks that are fine with cheaper products?

By the way, doesn't Obama's mortgage bailout plan feature five year teaser rates?

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

Democratization of Credit

A reader writes in response to my post about Thomas Geoghegan's article in Harper's calling for bringing back anti-usury laws:

I'm confused about your argument re: usury.

Isn't the scam that they charged too little for loans? That would be the case with AIG for sure, that they insured banks' assets for far too little. Rarely, it seems, does a crisis occur because the lender was too aggressive about charging for risk. Unless I'm missing something with your argument -- if anything, we need more usury.

Let me try to put the question in a more general context of the "democratization of credit" in return for higher interest rates, which has been a major trend in my lifetime.

But, first, I'll admit that the risk premiums for subprime loans were low -- a few percentage points -- compared to the much higher risk premiums seen for other kinds of loans to marginal borrowers. Presumably, this was because lenders assumed that they could get the collateral -- the house -- back from mortgage defaulters much more easily and profitably than they could get collateral back from, say, credit card defaulters. So, Geoghegan was, to some extent, using the mortgage meltdown to ride a hobbyhorse of his.

Still, Geoghegan has revived a very old perspective on human affairs that has been all but forgotten over the last few decades when "the democratization of credit" was the byword, and it's worth seeing what we can learn from that viewpoint.

I don't think what follows is by any means the full story, but the downsides of the democratization of credit is a line of thought that I, personally, just didn't pick up on during a rather conventional education in contemporary economic thought -- BA in Econ in 1980, MBA in Finance in 1982, long time reader of the WSJ op ed page after that, etc.

I could tell you all the arguments against anti-usury laws, but I couldn't tell you the arguments for them. I just assumed that protests against "predatory lending" were just economically ignorant and probably anti-Semitic to boot.

Now, I'm a pretty skeptical guy overall, who usually isn't bad at figuring the tradeoffs, the pros and cons, in various practices. I'm a staff guy by nature, who spent years telling CEOs stuff like: "If we do A, we'll come out ahead on X but behind on Y, while if we do B, we'll be worse off on X but better on Y, so, which do you choose?" And I didn't have any financial stake in high-interest lending. So, if I was a chump for the reigning zeitgeist that assumed that only anti-Semitic know-nothings used the word "usury," then how can I blame people in the financial business for falling for their own propaganda?

Here's what I've only recently figured out, after decades of thinking about economics.

Traditionally, there were legal or cultural limits on interest rates. Even though anti-usury laws and traditions were often perceived as a populist issue, it actually meant in practice that finance used to be much more elitist. If people in Arkansas got their state legislature to cap interest rates that New York banks could charge them, well, the New York banks would then lend only to the least risky Arkansawyers.

So, if you couldn't qualify for a prime mortgage, you didn't get a mortgage. If your corporation couldn't issue bonds above junk quality, no reputable investment bank would issue bonds for it. If you had a bad credit record, you couldn't get a credit card.

(Of course, this meant there existed a nether world of pawn brokers for the broke and loan sharks for the truly desperate or deluded.)

For example, up through the mid-1970s, respectable Wall Street investment banks wouldn't involve themselves in the issuance of corporate junk bonds. It just wasn't done. Now, some corporate bonds at the time did fall to junk ratings as their issuers teetered near default. The young Mike Milken did a study and found that these formerly solid but now junk bonds tended to be profitable to own, as long as you owned a wide enough portfolio to diversify away the threat of gambler's ruin.

So, Milken recruited hard-chargers from the fringes of the financial world to bid for publicly traded companies and promise to issue bonds that were junk from the get-go to pay off the takeover price. If they made the payments, then they wound up owning a fancy company. If they defaulted, well, it was back to the fringes for them after a few fun years of being big shots.

Similarly, this "democratization of credit" went on in credit cards, mortgages, student loans, and the like. "Why should laws and traditions restrict credit to yacht club members when willing lenders and willing borrowers could work out a mutually beneficial deal, just involving a few extra points?"

This was a widely appealing argument. Libertarians thought it made perfect sense. Business liked it because it meant more lending and more buying. Liberals liked it because it let poorer people buy more stuff. Leftwing community activists often started out protesting against "predatory lending" but would eventually figure out that if they succeeded in cutting down on lending, that meant no money for them. So, they would negotiate deals with financial institutions to provide them with "regulatory cover" that would call for more lending minorities. At least this way, the leftist activists could get a cut.

And, indeed, for many borrowers, this worked out fine: some of the old restrictions and traditions were too restrictive.

The problem was that you just couldn't push this practice of extending credit all that far, because the higher interest rates increased the chances of default even higher. So, you rapidly ran out of borrowers who were just moderately too risky under the old system, and soon reached potential borrowers who were walking time bombs under the sky-high interest rates that their low chances of paying back those sky-high interest rates demanded.

But, in modern finance, everything profitable gets pushed too far. The sons forget what their fathers painfully learned. Moreover, the entire literature of anti-usury argumentation was dropped down the Memory Hole because so much of it was either explicitly (e.g., Henry Ford's) or implicitly anti-Semitic (or, in Ezra Pound's case, anti-Semitic and crazy).

The destruction caused by lending to walking time bombs was amplified by the fact that, in general, the higher reaches of the financial world have traditionally treated debt as something where defaults are the exception to the rule. In contrast, pawn brokers have a perfectly reasonable way to deal with likely deadbeats -- they hold on to the physical collateral. But a financial world where the laws, regulations, customs, and institutions were built assuming that borrowers aren't going to default because anti-usury laws and customs denied loans to marginal borrowers is extremely vulnerable to erosion of the quality of borrowers, which the relaxation of limits on interest rates made profitable.

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

Next April Fools Day

You know what would be a cool April Fools Day tradition? If journalists in the Mainstream Media were allowed to print truths for one day each year without damaging their careers.

They could print headlines like:

“Neocon foreign policy advocates tend to be Jews obsessed with Israel”

“Blacks are better at basketball on average”

"Affluent whites like illegal immigration because they are scared of letting black service workers into their homes and yards"

But there would be a Carnaval-in-Rio-style exemption for anything you publish on April 1st that would keep you from getting kicked off JournoList. You’d have Plausible Deniability. Indeed, you could get all PC and huffy on your critics:

“Hey, it was just an April Fools Day prank. What, you were so naive as to believe that blacks are better at basketball? What are you? Some kind of racist? Only a racist wouldn’t realize that was just an April Fools joke! You're probably a racist deep-down. Racist! Racist!”

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