Global Grand Strategy for 2100

This seemingly silly little incident of Joel Stein being forced to apologize for admitting to not liking Indian immigrants taking over his hometown reminded me that I've long sensed that the chief long term competitors (say, by 2100) in America for Jews will be Indians. A commenter had the same thought:

"Even if only 5% of Indians have the goods to be as successful as the American Asian Indian community (IQ and all) that still makes it more than 50 million plus. That is far higher than the entire Jewish population of the world. I think the Jewish lobby will have to give way to the upcoming Indian lobby as the most powerful in the land. Indians will eventually take over other areas of Jewish dominance too."

This becomes even more interesting when you look at the implications for global dominance. 

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been dominated by the United States, or, more broadly, by the Anglosphere led by the U.S., or, most broadly, by the North Atlanticists (Anglosphere plus EU) more or less led by the U.S. 

There are, however, two gigastates, China and India, both of which are considerably more important economically than they were two decades ago. Both have been content to let the U.S. spend a fortune on military power while they build their strength. Why play the Great Game when you can sit it out? Let the rich, foolish Americans blunder around in Afghanistan and the like.

But, men play the Great Game not because it makes sense but because they like to win. So, it's unlikely that China and India will sit out the Great Game for the rest of the century. Let's assume that China and India eventually decide to play for dominance of the world.

If it can keep from falling apart, China, whose GDP is already well over half the U.S.'s, will surpass the U.S. economically in a fairly short period. India is a little under half of the GDP of China, so it would appear to have a tougher road ahead of it in the eventual struggle for world dominance with China. Moreover, China clearly has a stronger sense of national unity than India, which is riven by caste, religion, and a lack of a unified history.

But the Great Game is much more interesting than a simple, boring struggle for the largest GDP. 

The American colonies had a smaller GDP than the mother country during the American Revolution, for example, but Ben Franklin talked the French government into bankrupting itself for American independence. (He was quite the charmer.) In WWI, Germany, despite having tens of millions of German farmers and engineers in America, did not charm America, and thus lost. Israel, to cite a more recent example, has done quite well for itself strategically despite a limited GDP and being up against Arabs and their oil money.

So, the obvious card to play in the coming China vs. India global struggle is for influence and control over the fading Anglo-Euro world, especially because Anglos don't like to think about themselves being played.

When looked at from this perspective, India's chances against China in 2100 don't look so awful. Indians are better at learning English, and better at marketing ideas in English than Chinese. (One American marketing consultant in China has said that to Chinese factory owners, "marketing" means shouting "Real cheap! You buy now!")

Let's look at the leading Anglosphere countries and which way they are likely to tip (or be tipped):

Australia: China

Canada: I don't know. It could be close.

Britain: India

America: That's the big question

There are lots of Chinese in America. The Chinese have lots of money and will have even more in the future. Over several generations, the emotional distinctions between China and their neighbors and/or enemies like Vietnam, Korea, and Japan might fade, leaving a unified East Asian v. South Asian division from the perspective of the U.S.

On the other hand, I have a vague sense that the East Asians in America might wind up playing the role of Midwestern German-Americans in early 20th Century America, who were outmaneuvered by Anglophilic Eastern elites.

In this China v. India struggle for influence over America in the second half of the 21st Century, the key question will be which side American Jews come down in favor of. Currently possessing the optimal combination of power (35% of the Forbes 400 and 50% of the Atlantic 50 most influential media pundits), cohesion, and immunity from criticism as a group, they are the key players in a fractured market for power.

Which way will American Jews lean? That's  hard to predict.

It won't solely be a matter of material interest. Much of it will depend upon which Asian superpower best figures out which American Jewish buttons to push to get Jews to feel that healing the world depends upon the U.S. siding with either India or China. 

In this, I would bet on the Indians.

On the other hand, it's exactly the greater similarities between Jews and Indians that might lead Jews to resent Indians as their displacers, and conclude that they would be better off in a Chinese-run world where their skills would be more valuable.

We shall live in interesting times. 

Well, not me, personally. I'm not going to last that long, but somebody reading this will likely make it to 2100.

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

Joel Stein's Own Private Jesse Jackson

Joel Stein is in trouble with Indians (Asian) for his Time column "My Own Private India" about how he regrets the demographic changes in his Edison, New Jersey hometown since he grew up:

TIME responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense. 
 
Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.

The amusing thing is that Stein already wrote a 2006 column for the LA Times apologizing in advance to Jesse Jackson:

Sorry in advance, Jesse Jackson

The reverend turns down a preemptive 'I'm sorry' and denies that he's the arbiter of apologies

Joel Stein
December 5, 2006

EVENTUALLY, I'M going to write something horribly offensive. And when I do, it might be several tense hours before I can get Jesse Jackson on the phone in order to apologize to him. So I figured I'd call him now and pre-apologize.

In addition to Michael Richards telling Jackson that he was sorry for his racist tirade at the Laugh Factory, Jackson has accepted apologies from Mexican President Vicente Fox (for saying Mexican immigrants will do jobs that "not even blacks want to do"), the producers of "Barbershop" (for a Rosa Parks joke in the film) and himself (for calling New York "Hymietown").

Needless to say, the new Seinfeld DVD is selling swiftly, Fox served his full term, "Barbershop" had a sequel and New York is still chock full of Jews. A Jackson pardon never fails.

So after putting in a request that I thought Jackson's staff wouldn't take seriously, I was startled when my phone rang two hours later and the reverend was on the other end. I would be absolved, I thought, in two or three minutes.

I was very wrong. When I explained my request, it became clear that this hypothetical offensive thing I might do someday was instead happening right now.

"Why should you be offensive?" Jackson asked, annoyed. "I don't know why you would do that."

Luckily, as I was stammering a response, Jackson smoothly segued into reciting his own agenda. I was not surprised to hear him tell me about America's lack of concern about Katrina victims, the media ignoring Trent Lott's return to party leadership and the dearth of black actors on television ("all day, all night, all white"). I was, however, surprised that it took him nearly four minutes before he mentioned that he worked with Martin Luther King Jr.

A smarter man would have thanked Jackson for his time and gotten off the phone. But as I predicted in the very premise of this project, I am not a smarter man. I asked again if he could slip me an indulgence.

"I don't know why you would insist on continuing to bring this up," he said. Oddly, I was thinking the exact same thing.

I explained that I was interested in finding out how a single person can play judge for damage done to an entire group, and why society needs a figurehead to represent its pain. Then I hoped and prayed that sounded smart.

Jackson said that when Richards called him, "I made it clear that I am not the arbiter of apologies." In fact, he said, "I'm more likely to be called upon to get someone out of a foreign jail than to accept an apology." Between the foreign arrests and the apologies for racist slurs, being a civil rights leader seems a lot like being a parent to rich children.

Then Jackson pointed out that listening to confessions is pretty common for someone in his line of work. "When people are distressed, when people are injured, when people need their cases argued, they tend to call a minister," he explained. "People tend to call someone to give them a listening ear. That's all. At the end of the day, it's about providing a service: to alleviate misery."

My future misery, however, was currently unalleviable. "It would be inappropriate," he finally told me. I am the first person in history to have an apology turned down by Jesse Jackson.

But as ridiculous as it seems to have people apologize to Jackson for things they didn't do to him, and for him to demand apologies for events he wasn't involved in (Outkast for dressing in Native American outfits; the U.S. for crashing a jet in China) — the theatrics do serve a purpose.

Confrontation is a necessary part of contrition. Apologizing in a press release to anyone offended makes sense in theory, but it has no stakes. We need to see human emotions expressed by real humans; our catharsis has to come from leaders playing our parts on stage.

And though Jay Leno, Barbara Walters and Dr. Phil may try, Jackson performs that role best. I know that after I finally got off the phone, my sweaty palms and aching stomach felt like they were taught a moral lesson.

I just hope that people don't find this column so offensive that I'll have to really apologize. Because I'm not sure Jackson would take my call after this. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course he will. 

Meanwhile, the second most-read article on LATimes.com last evening was 

Jewish organizations protest UC president's handling of reports of anti-Semitism
The groups assert that the university's reaction has been too weak. University chief Mark G. Yudof says the groups may be basing their responses on an unreliable sampling of student opinion.

By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times

July 7, 2010

The president of the University of California and leaders of a dozen prominent American Jewish organizations are in an unusual public dispute about the extent of anti-Semitism on UC campuses and the university's response to it.

In a letter to UC President Mark G. Yudof, such groups as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the national governing bodies of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism have criticized the university's reaction to anti-Semitic acts on UC campuses as too weak. The letter, sent June 28, cited what it said were increasing incidents of swastika graffiti and anti-Israel speakers who use anti-Semitic language, and alleged that many Jewish UC students feel "an environment of harassment and intimidation." ...

Yudof, who is Jewish and whose wife, Judy, is the former lay president of Conservative Judaism in North America, also wrote that the Jewish groups may have based their concerns on an unreliable sampling of student opinion. Most Jewish UC students' "perspectives are more mixed than you suggest," he wrote.

The UC president said he was disappointed that the letter writers seemed to have dismissed the new UC Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion as destined to fail, and he urged them to support its work.

Considering that UC Campuses are typically located in places like La Jolla, Irvine, Westwood, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley, I'd say the the UC "Campus Climate" is pretty dog-gone nice: typically 70s and sunny.

Oh, wait, that's not what the word "climate" means anymore on campus. (Except when it's about "climate change.")

The panel, which met for the first time last week, was created after several controversial incidents over the last school year. Those included an off-campus "Compton Cookout" party by UC San Diego students that mocked Black History Month, and the spray-painting and carving of swastikas at several locations on the UC Davis campus, including the dorm room door of a Jewish student.

Some Jewish leaders have complained that UC administrators seemed to be more upset by the UC San Diego incident than the swastikas. UC officials have denied this.

Okay, so that's what this is all about: competitive aggrievement. The Jewish organizations are mad that the black organizations got more mileage out of their recent UC San Diego hate hoax brouhaha. Well, of course.

Still, the reigning heavyweight title contenders of competitive aggrievement, the blacks and the Jews, should be aware that there's a new Indian kid in town who is ready to rumble.

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

Is Our Adults Getting Stupider?

See if you can figure out the answer to the mystery posed in the following blog item by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Neither Kevin, nor the physics professor he quotes at length, nor Kevin's first 29 commenters can figure it out. Put your solution in my comments below. Kevin blogs:

Is Our Kids Studying? -- Take 2

After I posted a couple of days ago on the subject of whether or not college students are studying less than they used to, I got a long email on the subject from Paul Camp, a physics professor at Spelman University. This is pretty far outside my wheelhouse of expertise, but his take was so interesting that I wanted to repost it here just so that everyone would have a chance to comment on it. Here's what he told me:

I've been engaged in a few conversations about this in the past couple of years. I can offer the following data that correlates with anecdotal evidence from other professors at a variety of institutions.

Since the early 1990's, I have pre and post tested all of my introductory mechanics classes using a research based diagnostic instrument, the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation.

My first job out of graduate school was at an unranked tier 4 institution in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Coastal Carolina "University" to be specific. It was the 13th grade. There were a few brilliant students — I've learned that for a variety of reasons you can find exceptional students anywhere — but for the most part the student body was composed of people who were there for financial reasons or because they thought it would be a cool idea to go to school at the beach. The first four pages of our brochure described the beach, not the college. We knew which side our bread was buttered on.

I pretty reliably got 50-60% normalized gains on the FMCE.

Normalized gain is the ratio of how much their scores increased compared to how much they could have increased — (post-pre)/(100-pre). 50-60% is actually pretty stupendous on this particular measure. It means they were typically getting 80-90% of the questions right.

I left that job in a huff. There's a very long story, but the short version is that I was ordered by my dean to give everyone a passing grade and I wouldn't do it. I spent 5.5 years in a research position at Georgia Tech before coming to Spelman.

Spelman is a top 75 liberal arts college, according to US News, and top 10 according to the Washington Monthly. My personal impression of the students is that the average is generally much higher than it was at Coastal. These are students who can think around a few corners. Also, since they are able to cross register in some considerably easier classes at other AUC institutions, I tend to get classes of students who are there because they choose to be there and are therefore more engaged and thoughtful about their efforts.

I think I'm at least as good an instructor as I used to be, and probably a lot better. I know quite a bit more about developmental psychology and cognitive science as a result of my job at Georgia Tech and I think that improves my instruction considerably.

And yet, in a good year I get about 20-30% normalized gains.

I don't really know what is different but something clearly is.

Right now, I'm blaming No Child Left Behind, but that is less because of data than of general suspicion of high stakes testing. In fact, I am also now quite skeptical of pre/post testing (I could send you a research paper on that if you're interested) but not enough that I can account for the difference in the data. ...

I can't really say that this is a correct account. I can say that many faculty I have spoken with have expressed similar observations without me prompting them, but the difference between me and them is that I have data. I know what I used to get at a crappy college with surfer students, and I know what I now get at a top tier college with highly engaged students, and it isn't consistent with ought to be happening, all other things being equal.

So that's my data point. I suppose I could always have had some kind of mental excursion and become a bad teacher without knowing it, but I don't think so and my students don't think so either, and neither do my peers in and out of the physics department. So I'm going to provisionally discount that explanation.

I left Coastal in 1998. I started at Spelman in 2004. You tell me what changed during that time frame.

Class, this mystery has baffled the best minds of Mother Jones magazine. Do you have any ideas how to solve this conundrum? Put them in the comments below.

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

World Cup Final: Spain v. Netherlands

In the semifinals, Spain beats Germany 1-0 and Netherlands beats Uruguay 3-2 (hey, a good score!).

So much for the LA Times headline: "Germany's World Cup streak may be result of a multicultural team." In reality, Germany did about as good in 2010 as it usually does: semifinalist in 2010, semifinalist in 2006, finalist in 2002, quarterfinalist in 1998 and 1994, champion in 1990, finalist in 1986 and 1982.

The only way I think the American liberal soccerati can spin a Spain v. Netherlands Final as Another Triumph of Soccer Diversity over racist American sports like football is to focus on the immigrant stock players on the Dutch team as proof that Pym Fortuyn got what he had coming. 

The ironies pile up. The South African Boers will get to watch their ancestral team play Spain, a team that looks at least as white as the Washington Senators of the late 1930s, who used to sneak, pre-Jackie Robinson, a couple of part-black Cuban players onto the squad on the grounds that they were Latin so the color line didn't count.

So, in reality, soccer remains a white-dominated sport. Where are the calls from the American SWPL soccer fans for affirmative action programs so that the non-white majority of the world doesn't continue to suffer such relentless disparate impact in the World Cup?

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

Formerly, the Carbon-Based Life Form Vote

Here's an article from the Washington Post on the white vote in the 2010 election. It's notable for the straight-forward, non-apologetic way it talks about the importance of the white vote. Long ago, there was no more point for political reporters to talk about the national white vote than for fish to talk about water. Then, it became in bad taste. But as the country becomes less white, it becomes paradoxically inevitable that the white vote will have to be talked about.

Democrats hope Obama 2008 model will help stem midterm losses

By Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2010; A02

To become the nation's first black president, Barack Obama not only won heavy percentages of the black and Hispanic vote but also managed to trim the Democratic Party's traditional deficit among white voters.

Four years after Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost the white vote by 17 percentage points, Obama lost it by 12, according to exit polls. While the 2008 gains were generally attributed to Obama's strength with young voters -- he won by 10 points among whites 18 to 29 years old -- he managed to improve on Kerry's showing with white voters across every age demographic.

Fast-forward to today. With the November midterm elections less than four months away, Obama's standing among white voters has sunk -- leading some party strategists to fret that the president's erosion -- and the party's -- could adversely affect Democrats' chances of holding on to their House and Senate majorities.

"Since in the past House elections white voters tended to represent the independent vote, [the midterms] will surely be devastating for Democrats running in an election that will be a referendum on the Obama agenda," predicted one senior Democratic operative who closely tracks House races.

In Washington Post-ABC polling, Obama's approval rating among white voters has dropped from better than 60 percent to just above 40 percent. In a June poll, 46 percent of white voters under age 40 approved of how Obama was doing, compared with just 39 percent of whites 65 and older.

The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reveals that Obama's standing among white voters is remarkably similar to that of President George W. Bush at this same time two years ago.

In the June 2008 NBC-WSJ survey, 37 percent of white men and 26 percent of white women approved of the job Bush was doing. In the June 2010 poll, an identical 37 percent of white men approved of Obama's handling of his job, as did 35 percent of white women. ...

One senior strategist, speaking candidly about his concerns on the condition of anonymity, noted that white voters made up 79 percent of the 2006 midterm electorate, while they made up 74 percent of the 2008 vote. If the white percentage returns to its 2006 level, that means there will be 3 million more white voters than if it stayed at its 2008 levels. That scenario, said the source, "would generate massive losses" for House and Senate Democrats in November because of Obama's standing with that demographic.

To avoid such losses, the Democratic National Committee has committed to spending tens of millions of dollars to re-create (or come somewhere near re-creating) the 2008 election model, in which Democrats relied heavily on higher-than-normal turnout from young people and strong support from African American and Hispanic voters.

The DNC's plan is ambitious, to say the least: In the space of a few months, the strategists hope to change the composition of a midterm electorate that, if history is any guide, tends to be older and whiter than in a presidential-election year. Put that way, it sounds crazy -- and it has drawn considerable skepticism from independent observers.

But given the reality that white voters -- again -- almost certainly hold the key to Obama's and the Democrats' chances in the fall, they would be even crazier not to try. 

McCain didn't do all that that badly among those whites who bothered to vote in 2008 -- 55% relative to Bush's 54% in 2000 -- but he didn't get all that many whites to bother, whereas Obama got lots of nonwhites, including young ones, all worked up. Since 2008, however, the Youth of the Future have gotten bored with politics (as is natural -- politics becomes more relatively interesting as sports, music, romance, etc. become less interesting, so politics is Last Man Standing among your interests). Obama is trying to whip them into a frenzy again, but without alienating whites.

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

"The Twilight Saga: Eclipse" v. "Knight and Day"

In Taki's Magazine, I review two anti-Buttkicking Babe movies:

It’s worth comparing a current box office smash—The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, a Mormon teen vampire romance—to a dud—Knight and Day, an expensive Cameron Diaz-Tom Cruise thriller parody.

Knight and Day is expertly made and consistently entertaining, while the Twilight episode is talky and amateurish. Yet, the public’s preference makes sense, because Eclipse’s bizarre ambitions and common passions makes it more memorable than Knight and Day‘s facile technique.

Both movies revolve around a young woman’s struggle to choose the man who will protect her in a savage world.

Eclipse is the adaptation of the third of Mormon housewife Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, the biggest bestsellers since J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Bella (pretty Kristen Stewart from last year’s Adventureland) is a human schoolgirl whose (follow me closely here) especially tasty-smelling blood drives vampires wild with bloodlust. Her lively scent has won the heart of the undead Edward (tween heartthrob Robert Pattinson), a gentlemanly vampire who strives manfully to keep his lusts under control. When a less civilized vampire army from Seattle comes hunting for her, however, the icy Edward realizes that Bella's safety requires him to seek assistance from his warm-blooded rival for her heart, Jacob, a weightlifting American Indian werewolf.

I realize that this previous paragraph will likely strike you either as old news (if you are a 9 to 17-year-old girl) or as gibberish (if you aren’t). And I must admit to being baffled for long stretches of Eclipse.

A weaker novelist than Rowling, Meyer doesn't so much understand the adolescent girl’s mind as share it. Her Bella epitomizes female teen self-absorption, the desire to have every boy fight over you and every girl hate you for it.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

By the way, Stephen Dawson points out the that on IMDB, Eclipse is rated 6.9 by females and 3.6 by males. Is that the biggest gender gap ever in IMDB ratings for a hit movie?

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

Friends of the Israel Defense Forces

A friend who was employed fundraising for a Democratic candidate was struck by all the interesting charities he came across when looking for the names of big givers. For example, there's the:

Friends of the Israel Defense Forces
Their job is to look after Israel. Ours is to look after them.

On Thursday, December 17th, more than 1,100 people filled the International Ballroom of The Beverly Hilton hotel to honor Israel's brave soldiers. The annual LA Gala, which was once again chaired by Cheryl & Haim Saban, was completely sold out by the first of December and set a new record raising $5.2 million in support of a variety of programs that ease the burden and further the wellbeing of Israel's soldiers.

Jason Alexander served as Master of Ceremonies for the event... In announcing that the Gala had raised $1.6 million, Gala Chair Haim Saban stated that he and his wife, Cheryl, would be matching that total "dollar for dollar."

Haim Saban, owner of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, is, of course, one of the top donors to the Democratic National Committee, the Brookings Institute, and the Clinton Foundation. He was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton's run for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

Saban's donations are, apparently, tax-deductible:

"Headquartered in New York City, FIDF is a 501c3 not-for-profit corporation that operates 13 regional offices in the United States and two offices in Latin America."

Saban is a dual citizen of Israel and America. He was born in Alexandria, then moved to Israel due to the 1956 Suez Canal war, and then moved to America in 1975. 

Presumably, Saban took the Oath of Allegiance when he became a U.S. citizen. I don't know what the exact wording of the Oath of Allegiance was when he took it, but it currently reads:

"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God."

Who do we think we're kidding with this Oath? (Not Haim Saban, that's for sure.)

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

A good question

A reader asks:

Do you know of any studies investigating whether there is a correlation between a child's physical resemblance of one parent and that child's similarity in personality to that same parent? e.g. Al looks much more like Dad and has his laid back personality, while Al's brother Bob looks much more like Mom and has her lively personality. 

Assuming that Bob really is Dad's son, of course ...

I don't know, but this is a good question because it could help get at an idea that has been lingering for a long time -- are differences in looks associated with differences in behavior? If so, why?

Greg Cochran has a strong aversion to Darwin's theory of sexual selection (not because it's never true -- it is in some cases -- but because it gives too easy an out for explaining physical differences: "Somebody must have thought it looked purty.") He suspects, for example, that fair hair and fair skin were less selected for in themselves than that they were by-products of something else that was being selected for in Europe.

Looking at siblings who look different, especially fraternal twins, might provide some evidence on this subject.

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

"Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability"

A reader writes in reference to the new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability by Christopher Eppig, Corey L. Fincher and Randy Thornhill.

Steve, did you notice that The Economist finally decided to inform its readers about Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ estimates?

When Dr Lynn and Dr Vanhanen originally published their IQ data, they used them to advance the theory that national differences in intelligence were the main reason for different levels of economic development. This study turns that reasoning on its head. It is lack of development, and the many health problems this brings, which explains the difference in levels of intelligence. No doubt, in a vicious circle, those differences help keep poor countries poor. But the new theory offers a way to break the circle.

Of course it's only now that a politically correct explanation has been found 8 years later.

A subscription to The Economist is expensive, so subscribers should complain that the editors were covering up important information until a more polite spin could be found.

Actually, The Economist did cite "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" once before, in its May 15, 2004 issue (p. 26) when The Economist fell for that lowbrow Internet hoax about high IQ blue states and low IQ red states!

The Economist is doing a disservice to the long-term reputations of Eppig, Fincher, and Thornhill, since it's an interesting paper, and I recommend that you read it. I don't find anything novel about the idea that improvements in health are one of the reasons for rising raw IQ scores, but it's a good point to reiterate. 

Eppig et al don't actually support the Economist's spin, writing:

A nation of more intelligent individuals is likely to produce a higher GDP, but a wealthier nation is also more able to pay for public education, as well as public medical and sanitation services. An indirect link between education and intelligence may also exist, as a better-educated population may be more interested in public health measures—leading to increased IQ by reducing parasite stress—provided that education includes information about germ theory and hygiene. These sources of endogeneity must be considered when interpreting our findings (and see below). It should also be mentioned that we are not arguing that global variation in intelligence is only caused by parasite stress. Rather, variation in intelligence is probably caused by a variety of factors, including those we have mentioned here as well as factors that are yet unknown.

They make the point that I made last week:

We also propose a complementary hypothesis that may explain some of the effects of infectious disease on intelligence. As we mentioned, it is possible that a conditional developmental pathway exists that invests more energy into the immune system at the expense of brain development. In an environment where there has consistently been a high metabolic cost associated with parasitic infection, selection would not favour the maintenance of a phenotypically plastic trait. That is, the conditional strategy of allocating more energy into brain development during periods of health would be lost, evolutionarily, if periods of health were rare. Peoples living in areas of consistently high prevalence of infectious disease over evolutionary time thus may possess adaptations that favour high obligatory investment in immune function at the expense of other metabolically expensive traits such as intelligence.

Still, there are some problems with the paper. 

Their model correlates national average IQ and "disability adjusted life-years lost" owing to infectious disease. (Unfortunately, I can't find from following their footnotes where they got this data for 192 countries. I can only find it summarized by WHO by regions. If you can find the data for each country, please let me know.) 

But, of course, the obvious question is: Does Singapore have a high average IQ because it has a remarkably low infectious disease burden for it's tropical, sea-level, humid location, or does it have a remarkably low infectious disease burden because it's run by high IQ and hard-working officials, such as Lew Kwan Yew? 

In contrast, Afghanistan has terrible life expectancy and longevity figures compared to Singapore, indicative of terrible disease burden, despite having a climate rather like Colorado's. (Afghanistan's problem is less that its residents are empty-headed as that they are bloody-minded, with one of the most selfish, nasty cultures in the world.)

If Lagos has a similar climate to Singapore but worse disease burden, it that the cause or the symptom of the difference in average IQ? (Most likely both, of course, but it should be possible to allot causality.)

I think this key problem of causation could be tackled by using not the actual current disease burden but the predictions of a theoretical model of what disease burden would be based on the natural factors of each country. Eppig et al write:

The worldwide distribution of parasites is well known. Disease-causing organisms of humans are more prevalent in equatorial regions of the world and become less prevalent as latitude increases. Ecological factors contributing to this distribution include mean annual temperature, monthly temperature range and precipitation (e.g. Guernier et al. 2004). Similar trends of parasite distribution have been shown in other host species (e.g. Møller 1998).

So, there must be models that would predict that Singapore and Lagos would have similar disease burdens. Therefore, use the theoretical predictions of disease burden to correlate with IQ, not the current actual disease burdens.

My commenter goes on:

Eppig et al report a strong correlation between infectious disease burden and national IQ, using either Lynn's estimates or Wicherts revised estimates for sub-Saharan Africa.

Eppig et al repeat a number of related analyses to show that infection disease is the strongest, but they decided not to reanalyze the one variable that's stronger than infectious disease: skin color (r = -.92). Their argument for why they can ignore the results of Templer & Arikawa (2006) is an amazing feat of intentional misunderstanding:

"Although Templer & Arikawa (2006) found a positive relationship between IQ and skin darkness, we will not use skin darkness in our analyses for three reasons: (i) although evidence suggests that skin darkness is a measure of historical infectious disease intensity over evolutionary time, it is unclear exactly what kind of infectious diseases it is indicative of (see discussion); (ii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) argued that the relationship between skin darkness and IQ is not causal; and (iii) Templer & Arikawa (2006) did not sufficiently explain why the association between intelligence and skin darkness exists. Without a reasonable theoretical framework for this association, we did not feel it was appropriate to compare it with other variables for which there is a better theoretical rationale."

Obviously the explanation for the relationship between IQ and skin color given by Templer & Arikawa (2006) was a population's evolutionary history of cold climate with adaptation to UV exposure -- a genetic model.

Again, the correlation found by Templer & Arikawa (2006) for IQ and skin color (-.92) exceeds that found for IQ and infectious disease (-.82), but this fact is avoided by Eppig et al and by The Economist.

Interestingly, Eppig el al note:

Mackintosh (2001) presented comprehensive evidence that skin darkness and the associated cellular components (e.g. melanocytes) have an important role in defending against infectious disease. Moreover, Manning et al. (2003) found that, in sub-Saharan Africa, rates of HIV infection were negatively associated with skin darkness. Manning et al. (2003) attributed this relationship in part to lower infection rates of other parasites, especially bacteria and fungi, that lead to tissue damage in the genital tract and hence increased opportunity for contracting HIV. Templer & Arikawa (2006) concluded that, despite the strong negative correlation between skin colour and average national IQ, there must be an unknown mediating factor accounting for both because there is no obvious reason for skin darkness to reduce IQ. Given the previous research linking skin colour to infectious disease (Mackintosh 2001; Manning et al. 2003), the unknown factor linking skin colour and IQ may be infectious disease.

Also, Eppig et al admit that the Usain Bolt-producing part of the world is a pretty healthy place but just isn't all that super-smart.

The only world region in which this relationship [between IQ and disease] was not significant was South America [defined here to include the West Indies]. This exception may be owing to the presence of several outliers. The group of conspicuous outliers in which IQ was much lower than expected in the worldwide trend (figure 1) are all Caribbean countries (St Lucia, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Vincent and Grenadines, and Jamaica), which represent 4 of 23 nations in the South America analysis (St Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines). Because these outliers are in the same geographical location, it is possible that local parasites that are not included in the DALY owing to infectious disease variable are causing these outliers.

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

"Climate Change"

Has there been a stupider public relations blunder than changing "global warming" to "climate change?"

I understand why they did it. For example, the weather in LA has been ridiculously nice and cool for the last month: 70 and sunny most days, without even much of the usual June Gloom. For once, my lawn looks great. I wore my heavy jacket to see the fireworks on July 4th for the first time in memory.

So, instead of manfully standing their ground and saying, "Sure, there are always going to be exceptions to the trend, but the overall trend toward global warming is what's important," they concocted the term "climate change" to cover anything out of the ordinary with the weather that anybody might notice. 

Your lawn is verdant in July for once? Climate change!

And is "climate change" even that scary a term? Sure, it is if you live in San Diego and climate change could only be for the worst. But I lived in Chicago for a long time. "Climate change" sounds like a great idea to a Chicagoan.

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

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Peter Nicholas of the LA Times reports:

Obama's immigration speech echoes Bush in policy, rhetoric

Though he is quick to deride former President George W. Bush's performance in office, President Obama seems to think his predecessor gives a pretty good immigration speech.

Obama's widely publicized speech on the controversial topic Thursday closely tracks, in rhetoric and basic policy, a speech Bush gave on the same subject in May 2006.

Speaking at American University, Obama delivered an address intended to rally the nation behind a plan that would strengthen border security while providing a path to legal status for the estimated 12 million people living in the U.S. illegally. ...

But in fundamental ways, the speeches carry the same message. The parallels show the two presidents — one a Republican, the other a Democrat — have staked out basically the same centrist position on immigration.

The speeches also reveal similarities in ways presidents of both parties communicate with the public.

After reading a transcript of Obama's immigration address, former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer said in an e-mail that "this speech could almost word for word have been delivered by George W. Bush on the exact same subject. Do they just copy our old speeches?" ...

A White House official said Friday he did not believe that anyone examined Bush's old speeches while drafting the Obama address. Rather, the speech was written by a member of the president's speechwriting team, with Obama providing "a good deal of writing," the official said.

Both speeches talk about immigrants who "live in the shadows." Both mention immigrants who came to the U.S. in search of "a better life." Both describe the U.S. as "a nation of immigrants" and reject calls to "round up" people who are here illegally.

And both use the same language about business. Obama said businesses "must be held accountable" for hiring undocumented workers; Bush said, "We need to hold employers to account."

Plunging into the body of his speech, Obama discussed how "in recent days the issue of immigration has become once more a source of fresh contention in our country." ... Bush, in his speech, alluded to a wave of street protests in favor of an immigration overhaul, saying, "The issue of immigration stirs intense emotions, and in recent weeks, Americans have seen those emotions on display."

Neither Bush nor Obama wanted to be seen as neglecting border enforcement. Obama said that "government has a threshold responsibility to secure our borders," whereas Bush said that securing the border is "a basic responsibility of a sovereign state."

Each president laid out steps they'd taken to prevent illegal crossings, using the same multipliers. Bush said he "doubled" the size of the Border Patrol; Obama said that he "doubled" the personnel assigned to border enforcement security "task forces."

Yet neither claimed that the borders are impregnable. Bush said, "We do not yet have full control of the border." Obama said that the Mexican border is more secure than ever, but acknowledged that "that doesn't mean we don't have more work to do."

Both speeches use a device in which they rejected what they portrayed as extreme positions — blanket amnesty on the one hand, and deportation of all illegal immigrants on the other.

Instead of those extremes, each president said, the country should adopt a more moderate alternative in which illegal immigrants could gain legal status by meeting tough requirements.

Bush said immigrants must "pay their taxes" and "learn English." Obama used the same language — "pay their taxes" and "learn English," among other things.

And at some point in each speech, the president told an inspiring story of an immigrant who came to the U.S., joined the military and gained citizenship.

Bush mentioned Guadalupe Denogean from Mexico, who joined the Marines and was wounded in Iraq. Obama's example was Perla Ramos, who came to the U.S. from Mexico after the Sept. 11 attacks, joined the Navy and became a citizen.

peter.nicholas@latimes.com

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

Benjamin Franklin's Grand Strategy

From my new VDARE column:

It’s funny how, in the woozy minds of America’s elite, celebrating Independence Day has turned into celebrating  Immigration Day. For a particularly ripe example of Ellis Island kitsch, let’s review this July 3, 2010 Washington Post op-ed by former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Harvard political scientist  Robert D. Putnam:

“A better welcome for our nation's immigrants

“On our national birthday, and amid an angry debate about immigration, Americans should reflect on the lessons of our shared immigrant past.”

By the way, have you noticed how the word “angry” has come to mean “The state of mind of any person who is winning a debate with an immigration enthusiast?”

Putnam and Bush then add a topical Independence Day note:

“We must recall that the challenges facing our nation today were felt as far back as the Founders' time. … Today's immigrants are, on average, assimilating socially even more rapidly than earlier waves.”

Why haven’t more recent immigrant groups assimilated enough not to default on their mortgages? Well, what kind of angry person even notices hatefacts?

“One important difference, however, that separates immigration then and now: We native-born Americans are doing less than our great-grandparents did to welcome immigrants.”

See? It’s all your fault.

Who are Jeb Bush and Robert D. Putnam and why are they saying these foolish things? In the past, Putnam and Bush have both made themselves conspicuous over immigration to a comical degree. So let’s review their history.

Read the whole thing there. I also outline Benjamin Franklin's grand strategy in response to the usual immigrationist attack on Franklin.

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

Happy Independence Day from the Washington Post

From the Washington Post, an unintended reminder of the magnanimity, broadness of vision, and faith in our common humanity of Steven Spielberg, as compared to art critic Blake Gopnik's identity politics-driven rage at how Norman Rockwell just won't stay shoved down the Memory Hole.

Norman Rockwell exhibit opens at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
By Blake Gopnik
Sunday, July 4, 2010; E01

This Fourth of July, let's celebrate courage. It took courage to split from England, courage to risk democracy and still more courage to dream up a constitution to preserve it.

Courage has been the signature virtue of almost every great American: Emily Dickinson was brave to warp grammar, Louis Armstrong was brave to blow jazz and Jackson Pollock was brave to paint splats.

Norman Rockwell is often championed as the great painter of American virtues. Yet the one virtue most nearly absent from his work is courage. He doesn't challenge any of us, or himself, to think new thoughts or try new acts or look with fresh eyes. From the docile realism of his style to the received ideas of his subjects, Rockwell reliably keeps us right in the middle of our comfort zone. 

Definitely not in the middle of Mr. Gopnik's comfort zone, however. 

A new show of 57 Rockwells, borrowed from the collections of Hollywood celebrities Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, opened Friday at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Right, Spielberg and Lucas are "Hollywood celebrities," same as Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. (By the way, I'm not a big fan of Lucas's movies after American Graffiti and Star Wars, but I've got to admit the man's got good taste in architecture. His Skywalker Ranch in Marin County looks like what the world would look like today if the Great War hadn't come along in 1914 and ruined the West's self-confidence.)

It includes oil paintings and drawings, and every one of them is a perfect depiction of what we've been taught to think of as true Rockwellian America.

There's the small-town runaway, and the cop who takes him out for a malt before returning him home. Aw, shucks.

There are the three old biddies gossiping, imagined as so ancient and gnarled that Rockwell had to use a man in drag to model them. What a hoot!

There's the remote blonde in her convertible being joshed by a couple of truckers. Jeez, lady, wontcha give those guys a wink? ...

Of course, the "art" in Rockwell's pictures isn't that modern stuff promoted by Picasso and his crowd. Rockwell's painted realism tells us that his pictures are the real thing, old-fashioned and skilled -- the very art admired by the kinds of regular, all-American folk his craft is used to depict, and to whom it sells magazines and products.

By the 1930s, making pictures the way Rockwell did couldn't count as just a neutral preference for the old. In the hands of America's Favorite Artist, it stood as a willed repudiation of the new. Judging from the fan mail that survives, that's precisely how it was read. Rockwell panders, in the very substance of his pictures' making, to his public's fear of change.

Rockwell's greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché. The reason we so easily "recognize ourselves" in his paintings is because they reflect the standard image we already know. His stories resonate so strongly because they are the stories we've told ourselves a thousand times.

They became clichés after Rockwell recognized these stories in daily life and showed that, by taking endless pains, they could be clearly conveyed in a single memorable image. Golden Age Hollywood then amplified his influence. (Frank Capra is the most obvious analog to Rockwell in fertility of invention.) But moviemakers had it easier in a way because they could tell his kind of stories using actions, words, and music.  It's amusing, though, how the frequently Rockwellian products of Golden Age Hollywood seldom comes in for quite so much fury.

... Most reactions to Rockwell, however, continue to be decidedly simpler. Steven Spielberg has said, "I look back at these paintings as America the way it could have been, the way someday it may again be." He and others have bought Rockwell's bill of goods. But what these speakers, and these pictures, fail to grasp is that the special, courageous greatness of the nation lies in its definitive refusal of any single "American way." 

Norman Rockwell died 32 years ago. And Mr. Gopnik's views have been representative of elite discourse for longer than that, burying Rockwell's reputation under a barrage of anger. But, Gopnik, even though he's on the winning side, is still furious that his victory isn't total.

If you want a picture of Mr. Gopnik's ideal future, imagine a boot stamping on Norman Rockwell's face -- forever. (But not, let me hasten to add, a well-painted realist picture of a boot stamping on a face. Instead, say, a picture of a surrealist boot stamping on a cubist face with Jackson Pollock-like blood splatters on the floor.)  

America isn't about Rockwell's one-note image of it -- or anyone else's. This country is about a game-changing guarantee that equal room will be made for Latino socialists, disgruntled lesbian spinsters, foul-mouthed Jewish comics and even, dare I say it, for metrosexual half-Canadian art critics with a fondness for offal, spinets and kilts.

I don't want to live by the clichés of a wan, Rockwellian America, and I don't admire pictures that suggest that all of us should. But I see why we need to look into how, in a world full of threats, so many of us have been soothed by their vision.

Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg is on through Jan. 2 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at Eighth and G streets NW. Call 202-633-7970 or visit http://www.americanart.si.edu.

To be frank, if a WASP critic displayed this much overt ethno-cultural animus toward a Jewish painter, he would be unemployable at the Washington Post.

It should make us all appreciate Mr. Spielberg even more.

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

A World Cup prediction

Ah, the irony. In the U.S., followers of overseas soccer tend to believe themselves to be diversiphiles, unlike those boorish fans of American football, who are, no doubt, racist under the skin for not liking soccer.

Here are the upcoming World Cup soccer semifinals:

	Uruguay	vs.			Netherlands					-	Jul 6 11:30am (PT) on ESPN
	Germany	vs.			Spain					-	Jul 7 11:30am (PT) on ESPN

Let me make a prediction: somehow, some way, some American soccerati pundits are going to cite this as Another Triumph of Diversity for soccer in contrast to xenophobic, nativist, redneck, racist American sports like football, where NFL rosters average only 31% white (but every single one of the NFL's soccer-style placekickers is a non-Hispanic white guy, which tells you a lot about how soccer in the U.S. is largely White Flight in Short Pants). I don't know how they will do it, but they'll do it.

(And if the Final turns out to be Netherlands v. Germany, then they'll just redouble their efforts! Or, if it's Uruguay v. Spain, the whitest teams of the final four, then that will serve to, uh ... prove immigration skeptics wrong!)

Seriously, in today's mental climate, it's very hard for American soccer fans to express the thought, even in the privacy of their own minds, that soccer is, by the standards of big American teams sports, a white-dominated game.

At the highest levels of global soccer, about 75 percent or slightly more of the top players are white. Soccer in 2010 is like basketball in 1959. But, most Americans commentators are too mentally disabled these days to notice what's in front of their noses.

Let’s look at ESPN’s list from earlier this year of the “Top 50 players of the World Cup.” The five best players in the world -- Lionel Messi of Argentina (who is of Italian descent), Christiano Ronaldo of Portugal (a Tim Tebow-lookalike), Wayne Rooney of England, Kaka of Brazil (who is from an upper middle-class family), and Xavi of Spain --are white.

Out of the top 10, eight are white and two from West Africa. Out of the top 50, the proportions look similar. Judging from their pictures, I would say 10 are black, one is mostly white but clearly part black, and the other 39 look more or less white. None of the top 50 are East Asian or South Asian, and I don’t see any that are as part-Amerindian-looking as, say, Diego Maradona, the star of the 1986 World Cup.

In contrast, only one American-born white guy has been selected to the NBA All Star game in the last half dozen years. Most of the prestige positions in the NFL other than quarterback are dominated by blacks. 

Of the soccer top 50, 24 are white guys from the six sunny powers of Spain (9 of the top 50), Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. In other words, almost half of the global soccer superstars are Southern Europeans. As baseball discovered back in the days of Joe DiMaggio, it doesn’t really hurt your sport’s popularity to have stylish Mediterranean guys as stars.

The World Cup is a paradox: the results of individual games seem pretty random but the results always come out about the same: traditional soccer powers get to the finals.

When people go on about how much they love diversity, what they mean is that they want about an 80% white majority and 20% colorful minorities to spice things up, roughly what high level soccer delivers -- not the opposite. (But the opposite is what everybody will eventually get.)

Much of the glamor of the World Cup stems from it being a mostly white sport. Do you think up-and-comers like the South Koreans would be fascinated by the World Cup if it were traditionally dominated by, say, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Bolivia? Would SWPLs in the U.S. love soccer if it were associated in their minds with "Kinshasa" rather than with "Barcelona"?

Look at what's happened to interest in track & field over the decades as East Africans have come to dominate the endurance races and the West African diaspora the sprints. (People don't believe me these days when I say that the Olympic running races used to be a really big deal. Who'd ever be interested in people running?)

The rules of soccer could either be more favorable to men of West African descent who are great at sprinting but lack endurance, the way the NFL and the NBA are, by making the game more amenable to sprinters by having more times outs (great for TV commercials) and substitutions. Or soccer could be made more amenable to highlanders with less speed but great endurance such as East Africans, Mexicans, Bolivians, Rif Mountain Northwest Africans and the like by preventing players from wasting time whenever play stops. But the rules are set in such a way that whites predominate in soccer.

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

College ROI

Ben Espen blogs:

I did a quick plot of the top 50 schools on the Payscale list versus the 25th percentile SAT scores of incoming students, and some schools definitely do better than others. I also resorted the list by annualized rate of return, and plotted the top 50 again, and the public schools do much better on rate of return than on 30 year net return.

The same schools stand out on both lists:

    Georgia Institute of Technology
    University of Virginia (UVA)
    Brigham Young University (BYU)
    Colorado School of Mines
    College of William and Mary
    University of California, Berkeley
    University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
    University of Michigan
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
    University of Florida (UF)
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNCH)
    California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (CalPoly)

All public schools with strong engineering and science programs, except for BYU, but they produce good engineers too. These schools are probably good options if you live in state, especially since there are often incentive programs to keep academically talented students at state universities. And they are a lot cheaper than the top private schools on the list

By the way, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo didn't have affirmative action last time I checked because it's in the second-tier Cal State system. Proposition 209 outlawed racial preferences in California in 1996, so the top tier University of California colleges responded by imposing "holistic admissions" where you submit an essay about how The Man Has Been Keeping You Down so the admissions officer can guess your ethnicity. But the Cal State system can't afford too many admissions staffers, so they just use the same system UC used to use: GPA and test scores. Nobody much cares about the other Cal State schools, but Cal Poly SLO is worth caring about so MALDEF sued it for not discriminating. 

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

Political Evolution in Tibet

Nick Wade writes in the NY Times:

Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution

Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness. The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far.

Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.
 
If confirmed, this would be the most recent known example of human evolutionary change. Until now, the most recent such change was the spread of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest milk in adulthood — among northern Europeans about 7,500 years ago. But archaeologists say that the Tibetan plateau was inhabited much earlier than 3,000 years ago and that the geneticists’ date is incorrect.

When lowlanders try to live at high altitudes, their blood thickens as the body tries to counteract the low oxygen levels by churning out more red blood cells. This overproduction of red blood cells leads to chronic mountain sickness and to lesser fertility — Han Chinese living in Tibet have three times the infant mortality of Tibetans.

... The biologists found about 30 genes in which a version rare among the Han had become common among the Tibetans. The most striking instance was a version of a gene possessed by 9 percent of Han but 87 percent of Tibetans.

Such an enormous difference indicates that the version typical among Tibetans is being strongly favored by natural selection. In other words, its owners are evidently leaving more children than those with different versions of the gene.

The gene in question is known as hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha, or HIF2a, and the Tibetans with the favored version have fewer red blood cells and hence less hemoglobin in their blood.

The finding explains why Tibetans do not get mountain sickness but raises the question of how they compensate for the lack of oxygen if not by making extra red blood cells.

... Genetic differences between Tibetans and Chinese are a potentially delicate issue, given Tibetan aspirations for political autonomy. Dr. Nielsen said he hoped that the Beijing team’s results would carry no political implications, given that it is cultural history and language, not genetics, that constitute a people. There is not much genetic difference between Danes and Swedes, he added, but Denmark and Sweden are separate countries.

 

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. The Chinese government is encouraging Han Chinese to flood into Tibet and demographically overwhelm Tibetans. Is this strategy doomed by the Han's genetic lack of adaptation for living and reproducing at roughly the top of Pike's Peak? Or do these new findings hold out hope to the Chinese government that they could start a program to genetically screen potential Han colonists to find the small percentage with the right gene variants to thrive and reproduce in Tibet? After all, there are a lot of Han to choose among.

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

How to live to be 100

From the Washington Post:

Perls and his colleagues analyzed the genes of participants in the New England Centenarian Study, which is the largest study of centenarians and their families in the world. The study involves about 1,600 centenarians and has been ongoing since 1995.

"A lot of people might ask, 'Well, who would want to live to 100?' because they think they have every age-related disease under the sun and are on death's doorstep," Perls said. "But this isn't true. We have noted in previous work that 90 percent of centenarians are disability-free at the average age of 93."

They also noticed that longevity seemed to run in centenarians' families, indicating that genetics must play a role.

So the researchers compared the genes of 1,055 centenarians with 1,267 other people to see whether they could identify any unique patterns. Based on that work, the researchers identified 150 genetic variations that appeared to be associated with longevity that could be used to predict with 77 percent accuracy whether someone would live to be at least 100.

"Seventy-seven percent is a very high accuracy for a genetic model, which means that the traits that we are looking at have a very strong genetic base," said Paola Sebastiani, a professor of biostatistics at the Boston University School of Public Health who helped conduct the study.  

I'm not really interested in this topic enough to go find the paper, but my question would be whether the researchers split their sample in half, data-mined one half, then tested their findings on the other half. That's proper research hygiene so that you don't just come up with a lot of small, random associations. 

But it's hard to make yourself do it. I remember taking a finance course at UCLA in 1981 where we had to do a SAS analysis of a hypothesis about patterns in the stock market to test the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. So, I typed in from the Baseball Encyclopedia the dates of World Series home games involving the Yankees going back to 1921, and the stock market volume and change in Dow Jones average. The professor had said over and over that you had to divide your sample size in two, but there just weren't enough home games, so I didn't do it and got only a B on the project. (I didn't find any effect on prices, but NYSE volume was down on days of Yankee World Series home games.)

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

Hereditary Privilege through Rights and Complexity

America doesn't have as much social class mobility as we might think. People who do well now generally have kids who do pretty well. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one that's kind of obscure is the increasing complexity of the meritocratic ladder, often justified in the name of Rights. The result is that kids with smart, hard-working, married parents can get an edge on the system in multiple ways.

For example, when I was a kid, taking the SAT was pretty simple. For example, you didn't have any right to look at your test once you turned it in. But, now, you have the "right" to order (for a non-nominal although not extortionate sum) from College Board your SAT test booklet along with a reproduction of your answer sheet (at least for certain test dates) so that you can study what you messed up on. I just spent two hours looking at my son's May test performance looking for patterns in his mistakes so he can do better on his next try. It's an intellectually challenging process.

I suspect there are a lot of little angles like that that have emerged in recent decades that help upper middle class families stay ahead of broken lower middle class families.

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

Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell, painter of hundreds of Saturday Evening Post covers, was long derided as an artistic dead end because he had so little influence on subsequent celebrity painters. But that always struck me as stupid because Rockwell was hugely influential on one of the most influential cultural figures of the later 20th Century, Steven Spielberg, who mostly paid for the Rockwell museum in Massachusetts. 

That Rockwell didn't have much impact on subsequent painters just shows that painting was becoming a minor art due to technological advance. Rockwell operated much like a modern filmmaker, holding auditions for models and having his staff construct sets and assemble props. If he'd been born a couple of generations later, he might well have become a movie director.

It turns out that George Lucas owns even more Rockwells than Spielberg does. Together, they are mounting an exhibit at the Smithsonian: "Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg." 

If your followers include Spielberg and Lucas, your influence lives on.

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

Guardian: Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim

From The Guardian:

Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim
Energy can be diverted away from brain development to fight infection, explaining 'lower intelligence in warmer countries'

People who live in countries where disease is rife may have lower IQs because they have to divert energy away from brain development to fight infections, scientists in the US claim.

The controversial idea might help explain why national IQ scores differ around the world, and are lower in some warmer countries where debilitating parasites such as malaria are widespread, they say.

Researchers behind the theory claim the impact of disease on IQ scores has been under-appreciated, and believe it ranks alongside education and wealth as a major factor that influences cognitive ability.

Attempts to measure intelligence around the world are fraught with difficulty and many researchers doubt that IQ tests are a suitable tool for the job. The average intelligence of a nation is likely to be governed by a complex web of interwoven factors.

The latest theory, put forward by Randy Thornhill and others at the University of New Mexico, adds disease to a long list of environmental and other issues that may all play a role in determining intelligence. Thornhill made the news in 2000, when he coauthored a provocative book called A Natural History of Rape in which he argues that sexual coercion emerged as an evolutionary adaptation.

Writing in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Thornhill and his colleagues explain that children under five devote much of their energy to brain development. When the body has to fight infections, it may have to sacrifice brain development, they say.

In the American South, for example, hookworm, an energy-sapping infection that can cause cognitive impairment, was a giant problem until John D. Rockefeller funded a campaign against it starting in 1909. Poor Southerners seemed to have a lot more pep, physical and mental, once they started wearing shoes and taking other steps to avoid hookworm.

Hookworm is still a big problem in some of the warm-weather parts of the world. I'm sure there are other nasty parasites, and they tend to be more common in the tropics.

As Greg Cochran and Paul Ewald pointed out in the 1990s, there are probably numerous chronic infections that don't attract as much attention as major acute ones, but do often add up to trouble. A lot of things in the modern world, such as clean tap water, probably diminish their impact. Little kids get a lot of antibiotics these days for acute infections like earaches. The antibiotics might be killing off low-level infections at the same time. Who knows?

Likewise, Darwinian selection under conditions of heavy infectious disease burden will tend to be oriented toward improving the immune system more than raising intelligence, which will tend to have long term effects on tropical populations.

To test the idea, Thornhill's group used three published surveys of global IQ scores and compared them with data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on how badly infectious diseases affect different countries. The list included common infections, such as malaria, tetanus and tuberculosis.

The scientists found that the level of infectious disease in a country was closely linked to the average national IQ. The heavier the burden of disease, the lower the nation's IQ scores. Thornhill believes that nations who have lived with diseases for long periods may have adapted, by developing better immune systems at the expense of brain function.

"The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at," said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. "Disease is a major sap on the body's energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don't have enough, you can't do it properly."

"The consequence of this, if we're right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease," Eppig added.

"It's an interesting and provocative finding," said Geraint Rees, director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. "It explains about 50 to 60% of the variability in IQ scores and appears to be independent of some other factors such as overall GDP."

"The authors suggest that more infectious disease could lead to lower IQ scores through an impact on brain development. This is an interesting speculation, but the data don't prove it one way or the other," he said. "A bigger problem is that it might be driven by a third factor, that affects both infectious disease prevalence and IQ test scores."

Right. Multicollinearity is always a problem with correlation studies, and this topic especially: are lower IQs in the tropics caused by tropical diseases or by the tropics that cause the tropical diseases themselves?

For example, I've long hypothesized that one general problem that brains need to deal with is shedding heat and that is of course a bigger problem in the tropical than the temperate world. 

How to dissipate heat generated by computer chips is a huge issue in computer design. As I type on my laptop computer, the surface of the machine that is touching my wrists is about 100 degrees F. The bottom of my laptop must be 150 degrees or more. A fan is running full speed to shed heat to keep the CPU chip from melting. My office is heating up from the combination of my PC and myself, both working hard. I have just now opened my window to disperse the heat. It is a cool evening here, so the temperature is palpably dropping by the minute. If I was in a tropical climate, I'd need to turn on the air conditioning or start the fan or whatever.

Intel had driven up the power of CPU chips largely by increasing the clock speed, but when they hit four gigahertz, Intel found that chips were melting down. So, Intel  had to revamp massively and find other way to follow Moore's Law, such as multiple cores.

Similarly, your brain generates more heat when you are thinking hard than when it is idling.

Not surprisingly, skull shapes seem to be somewhat related to heat dissipation problems. Eskimos have round heads to conserve heat, while Kenyan marathoners tend to have narrow heads with a lot of surface area that dissipate heat more easily.

For reasons that are unclear, IQ scores are generally rising around the world. Thornhill suggests monitoring rates of infectious diseases in nations as they develop, to see if they decline and IQ tests scores rise.

Singapore would seem to be an example of a tropical place where public hygiene, antibiotics, air conditioning, education, and so forth combine in a virtuous circle.

Richard Lynn, professor of psychology at Ulster University, and author of the 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, said disease and IQ is a two-way relationship, with low national IQs being partly responsible for widespread infectious diseases.

Right, it's hard to get started turning, say, Equatorial Guinea into Singapore without Singaporeans to get you started.

Here's the abstract of Thornhill's paper:

In this study, we hypothesize that the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability is determined in part by variation in the intensity of infectious diseases. From an energetics standpoint, a developing human will have difficulty building a brain and fighting off infectious diseases at the same time, as both are very metabolically costly tasks. Using three measures of average national intelligence quotient (IQ), we found that the zero-order correlation between average IQ and parasite stress ranges from r = −0.76 to r = −0.82 (p < 0.0001). These correlations are robust worldwide, as well as within five of six world regions. Infectious disease remains the most powerful predictor of average national IQ when temperature, distance from Africa, gross domestic product per capita and several measures of education are controlled for. These findings suggest that the Flynn effect may be caused in part by the decrease in the intensity of infectious diseases as nations develop.

Afghanistan would be the leading example of a cold winter place that seems pretty dim, perhaps due to disease burden. It's second in the world in infant mortality. (The rest of the Worst 20 are black African countries, while Afghans are, as Daniel Dravot notes in the Man Who Would Be King, a bunch of more or less white people. But how did that Civilizing Mission thing work out for you, Danny boy?)

James Michener's 1963 novel about Afghanistan, Caravans, has an Afghan leader arguing, with some pride, that while children die like flies in Afghanistan, if they survive past childhood, they grow up to be tough, mean bastards with well-tuned immune systems.

But, it's stupid of Afghans to have so much disease burden. So, I'm not sure that says much about causality. Are they so knuckleheaded because they are sick so much, or are they sick so much because they are so knuckleheaded?

But, even when it proves hard to determine ultimate causation from correlation studies, correlation itself is worth knowing. The general rule is that, as Kingsley Amis said in Lucky Jim: "There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."

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