"Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson

In VDARE, I review the authorized (but revealing) new biography of the late Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple.

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

Babbage Remembered

John Markoff writes in the NYT about a new plan to build Charles Babbage's plans for a steam-powered computer:

[Charles] Babbage, who lived from 1791 to 1871, is rightfully known as the “father of computing.” But it would be left to a fellow scientist, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, to fully appreciate that his inventions were more than just tools for automatically tabulating logarithms and trigonometric functions. 

Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron — recognized that the Analytical Engine could be a more generalized media machine, capable of making music and manipulating symbols. And 113 years before John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence,” she considered — and then rejected — the notion that computers might exhibit creativity or even thought. 

While Babbage was driven by the desire to automate tabular data for military and related applications, Lovelace wrote a lengthy commentary on the design that would prove deeply influential when it was rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century. 

Lovelace is known as the first programmer, because she designed a program for the unbuilt machine. The algorithm appears in a series of notes written by Lovelace after a friend of Babbage asked her to translate an Italian professor’s write-up of a lecture Babbage had given at the University of Turin. 

The Lovelace notes are remarkable both for her algorithm for calculating the sequence known as Bernoulli numbers and for what would become known as the “Lovelace objection.” In passing, she commented that the Babbage computer would not originate anything, but rather could do only what it had been instructed. The implication was that machines would not be creative, and thus not intelligent. 

The consensus of computer historians is that while Babbage was clearly the first to conceive of the flexible machine that foreshadowed the modern computer, his work was forgotten and was then conceptually recreated by Turing a century later.

That Babbage and Lovelace were long forgotten says a lot about anybody's chance to be remembered, because they were celebrities in their own time. It's not as if society was prejudiced against them. Ada was an aristocrat by birth and her father had been the most famous man in the world after Napoleon.  Babbage was a rich socialite who lived in London, when it was the capital of the world. He knew everybody. Dickens modeled a character on him. Parliament voted him generous subsidies for many years until Prime Minister Peel pulled the plug. 

When interest grew in Babbage again after the electronic computer came along, there turned out to be a huge amount of documentary evidence on him, and they now show up everywhere. The central characters in Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia are romanticized versions of Ada and Babbage. James Gleick's 2011 history of the Information Age, The Information, quotes at length from Ada's charming letters to Babbage (Stoppard used Gleick's 1987 book on chaos theory in Arcadia, so it was natural for Gleick to devote quite a few pages to the pair.)

Paul Johnson's 1991 book The Birth of the Modern on the years 1815-1830 explains the various reasons Babbage failed. It's an odd book -- an extremely long history of everything -- but it's centered around an encyclopedic knowledge of the witticisms of Johnson's three favorite pre-Victorians: Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and the Duke of Wellington. And Johnson's point of view is unusual: instead of being amazed by all the progress the Brits were making in 1815-1830, he repeatedly wonders why they didn't go faster. For example, why waste all that time on railways when they could have leapt to the automobile? One of his heroes is a man who built a steam powered automobile in the 1820s.

Babbage was the man who, more than anybody else, could have jumped Britain into the future, but he failed. Besides the obvious mechanical and metallurgical problems, Babbage didn't have good corporate structure examples to draw upon. Today, we know all about computer start-ups. If you are Jobs and the Woz in Silicon Valley in 1977, you can look up how Noyce and Moore or Bushnell did it. Johnson writes:

He should have set up his own company and employed a general manager to run its finances. He should have employed a showman to explain his purpose to the public. But, most of all, he needed a head engineer, closely identified with him in the success of the venture. Instead, he used Joseph Clement, not as a fellow entrepreneur with a stake in the engines, but as an employee, under a cost-plus contract. ... The loss of so much taxpayers' money in a chimera that came to nothing was thereafter cited as a reason for refusing public funds for any kind of scientific research project. 

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

High Speed Rail, Slow Speed Plan

High speed rail is considered to be a liberal or progressive cause in the U.S., but all those terms are increasingly outmoded. 

Consider California's attempts to build a high-speed rail system. At present, there are attempts to build a Train to Nowhere from somewhere in the flat, rural Central Valley to somewhere else in the flat, rural Central Valley. But even that easy stage is running into entrenched opposition. From the LA Times:

Critics say such blunders are routine for the rail authority. Across the length of the Central Valley, the bullet train as drawn would destroy churches, schools, private homes, shelters for low-income people, animal processing plants, warehouses, banks, medical offices, auto parts stores, factories, farm fields, mobile home parks, apartment buildings and much else as it cuts through the richest agricultural belt in the nation and through some of the most depressed cities in California. 

Although the potential for such disruption was understood in general terms when the project began 15 years ago, the reality is only now beginning to sink in. 

The potential economic, cultural and political damage may be an omen. The Central Valley, where construction could start next year, is expected to be the politically easiest and lowest-cost segment of the system, designed to move millions of passengers between Southern California and the Bay Area. The project's effects could be even greater in more populous places like Silicon Valley, Orange County, Burbank, San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles.

Okay, so they've been planning away for 15 years, and now the real fights begin.

California's freeways were built during the heyday of majoritarianism in the middle of the 20th Century. The amount of high-handedness required to build the freeways seems staggering today. Let me give an example not from freeways, but from a business law class I took in 1979. Even by then, this seemed hilariously high-handed.

After WWII, the U.S. government started above-ground nuclear bomb testing in Nevada. One nuke shock wave knocked down a bunch of ranchers' barns and all the scared cattle ran away and most of them died before they could be rounded up. The ranchers tried to get compensated for their barns and cows, but the feds said they had taken every reasonable precaution; therefore, the ranchers shouldn't get a dime. The ranchers sued on the grounds that nuclear bombs should fall under the doctrine of strict liability, just as owning lions and tigers do. If you own a tiger and it eats somebody, you are liable even if you took all the precautions a reasonable man would. The courts ruled for the government: the government's nuclear bombs shouldn't be treated as something inherently dangerous, in contrast to scary lions and tigers.

In contrast, compare that to the federal government's plan to store nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The feds began studying Yucca Mountain in 1978, but then gave up in 2010, almost a third of a century later.

The 1960s can be characterized as the switch from majoritarianism to minoritarianism in America, when the moral high ground shifted from the majority to anybody who can successfully characterize themselves as a victimized minority. Not surprisingly, this gets in the way of progressive plans like High Speed Rail. 

Further, the power of Not in My Back Yard politics grows with the number of back yards. When the freeways were built, there was a lot more open land. In other words, the huge population growth in California makes for a more gridlocked society. This isn't all that complicated, but the connection between immigration, population growth, and gridlock isn't on the mental radar of even 5% of the punditocracy.

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

Time to narrow the NFL goal posts

From Crossing Wall Street on November 2:

We’re nearly halfway through the [NFL] season and kickers have made a stunning 85.9% of their field goal attempts. In just ten years, kickers have increased their accuracy by nearly 10%. 

Not only that, but they’re kicking longer as well. So far this season, kickers have made 78% of their attempts between 40 and 49 yards. That’s better than the NBA’s league-wide accuracy from the free throw line (76.3%). 

And the numbers from attempts over 50 yards out are even more impressive. This season, kickers have nailed 45 of their 63 attempts from 50 yards or more. That’s more accurate than the league was from any distance 25 years ago. Since 1994, long-range accuracy has doubled and long-range attempts-per-game are up by more than 63% from just five years ago. 

Improved kicking is rapidly changing football strategy. In fact, this season is on track to be the highest-scoring season since the AFL-NFL merger, and kickers deserve a lot of the credit. Touchdowns-per-game are nearly identical to where they were 30 years ago, but field goals-per-game are up by 45%. 

This high-octane accuracy is completely new to football. In 1974, the first year when the uprights were placed at the back of the end zone, kickers made just four of 30 field goals from 50 or more yards. Jan Stenerud, the only pure placekicker in the Hall of Fame, made 66.8% of his career field goal attempts. Today that’s good enough for 105th place in career accuracy. Nearly every player in the top 30 for career accuracy is currently active. 

It’s not just field goals, either. NFL kickers have only missed two of their 546 extra-point attempts this year. That’s a success rate of 99.63% which would also be a league record. Think about this: There will probably be one-tenth as many missed extra-points this year as there were 25 years ago.

The NYT has a similar article today.

I have a basic rule of thumb that human beings find more interesting things that are closer to a 50-50 proposition. Field goal kicking in the NFL, however, has become more of a sure thing, which means that less credit is given to kickers for making a field goal than blame is given to them for missing. Call it the extra pointification of the field goal. The point-after-touchdown kick is a vestigial ritual that just makes games longer. Nobody ever is the hero for kicking the PAT that wins the game 28-27. 

One reason for the improvement is that NFL teams have perfected teamwork on the snap: they often have a deepsnaping specialist and the the punter is delegated to be the holder. Since these three guys don't have much else to do, they get really good at working together. Another reason is the spread of specialty camps training young kickers and snappers. This year, the first ever Sailer Award will be given to the country's top high school kicker.

Coaches are finally attempting more field goals from 50 yards or longer, and kickers are making 71% of them. This has given placekickers a moment to shine this year, but soon it will be considered routine to make 55 yard field goals, and kickers will remain uncelebrated.

As Eddy Elfenbein of Crossing Wall Street says, what the NFL should do to make field goal kicking less of a sure thing is to narrow the goal posts to make field goals more of an accomplishment. The NFL's goal should be for placekickers to be talked about as heroes rather than as screw-ups.

Ironically, placekickers might object because then they'd miss more PATs, and they would worry that they'd get fired more for missing PATs. But why not just eliminate the PAT and make the NFL touchdown worth 7 points? If you went for a 2-point conversion and failed, you'd have a point deducted. NFL games are ridiculously long as it is. The PAT mostly exists today for the sake of additional TV advertising opportunities.

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

Your ancestors more likely to be pioneers than stay-at-homes

From Scientific American:

In the classic book series, Little House on the Prairie, Pa's wanderlust repeatedly drives the Ingalls family westward past the edges of civilization. That craving for open space is probably what drove Homo sapiens to leave Africa in the first place and spread across the globe. According to new research, the desire to expand into new territory may have provided an evolutionary advantage to those who had it over those who lacked it. 

The study, published November 4 in Science, analyzed the genealogies of settlers in Canada's Charlevoix Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean region, northeast of Quebec City. Since the colony's initiation in 1608, it underwent several waves of geographic expansion. The researchers, led by population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Montreal, looked at the colony's marriage and birth records between 1686 and 1960. The analysis found that families living on the edges of the expansions had 20 percent more children than families living at the settlement's core. They also married one year earlier, on average, and contributed up to four times more genes to the region's current population. 

"This is a lovely paper," said Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at University of Utah, who did not participate in the study. Although the researchers could only include births registered in church records, which most likely excluded illegitimate births, Harpending said the researchers "did a thorough job, and analyzed lots of data."

Of course, these lands weren't unpopulated when the French Canadians settled them. They just overwhelmed the Indians.

Benjamin Franklin more or less pointed this out in 1754 in calling for immigration restriction in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. (By the way, somebody should post a more readable version with modern spelling and without Franklin's surfeit of capitalization -- this is one of the key documents in intellectual history, Franklin->Malthus->Darwin, but it's hard for 21st Century people to read in the original.)

After the outbreak of the French & Indian War in 1756, Franklin progressively lost interest in immigration restriction as the opportunity for his people to break out of their narrow coastal strip and violently conquer the great Mississippi watershed increased. (Now, in the Pinkerian imagination, immigration restrictionism is equated with war, while the Enlightenment is equated with peace and immigration, but in the mind of Franklin, one of the great geopolitical strategists of the Enlightenment, immigration restriction and war were alternatives. War against the French and Indians would obviate the need for immigration restriction by allowing the English to conquer vast new lands.After the war, the British government thought to give Canada back to the French in return for a sugar island, but Franklin managed to convince them not to do that: he recognized that the St. Lawrence watershed was key to controlling the Mississippi watershed, which he lusted after for his people.

Then, when the British government tried to restrict the colonists from expanding over the Appalachians, Franklin slowly turned toward war with Mother England to free up the center of the continent for Anglo-American settlement.

In the 21st Century, we witness the same kind of fertility explosions among illegal immigrants to the U.S.

You'll notice that there aren't a lot of Amerindians around these days.

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

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

A perennial controversy is over who really wrote Shakespeare's plays. Rather than get into the endless details, I got to wondering whether there are any other controversies over who really wrote something. For example, 1984 was actually written by a man named Eric Blair, but we know that. 

What I'm wondering is whether there are any other controversies over who wrote famous works of literature. If they were fairly common, then that would seem to make the anti-Stratfordian case seem more plausible. It these controversies are very rare, then the likelihood that there just happens to be a controversy over the most famous of all writers would seem lower.

By way of analogy, when I was a kid, there was a controversy over whether Paul McCartney was dead. If there had been other raging controversies over which musicians were dead, such as whether ? of ? and the Mysterians (96 Tears) was dead, then the Paul Is Dead brouhaha would have seemed more plausible: "Oh, rock stars are always dying and not telling anybody, so it's perfectly likely that Paul is dead." On the other hand, if the only controversy involved the most famous band of all time, then it would seem more likely to be just some stupid idea that obsessive potheads made up.

Similarly, lots of people believed that Elvis, Jim Morison, and Tupac Shakur weren't dead. But that seemed like wishful thinking. If lots of people were going around saying stuff like, "You know, The Big Bopper? Chantilly Lace? I never really liked him, but I thought this was interesting: he didn't really die in that plane crash with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. He was actually on the bus with Waylon Jennings and just used the plane crash to skip out on some IRS trouble and a statuatory rape rap *. I don't really care about the Big Bopper, but I thought that was interesting," well, that would make it seem a little more plausible that fanatical fans of Presley, Morison, and Shakur were denying their heroes' deaths: Rock stars are always disappearing. That's what they do.  

Of course, there are a lot of questions about whether bestsellers written by celebrities were ghostwritten. For example, Michael Jordan is said to have written more books than he has read. Jack Cashil argues that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama's autobiography for him. Nobody doubts that Karen Hughes wrote George W. Bush's 1999 campaign autobiography for him. 

But what about real books? The only recent such controversy I can think of involves the 1965 Nobel Laureate in literature, Mikhail Sholokhov. In the 1960s, Soviet dissidents, Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the right and Roy Medvedev on the left, argued that the Stalin Prize winner had plagiarized the manuscript for And Quiet Flows the Don from a dead Cossack officer. Looking at Wikipedia, it appears that most of the more recent evidence points toward Sholokhov as being the actual author, although who knows who cares enough about this dusty controversy to edit Wikipedia.

If you go farther back in time, there may be more such controversies. One that I'm aware of involves the epistles of Ivan the Terrible, first Czar of all the Russias. Wikipedia writes:

D.S. Mirsky called Ivan "a pamphleteer of genius". The epistles attributed to him are the masterpieces of old Russian (perhaps all Russian) political journalism. They may be too full of texts from the Scriptures and the Fathers, and their Church Slavonic is not always correct. But they are full of cruel irony, expressed in pointedly forcible terms.

Stalin apparently liked Ivan the Terrible's style.

The shameless bully and the great polemicist are seen together in a flash when he taunts the runaway prince Kurbsky with the question: "If you are so sure of your righteousness, why did you run away and not prefer martyrdom at my hands?" Such strokes were well calculated to drive his correspondent into a rage. "The part of the cruel tyrant elaborately upbraiding an escaped victim while he continues torturing those in his reach may be detestable, but Ivan plays it with truly Shakespearian breadth of imagination".[37] These letters are often the only existing source on Ivan's personality and provide crucial information on his reign, but Harvard professor Edward Keenan has argued that these letters are 17th century forgeries. This contention, however, has not been widely accepted, and other scholars, such as John Fennell and Ruslan Skrynnikov continued to argue for their authenticity. Recent archival discoveries of 16th century copies of the letters strengthen the argument for their authenticity.

On the other hand, note that this is the opposite of the Shakespeare controversy. With Ivan the Terrible's letters, the question is whether this important and famous man wrote these works, or whether somebody's lower ranking's work is attributed to the Czar. With the Shakespearean controversy, the standard view is that the plays were written by an obscure hustler from Stratford, while the heretics argue that they were written by somebody more important and high-ranking, such as the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, or King James (the candidate of Malcolm X).
--------
* Warning: Don't believe anything you read here about ? or The Big Bopper.

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

Is Silicon Valley racist? CNN wants to know!

There's been a kerfuffle going on for a week now over an upcoming documentary for CNN by Soledad O'Brien on racism in Silicon Valley. Ms. O'Brien is, apparently, CNN's minority expert on minorityism because she's a nice looking white woman who claims to be a black and Hispanic twofer. Prominent tech blogger Michael Arrington got himself in a lot of trouble for noting that not many blacks found successful tech startups and implying that he didn't think that this was the Biggest Problem in the World. 

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

Telling people what they want to hear

In general, the field of psychology is doing relatively well, especially compared to former contenders such as cultural anthropology. One reason is that psychologists have developed a number of quantitative tools that actually have predictive validity, such as IQ tests. 

On the other hand, there isn't a lot of press and public demand for studies gleaning wisdom from IQ tests. Instead, there's much demand for studies uncovering white racism, male sexism, and so forth. Not surprisingly, demand generates supply. From the New York Times: 

Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology ResearchBy BENEDICT CAREY

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. 

The psychologist, Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg University, committed academic fraud in “several dozen” published papers, many accepted in respected journals and reported in the news media, according to a report released on Monday by the three Dutch institutions where he has worked ... 

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. ... 

In a prolific career, Dr. Stapel published papers on the effect of power on hypocrisy, on racial stereotyping and on how advertisements affect how people view themselves. Many of his findings appeared in newspapers around the world, including The New York Times, which reported in December on his study about advertising and identity. 

In a statement posted Monday on Tilburg University’s Web site, Dr. Stapel apologized to his colleagues. “I have failed as a scientist and researcher,” it read, in part. “I feel ashamed for it and have great regret.” ... 

Dr. Stapel has published about 150 papers, many of which, like the advertising study, seem devised to make a splash in the media. The study published in Science this year claimed that white people became more likely to “stereotype and discriminate” against black people when they were in a messy environment, versus an organized one. Another study, published in 2009, claimed that people judged job applicants as more competent if they had a male voice. The investigating committee did not post a list of papers that it had found fraudulent. 

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

What are other examples of Morrissey-in-East-L.A. Syndrome?

In Chicago in the 1990s on lowly public access TV there was a sketch comedy show starring Dale Chapman called "We're Geniuses in France," the joke being that they were nobodies at home. 

Everybody knows that Jerry Lewis is more popular/respected in France than in America. Another example of this phenomenon is the popularity of Morrissey, formerly lead singer of the English 1980s art mope band The Smiths, among East L.A. Chicanos. 

Morrissey is #3 on Stuff Chicanos Like, ahead of the Dodgers and Pretending to Hate Thanksgiving, and behind only the Virgin Mary and Art Laboe. Art is an octogenarian Armenian disk jockey who may have invented the phrase "oldies but goodies." Chicanos traditionally love pre-British Invasion r&b and rock 'n' roll, especially doo-wop. 

They cannot, and I repeat, cannot, get enough of their “Oldies but Goodies”, or their “Memories of El Monte”. Art Laboe, a syndicated radio personality, gets to the core of Chicano culture with his dedication show where you can hear a plethora of Chicano callers from all over the United States call in and say things like “I’d like to dedicate ‘Angel Baby’ to my baby Angel who is locked up, baby, I love you” or “Yeah, I’d like to dedicate ‘These Arms of Mine’ to my hyna Rosie, hope you visit this weekend” or Art Laboe himself will send the dedications, “Little Puppet from Cypress sends his love to Babygirl, says he misses you and can’t wait to be home”.

I think the last time I listened to Art Laboe's dedication show was driving back from Mt. Whitney in 1977 when nothing else was coming in on the AM radio in my dad's Buick. "Angel Baby" was one of the songs dedicated (or maybe it was "Earth Angel," or, now that I think about it, probably both). So, some things never change. 

Doo-wop started out as an African-American vocal harmonizing style, and then spread to Puerto Ricans and Italians in Eastern cities. There were black L.A. doo-wop groups like The Penguins. On the charts, it peaked around 1961, but Mexican-Americans in East L.A. kept the faith. So, loving doo-wop in the 1970s in East L.A. was kind of like loving Morrissey in the 2000s in East L.A.

Anyway, what are some other examples of this phenomenon of individuals being more popular in some other culture than in their own, like Jerry Lewis in France or Morrissey in East. L.A.? Which blacks are more popular with whites than with other blacks? Which whites are more popular with blacks than with whites?

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

Johnny Depp in Hunter S. Thompson's "The Rum Diary"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Writers traditionally bemoan how the movie industry fails to appreciate them. Yet, there are more films about writers than there is demand from the paying public for motion pictures about individuals whose jobs involve sitting still and, every so often, scratching themselves. For instance, this week brought Anonymous, in which we learn that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, and next week imports Young Goethe in Love. 

Hunter S. Thompson isn’t in quite the same league as Shakespeare and Goethe, but he did write one epochally hilarious book. The Rum Diary—a quasi-autobiographical novel about Thompson’s 1960 misadventures as the astrology and bowling correspondent for an English-language newspaper in Puerto Rico—isn’t, unfortunately, it. 

Johnny Depp, who stars as the 23-year-old Thompson, claims to have discovered The Rum Diary‘s moldering manuscript at Thompson’s fortified compound outside Aspen while prepping for the 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and then talked the reluctant author into allowing publication. Depp’s implication that Thompson—who loved spending money on firearms, drugs, motorcycles, room service, explosives, knives, valet parking, and vicious animals—had passed up getting paid for his juvenilia out of aesthetic modesty doesn’t jibe well with his long decline in which he sold every thought that flitted across his short-circuited brain. Among major American writers, Thompson was rivaled only by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, and Tom Wolfe as a flaming materialist.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Richard Lynn's "The Chosen People"

In VDARE.com, I review Richard Lynn's new book The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish Intelligence and Achievement.

It has long been predicted that Jewish achievement in science will slow down, as affluent younger Jews turn to more lucrative or fun careers, such as Wall Street and Hollywood. But we don't yet see that in the Nobel Prize data. In the 21st century so far, Jews have won 24 of the 91 hard science Nobels, or 26 percent, which is even higher than their 20th Century rate.

Read the whole thing there.

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

"The Last Taboo"

From Mother Jones:

The Last Taboo 

As of October 31 there will be 7 billion humans on earth,. So why can't we talk about population? 

—By Julia Whitty

A decent article, but she makes a complete hash of the Sierra Club story, evidently trusting Morris Dees (!) to be a disinterested observer.

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

Sweden v. Switzerland

In Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Sweden (and other Scandinavian countries) are frequently cited as models for all humanity. In contrast, the other Sw European country, Switzerland, is mentioned only in passing, and no attention is devoted to Switzerland's avoidance of war, even though much of the book is devoted to international warfare. 

That the Swiss managed to remain at peace during WWI and WWII is far more of an accomplishment than that the Swedes managed it. Sweden is not strategically located. It's not on the way to anywhere other than Norway. Switzerland, in contrast, is on the way to the Rhine, Rhone, Po, and Danube river valleys. And still, the Swedes were basically the Nazis' patsies during WWII, Thus, Hitler mounted plans to invade Switzerland but called them off as too costly.

And while Sweden was an ethnically homogeneous society in the 1940s, Switzerland has four national languages. 

There are various reasons for why we hear more about Sweden than Switzerland. For one thing, the Swedes tend to loudly evangelize their culture as a model for the world, while the Swiss tend to keep their mouths shut. More fundamentally, the Swiss example is bad for Pinker's overall thesis that there has been a general trend toward Swedishness, which reduces both international warfare, hunting, militarism, guns, isolation, cosmopolitanism, spanking children, and so forth and so on. 

The Swiss example raises doubts about Pinker's overall argument: To stay at peace, the Swiss in the 20th Century had a highly militarized society, with constant weekend drilling of civilian reserves, and a national obsession with rifle shooting. To maintain internal peace, the Swiss devolved domestic government down to the cantonal level, which are overwhelmingly monocultural. The Swiss stayed out of most international organizations, not joining the UN until 2002. The Swiss stayed out of the European Union, which is why the Swiss franc has gone through the roof recently as the Euro has teetered. Culturally, the Swiss tend to be somewhat more conservative than the Swedes, although this is all by European standards.

In case you are interested in more, here's a 2000 piece I wrote for VDARE on Switzerland.

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

Breaking news: Diversity <> equality

There have been a couple of think pieces lately noticing that Diversity and Equality are not the same thing. Here's Jim Sleeper on Why Diversity At Elite Schools Deepens Inequality. 

And Alexander Stille writes in the NYT:

IT’S a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream. 

At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world. 

The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. 

The United States prides itself on the belief that “anyone can be president,” and what better example than Barack Obama, son of a black Kenyan immigrant and a white American mother — neither of them rich. 

And yet more than half the presidents over the past 110 years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton and graduates of Harvard and Yale have had a lock on the White House for the last 23 years, across four presidencies. Thus we have become both more inclusive and more elitist. 

It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?

Back in 2005, I wrote in The American Conservative about the fundamental reason then-Harvard president Larry Summers had got himself in so much trouble at Harvard for mentioning a few facts about intelligence out loud:

Summers' job is partly to enhance, but mostly to protect, one of the world's most valuable brand names. "Harvard" stands for "intelligence," extreme far right edge of the IQ Bell Curve smarts. America is increasingly stratified by IQ, and the resulting class war that the clever are waging upon the clueless means that having Harvard's endorsement of your brainpower is ever more desirable. Thus, applications and SAT scores have skyrocketed over the last half century. 

Yet, Harvard's IQ elitism sharply contradicts its professed egalitarianism. The typical Harvard professor or student considers himself superior to ordinary folks for two conflicting reasons: first, he constantly proclaims his belief in human equality, but they don't; and second, he has a high IQ, but they don't. 

Further, he believes his brains weren't the luck of his genes. No, he earned them. Which in turn means he feels that dumb people deserve to be dumb. 

Ivy League presidents aren't much worried that the left half of the Bell Curve will get themselves well enough organized to challenge the hegemony of the IQ overclass. No, what they fear is opposition to their use of IQ sorting mechanisms, such as the politically incorrect but crucial SAT, from those identity politics pressure groups who perform below average in a pure meritocracy, such as women, blacks, and Hispanics. But, they each boast enough high IQ activists, like Nancy Hopkins, to make trouble for prestige universities. 

So, Harvard, like virtually all famous universities, buys off females and minorities with "a commitment to diversity" -- in other words, quotas. By boosting less competent women, blacks and Hispanics at the expense of the more marginal men, whites, and Asians, Harvard preserves most of its freedom to continue to discriminate ruthlessly on IQ. 

What is obviously in the best interest of Harvard, and of the IQ aristocracy in general, is for everybody just to shut up about group differences in intelligence. Stifling arguments allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of everyone else.

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

The Protestant View (according to Monty Python)

The NYT reports:

Breaking a Long Silence on Population Control 

By MIREYA NAVARRO 

Major American environmental groups have dodged the subject of population control for decades, wary of getting caught up in the bruising politics of reproductive health.

The first part of that sentence is on the money, while the second part is misleading. Back when the Catholic Church was vastly stronger politically, population control was a favorite topic of the media (e.g., Paul Ehrlich appearing on the Johnny Carson Show dozens of times). 

I've been thinking about this for awhile, and I've come to the conclusion that population control was a very big deal in the press back when Protestants were worried that Irish Catholics were going to swamp them. As soon as that threat disappeared, Protestants lost interest in the whole question, and we rapidly moved to today's situation where only crimethinkers publicly suggest that maybe some of those 10,000 NGOs in Haiti should provide Depo Provera shots.

For the old time Protestant view, watch this clip from Monthy Python's The Meaning of Life from 1983.

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