Paging Doctors Herrnstein and Murray!

From the Washington Post:

Many in U.S. slip from middle class, study finds 

By Michael A. Fletcher, 

Nearly one in three Americans who grew up middle-class has slipped down the income ladder as an adult, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says. 

... The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars. 

People were deemed downwardly mobile if they fell below the 30th percentile in income, if their income rank was 20 or more percentiles below their parents’ rank, or if they earn at least 20 percent less than their parents. ... 

Overall, African American men have a particularly hard time clinging to middle-class status. Thirty-eight percent of black men who grew up middle-class are downwardly mobile, nearly double the rate of white men, the report says. Hispanic men are slightly more likely than white males to fall down the economic ladder, but the difference was not statistically significant.
Among African Americans and Hispanics, men are more likely to slip than women, although the reverse is true among whites. 

The racial gap in mobility has perplexed researchers at Pew since a 2007 report that said nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults. That report underscored the feeble grip many African Americans had on middle-class life, prompting researchers to probe deeper, said Erin Currier, project manager of Pew’s Economic Mobility Project. 

The new report called the performance of blacks on a key standardized test a factor that accounts for virtually the entire mobility gap separating the races. Black males scored much lower than white males on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which measures reading comprehension, vocabulary and math ability. 

“Taking into account differences in AFQT scores between middle-class white and black men reduces the gap until it is statistically indistinguishable from zero,” the report said. 

The findings in the report are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a group of 12,000 interviews that researchers have followed since 1979.

Hmmhmmhhhh ... AFQT scores ... the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ... Where have I heard all this before?

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

Ideal elevation?

Ever since I was a Boy Scout, I've been fascinated by the effects of altitude on a place's climate, vegetation, and human life. When I reread volumes of my 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica, I appreciate that the standard Britannica format is to put the altitude of a place in the first paragraph.

Yet, altitude doesn't come up much in daily thinking, which can cause problems. For example, I knew a man who spent his prime building his retirement dream home at 9,000 feet, but then found that by the time it was finally finished, he was getting on in years and didn't thrive anymore in that thin atmosphere. 

Elevation is an important element in the concept of "Whitopia," a term coined by a black journalist named Rich Benjamin in his genial book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America. Benjamin drove around to various places white people are moving to in out of the way states like Utah and Idaho to discover what white people are up to. He discovered, among other things, that they are up to playing a lot of golf. To burrow deeper into his investigative journalism project, he took up golf. And discovered that golf is awesome. In fact, golfcentric whitopias are pretty cool overall, he found. 

Whitopias tend to be located in the sunny, low humidity inland West.

I think you can divide whitopias into two class categories, by elevation. Elite whitopias like Aspen (7900 feet), Santa Fe (7200), and Telluride (8700) tend to be very high ski resorts. The homes in these elite whitopias tend to be second (or third) homes. For example, I stayed once at my boss's 17,000 square foot house in a highland suburb of Aspen at about 9,000 feet. Personally, I would be leery of buying a house at 9,000 feet, but the kind of people who buy giant homes in Aspen (e.g., my boss's neighbor Chris Evert) tend to have outstanding aerobic capacity. 

Extreme altitude can cause massive health problems. For example, doctors in Leadville, Colorado (10,152 ft.) insist that all pregnant women go down to lower elevations. In Peru and Bolivia, white people have trouble carrying babies to term on the Altiplano relative to Amerindians.

More middle class whitopias like Bend, Oregon (3600 feet), Grand Junction, Colorado (4600), and St. George, Utah (2900) tend to be middling in height. They are often located in the high desert near the base of major mountain ranges, which provides easy access to the highlands for recreation without having to deal with massive snowfalls, and a lot of water for lawns and golf courses in the summer, when temperatures, while warm, are not as insufferable as in low deserts. 

So, has anybody systematically looked at the effects of elevation on real estate?

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

Malconomics

Economist Steven D. "Freakonomics" Levitt reports:

"The fee for a trick varies with the type of sex act, and prostitutes seem to discriminate across clients in order to maximize profit. White men pay $8 to $9 more per trick than black customers, with Hispanic clients paying some amount in between. When bargaining, prostitutes will usually offer a price to a black customer but will make a white man throw out a number first. Repeat customers pay slightly less than new customers."

Too bad prostitutes can't afford to pay for Malcolm Gladwell to address them, because Malcolm would explain to them that, like car salesmen, if only the whores understood that they were unconsciously discriminating, they'd stop leaving money on the table.

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

Glenn Burke: tragic victim of homophobia or his own all-around suckiness?

From ESPN.com, about Glenn Burke, a 1970s ballplayer who died of AIDS:

What most people didn't know was that Burke was gay. Following his retirement, in 1980, he became the first major leaguer to come out. Even though he tried to keep his sexuality a secret during his playing days, there had been rumors in the clubhouse. And as the 2010 television documentary Out: The Glenn Burke Story revealed, Dodgers executives scrambled to squash those rumors at all costs: In the off-season of 1977, team VP Al Campanis offered Burke $75,000 to get married. According to a friend, Burke rejected the marriage deal with a mix of wit and rebelliousness. He told Campanis, "I guess you mean to a woman." 

It was around that time that Burke struck up a relationship with Spunky Lasorda, aka Tommy Lasorda Jr. Spunky was a lithe young socialite who frequented West Hollywood's gay scene, smoking cigarettes from a long holder. A 1992 GQ profile of Spunky portrayed his homosexuality as an open secret. But his father was in staunch denial and remained so even after Spunky's death, in 1991, from pneumonia. GQ reported that the death certificate said his illness was likely AIDS-related. "My son wasn't gay. No way," Lasorda Sr. told the magazine.
Burke and Spunky's relationship didn't become public until years later and remains ambiguous. Burke's sister, Lutha Davis, insists the two men were just close friends. In his 1995 memoir, Out at Home, co-authored with Erik Sherman, Burke went out of his way to leave the true nature of the relationship unclear. "That's my business," he wrote. He also explained that Lasorda Sr.'s homophobia was something he and Spunky commiserated about. Burke described them turning up together at Lasorda's house one night, done up in pigtails and drag, hoping to stage a kind of gay Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. They chickened out before knocking on the door. 

Whatever the case, Burke's association with Spunky marks the point at which his big league career took an irrevocable left turn. Lasorda stopped being amused by the player's dugout antics and, according to Burke, turned on him. "Glenn had such an abundance of respect and love for Tommy Lasorda," says Burke's sister. "When things went bad at the end, it was almost like a father turning his back on his son." Early in the 1978 season, the Dodgers abruptly dealt Burke to the Oakland A's — among the most lackluster teams in baseball — for Billy North, an outfielder past his prime. L.A. sportswriters described the trade as sucking the life out of the Dodgers' clubhouse. A couple of players were seen crying at their lockers.
For Burke the trade had everything to do with his sexuality — though the outfielder sounded off to the press about it in only the most cryptic terms. "I never got a chance here," he said. "I felt I was supposed to kiss ass and I didn't." 

After unproductive years in 1978 and '79, Burke hoped for a fresh start in 1980 under new A's manager Billy Martin. But the gay rumors followed Burke to Oakland. Martin threw the word "faggot" around the clubhouse and didn't play Burke. Some teammates even avoided showering with him. Burke, accustomed to being the heart of the clubhouse, felt crippled by the discomfort he was causing. His unhappiness was compounded by a knee injury and a demotion to Triple-A. After playing just 25 games in the minors in 1980, he abruptly retired. He was 27 years old. "It's the first thing in my life I ever backed down from," he later said.
Burke started hanging around San Francisco's Castro district. He became a star shortstop in a local gay softball league and dominated in the Gay Softball World Series. "I was making money playing ball and not having any fun," he said of his time in the majors. "Now I'm not making money, but I'm having fun." Jack McGowan, a friend in the Castro who has since passed away, once said of Burke: "He was a hero to us. He was athletic, clean-cut, masculine. He was everything that we wanted to prove to the world that we could be." 

In the Castro, Burke's creation of the high five was part of his Herculean mystique. He would flash his magnetic smile and high-five everyone who walked by. In 1982, he came out publicly in an Inside Sports magazine profile called "The Double Life of a Gay Dodger." The writer, a gay activist named Michael J. Smith, appropriated the high five as a defiant symbol of gay pride. Rising from the wreckage of Burke's aborted baseball career, Smith wrote, was "a legacy of two men's hands touching, high above their heads." 

By that time, however, Burke was struggling with a drug habit. It escalated in 1987, when a car plowed into him as he was crossing a street, breaking his right leg in four places and stealing his athleticism. He couldn't hold a job. He went broke. He did some time at San Quentin for grand theft. Then, in 1993, he tested positive for HIV. He passed away on May 30, 1995, after a sharp and grisly decline.

I remember Glenn Burke from when I was an intense Dodger fan in the late 1970s. He struck me then as a useless waste of space any time he got into the lineup. Looking up his statistics, I see I was right: In his career, he had 556 plate appearance, or about one full season's worth. His career stats in MVP form were .237 average, 2 homers, and 38 rbi. He got all of 22 walks in his career. His career on base percentage was .270 and slugging average was .291, for an OPS of .561. His OPS+ on a scale where an average big leaguer is 100 was 57. His career wins above replacement was -3.1, evenly split by being terrible on both offense and defense. The remarkable thing about Burke was not that his promising career was sidetracked by irrational discrimination, but they let him stay in the big leagues so long when there were better players in Triple A.

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

Ed Tech

From the NYT:

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores
By MATT RICHTEL 

CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” — but not in any traditional way. 

In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius. 

The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies. 

The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices. 

“This is such a dynamic class,” Ms. Furman says of her 21st-century classroom. “I really hope it works.” 

Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores. 

Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen. ...

First of all, 7th-graders shouldn't be reading Shakespeare. He's too hard for them. Maybe 9th graders should read Julius Caesar, a play with a much simpler style. But Shakespeare's comedies are hard. Also, they aren't very funny. King Lear is still really, really sad, but As You Like It is not really funny anymore.

Larry Cuban, an education professor emeritus at Stanford University, said the research did not justify big investments by districts. 

“There is insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period,” he said. “There is no body of evidence that shows a trend line.” 

Some advocates for technology disagree. 

Karen Cator, director of the office of educational technology in the United States Department of Education, said standardized test scores were an inadequate measure of the value of technology in schools. Ms. Cator, a former executive at Apple Computer, said that better measurement tools were needed but, in the meantime, schools knew what students needed.

Okay, but why is Ms. Cator a former executive at Apple Computer? If the K-12 market is as promising as she thinks, wouldn't her former boss Steve Jobs have made sure to keep at Apple? After all, he has a pretty good nose for the next big thing. Moreover, a quarter of a century ago, Apple was, to a large extent, the chief K-12 technology company. That was its strong suit in 1985. Since his return to Apple in the mid 1990s, Jobs has largely abandoned K-12 for the well-educated grown-up market, with vast success. 

On the other hand, I think there are opportunities to help kids learn better in K-12 with technology. Intelligent drilling is what computers can do well. And the iPad looks like a particularly good form factor. But most of the software currently for K-12 is lousy, and most of the people buying K-12 software aren't very good either.

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

Interning

A headline from the LA Times:

Rug store owner showed porn to teenage intern, police say

Wait a minute ... they have interns now in the rug business? Is nothing sacred anymore? I understand that the practice of interning -- i.e., young people from affluent families working for free to get a networking leg up on the competition -- had infested many industries. But, I had assumed, the venerable rug merchant business, which has been a byword for thousands of years of being in it for the money, would not stoop so low.

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

Obamamania in perspective

Brent Staples reviews Randall Kennedy's book on Obama for the NYT:

Every campaign enlists its own meta-language. As Randall Kennedy reminds us in his provocative and richly insightful new book, “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency,” the Obama forces disseminated several messages intended to soothe the racially freighted fears of the white electorate. On one channel, they reassured voters that he was not an alien, but a normal American patriot. They also made clear that he was a “safe,” conciliatory black man who would never raise his voice in anger or make common cause with people, living or dead, who used race as a platform for grievance. On yet another wavelength, the candidate proffered his bona fides as a black man to ­African-Americans who were initially wary of his unusual upbringing, his white family ties and his predominantly white political support. 

The press viewed this courtship of black voters as largely beside the point for a “post-racial” campaign that had bigger fish to fry on the white side of the street. Kennedy, who teaches law at Harvard, is having none of that. He argues with considerable force that the candidate deliberately set out to blacken himself in the public mind — while taking care not to go too far — and would have lost the election had he not done so. He sees Obama’s courtship of black voters not as tertiary, but as the main event and as the perfect vantage from which to view the campaign and the presidency. 

“The Persistence of the Color Line” consists of an introduction and eight inter­related essays that offer a fresh view of events that had prematurely taken on the cast of settled history. One essay, “The Race Card in the Campaign of 2008,” lays out an exacting standard for determining when the charge of race baiting is appropriate and applies it to several statements that were labeled as racist, or at least nearly so, during the last presidential campaign. Kennedy praises the Republican nominee, John McCain (he “imposed upon himself a code of conduct that precluded taking full advantage of his opponent’s racial vulnerability”), and redeems the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who was run out of the Clinton campaign essentially for saying what was indisputably true: Obama’s blackness mattered to his stature as a candidate. Without it, he would never have appealed so strongly “to the emotions of millions of white Americans who yearned for a moment of racial ­redemption.” 

... He sees [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright’s critique of America as excessive, but notes that it is, at bottom, more integral to the African-American worldview than was generally acknowledged during the episode. 

The messianic glow that surrounded Obama’s candidacy — Kennedy and others call it “Obamamania” — precluded closer scrutiny of his pronouncements, especially those having to do with race. The widely held notion that the now-famous race speech, “A More Perfect Union,” ranked with the Gettysburg Address or “I Have a Dream” strikes Kennedy as delusional. The speech, he writes, was little more than a carefully calibrated attempt to defuse the public relations crisis precipitated by the Wright affair. Far from frank, it understated the extent of the country’s racial divisions and sought to blame blacks and whites equally for them, when in fact, Kennedy writes, “black America and white America are not equally culpable. White America enslaved and Jim Crowed black America (not the other way around).” The speech was in keeping with the candidate’s wildly successful race strategy, which involved making white voters feel better about themselves whenever possible.

The cornerstone essay, “Obama Courts Black America,” is a breath of fresh air on many counts, not least of all because it offers a fully realized portrait of the black political opinion — left, right, center, high and low — that was brought to bear during the campaign. This is the most comprehensive document I’ve yet read on the near street fight that erupted over the question of how Obama should identify himself racially. There were those who viewed him as “too white” to be legitimately seen as black; those who had no problem with his origins; those who viewed the attempt to portray him as “mixed race” as a way of trying to “whiten” him for popular consumption; and those who accused Obama of throwing his white mother under the bus when it became clear that he regarded himself as African-American. 

Tallying votes, Kennedy reckons that it would have been political suicide for Obama to identify himself as anything other than black. This would have undermined his standing among African-Americans, whose overwhelming support he needed to win, and gained him nothing among those whites who were determined to punish him for his skin color, no matter how he described himself. 

Of course Obamamania was always all about race. Look, the guy was a state legislator as of 2004, and not even speaker, majority leader, or a whip in the Illinois legislature. He was chairman of the state senate's health and human services committee, which isn't bad, but it's not automatic Presidential Timber. Four years later, he gets elected President.  If his daddy hadn't been black, he would no more have become President than if the previous guy'd daddy had been Mr. Tree.

Let's say that as of 2004, Obama was about the 10th most important person in one of the 50 state legislatures in the country. With 50 governors, 100 U.S. Senators, and 435 Representatives, that means he was probably not in the top 1,000 politicians in the country four years before winning the Presidential election. Four years before getting elected President, Bush II was governor, Clinton was governor, Bush I was Veep, Reagan was ex-governor, Carter was governor, Ford was House minority leader, Nixon was ex-Veep, LBJ was Senate majority leader, JFK was U.S. Senator, Eisenhower was former supreme commander, and Truman was U.S. Senator.

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

Disparate Impact, Part MCXXXVII

The New York Times editorializes:

EDITORIAL
The Military and the Death Penalty 

Racism in the application of capital punishment has been well documented in the civilian justice system since the Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976. Now comes evidence that racial disparity is even greater in death penalty cases in the military system. 

Minority service members are more than twice as likely as whites — after accounting for the crimes’ circumstances and the victims’ race — to be sentenced to death, according to a forthcoming study co-written by David Baldus, an eminent death-penalty scholar, who died in June. 

The analysis is so disturbing because the military has made sustained, often successful efforts to rid its ranks of discrimination. But even with this record, its failure to apply the death penalty fairly is more proof that capital punishment cannot be free of racism’s taint.

You know, if you do a study of star football running backs, after accounting for the circumstances, such as honors earned at that level, the whites will go on to be victims of racism in college, and then again in the pros. How do we know that? Because of disparate impact.

Alternatively, if one group has a bell curve shifted versus another group, the shift tends becomes more extreme the more extreme the selection critieria, whether for starring as running backs or committing heinous crimes. But, who could expect the New York Times editorial board to be familiar with and grasp the logic of normal probability distributions, as explained by La Griffe du Lion. Why should they? He's some pseudonymous academic.

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