Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog

If race doesn't exist ...

2012-02-01T18:38:00.003-08:00

I'm often told that race doesn't exist because, uh, what about Tiger Woods? What about American Indians and Chinese? Are they one race or two? What about Sioux v. Cherokee? Separate races or not? Huh? Huh?

If there isn't a race for everyone and everyone in his one race, then race can't exist.

Okay, this kind of legalistic thinking, with no gray areas, is appealing to human minds, but that's not generally how nature works. Carving nature at its joints is generally fairly difficult in most fields of science. One obvious example is psychiatry, which is notoriously a mess. The release of a new edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders has generated these headlines in just the New York Times alone over the last few weeks:

Asperger’s History of Over-Diagnosis

I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly.

New Definition of Autism Will Exclude Many, Study Suggests

Depression's Criteria May Change to Include Grieving

Not Diseases but Categories of Suffering

But as all those Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals have stated clearly in their introductions, while the book seems to name the mental illnesses found in nature, it actually makes “no assumption that each category of mental disorder is a completely discrete entity with absolute boundaries dividing it from other mental disorders or no mental disorder.” And as any psychiatrist involved in the making of the D.S.M. will freely tell you, the disorders listed in the book are not “real diseases,” at least not like measles or hepatitis. Instead, they are useful constructs that capture the ways that people commonly suffer. The manual, they go on, was primarily written to give physicians, schooled in the language of disease, a way to recognize similarities and differences among their patients and to talk to one another about them. And it has been fairly successful at that.

Still, “people take it literally,” one psychiatrist who worked on the manual told me. “That is its strength in a political sense.” And even if the A.P.A. benefits mightily from that misperception, the troubles on the front page are not the organization’s fault. They are what happens when we expect the D.S.M. to be what it is not. “The D.S.M. has been taken too seriously,” another expert told me. “It’s the victim of its success.”

Psychiatrists would like the book to deserve a more serious take, and thus to be less subject to these embarrassing diagnostic squabbles. But this is going to require them to have what the rest of medicine already possesses: the biochemical markers that allow doctors to sort the staph from the strep, the malignant from the benign. And they don’t have these yet. They aren’t even close. The human brain, after all, may be the most complex object in the universe. And the few markers, the genes and the neural networks, that have been implicated in mental disorders do not map well onto the D.S.M.’s categories.

By the standards of psychiatry in 2012, the study of human races by, say, the mid 1960s (i.e., toward the end of the pre-genetic era) was pretty accurate. It's hard to imagine that the 2012 D.S.M. will seem as accurate in 2059 as physical anthropologist Carleton Coon's 1965 book Living Races of Man seems in 2012 to somebody familiar with the 21st Century outpouring of genetic data. Indeed, psychiatry in 1965 was vastly more of a "pseudo-science" than the study of race in 1965.

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

Jodi Kantor's "The Obamas"

2012-01-31T22:32:00.001-08:00

I've got another column in Taki's Magazine this week, a review of New York Times White House correspondent Jodi Kantor's seemingly perky but actually insidiously subversive book on Barack and Michelle's life together in the White House.

Kantor has done some good reporting on Obama over the years. For example, she published a story in the NYT in March 2007 on Rev. Wright, eleven months before the rest of the press paid much attention to that fascinating figure.

However, Kantor's reporting on Obama has had little impact because it's so carefully understated that nice people are oblivious to her almost imperceptible sharp edges. With Kantor on Obama, you have to read very carefully to notice the interesting stuff. I'm pretty good at reading carefully, so my review gives you the good stuff in her book.

Much of The Obamas’ focus is psychological, and rightly so. History is often made by those whose positive moods are timed right. For example, at the last possible moment in South Carolina to head off a Mitt Romney cakewalk to the GOP nomination, Newt Gingrich—whose mother was bipolar—turned into a ball of fire. (As I write, Newt’s promising a moon colony by his second term and is proudly accepting the label “grandiose.”)

Kantor is struck by the less flagrant but still marked swings in Obama’s mood and energy level. ... Oddly, Obama’s down spells never seem to undermine his ego, which in Kantor’s telling remains bizarrely expansive for such an otherwise rational individual.

Please read the whole thing there.

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

College admits cheating on SAT

2012-01-30T23:05:00.002-08:00

From the NYT:

Claremont McKenna College, a small, prestigious California school, said Monday that for the past six years, it has submitted false SAT scores to publications like U.S. News & World Report that use the data in widely followed college rankings.

In a message e-mailed to college staff members and students, Claremont McKenna’s president since 1999, Pamela B. Gann, wrote that “a senior administrator” had taken sole responsibility for falsifying the scores, admitted doing so since 2005, and resigned his post.

The critical reading and math scores reported to U.S. News and others “were generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each,” Ms. Gann wrote. For the class that entered the school in September 2010 — the most recent set of figures made public —the combined median score of 1,400 was reported as 1,410, she said, while the 75th percentile score of 1,480 was reported as 1,510.

This doesn't look like a lot, but note that Claremont McKenna is 9th among liberal arts colleges on the USN&WR list. In other words, it's right on the bubble of being Top Ten or not Top Ten, which is the kind of thing that means a lot for bragging rights at extended family dinners in San Jose and Seoul. So, every little bit helps.

Is this some unique scandal, or is it only news because the college got caught? Does USN&WR impose rigorous audits upon data submitted to them by colleges? I doubt it.

The president of Reed, that anti-affirmative action hippie college in Portland that is becoming a rare outpost of the old, weird America, has pointed out that lots of colleges game the USN&WR system by issuing anti-SAT rhetoric, denouncing the SAT as biased, so therefore they're going to allow students to apply without submitting SATs. This lets them let in athletes, quota kids, rich kids, and the like without it having any effect on the college's SAT scores in USN&WR. (The magazine routinely downgrades Reed in its rankings.)

By the way, I wrote an article about Pamela B. Gann and Claremont McKenna for The American Conservative in 2004: Hate Hoax.

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

The IQ Ameliorist School

2012-01-30T20:26:00.001-08:00

In Taki's Magazine, I write about a major new paper by leading lights in the left-of-center Ameliorist school of IQ experts, including Robert Nisbett, James Flynn, and Eric Turkheimer:

Even more courageously, the seven Ameliorists note that IQ tests are valuable because they quantify that most career-threatening of hot buttons in American intellectual life—racial differences in intelligence—which they find both sizable and socially significant:
IQ is also important because some group differences are large and predictive of performance in many domains. Much evidence indicates that it would be difﬁcult to overcome racial disadvantage if IQ differences could not be ameliorated.

Read the whole thing there.

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

College sports recruiting

2012-01-30T20:11:00.004-08:00

Many of us like to believe the recruiting of football and basketball players by colleges is simply a covert auction. But the truth seems to be, in general, rather more sinister: You have a whole lot of adults -- some coaches, some slightly pimpish substitute father figures from the 'hood -- trying to induce feelings of undying loyalty to themselves in teenage boys.

From an L.A. Times article on some of the new assistant football coaches hired by UCLA in recent weeks to divert high school recruits loyal to them to UCLA. For example, UCLA hired Adrian Klemm away from SMU, and, it is widely hinted, two high schoolers he had talked into going to SMU have now switched to going to UCLA:

Klemm announced it with the tweet: "8 clap!!!!! My boy meat doin' work!"

I don't know what that means and I don't really want to know.

On second thought, I suspect this assistant coach meant to refer to a top ranked defensive tackle by the nickname "Meat," as in, "My boy, Meat, doin' work!" But is it too much to ask assistant coaches in these post-Sandusky days to properly punctuate their tweets so they don't come out referring to "boy meat"?

Rick Kimbrel, publisher of Bruinblitz.com, said staff changes can lead to awkward situations.

"You're in a living room one night expounding how great it is at Cal," Kimbrel said, "and you're calling the kid the next day saying you're going to Washington and, 'I think you should go there too.'"

Klemm confirmed that is exactly what happens.

"You have been talking to kids for another school and now you're recruiting for UCLA," he said. "You just have to make it known why you came here. It's the same reason why you want them to come here."

Well, no, the reason you, the coach, are changing schools is because the new college is paying you more money.

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

Which are first choice colleges and which are safety schools?

2012-01-30T19:37:00.007-08:00

USN&WR lists colleges by yield ratings (number of accepted applicants who show up in the fall divided by number of applicants accepted the previous spring). Not surprisingly, Harvard is #1, but what's #2, well ahead of #3 Stanford? Hint: A man much in the news started out at #3, graduated from #2, then earned two degrees from #1.

Many of the other highest yield colleges are red state public colleges like the #5 University of Alaska, Fairbanks (where Edward, the immortal vampire in Twilight, claims to be headed once he graduates from high school, presumably either because it's far from everybody they know, or because it's dark half the year so he won't sparkle -- I didn't really get into Twilight enough to figure that out.)

A lot of famous colleges, like Duke, Rice, Cal Tech, and Northwestern, are treated by many applicants as safety schools, giving them lower yields than much less prestigious schools.

This is tied into Charles Murray's view of changes in American culture. It used to be that almost all colleges were regional. Stanford was for smart, affluent kids from California. Mitt Romney attending Stanford for a year was part of a fairly new push by Stanford to get elite kids from "back East" (as we Californians like to vaguely handwave about everyplace from Denver to Maine).

A regional college system is more conducive to marrying your high school sweetheart. For example, when young Mitt was a freshman at Stanford in 1964, he frequently flew home on weekends to see a beautiful high school girl, Ann, to whom he's still married.

Something like this was an underlying theme of George Lucas's 1973 movie American Graffiti: In 1962, Richard Dreyfuss isn't as sure as his best friend Ron Howard is that he wants to leave podunky Modesto, CA the next morning for a famous college back east. (By the way, I haven't seen American Graffiti since I was about 16, and we've all undergone multiple revisions in our views of Lucas since then. Way back then, it struck me as a tremendous movie, but I was 16, so what do I know? Does it hold up?)

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

Young engineers and the allure of gravity, cont.

2012-01-30T19:04:00.000-08:00

A reader points out that MIT students traditionally celebrate "Drop Day" -- the last day for dropping classes in the Spring semester -- by pushing a piano off a six story building.

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

Charles Murray's "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010"

2012-01-30T03:39:00.002-08:00

My review of Charles Murray's new book on the evolution of the class system over the last half century appears in the February issue of The American Conservative, available to subscribers online now.

By the way, I've read various discussions over the last few days of Murray's new questionnaire for determining what your class is on a 0-100 scale and how insulated you are from the rest of America, but most of the talk is based on an extremely crude version of the chapter in Murray's book that somebody posted online with a lot of pictures. Don't bother with that.

Murray himself posted a rough draft of his quiz online about a year ago. The final version in the book is much better, reflecting the feedback he got from that early version. I discuss it in a little detail in my review, but I just wanted to point out here that you shouldn't trust the dopey caricature that somebody put online.

On a different subject, one of the cool things that Murray does to make all his data come alive is to describe what daily life was like in America on the day before everything started to change: November 21, 1963. For example, the most popular car in America, the Chevy Impala, cost a little over $26,000 in today's money, which is probably about or little more than what people pay for family sedans these days. But the average asking price of the homes in Chevy Chase, Maryland, the lovely suburb just over the border from the northwest side of the District of Columbia, was only $262,000. You can't get a typical house in Chevy Chase for only ten times the cost of a family sedan these days.

As Murray's subtitle suggests, he uses the 1960 Census as his anchor point for many of his graphs. But, as his chapter on 11/21/1963 demonstrates, the whole Kennedy era makes a good baseline, not radically different from the preceding decade.

But that raises a question that Murray doesn't particularly try to answer that I've been thinking about again. I believe I may have a fairly unusual answer to the old question: Why, in the popular imagination, did The Sixties not start until JFK's assassination? Why does 11/22/1963 show up around a lot of inflection points in a lot of trends? Why do the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras seem more of one piece than do the Kennedy and Johnson eras?

I'll probably write up my idea of what exactly was it about the Kennedy assassination that put an end to one era and started another later, but I'd like to hear your suggestions first. Comment away!

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

Was Nixon gay?

2012-01-28T19:03:00.003-08:00

Are we talking about Richard M. Nixon or Cynthia Nixon? Or both?

A new book says Dick Nixon was once seen clutching the hand of Presidential Buddy Bebe Rebozo for a minute. Proof!

As for actress Cynthia Nixon, formerly of Sex and the City, she is in the dog house for saying she wasn't born a lesbian, she chose to be one. This is "controversial," even insensitive, since everybody knows that the behavior of all minority groups is controlled wholly by their genes; nobody should be allowed to doubt genetic determinism like Nixon is doing, at least not in public. Think of the children! Is she some sort of hater? (Personally, I pointed out to my wife back in the late 1990s that Nixon and/or the character she played on that show was an obvious angry repressed lesbian, but Nixon didn't seem to notice that herself until several years later.)

Frank Bruni in the NYT punditizes "Genetic or Not, Gay Won't Go Away." Of course, it never seems to dawn on Bruni and most other commentators that there might be significant statistical differences between gay males and lesbians, as I pointed out 18 years ago in Why Lesbians Aren't Gay, one of which is that gay men tend to be more enthusiastic about the born-that-way theory than are lesbians. You just aren't supposed to notice stuff. Noticing things is the cause of all the trouble in the world.

Seriously, what has changed over the last 18 years? The big difference I've noticed is that in the 1990s male homosexuals, qua homosexuals, tended to be more apolitical, with more humor, art, and fashion to occupy themselves, while lesbians tended to be the Shock Workers of the long march through the institutions, the truest true believers in the social conditioning theories dominant in 1990s academia.

Since then, gay men have become more politicized. Back in 1994, few cared about Gay Marriage, but it's one of those issues that can easily be turned into a test of whether or not "You like me! You really like me!" Politicization over Gay Marriage meant that gays' traditional snarky comments about lesbians were bad for the coalition, so the concept that lesbians aren't gay has become much more politically unpopular over the years.

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

Why are SAT scores rising at the high end?

2012-01-28T17:44:00.004-08:00

In recent years, the number of kids scoring 700 or higher on SAT tests has been increasing. For example, the number of students with 700-800 scores on Math has gone up from 75,000 in 2001 to 112,000 in 2011. There are no doubt a lot of reasons for this, such as ambitious students who would have only taken the ACT in the past because it's the default in their region now taking both the ACT and the SAT, and more foreign elite students taking a shot at the SAT.

But here's another one that probably has an effect but I can't say how big: Back in the 1970s, students used to take drugs the night before the SAT. Now, with the spread of prescriptions for Ritalin and Adderall, they are more likely to take drugs the morning of the SAT.

Here's an opinion piece in the NYT that's skeptical about the rise of concentration drugs:

TO date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems, the very things we would most want to improve. Until recently, most studies of these drugs had not been properly randomized, and some of them had other methodological flaws.

But in 2009, findings were published from a well-controlled study that had been going on for more than a decade, and the results were very clear. The study randomly assigned almost 600 children with attention problems to four treatment conditions. Some received medication alone, some cognitive-behavior therapy alone, some medication plus therapy, and some were in a community-care control group that received no systematic treatment. At first this study suggested that medication, or medication plus therapy, produced the best results. However, after three years, these effects had faded, and by eight years there was no evidence that medication produced any academic or behavioral benefits.

Yeah, well, as the man said, in the long run, we're all dead. In the short run, there are a lot of key moments in life that help determine what path you get on. Taking the SAT might be one of them. As Robert Heinlein's narrator Kip says in the juvenile sci-fi classic Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, he made sure to stock his second hand spacesuit with "almost any pill a man can take take to help him past a hump that might kill him." (Of course, if you take too many pills, you can wind up, say, writing the uncut version of Stranger in a Strange Land. I've never read a good account of Heinlein's drug use, but it's pretty obvious he was very interested in them -- e.g., the "tempus fugit" drugs in Puppet Masters that make time appear to be moving more slowly.)

I sometimes wonder what percentage of my competitors in the punditry field are on prescription stimulants.

There was an okay movie last year, Limitless, with Bradley Cooper as a would-be novelist with writer's block who gets a supply of a black market superdrug that makes him vastly smarter. One of the first things this writer does after his IQ doubles is to stop being a writer. I suspect there may be a lesson in there for me somewhere. I should drink four or five Diet Cokes and try to figure it out.

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

Does socializing lower women's effective IQs?

2012-01-28T16:17:00.002-08:00

That most authoritative source on all things scientific, the London Daily Mail, reports:

Researchers conducted a series of tests on groups of men and women with similar high IQ ratings. In the first set of tasks, the subjects were given basic puzzles to solve.

Then they were each told how well the others in the group had performed before being given another series of similar tests.

Once they knew the others were good at the tasks, the performance and IQ of both sexes dropped, but women's more significantly.

Scans showed the part of the brain dealing with emotion increased in activity while that associated with problem solving decreased.

The researchers, at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in the U.S., say the results suggest companies should develop strategies to get the most out of staff who may be 'susceptible to social pressures' in small groups.

This seems plausible to me. Young women studying alone do fine, as school and college grades show, but in groups, women tend to be more cooperative and less competitive than men, more concerned with everybody feeling comfortable, so they tend to turn down their cognitive levels.

This avoids the kind of problems I used to run into when socializing before the Internet gave me a better outlet for the corrosive side of my intellect. At a party, I'd start out popular because I knew enough about most things to be able to ask other guests intelligent questions about their personal field of interest. But I tended to get really interested in what they told me and kept asking questions, which at first they found flattering. But I'd eventually get carried away thinking about the topic and get to the point where I'd ask some extremely unsettling question that the other guest didn't want to think about at all (e.g., So, if the Efficient Markets Hypothesis that you studied at B-School is correct, how do you people in the stocks and mutual funds business add value?).

Very few women allow themselves to get close to committing these kind of faux pas in a social situations, which makes the world a more pleasant place.

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

Things you learn from Wikipedia

2012-01-28T03:00:00.004-08:00

I just noticed that the Wikipedia article about me says:

In a 2006 National Observer column, Paul Gottfried (who also writes for VDARE.com) reported that Sailer operates a computer business in California, commenting that "given the politically incorrect topic that he addresses and the precariousness of his journalistic career, this advocate of immigration restriction is indeed wise to have other sources of income."^[8]

If you happen to find my computer business or my other sources of income, could you return them to me? I suspect they must be hiding in the same place as my gold medal from the 1984 Summer Olympics in the Plunge for Distance. Also, if you stumble upon my wisdom, please bring it back. I could definitely use it.

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

The Forgotten

2012-01-28T02:49:00.002-08:00

The career of journalism is not one conducive to having your name go down in history. Most journalists are forgotten within a week of their last byline. Your best hope of being remembered might be to write for a periodical that happens to outlive you and thus has an interest in dredging up your name now and then.

Much of what we think we know about controversies of the past is filtered via this "survivorship bias." The current editors of The New Republic or The Nation or National Review or The Atlantic explain that the key intellectual breakthrough of the past age came in some article they happened to have published. But a huge amount of influential journalism was published in periodicals that aren't around anymore.

Having been an enthusiastic reader of opinion journalism going back to the late 1960s, it strikes me that much of our current pictures of what people thought back then is warped by which publications happened to endure. For example, when I began high school debate in 1972, one of the magazines that was most quoted as "evidence" was the liberal intellectual weekly, The Saturday Review of Literature. It was a huge presence in the national discourse, having something like 600,000 subscribers (trust me, that's a lot). And it had been a big magazine for decades. In fact, it was so big that various financial engineers tried to make a lot of money off it, which eventually led to its demise.

The Saturday Review's editor, Norman Cousins, ranked not far behind William F. Buckley as the most famous opinion magazine editor of the 1970s. Cousins even became a household name far beyond intellectual spheres when he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine recounting how, when suffering an illness, he attempted to induce a placebo effect in himself by reading funny books and watching his favorite Marx Bros. movies.

When I had cancer in 1997, I more or less followed Cousins' advice. Many people try to heroically combine doing their jobs with undergoing chemotherapy, but with Cousins' theory in mind, I immediately went on disability and just did whatever I liked. I reread all Robert Heinlein's novels, took long walks along the Chicago lakefront, played golf, and carefully polished perhaps my best article Is Love Colorblind? And I slept 12 hours per day. (Nice work if you can get it.)

Did it work? I dunno, but 15 years later, I'm still here.

You can now find all 2,646 issues of The Saturday Review at Unz.org, along with over 100 other magazines. Ron Unz's trove of opinion journalism and the like is a great resource for historians and the historically-minded. You can search the Unz.org archive in Google just by starting a search with

site:Unz.org

When reading up on Norman Cousins, I saw this quote in his NYT obituary:

"That made it apparent to me that there was a new breed in America," he said, "people who were business executives, or in science, say, who were interested in ideas but not interested in intellectual cliques or literary gossip. I recognized that this was one of the most exciting intellectual developments of our times -- but its manifestations hadn't been acted upon by those in the world of communications."

I suspect Cousins' had one particular business executive / scientist foremost in mind when he said that: Everette Lee DeGolyer, who owned The Saturday Review and bequeathed it to Cousins when he died in 1956.

This picture of a young DeGolyer, tired and muddy but rightly happy, is my favorite in Daniel Yergin's monumental history of the oil industry, The Prize. The caption reads, "The geologist Everett Lee DeGolyer, sitting on a porch near Tampico after his discovery in 1910 of what became Mexico's Golden Lane. By 1921, Mexico was the world's largest oil producer." It's a great picture of the Enterprising Young American.

DeGolyer would be high on the list of Most Valuable Americans whom nobody these days has ever heard of. The oil industry is a massive contributor to the wealth of America, and DeGolyer contributed as much to the success of the American oil industry in the first half of the 20th Century as anybody. Yergin writes:

No man more singularly embodied the American oil industry and its far-flung development in the first half of the twentieth century than DeGolyer. Geologist -- the most eminent of his day -- entrepreneur, innovator, scholar, he had touched almost every aspect of significance in the industry. Born in a sod hut in Kansas ... while still an undergraduate, he took time time off to go to Mexico, where in 1910, he discovered the fabulous Portrero del Llano 4 well. ... It was the biggest oil well ever discovered ...

That was only the beginning. DeGolyer was more responsible than any other single person for the introduction of geophysics into oil exploration. He pioneered the development of the seismograph, one of the most important innovations in the history of the oil industry ...

He put together one big oil firm, Amerada, then started the premiere oil engineering consulting firm, DeGolyer and McNaughton. He made $2 million per year during the Depression. In 1943, FDR sent him on a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia to figure out how important that hunk of desert was. One of his staffers reported back, "The oil in this region is the greatest single prize in all history."

Eventually he grew bored with making money and gave a lot of it away. ... He was a founder of what became Texas Instruments. He was a considerable historian of chili. He built an extraordinary collection of books. He bailed out the Saturday Review of Literature when it was about to go bust, and became its chairman, though he never did care much for its politics.

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

Maybe it wasn't all Le Corbu's fault?

2012-01-28T00:03:00.002-08:00

Among many other writers on architecture, such as the witty Charles Jencks, Tom Wolfe gleefully celebrated the 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis as one in the eye for the modernist style of architecture that he disliked. But a New York Times critic notes that, hey, wait a minute, there are a lot of Le Corbusier-style apartment towers still around that aren't vertical hellholes. What gives?

Tower of Dreams: One Ended in Nightmare
Michael Kimmelman

I went to Penn South this week, having seen “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Chad Freidrichs’s shattering documentary, now at the IFC Center. Pruitt-Igoe was the notorious St. Louis public-housing complex, demolished in 1972. Images of imploded Pruitt-Igoe buildings, broadcast worldwide, came to haunt the American consciousness. Critics of welfare, big government and modern architecture all used the project as a whipping boy. “The day that modern architecture died,” Charles Jencks, the architect and apostle of postmodernism, called the demolition.

Penn South (started a half century ago by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) is a cooperative in affluent, 21st-century Manhattan past which chic crowds hustle every day to and from nearby Chelsea’s art galleries, apparently oblivious to it. It thrives within a dense, diverse neighborhood of the sort that makes New York special. Pruitt-Igoe, segregated de facto, isolated and impoverished, collapsed along with the industrial city around it.

But they’re both classic examples of modern architecture, the kind Mr. Jencks, among countless others, left for dead: superblocks of brick and concrete high rises scattered across grassy plots, so-called towers in the park, descended from Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City.” The words “housing project” instantly conjure them up.

Alienating, penitential breeding grounds for vandalism and violence: that became the tower in the park’s epitaph. But Penn South, with its stolid redbrick, concrete-slab housing stock, is clearly a safe, successful place. In this case the architecture works. In St. Louis, where the architectural scheme was the same, what killed Pruitt-Igoe was not its bricks and mortar. (Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Towers, was the architect.)

The lesson these two sites share has to do with the limits of architecture, socially and economically, never mind what some architects and planners promise or boast. The two projects, aesthetic cousins, are reminders that no typology of design, no matter how passingly fashionable or reviled, guarantees success or failure: neither West Village-style brownstones nor towers in the park nor titanium-clad confections. This is not to say architecture is helpless, only that it is never destiny and that it is always hostage to larger forces.

iSteve readers won't have too much trouble figuring out why the same architectural style led to different fates in Pruitt-Igoe, which had been the boyhood home of two future heavyweight champs, Leon and Michael Spinks, and Penn South, a private co-op started by a heavily Jewish union for its members. I noticed about 1983 that the modernist high rise I was living in in Chicago was about the same style as the notorious Cabrini Green housing projects.

Most of the comments sounded pretty clueless, but this one was pretty good:

Thank you for this. Too often, we are force-fed the notion that high-rise buildings for the poor and working class was a failed idea of the past that can never work. We are told the only solution to the nation's housing problems are "mixed-income" low-rise buildings. This has served as a cover for the demolition of thousands of units of affordable housing and subsequent dislocation of the poor (and Federal subsidiziation of middle class in the replacement houses). The replacement low-rise homes in places like Chicago or St. Louis might look better to suburban eyes, but in reality they are a massive waste of taxpayer money - often subsidized to the tune of 2-300k per unit. Properly maintaining the buildings, and making sure services, employment and management of the buildings are there, are much more efficient uses of taxpayer money.

In other words, the current orthodoxy that public housing projects for poor people should be low to the ground less reflects some design theory breakthrough than it does the covert realization that if you don't stack poor people up high, then you can't have as many around you. Most of them will have to go somewhere else, far away from you. So, of course, all sensitive, sophisticated Chicagoans now want a handful of handpicked poor people to enjoy lovely lowrise accommodations ... because that means that the rest of them have to go live in Champagne-Urbana or Round Lake Beach or somewhere else far away from Chicago.

This is not to say that one need not be careful about the interaction of the types of buildings and the types of residents. For example, my experience at Rice U. was that it was a really bad idea to house 250 young men, especially young engineering majors, in the only high rise on campus.The urge to drop stuff from 14 floors up is a powerful one in the 19-year-old's mind, especially when all your rivals live in much lower dormitories over which you, possessing the high ground, can easily exert military dominance. It turns out that you can build a giant slingshot out of rubber surgical tubing and shoot water balloons about 300 yards with fair accuracy. You just have four guys stand on the edge of the balcony holding the ends of the surgical tubing, then have have a couple of pullers draw the slingshot back across the big lobby, then call the elevator and pull the water balloon all the way to the back of the elevator, from whence you let it fly.

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

Which fields have the highest GRE scores?

2012-01-27T03:15:00.000-08:00

Razib at GNXP Discover has a good graph showing grad school specialties by GRE scores. Fields that score exceptionally well in verbal and quite well in math include Classical Language, Classics, History of Science, Philosophy, Russian, Comp Lit, and Linguistics. Physics of course does well in math, but is also strong verbally (i.e., no surprise, physicists tend to be smart). Low in math, low in verbal include PE, Criminal Justice, and Social Work.

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

Do Florida Hispanic voters care much about immigration?

2012-01-26T05:17:00.001-08:00

Sun-Sentinel columnist Guillermo Martinez explains:

Since Latinos make up 13.1 percent of Florida's 11.2 million registered voters, national pundits are talking about how their choice in next Tuesday's primary will be an indicator for other Hispanic communities. As if Florida is a good indicator — which it is not.

Very much on time, the Pew Hispanic Center has provided a primer of the profile of Hispanic voters in Florida. And it will surprise many. For instance:

... 32 percent of Florida voters are of Cuban origin; 28 percent Puerto Rican, and nine percent Mexican.

And the Hispanic Republican primary voters are likely to be even more Cuban.

... It will be a swing state where the Hispanic vote is crucial, but not for the same reasons as it is in the Southwest or in the Northeast. Immigration is touchy, but not a decisive factor inasmuch as Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth and can vote for president when they live in the 50 states. And Cuban-Americans have a privileged status that allows those who arrive in this country to become legal residents in one year — and citizens in five.

This reminds me of when Newt Gingrich told House Republicans to vote for statehood for Puerto Rico to win over the Mexican vote. White people in Washington don't really know much about Latinos, so they get worked up over wacky stuff.

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

"Why the long face?"

2012-01-25T11:39:00.002-08:00

Libby Copeland writes in Slate on a study suggesting that voters aren't just looking for good-looking candidates, they favor a particular kind of good looks suggesting competence:

What does competence look like? Working with subjects rating photos of hundreds of faces, Todorov and colleagues have developed computer models of how faces can suggest character traits like trustworthiness and likability. The competent face shape is masculine but approachable, with a square jaw, high cheekbones, and large eyes. When people say Romney just looks presidential, this is the image they’re summoning.

Todorov and other psychologists believe that otherwise expressionless faces can appear to show emotion based on how they’re formed—the shape of the eyebrows can suggest anger, for instance, while a long distance between the eyes and the mouth can suggest sadness. On Todorov’s computer model of an incompetent face, beady, close-together eyes paired with high eyebrows suggest fearfulness, even through the face is expressionless. Todorov believes our tendency to read expression into neutral faces amounts to an “overgeneralization” of a healthy trait—human beings’ ability to judge others’ intentions from a brief glance.

I added the emphasis on the long distance between eyes and mouth connoting sadness because that's a standard in Byzantine iconography of Jesus Christ going back, oh, 1500 years. Spanish movie star Javier Bardem has a bit of that look to his face.

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

Democracy v. Diversity in the Muslim World

2012-01-24T21:36:00.002-08:00

From my new column (link fixed) in Taki's Magazine:

If the Arab Spring is good for democracy, then it has to be good for diversity, right? We know that democracy and diversity are virtually the same thing: Both words begin with a “d,” end with a “y,” and by definition are good. Who isn’t aware that minority protection (indeed, minority promotion) is the essence of majority rule?

Read the whole thing there (link fixed).

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

Oscar nominations

2012-01-24T21:14:00.004-08:00

A reasonable number of pretty good movies came out in 2011, but not too many really good ones. Here are links to my reviews in Taki's Magazine of Oscar nominated films in chronological order.

Rango -- Best Animated Feature. Gore Verbinski's reptilian Western is ugly but amazing.

Bridesmaids: Best Original Screenplay for Kristen Wiig and Best Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy, who is very funny. It's good to see a non-Woody Allen comedy recognized in the overly serious Oscar nomination.

Midnight in Paris: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. For the first time in a long time, Woody Allen deserves his nominations for this slight but delightful comedy.

The Tree of Life: Best Picture, Best Director (Terrence Malick), Best Cinematographer (Emmanuel Lubezki from Mexico who would be a deserving winner) -- I managed to miss the first 15 minutes due to traffic, so I enjoyed it a lot more than everybody else did. There's a beautiful 90 minute movie about growing up in Waco surrounded by a dull 45 IMAX film about the Big Bang. In my view, the Tree of Life glass is 90/135ths full, but others have been known to differ.

Jane Eyre -- Costume Design. Michael Fassbender, who was good in this as Mr. Rotchester and three other movies (X-Men, A Dangerous Method as Carl Jung, and Shame), didn't get any nominations this year.

Transformers -- Three technical nominations for a better than expected fighting robot movie. I had a good time at this film.

Harry Potter -- Three technical nominations for what was a disappointing end to an admirable franchise.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes -- Just a Visual Effects nomination, with Andy "Gollum" Serkis once again denied a Best Supporting Actor nod. What's the over-under year for when Serkis will get his Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy: 2035?

Drive -- Just a sound editing nomination for a kind of cool movie. I think if they'd made the heroine into a femme fatale, it would have kicked it up the last notch, but hardly anybody makes femme fatale movies anymore. The dominant male audience disapproves of them.

Moneyball -- Best Picture (but not Best Director, so it won't win BP), Brad Pitt (I would have picked his performance in Tree of Life), Jonah Hill (who was excellent as the stat nerd), and, of course, a Best Adapted screenplay nomination for Sorkin and Zallian. Ranked on a degree of difficulty scale -- it's a baseball statistics movie -- this might be the most remarkable accomplishment of the year. On the other hand, it's a baseball statistics movie ...

The Ides of March -- An Adapted Screenplay nomination for the Democratic primary campaign movie, but kind of forgettable.

Margin Call -- J.C. Chandor's Wall Street movie got a Best Original Screenplay nomination: "Speak to me as if I were a young child or a Golden Retriever. It weren’t brains that got me here, you know that.”

The Descendants -- A potential Best Picture winner, although it's not really that good. But it would be a decent placeholder Best Picture winner like last year's The King's Speech. In 2020, everybody will go around saying that the Academy was nuts to give the Oscar to The King's Speech because we all realize now that the most important movie of 2010 turned out to be ... But the problem is that we don't know what movie from 2010 will look like the real landmark in 2020. (And something else will seem better in 2030, and so forth.) In the mean time, though, while we're waiting, The King's Speech was a perfectly okay Best Picture winner. Similarly, Alexander Payne's The Descendants is a very nice movie, and would be a respectable Best Picture winner until everybody figures out what really should have won.

Hugo -- Led the pack with 11 nominations.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- A lot of technical nominations, but no Best Picture or Best Director nod for David Fincher, which seems about right. Maybe it will send Fincher the message not to waste his skills on junk like this.

The Iron Lady -- Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher

The iSteveier movies of 2011 -- Bad Teacher, X-Men: First Class, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Guard -- didn't garner much Oscar love. It's clearly some kind of conspiracy.

In other news, the great Gary Oldman finally got himself an Oscar nomination.

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

"Hugo's" 11 Oscar nominations

2012-01-24T13:45:00.002-08:00

I was underwhelmed by Martin Scorsese's 3D kids' (?) movie Hugo (here's my review from Taki's Magazine), but, boy, did sci-fi author Orson Scott Card really do a takedown on Hugo.

So the movie we were promised -- Hugo the orphan repairs a mechanical man to receive a message from his father -- turns into a movie we would never have paid to see: sad old forgotten movie director gets a round of applause.

Only a movie director would think he could switch us from caring about an orphan whose father was burned to death, to caring about an old man who is depressed because his career collapsed.

Dead father vs. career loss. Magical machines vs. endless self-pity. What idiot would choose to make the career-loss self-pity movie, when he has all the makings of the dead-father magical-machine movie?

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

Vibrancy

2012-01-24T00:43:00.001-08:00

A reader sends me this from NBER:

Importing Corruption Culture from Overseas: Evidence from Corporate Tax Evasion in the United States

by Jason M. DeBacker, Bradley T. Heim, Anh Tran

Abstract:

This paper studies how cultural norms and enforcement policies influence illicit corporate activities. Using confidential IRS audit data, we show that corporations with owners from countries with higher corruption norms engage in higher amounts of tax evasion in the U.S. This effect is strong for small corporations and decreases as the size of the corporation increases. In the mid-2000s, the United States implemented several enforcement measures which significantly increased tax compliance. However, we find that these enforcement efforts were less effective in reducing tax evasion by corporations whose owners are from countries with higher corruption norms. This suggests that cultural norms can be a challenge to legal enforcement.

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

Apple's textbook whiff

2012-01-23T22:32:00.001-08:00

For a long time, Apple has been talking about revolutionizing textbooks with the iPad. The firm finally had its dog and pony show, but the whole thing turned out to be bizarrely retro: we can make learning fun by embedding animations in textbooks!

Look, moving textbooks onto electronic tablet is a good idea in the long run, for two obvious reasons, neither of which Apple did enough to emphasize:

1. A single iPad weighs a lot less than a half-dozen massive modern textbooks. From 7th through 11th grades, I used to ride my bike to school, but my textbooks only weighed a few pounds back then. These days, there is only one kid in my neighborhood who rides a bike to school, and he has these elaborate saddle bags on either side of his rear wheel because that's the only way to keep his bike from being dangerously top-heavy.

2. A tablet also serves as a workbook providing immediate feedback. The program can even make the next problem easier or harder depending upon how you do on this one. Teachers won't have to grade homework because the computer system does it for them. For math an iPad might be even better than a laptop with a keyboard because it's a lot easier to do math problems with pencil and paper than with a keyboard.

At present, tablets are still kind of expensive, but the future for them looks pretty clear, although my guess is that the future will be a clamshell even thinner than a Macbook Air, with a touchscreen and a sophisticated set of hinges that lets you use it in either tablet or laptop mode.

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

Dog v. Tail

2012-01-23T20:24:00.006-08:00

The NYT's top story tonight is:

Backer Pumps $5 Million Into Pro-Gingrich ‘Super PAC’

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE42 minutes ago

The Gingrich campaign got a significant influx of cash from the wife of Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino owner who contributed $5 million to the campaign earlier this month.

One interesting trend is that that these heavy hitter mega-donors like Dr. Miriam Adelson and Haim Saban, a major Democratic contributor, are often dual-citizens who are also big players in Israeli politics. The Adelsons, for example, started a newspaper in Israel that is given away for free to promote Likud. It's now the biggest newspaper in Israel.

I don't pay much attention to Israeli politics because I am not an Israeli, but it sounds pretty fascinating, more exciting than American politics. I wonder if the Adelsons see supporting Netanyahu as being good for Gingrich or whether, for them, it's more that getting Newt elected President would seem good for Bibi. (Personally, I find Bibi more impressive than Newt, but I don't know how the Adelsons feel.)

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of politics by other means, but increasingly American politics resembles Israeli politics continued by other means. It would be interesting to ask the Adelsons which country, in their view, is the dog and which is the tail.

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

Who knew?

2012-01-23T03:14:00.002-08:00

Maureen Dowd writes in the NYT about how the Cool Black President she thought we were electing turned out to be less entertaining than she had expected from all those years watching Cool Black Guys on TV:

FOR eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.

“I, I’m so in love with you,” Barack Obama crooned to a thrilled crowd at a fund-raiser at the Apollo in Harlem on Thursday night, doing a seductive imitation as Al Green himself looked on. ...

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

We disappointed them.

As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.”

They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Who knew, in the exuberance of 2008, that America was electing an introvert?

Who knew? How could anyone possibly know? I mean, besides the presidential candidate having published at age 33 a 150,000 word autobiography that is introverted, elegant, dull, egotistical, self-pitying, not particularly insightful, and a little depressing: Obama's Presidency in convenient book form? But other than this whopping huge memoir, how could anyone have known anything about the man? And who could expect busy media figures like Maureen Dowd to read a Presidential candidate's well-written autobiography? Or even its subtitle?

Kantor writes that the Obamas, feeling misunderstood, burrowed into “self-imposed exile” — a “bubble within the bubble” — with their small circle of Chicago friends, who reinforced the idea that “the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader.”

She reports that Marty Nesbitt indignantly told his fellow Obama pal Eric Whitaker that the president “could get 70 or 80 percent of the vote anywhere but the U.S.”

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

Redmond v. Palo Alto over Yale v. Jail

2012-01-23T01:41:00.005-08:00

The lifestyles of the rich and famous of Silicon Valley span the dimensions from Larry Ellison-style Living Large to those who like a quiet upper middle class suburban existence (private jets not necessarily excluded). For example, Steve Jobs was too persnickety to get around to ever building the Japanese minimalist dream house he had planned, so his wife just moved him and the kids into the old part of Palo Alto, which is mostly a lot of nice two story houses on fairly small lots. Others in the neighborhood include Larry Page of Google and venture capitalist John Doerr. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook recently traded up from a 3k square foot to a 4k sf house around the corner.

All this is just an intro to say that people in Palo Alto tend to be a little less clueless than elsewhere.

On the other hand, Bill Gates lives in a 66,000 square foot house in the Seattle area. And one of the Gates Foundations' obsessions has been to get all the public high schools in California to require that all students to graduate must pass all the courses (known as the "A-G Requirements") necessary for admission to a University of California college, even though, by law, UC schools are for the top 1/8th of California's high school graduates. This is classic "Yale or Jail" thinking by the Gates Foundation: We'll force every student in California to be eligible for the elite UC system by threatening them that if they don't pass all the A-G requirements, they'll go through life as high school dropouts! What could possibly go wrong?

Most places, the educational bureaucracy is made up of people who are better with words than numbers, so if the Gates Foundation tells them to do it, they think it must be a great idea and announce that all the new 9th graders can't get a diploma without passing Algebra II. Later on, the high school math teachers quietly convince the administrations to postpone implementing this until next year. In a lot of places, it's been quietly postponed for many years in a row. The LA school board, for instance, passed an Algebra II requirement in 2005 at Gates' behest, but has yet to enforce it. But Come the Revolution, comrades, we'll all eat strawberries and like them.

Palo Alto, in contrast, is one of the few places where the math teachers have the confidence to say that the Gates Foundation plan is stupid.

So, this Redmond v. Palo Alto angle makes this Achievement Gap story from Palo Alto High School interesting. From the San Jose Mercury-News:

Palo Alto math teachers oppose higher math graduation requirements
By Sharon Noguchi snoguchi@mercurynews.com

Against the resolute push for higher academic standards geared toward preparing students for college, the Palo Alto High School math department has drawn a line in the sand.

Don't prepare all students for University of California entrance, the math faculty argues, because not all students can master quadratic equations and logarithmic functions.

Their counterpush against raising graduation standards to include Algebra II has angered educators and parents who believe schools, including districts like Palo Alto with strong college-going cultures, are failing poor and minority students by expecting too little of them.

The parents point to startling statistics: In the Palo Alto and Gunn high schools' 2011 class of seniors, only 15 percent of African-Americans and 40 percent of Latinos completed the prerequisites for the University of California and California State University with a C or better. That compares with 79.5 percent districtwide meeting those so-called A-G requirements.

The A-G requirements includes two years of a foreign language (increasingly only Spanish is on offer in California), which is hard on African-American youths because foreign language courses are hard in general, and blacks have so little interest in Spanish. And it demands Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II, which is a great idea for Lake Wobegon H.S., but Algebra II is a big hurdle for the 49.99% of young people who are below average in intelligence.

"It is disgraceful," said Kim Bomar, a parent of two Palo Alto elementary children, "in this district where some kids are doing so extremely well and the resources are so extremely rich."

Other districts, including San Jose Unified, East Side Union and San Francisco Unified, set A-G as the default curriculum, and in Palo Alto the administration had recommended the district follow suit. The school board is set to take up the issue in the spring. But Palo Alto High's math teachers oppose the recommendation. Yes, bump up the graduation requirement to three years of math, they argue, but don't require students to master Algebra II -- because they say not everyone can. ...

Palo Alto High math department chair Radu Toma said critics confuse standards with achievement. "They make the assumption just by setting the bar up there, the bar will be reached," he said. "I'm not saying it's impossible; it's a big gamble."

The risk, he said, is that courses will be devaluated.

Mr. Toma grew up in Communist Romania, so he's heard enough Grand Plans for one lifetime.

He said other districts' A-G standards aren't examples to follow. In San Jose Unified, which has had required A-G courses for 10 years, only 42 percent of seniors -- compared with Palo Alto's 80 percent -- last year completed them with a C or better, as UC requires. Students who aren't on track to complete the requirement may take different courses, spokeswoman Karen Fuqua said.

Toma said that while students elsewhere may pass Algebra II, 45 percent of CSU and UC students must take remedial math. That doesn't happen with Palo Alto graduates, he said. "When our kids finish with Algebra II, we are not pretending they completed Algebra II." Teachers, he said, are doing everything possible to support students in achieving their personal best in math.

The brouhaha escalated last fall, with the circulation of a letter signed by all but one of the math department's teachers, arguing against adoption of the A-G standards. "Diluting the standards in our regular lane to basic benchmarks, which might allow every student to pass Algebra II, would end up hurting the district's reputation and, implicitly, all of our students."

The letter also took a swipe at students who fail: "Most of our students are fortunate to come from families where education matters and parents have the means and will to support and guide their children in tandem with us, their teachers. Not all of them."

On Sunday, Toma said, "I am sorry that a couple of paragraphs in our letter that were quoted out of context led some community members who do not know our department, our program and our results, to doubt our commitment to all our students," Toma said.

Toma said last week that he did not mean to insult families, and said he believes all parents care about their children's success.

The letter provoked outrage. "It was unacceptable. It was racially insensitive," said Tremaine Kirkman, president of the Student Equity Action Network at Palo Alto High. His group provides tutoring and helps with college applications. In Palo Alto, he said, "no matter how well you understand math, it's such a fast pace you need a tutor to survive."

On the first day of calculus, he said his teacher told the class: "There's no way to switch down a lane; if you can't keep up, you have to get a tutor." Palo Alto high schools have five lanes of math.

In light of the math department's opposition, the Palo Alto school board postponed a decision on A-G. Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, called the delay "disheartening" and suggested the board risks damaging students' chances in life.

The larger problem, Kirkman said, is that Palo Alto schools track some students early on toward failure, including placing a disproportionate number of black and Latino children into special education.

Toma said the department would support adding another year of math -- geometry -- to Palo Alto's graduation requirement. In the San Mateo Union High School District, which requires three years of math, 68 percent completed it last year, Curriculum Director Cynthia Clark said.

That is doable, Toma said; adding Algebra II isn't. "The educational system in our country is littered with grandiose initiatives or policies that failed because the bar was set unrealistically high," he said. "Making this huge jump is not going to better our kids' math education."

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

Lazy HBDers

2012-01-23T00:00:00.001-08:00

Chuck at Occidentalist has been blogging up a storm lately of statistical analyses on various interesting questions. He vents:

What really frustrates me is Lazy HBD. There are dozens of public use data sets waiting to be explored from a HBD perspective. Statistical packages can be downloaded for free. All sorts of HBDish questions can be addressed: Do 2nd generation Blacks do worse on cognitive tests than 3rd+ generation Blacks? Do mixed White and Asians outperform Whites? What is the standardized difference between first, second, and third generation Hispanics controlling for SES? Does color correlate with IQ in the Hispanic population? Does color correlate with crime in the Black population? But it seems that few are interested. I don’t get it.

I'd get right on it, but I have to take a nap first.

Seriously, there truly is a huge amount of data out there. Various longitudinal studies have been going on for decades that follow thousands of individuals throughout their lives. The 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth is the most famous because Herrnstein and Murray made it the centerpiece of The Bell Curve. But there are many other ones.

Of course, it's a lot of work to do it right, as Chuck's wrestle through multiple blog posts with the old question of whether light-skinned blacks score higher on IQ tests than do dark-skinned blacks. Richard E. Nisbett argued that the lack of a correlation falsifies the theory that racial gaps in IQ are partly genetic. But the answer Chuck came up with appears to be ultimately yes there is a correlation, although it's not enormous. But as Chuck's work showed, there are a fair number of wrinkles that must be dealt with.

Meanwhile, Inductivist looks at the Add Health questionnaire data to see if respondents overrate their own intelligence versus their scores on the survey's vocabulary tests:

First, people do have a tendency to rate their intelligence correctly--self-described intelligence is positively correlated with measured IQ--but the tendency is only moderate. Next, males are not more likely than females to inflate their smarts. By contrast, blacks are significantly more likely to--compared to whites. The other racial/ethnics groups do not differ from whites.

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

To which GOP candidates does the Smart Money lean?

2012-01-22T22:45:00.002-08:00

Audacious Epigone looks through the federal campaign contribution database to find out whom individuals identifying their occupations as "lobbyist" have donated to:

Presidential candidate	Lobbyist $
1. Rick Perry	$25,500
2. Tim Pawlenty	$11,770
3. Newt Gingrich	$11,500
4. Mitt Romney	$8,000
5. Rick Santorum	$3,000
6. Herman Cain	$2,500
7. Barack Obama	$1,150
8. Jon Hunstman	$500
9. Michelle Bachmann	$250
10. Charles "Buddy" Roemer	$100

So, the smart money, the professional insiders whose stock in trade is knowing which way the political winds are blowing, have invested most heavily in Rick Perry and longtime iSteve favorite T-Paw. Heckuva job, lobbyists!

By the way, is it too late for Mitch Daniels to jump in? I've got another anecdote about the famously sensible Indiana governor's lifelong love affair with drugs that I haven't used yet, and it would be a shame to have to wait until the next Presidential Timber rounds in 2015.

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

3 states, 3 winners: Why is that so bad?

2012-01-21T22:50:00.003-08:00

So, Santorum won Iowa, Romney New Hampshire, and Gingrich South Carolina, with Paul hanging in there in all three. In other words, Republican voters haven't made up their minds yet, and why is that so intolerable? 47 states haven't had a say yet and the election isn't for almost 300 more days.

There's such a market for media prognostications in election campaigns (Perry Is Obviously Unbeatable! Romney Has the Big Mo!) that there is always a lot of irritation when voters in the first few states don't wrap things all up. But why shouldn't primary campaigns go on for months and months like the Democrats in 2008?

Does it really do a party good to have momentum run away with the decision in the winter? For example, John F. Kerry's sudden emergence as the Inevitable victor in the winter of 2004 didn't do the Democrats any good. For about three weeks he appeared to be Mr. Unstoppable, but after that he just turned out to be as big a stiff as he'd been before his hot spell. John McCain fluked his way into the nomination by February 5, 2008 by winning narrowly in some winner-take-all states, and then just got older for the next nine months.

The reforms that we really need are ones that would let new candidates get onto all future primary ballots after the first few states are done with. All we've learned so far is what we knew at this point in 2008: Romney seems like the most plausible President among the current contenders, but he doesn't inspire many people.

In this Computer Age, there's no reason that we need the huge lead times that dominate the current nominating process. The party that re-engineers the nominating process to be longer and more flexible, and thus more dramatic, would gain a modest advantage. In Presidential politics, nothing besides the economy, war, and whether or not the public is kind of sick of your party moves the needle much. But I could well imagine that the party that comes up with a primary process that climaxes in June rather than January on average might average a percentage point better in November over the long run.

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

Latest discrimination crisis

2012-01-21T02:25:00.001-08:00

I have this vague impression that Saturday is the day when the New York Times dumps its discrimination stories -- you know, the kind of clueless stuff that I love pointing out the logical holes in. For example, this Saturday, the NYT headlines:

Blacks Face Bias in Bankruptcy, Study Suggests

Maybe my cynicism has got the best of me, but I wouldn't be hugely surprised to learn that the New York Times has some kind of formal or informal quota about the number of stories it feels it must run weekly about the scourge of racism, but that its editors also feel that NYT readers are increasingly cynical and bored about scandals involving purported discrimination (unless you are some weirdo like me who finds that discrimination stories offer insights into how the world actually works). So, perhaps the editors tend to dump their Sailer-bait stories on Saturday, which is by far the least important day of the week in the newspaper business.

What about this new study that shows that, all across the country, relative to everybody else who goes bankrupt, blacks who go bankrupt are more likely to file for the more onerous Chapter 13 bankruptcy than the Chapter 7 bankruptcy? Why this disparate impact discrimination?

Eventually, the article gets around to reporting -- but, of course, not explaining -- a few informative facts:

Even though the attorneys’ fees for the more labor-intensive Chapter 13 are more than double the charge for a Chapter 7, some truly distressed debtors will pursue a Chapter 13 anyway, several bankruptcy experts said. That is because they can pay the fee over time, unlike in a Chapter 7, which typically requires a payment before the case is filed. If blacks are perceived as less likely to have the resources — or a family with resources — to come up with a lump sum, some lawyers may be inclined to suggest a Chapter 13, these experts suggested.

The mention that attorneys' fees are more than double for Chapter 13 raises the awkward question that never comes up in the article: Are blacks' attorneys more likely to be black? It's like that awkward question about the high rates of defaults by minorities on mortgages: How did the racial makeup of the mortgage brokers who sold mortgages that went belly up to Hispanics differ from the norm?

So, why would lawyers tend to perceive blacks "as less likely to have the resources -- of a family with resources -- to come up with a lump sum"? How in the world did this stereotype of blacks tending to be poorer than whites get started, anyway?

In general, A) the people who wind up in bankruptcy are poorer decisionmakers. B) Blacks wind up in bankruptcy at a higher rate. Therefore, it's hardly surprising that black bankruptees tend to be worse decisionmakers in bankruptcy than other bankruptees.

The most interesting thing about this data is actually that bankrupt Hispanics have the lowest rate of filing Chapter 13. Perhaps Hispanics have more extended family support in coming up with the lump sum, or perhaps the ones who would be likely to file Chapter 13 just take off for South of the Border.

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

Do the French still believe in Freud?

2012-01-21T00:21:00.001-08:00

Every culture is crazy in its own way. As I've gotten older, I've come to assume that the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys tend to know what they are doing even if it doesn't make sense to us Americans. But the French continuing to blame autism on "refrigerator mothers" is hard to reconcile with my late-in-life Francophilia:

From the NYT:

“Le Mur,” or “The Wall,” a small documentary film about autism released online last year, might normally not have attracted much attention.

But an effort by French psychoanalysts to keep it from public eyes has helped to make it into a minor cause and shone a spotlight on the way children in France are treated for mental health problems.

The documentary, the first film by Sophie Robert, follows two autistic boys: Guillaume, who has been treated with the behavioral, or “American,” approach; and Julien, who has been kept in an asylum for six years and treated with psychoanalysis. Guillaume, though challenged, is functioning at a high level in school. Julien is essentially silent, locked out of society. ...

Ms. Robert said the version of psychoanalysis that is most prevalent in France, particularly the post-Freudian school championed by Jacques Lacan, takes it as a given that autism and other mental health problems are caused by children’s relationship with their mothers, or by “maternal madness.”

“Sometimes, when the mother is depressed, in utero, I mean when she is pregnant or at birth, sometimes the child can be autistic,” an analyst tells the camera in one scene. Another explains that autistic children “are sick of language — autism is a way of defending themselves from language.”

To the question of what an autistic child can expect to gain from psychoanalysis, yet another analyst responds, “The pleasure of taking interest in a soap bubble. I can’t answer anything else.”

I'm not hugely optimistic about the efficacy of the "American" approaches, but the good news is that they at least tend to be more motivated by attempts to find something to help the children than to keep elderly acolytes of a defunct dogma employed. Aged Freudians guilt-tripping the moms of autistic kids doesn't do anybody any good, except keeping the old shrinks from realizing they've wasted their lives.

By the way, Lacan was born into a conservative Catholic family, Jesuit-educated, and, as a youth, a far rightist.

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

Demonizing schoolteachers

2012-01-20T23:08:00.002-08:00

Commenter Maya comes up with a pretty good analogy:

The truly smart people aren't staying away [from teaching] because of the money. The pay is decent enough for a job that is meant to be emotionally/spiritually rewarding and with ample vacation time. The truly smart are too smart to get into a situation where YOU [the media and the public] blame, demonize and threaten them for the severe shortcomings of other people. Smart people would rather become dentists, for example. A dentist doesn't get blamed for his patients' cavities nor is it ever suggested that a man getting his teeth broken in a bar fight is his dentist's fault.

Of course, dentists really can fill cavities, but teachers can't actually make everybody equally smart so that, as the federal law demands, no child is left behind.

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

Cuba: A view from Canada

2012-01-20T22:27:00.003-08:00

One to two centuries ago, from the Monroe Doctrine at least through the Smedley Butler era of pushing around banana republics, American foreign policy was deeply concerned with Latin America. These days, Latin America is seldom front-page news, unless people are trying to get worked up over Hugo Chavez.

The most obvious opportunity for advancing American interests would be in de-Communizing Cuba. Cuba is a remarkable piece of land, a long thin island with 2100 miles of coastline, much of it climatically moderated by sea breezes (a little bit like Hawaii, although not quite as perfect). And the place is just ridiculously poor in dollar terms due to Communism: in 2008, the average monthly salary was $16. Not until Raul Castro came to power were the sale of microwave ovens legalized!

I suggested in 2008 that President Bush consider that Cuban-American relations, like Chinese-American relations in the Nixon era were improved by ping-pong diplomacy, might be rife for some baseball diplomacy. In 2011 I suggested President Obama consider golf diplomacy, since the island will someday be the next great home of seaside golf courses.

I brought this up in my recent post on the Washington Post's attempt to smear the super-establishmentarian Center for American Progress as anti-Semitic. Not surprisingly, hardly anybody mentioned it because who cares anymore about America's foreign policy relations with countries not more than 90 miles away when we call all obsess over countries six thousand miles away?

But, one commenter called Canadian Observer took an aesthetic objection to America helping Cubans not be so incredibly poor anymore:

Steve... you really want to Americanize and de-Castroize Cuba? Turn that unique gem of an island into just another Caribbean sell-out tourist hot-spot rife with American strip malls and ESPN blaring from every single neighbourhood bar? Do we really have to change every single place on earth so that it satisfies the pedantic tastes of the gringo?

Cuba is unique in that it is the only civilized place on earth where the pervading force of Americanization and Walmartization is almost non-existent.

Leave it alone, I say. People forget that behind the ideology, Castro became popular with the educated and lower classes because he kicked out the American interests which had been turning Cuba throughout the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's into a nation of dancers, entertainers and hookers.

He does have a point. But, judging from the small bits of modern Cuba I've seen in movies over the last decade, there's an even greater irony here. Castro's Cuba is something of a time capsule of mid-Century America. As I wrote in a review of the 2004 movie-in-verse, Yes by doctrinaire English leftist Sally Potter: "Ironically, Cuba turns out, due to Castro's stultifying tyranny, to look like a well-preserved slice of the Eisenhower Era, full of '57 Chevies and Hemingway-worshipers." If Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane decided to come back to life for one day in 2012 to take a taxi to a bar for a couple of drinks, they might well choose Havana as the place that most reminds them visually of the good old days.

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

Are schoolteachers as dumb as education majors?

2012-01-20T00:50:00.003-08:00

It's well known that education majors in college have some of the lowest SAT / ACT scores of any major. The Education Realist blog points out, however, that a large fraction of those dumb ed majors fail to graduate, and that to become a public school teacher you not only have to have a college degree but then, usually, pass some kind of licensing exam, which can range from easy to rather hard for calculus teachers.

So, the people who make it through both college and then pass their subject area test tend to have higher SAT scores than the average Ed major. An ETS study of those who passed the licensing test in 20 states shows that, yes, gym teachers aren't all that intellectual, averaging about 960 on a 400 to 1600 scale. Elementary school teachers average a little over 500 on both Math and Verbal. High school teachers tend to be sharper, with math teachers averaging just under 600 on Math. Here's a graph from ETS of SAT scores for each subject area.

Overall, public school teachers are pretty average for college graduates. It looks like they average about a quarter of a standard deviation lower on college admission tests than do average college graduates. But then college graduates are above average. With the exception of high school math teachers, teachers tend to score higher on the Verbal / Critical Reading section than on the Math section. That's their job: to use words to explain stuff. But it also explains why they have trouble dealing with the flood of data that's been incoming in recent years: thinking about statistics isn't their strong suit.

My guess is that smarter teachers would probably be a good thing, so we ought to be thinking about ways to make the job of teaching more attractive to smart people. In general, smart people don't like dealing with knuckleheads, so forcing teachers to carry most of the burden of discipline, a growing trend in recent decades, is a good way to keep smart people out of the business. You can instead use some of those gym teachers to run after school detentions instead of delegating most of the disciplining down to the teachers as happens in so many public schools desperate to avoid disparate impact lawsuits by not generating a paper trail of discipline actions carried out by the administration.

Of course, the Obama Administration is actively working to make teaching a less attractive profession to people who like thinking about The Great Gatsby via their sweeping investigations into the mystery of why black students get suspended relatively more often than other races. Thinking statistically is not the Obama Admin ed experts' strong suit either, evidently.

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

How it works

2012-01-19T15:34:00.012-08:00

From the Washington Post, a news story (i.e., not an opinion piece) by reporter Peter Wallsten:

Obama-linked group accused of anti-Semitism

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely aligned with the White House, is embroiled in a dispute with several major Jewish organizations over statements on Israel and charges that some center staffers have used anti-Semitic language to attack pro-Israel Americans.

The controversy reflects growing divisions among important allies of President Obama over Middle East policy that could complicate the president’s reelection outreach to some Jewish voters, just as he is seeking to assure them of his commitment to Israel’s security amid fears of an Iran nuclear threat.

Among the points of contention are several Twitter posts by one CAP writer on his personal account referring to “Israel-firsters.” Some experts say the phrase has its roots in the anti-Semitic charge that American Jews are more loyal to a foreign country. In another case, a second staffer described a U.S. senator as showing more fealty to the prime U.S. pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, than to his own constituents, replacing a standard identifier of party affiliation and state with “R-AIPAC” on his personal Twitter account. The first writer has since left the staff.

Critics are also pointing to writings on the CAP Web site, where staffers have suggested the pro-Israel lobby is pushing the U.S. toward war with Iran and likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to the policies of the segregated American South.

Those statements, among others, have gained notice largely because of CAP’s influential role in Obama’s Washington. Founded and chaired by John Podesta, a onetime chief of staff in the Clinton White House, the center is an idea generator for the administration and a source for many of its top officials.

So, CAP is a totally mainstream group run by veteran Democratic insiders. Here's Glenn Greenwald of Salon [link fixed] on how the tarring and feathering is organized.

Being Democratic Establishment Central, CAP will survive, no doubt, but the "chilling effect" of being accused of anti-Semitism in the news columns of the Washington Post will remain as a reminder. If you are a Democratic underling, don't even think amusing thoughts about Republican senators who have sold out to AIPAC. In a moment of weakness, you might put them on Twitter. You can't be too careful.

At present, the Israel Lobby is likely to run into more resistance to this kind of smear than at other times. Right now, Israel has a right of center government that Republicans tend to feel more affectionate toward, whereas most American Jews are Democrats. This kind of disalignment tends to generate some healthy debate among Jews.

Years ago, I proposed that the Israel Lobby should be treated like the anti-Castro Lobby: as a big, powerful interest group that normally gets much of its way on the foreign policy questions it's interested in precisely because it's a big, powerful lobby. That's politics, and both the anti-Castro Lobby and the Israel Lobby play politics well.

In the abstract, I'd probably want the U.S. to explore a deal with the Cuban government to lift sanctions in return for major Cuban concessions (Cuba is so needlessly poor after 50 years of Communism that there's a big win-win deal possible to de-Communize Cuba that would make a lot of money for Americans and for Cubans: here are some details of how to get the ball rolling to a de-Communized Cuba), but I recognize the power of the Cuba Libre lobby and I understand their motivations, so it's not a big deal for me. I'm likely more sympathetic to Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians than I am to the Cuba Libre lobby and I understand the Israel Lobby's power, so I don't care much at all about Israel pushing the Palestinians around.

What I do care about is the liberty and quality of debate in the U.S.

The difference between the Israel and the Cuba lobby is that the Cuba Libre Lobby is happy when you mention out loud how powerful they are, because that makes them seem even more powerful.

In contrast, the Israel Lobby, although it boasts itself about its own power (just check out the annual AIPAC conference in D.C.) tries to destroy people who mention its power, or who might even someday get around to mentioning it, as long as the Israel Lobby isn't comfortable with them. "Pay no attention to that lobby behind the curtain!" The latter has a severely chilling effect on thought in the more careerist parts of America.

If we think of the Free Cuba lobby as a normal lobby, like the NRA or the NEA or the Armenians or the Turks or Big Pharma or whatever, lobbies that are often successful but are subject to the give and take of debate, then the goal should be for the Israel Lobby to be a normal lobby that wants everybody to talk about how powerful it is, instead of this force that tries, with some success, to control who can mention its very existence.

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

The Dumbest Idea of 2012

2012-01-18T20:41:00.006-08:00

An early contender for that title has got to be that the 2012 London Olympics will witness the debut of Women's Boxing as an Olympic sport.

Boxing (men's) used to be a big sport at the Olympics, and the short bouts were more exciting than long professional title fights. But it was always rife with ridiculous decisions, corruption, brawls between cornermen, and other bad craziness.

Plus, guys pounding each other in the head is just too brutal. I went to some preliminary rounds at the 1984 L.A. Olympics. First, they had flyweight bouts (something like 107 pound max). Those were a lot of fun because these guys couldn't seem to do much serious damage to each other. Then they had heavyweight bouts. One heavyweight caught another one under the chin with an upper cut that lifted the poor bastard clear off the floor. He laid on the canvas for 20 minutes until they strapped him to a cart and wheeled him away. That was the last time I went to a boxing match.

For a host of reasons, you haven't heard much about boxing in recent Olympics. It's a fading sport. But at least it has tradition.

But adding women's boxing to the Olympics at this point in the history of boxing is a little like adding Women's Plunge for Distance to the 2012 Games.

As I wrote in my review of Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning 2004 women's boxing movie Million Dollar Baby:

In reality, women's boxing is a pseudo-feminist trashsport that briefly flourished in the 1990s when impresario Don King noticed that Mike Tyson fans got some kind of weird kick out of preliminary catfights between battling babes.

Traditionally, society objected to women brawling because (to paraphrase the answer the shady doctor in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" gives to the question of whether his memory erasure technique can cause brain damage), "Technically speaking, boxing is brain damage."

If a man gets his head caved in during some pointless scrap, well, some other man will just have to step in and do double duty carrying on the species. But, women are the limiting scarce resource in making babies, so each woman lost lowers the overall reproductive capacity.

That kind of proto-sociobiological reasoning is unthinkable today, yet that hasn't brought about a feminist utopia. Instead, men employ gender equality slogans to badger women into doing things guys enjoy.

Still, female fisticuffs have faded recently due to the supply side problem of finding enough low-cost opponents for the handful of women stars. While the number of male palookas who will fight for next to nothing in the hope of becoming Rocky Balboa is ample, managers needing fresh meat for their female champs to bash frequently have to hire hookers and strippers to take dives -- and working girls don't work for free.

"Million Dollar Baby" simply ignores all this and asks you to believe that women's boxing today is a thriving duplicate of the men's fight game of a half century ago, which allows Eastwood to make a 1955-style boxing movie.

And that was 7 years ago that women's boxing was already fading and practically dead in the water. I can't recall reading anything about it in the last several years until hearing that it was going to be in the Olympics this year. Putting women's boxing in the Olympics in 2012 is just Zombie Feminism, following out the logic of gender equality to a reductio ad absurdum.

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

Noah Millman

2012-01-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

One of the wise men of part-time punditry, Noah Millman is moving from The American Scene to The American Conservative to join Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison.

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

Comedy

2012-01-18T02:05:00.002-08:00

Sean O'Neal of The Onion's AV Club is angry that a David Letterman staffer was honest about that professional comedy is dominated by men and is happy that the Letterman staffer got in trouble for being honest:

Eddie Brill, longtime comedy booker for The Late Show With David Letterman, has been dismissed from his duties following a recent, controversial New York Times interview, in which Brill made certain statements regarding female comedians—statements that suggested female comics were not as funny as men, which is a debate we are still having despite Judd Apatow’s recent ideological victory over Jerry Lewis.

Huh? Because Judd Apatow got rich off female comedians?

What's the sex ratio among writers for The Onion, Sean? Why is the younger generation so boringly sanctimonious when they take off their funny hats and put on their serious thought hats?

Most comedians are kind of screwed-up. There are a more guys with the the screwed-up comedian genes.

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

Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

2012-01-17T20:59:00.001-08:00

In Taki's Magazine, I write:

Perhaps the most lauded book of 2011 was Thinking, Fast and Slow by the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel (or, to be technical, Nobelish) Prize in Economic Sciences. The Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New York Times all anointed it one of the year’s top books. David Brooks declaimed, “Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now.”

In the New York Review of Books, elder statesman of physics Freeman Dyson announced that Kahneman’s “great achievement was to turn psychology into a quantitative science,” which might have come as a surprise to Wilhelm Wundt, who opened an experimental-psychology lab in 1879.

Read the whole thing there.

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

"False Flag"

2012-01-17T19:56:00.003-08:00

From Foreign Policy:

False Flag

A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.

BY MARK PERRY | JANUARY 13, 2012

Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.

Jundallah is supposedly a Sunni terrorist group from Baluchistan, the desert on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border, that blows up people in Iran to show their opposition to Iran being a Shi'ite state. Perry goes on:

The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah -- a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children.

But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel's Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel's recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel's ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials.

The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad's efforts.
"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," the intelligence officer said. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought."

Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.

... The [2008 CIA] report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush "went absolutely ballistic" when briefed on its contents.

"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told me. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians."

Israel's relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel's activities jeopardized the administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel.

"It's easy to understand why Bush was so angry," a former intelligence officer said. "After all, it's hard to engage with a foreign government if they're convinced you're killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same."

A senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing -- a result that the officer attributed to "political and bureaucratic inertia."

"In the end," the officer noted, "it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat." Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush's national security team, pitting those who wondered "just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on" against those who argued that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers. ...

What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. "This was stupid and dangerous," the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. "Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true."

In tribute to Obama, you gotta figure that this realization probably wasn't as big of a surprise to him as it was to Bush.

Anyway, lately, I have a hard time getting too worked up over this kind of thing. It's a little bit like when some college football team puts together a dynasty and then, surprise, surprise, gets suspended by the NCAA (e.g., USC). They just kind of wanted it more. These days, Israel just kind of wants to win at the Great Game more. It's their hobby.

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

Cruise liner captains don't go down with their ships

2012-01-17T13:44:00.006-08:00

The Italian cruise ship fiasco, in which the captain is under arrest for refusing the Italian Coast Guard's demand that he return to the ship to supervise the evacuation of passengers, reminds me of a 1991 cruise ship disaster with a happy ending. From People:

On Saturday evening, Aug. 3, as a 50-mph gale buffeted their ship, passengers aboard the Greek cruise liner Oceanos gamely made their way to the main lounge for the evening's entertainment. No sooner had they settled in than the lights went out. The 492-foot ship, suddenly without power, tossed in high seas off South Africa's aptly named Wild Coast. For 361 weekend tourists, one of the most harrowing nights of their lives had just begun. The Oceanos was sinking.

Disgracefully, many of the 184 crew members clambered aboard the lifeboats ahead of some of the passengers and paddled to the safety of tankers and trawlers that had drawn nearby. At daybreak on Sunday, South African Air Force helicopters joined the rescue operation. But to the astonishment and anger of the 217 passengers still aboard, Capt. Yannis Avranias grabbed the second chopper off the ship. With no one clearly in charge, an unlikely hero emerged among the remaining crew: Robin Boltman, 31, the ship's magician.

Giving the performance of his career, Boltman entertained and calmed passengers throughout the pitch-black night. In the morning he ascended to the bridge and maintained radio contact with rescuers. Finally, at 11:30 A.M., after all other passengers and crew had been removed to safety, Boltman was lifted from the ship by a helicopter. At 1:45 P.M. the luxury liner nosed into the Indian Ocean and disappeared under the waves.

You can read the magician's story of how he organized the evacuation here.

The tradition of women and children first in shipwrecks emerged in the 19th Century. One famous example was the death of John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest passenger on the Titanic in 1912. According to Wikipedia:

When Second Officer Charles Lightoller arrived on A deck to finish loading Lifeboat 4, Astor helped his wife with her maid and nurse into it. Astor then asked if he might join his wife because she was in 'a delicate condition'; however, Lightoller told him that men were not to be allowed to enter until all the women and children had been loaded. Astor stood back and simply asked Lightoller for the boat number. The lifeboat was lowered at 1:55 a.m. and Astor stood alone while others tried to free the remaining collapsible boats;[1] he was last seen on the starboard bridge wing, smoking a cigarette with Jacques Futrelle. A half hour later, the ship disappeared beneath the water. Madeleine, her nurse, and her maid survived. Astor's valet, Victor Robbins, did not.

This understated but memorable incident didn't even make the 1997 movie Titanic, presumably because it didn't fit the Celtic Good v. WASP Bad and Feminist (but Hot) Women v. Male Chauvinist Pigs dynamics that James Cameron suffused the movie with. Obviously, Cameron knows a lot about what contemporary audiences want to pay to see.

One implicit question is whether there is any connection between the change in the cultural atmosphere in recent generations and the poor behavior of these two captains. And the answer is: the sample size is too small to tell.

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

"What's race got to do with it?"

2012-01-16T20:07:00.002-08:00

Lee Siegel blogs in the New York Times:

Pundits have already begun the endless debate over whether Mr. Romney’s wealth and religion are hindrances or assets. But there has yet to be any discussion over the one quality that has subtly fueled his candidacy thus far and could well put him over the top in the fall: his race. The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.

Of course, I’m not talking about a strict count of melanin density. I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president. It is a whiteness grounded in a retro vision of the country, one of white picket fences and stay-at-home moms and fathers unashamed of working hard for corporate America.

... Contrast that with Mr. Romney’s meticulously cultivated whiteness. He is nearly always in immaculate white shirt sleeves. He is implacably polite, tossing off phrases like “oh gosh” with Stepford bonhomie.

Somebody a little less hot under the collar with resentments he doesn't quite understand than Siegel might notice that Romney's affect has probably held him back more in the 2008 and 2012 GOP campaigns than it has helped him.

By the way, is wearing clean clothes really a dead give-away that the wearer is white? I hadn't actually noticed that. I have noticed that the Japanese tend to be polite, even "implacably polite," so I guess that makes the Japanese white.

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

Ethnicity != Race!

2012-01-16T00:27:00.002-08:00

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend on how the government's racial categories don't fit Hispanics well: For Many Latinos Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color. It's like a dumbed-down version of one of my articles.

More than 18 million Latinos checked this “other” [race] box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000.

What's not mentioned is that that's actually a decline in percentage terms: there was a rise from 2000 to 2010 in the percentage of Hispanic ethnicity individuals calling themselves white on the race question. (This likely doesn't represent an underlying change in race or thinking about race. It probably had to do with minor changes in the wording of the race question on the 2010 Census that were intended to elicit more comprehension from Latinos.)

It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories — indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.

Of course, there's no mention that Latin American countries themselves use terms like "mestizo" and "mulatto" and "Indio" -- those words are considered multiculturally insensitive in America, even though they are considered useful in Latin America.

The main reason for the split is that the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Latinos, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs.

Of course, there's no mention that Hispanics are the only ethnicity to get their own question on the Census. There were only about 9 questions on the last Census and one was Are you Hispanic/Latino? Ethnically, to the Feds, either you are Hispanic or you are non-Hispanic. If you are non-Hispanic, the feds don't care about your ethnicity.

The general tone of the article is the usual: that Latino political power through ethnocentric solidarity is an unquestioned good. To newspaper reporters, what could be more self-evident? All the Latino leaders in their Blackberries tell them that. Granted, in the real world, not that many Spanish-surnamed people seem to care all that much, but that's just proof that we need to write even more articles telling the Latino masses to Get With The Program that their leaders have laid out for them. (If only we could get Latinos to read the Times instead of the Post.) These people who return my phone calls so promptly are the Martin Luther Kings of the 21st Century. If you don't believe me, just ask them.

Personally, the fact that all these newcomers to my country are internally divided by race and ethnicity so that they don't wield all that much political power would seem to me to be a feature, not a bug. I think we should get rid of the ethnicity category altogether and have only two race questions on government forms: "Are you descended from African-American slaves?" and "Are you an official member of an American Indian tribe?"

Readers will not be surprised that the person featured in the article (shown in the photo) as most outspoken in her indignation over the feds' insensitivity doesn't have a Spanish-surname herself: Erica Lubliner.

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

Consider the implications

2012-01-15T23:02:00.002-08:00

Gregory Cochran writes in 2012 Edge question series on "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?"

Germs Cause Disease

The germ theory of disease has been very successful, particularly if you care about practical payoffs, like staying alive. It explains how disease can rapidly spread to large numbers of people (exponential growth), why there are so many different diseases (distinct pathogen species), and why some kind of contact (sometimes indirect) is required for disease transmission.

In modern language, most disease syndromes turn out to be caused by tiny self-replicating machines whose genetic interests are not closely aligned with ours.

In fact, germ theory has been so successful that it almost seems uninteresting. ...

A huge amount of money has been devoted to searching for the genetic causes of slow-acting diseases because with the development of genome sequencing we have a very handy lamppost to search for our keys under. Looking for germs that might cause slow diseases has not been a priority because nobody has much of a plan for how to do it.

This isn't a terribly bad strategy. It's like when I'm playing golf and I slice my teeshot toward a tangle of head-high thornbushes. I might go look for my ball on the next fairway to the right: maybe the ball happened to bounce through all the thorns an on to the short grass of the wrong fairway. That probably didn't happen, but if it did, well, I can find my ball a lot more easily than if it's in the thorn bushes. But, when my ball doesn't turn up sitting pretty on the next fairway over, I try not to be disappointed.

Similarly, with big diseases, the balls aren't sitting up on the short grass where it would be easy to find them. The 21st Century hasn't seen a lot of cases of common diseases being caused by common gene variants, just as Cochran predicted back in the 20th Century. But few are thinking about how to wade into the thorn bushes to look for them.

It is still worth studying—not just to fight the next plague, but also because it has been a major factor in human history and human evolution. You can't really understand Cortez without smallpox or Keats without tuberculosis. The past is another country—don't drink the water.

It may well explain patterns that we aren't even supposed to see, let alone understand. For example, human intelligence was, until very recently, ineffective at addressing problems causing by microparasites, as William McNeill pointed out in Plagues and Peoples. Those invisible enemies played a major role in determining human biological fitness—more so in some places than others. Consider the implications.

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

Evolution of left-handedness?

2012-01-15T03:00:00.007-08:00

At Edge.org, Jonathan Gottschall offers a theory for why natural selection can't seem to make up its mind about left-handedness:

Which brings me to Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, a pair of French scientists who study the evolution of handedness. Left-handedness is partly heritable and is associated with significant health risks. So why, they wondered, hasn't natural selection trimmed it away? Were the costs of left-handedness cancelled out by hidden fitness benefits?

The scientists noted that lefties have advantages in sports like baseball and fencing where the competition is interactive (but not in sports, like gymnastics or swimming, with no direct interaction). In the elite ranks of cricket, boxing, wrestling, tennis, baseball and more, lefties are massively over-represented. The reason is obvious. Since ninety percent of the world is right-handed, righties usually compete against each other. When they confront lefties, who do everything backwards, their brains reel, and the result can be as lopsided as my mauling by Nick. In contrast, lefties are most used to facing righties; when two lefties face off, any confusion cancels out.

Faurie and Raymond made a mental leap. The lives of ancestral people were typically more violent than our own. Wouldn't the lefty advantage in sports—including combat sports like boxing, wrestling, and fencing—have extended to fighting, whether with fists, clubs, or spears? Could the fitness benefits of fighting southpaw have offset the health costs associated with left-handedness? In 1995 Faurie and Raymond published a paper supporting their prediction of a strong correlation between violence and handedness in preindustrial societies: the more violent the society, the more lefties. The most violent society they sampled, the Eipo of Highland New Guinea, was almost thirty percent southpaw.

Think about throwing a spear at an animal you are chasing like a quarterback throwing the football while rolling out. Righthanded quarterbacks can throw better while running to the right than the left. (Indeed, Robert Griffin III of Baylor likely won the Heisman last year because, more than any other single play, a remarkable pass he threw that beat Oklahoma on national TV. After rolling to his left, this righthander surprised the defense by throwing a long bullet into the right corner of the end zone (video). Having a lefthander in your hunting party ups your chances that somebody will connect.

Many studies have since examined the Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis. Results have been mixed, but facts have surfaced that are, to my taste, quite decidedly ugly. A recent and impressive inquiry, found no evidence that lefties are over-represented among the Eipo of Highland New Guinea.

It hurts to surrender a beloved idea--one you just knew was true, one that was stamped into your mind by lived experience not statistics. And I'm not yet ready to consign this one to the bone yard of lovely--but dead--science. Faurie and Raymond brought in sports data to shore up their main story about fighting. But I think the sports data may actually be the main story. Lefty genes may have survived more through southpaw success in play fights than in real fights—a possibility Faurie and Raymond acknowledge in a later paper. Athletic contests are important across cultures, and if we think they are frivolous we are wrong. Around the world, sport is mainly a male preserve, and winners—from captains of football teams to traditional African wrestlers to Native American runners and lacrosse players—gain more than mere laurels. They elevate their cultural status—they win the admiration of men, the desire of women (research confirms the stereotype: athletic men have more sexual success). This raises a bigger possibility: that our species has been shaped more than we know by the survival of the sportiest.

Here are the top ten baseball hitters of all time according to one measure where the average batter gets a 100:

Rank	Player (yrs, age)	Adjusted OPS+	Bats
1.	Babe Ruth+ (22)	206	L
2.	Ted Williams+ (19)	190	L
3.	Barry Bonds (22)	181	L
4.	Lou Gehrig+ (17)	178	L
5.	Rogers Hornsby+ (23)	175	R
6.	Mickey Mantle+ (18)	172	B
7.	Dan Brouthers+ (19)	170	L
	Albert Pujols (11, 31)	170	R
9.	Shoeless Joe Jackson (13)	169	L
10.	Ty Cobb+ (24)	168	L

Seven lefties, a switchhitter, and two righties. On the other hand, four positions in baseball: 2nd, short, third, and catcher are largely off limits to lefties because most throws wouldn't be cross body.

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

Epigenetics

2012-01-15T01:38:00.001-08:00

I have to say that I've never quite gotten the excitement over epigenetics as a revolutionizing nature-nurture debates. This is not to say that the study of epigenetics isn't valuable in and of itself, it just seems to have less implication for the kind of arguments that people really care about than its publicists assume.

If I say, "Twin studies, adoption studies, and so forth suggest that for a lot of traits, there's roughly a 50-50 breakdown between the effects of heredity and environment, over the last few years," I constantly get told that: "Oh, no, that's so 20th Century. You see, some of the genes are also being affected by the environment."

Me: "Okay, but that still leaves us with the results of twin and adoption studies. So, what it sounds like you are saying is that genes aren't just 50% of the importance, they're something like 75%, but maybe 1/3rd of the genes are influenced by the environment, so we're right back to 50-50, right?. I mean, we have to get back to what the studies report."

For example, here's Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers, writing in literary agent John Brockman's annual January question confab at his Edge.org:

To me, epigenetics is the most monumental explanation to emerge in the social and biological sciences since Darwin proposed his theories of Natural Selection and Sexual Selection. Over 2,500 articles, many scientific meetings, the formation of the San Diego Epigenome Center as well as other institutes, a five-year Epigenomics Program launched in 2008 by the National Institutes of Health, and many other institutions, academic forums and people are now devoted to this new field. Although epigenetics has been defined in several ways, all are based in the central concept that environmental forces can affect gene behavior, either turning genes on or off. ...

The consequences of epigenetic mechanisms are likely to be phenomenal. Scientists now hypothesize that epigenetic factors play a role in the etiology of many diseases, conditions and human variations—from cancers, to clinical depression and mental illnesses, to human behavioral and cultural variations.

Take the Moroccan Amazighs or Berbers, people with highly similar genetic profiles who now reside in three different environments: some roam the deserts as nomads; some farm the mountain slopes; some live in the towns and cities along the Moroccan coast. And depending on where they live, up to one-third of their genes are differentially expressed, reports researcher Youssef Idaghdour.

For example, among the urbanites, some genes in the respiratory system are switched on—perhaps, Idaghdour suggests, to counteract their new vulnerability to asthma and bronchitis in these smoggy surroundings. Idaghdour and his colleague Greg Gibson, propose that epigenetic mechanisms have altered the expression of many genes in these three Berber populations, producing their population differences.

Genes hold the instructions; epigenetic factors direct how those instructions are carried out. And as we age, scientists report, these epigenetic processes continue to modify and build who we are. Fifty-year-old twins, for example, show three times more epigenetic modifications than do three-year-old twins; and twins reared apart show more epigenetic alterations than those who grow up together. Epigenetic investigations are proving that genes are not destiny; but neither is the environment—even in people.

Okay, but we already knew that genes are not destiny, but neither is the environment.

I am hardly the first to hail this new field of biology as revolutionary—the fundamental process by which nature and nurture interact. But to me as an anthropologist long trying to take a middle road in a scientific discipline intractably immersed in nature-versus-nurture warfare, epigenetics is the missing link.

I'm not saying that it isn't valuable to know that one way the environment affects traits is through sending a message to the genes to turn themselves on or off, but that that doesn't tell us anything terribly significantly new about what people get hot under the collar about: the limits of environmental influence.

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

Parking

2012-01-13T00:29:00.002-08:00

When I was at UCLA in 1980-82, the place to be on weekend evenings was Westwood, the dining and movie theatre district just south of UCLA's campus. Everybody drove from the suburbs, paid to park, and then walked around like they were living in a city. Then it went out of fashion. Today, Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena is the new Westwood for today's well-heeled young people who want to drive somewhere to find a vibrant urban experience (i.e., pretty girls walking around at night). There's nothing particularly wrong with Westwood these days, it's just kind of staid and empty compared to the old days.

I'd assumed that this was just natural generational change or a matter of taste. Westwood is mostly modernistic and kind of swoopy-looking, so it still looked kinda cool in 1980, while Old Pasadena is pre-Great Depression-looking, and early 20th Century urban looks are more in style these days. But an article in Los Angeles Magazine by Dave Gardetta attributes the change to differences in government regulation.

People who once drove to Westwood on Saturday nights now visited Old Pasadena.

“If you had told people in 1990 that this switch would occur,” says Shoup, “you would have been considered insane.” There are many theories about why Westwood died, and Shoup has his own. “It’s a myth to say Westwood died because of one high-profile homicide in the 1980s,” he says, referring to the 1988 death of a Long Beach woman named Karen Toshima, killed in crossfire. “Westwood had an unbelievably high parking requirement—ten spaces for every 1,000 square feet of restaurant. Old Pasadena had none. Westwood had dangerous alleys, crumbing sidewalks. If you want to know why Old Pasadena succeeded Westwood, parking was a big part of the story.”

Cole had created the first Shoupista paradise: No parking requirements, parking meters where once there were none. His city grew rich off the notion—and nobody has tried it since. “For 5,000 years,” says Cole, “we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we’ve built them around the parking lot—a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale. Now we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. The saving grace is that the first 5,000 years might come back again.”

What I think this means is that Westwood (which is part of the city of Los Angeles) had onerous restrictions on new businesses, requiring them to provide lots of parking spaces, while Pasadena let entrepreneurs get away without investing in a lot of parking spaces, which attracted newer, more interesting businesses.

The idea behind mandating that new businesses provide parking spaces is to mitigate an externality so they have to meet the full costs. But maybe that degree of fairness slows new businesses down too much?

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

An exception to Moynihan's Law of the Canadian Border

2012-01-11T21:25:00.000-08:00

From the NYT, a map of percentage of adults who admit to binge-drinking:

The lowest state was Utah, the highest Wisconsin.

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

Goodbye, Mr. Chimps

2012-01-10T22:16:00.001-08:00

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

Although future behavioral taboos are notoriously hard to predict, it’s clear that within this decade America will end the use of chimpanzees in entertainment. I’ll go much further out on a limb and also predict that within a generation, and for much the same reasons, we will seriously consider banning child stars.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Chump change

2012-01-09T00:52:00.002-08:00

The newspapers are full of stories about how casino mogul Sheldon Adelson has given $5 million dollars to Newt Gingrich to run attack ads against Mitt Romney, revivifying Newt's campaign.

Is $5 million really headline news in politics these days? I feel very naive about this because I have no clue what the real deal is, but I've long noticed that when I'm reading stories about the political contributions of heavy hitters like Adelson and Haim Saban, the numbers tossed around about their donations don't seem all that staggering. Now, T. Boone Pickens giving $165 million to get Oklahoma State almost into the BCS title game -- that's significant money. But $5 million sounds like what some used car dealer ponies up to get his college football team's weight room refurbished, not the kind of serious moolah that may determine the course of American history. Reading these articles, I feel like I'm in that scene in Austin Powers where Dr. Evil is defrosted after 30 years and threatens to blow up the world if he's not given "One. Million. Dollars!"

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

Nutrition and Inequality

2012-01-08T21:52:00.004-08:00

Over the last year or two I've noticed a growing conventional wisdom consensus that inequality in America has something to do with nutrition. For example, Paul Krugman uses the word "nutrition" three times in today's column:

The failure starts early: in America, the holes in the social safety net mean that both low-income mothers and their children are all too likely to suffer from poor nutrition ...

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. ...

And the Congressional wing of his party seems determined to make upward mobility even harder. For example, Republicans have tried to slash funds for the Women, Infants and Children program, which helps provide adequate nutrition to low-income mothers and their children ...

I don't watch as much sports on TV as I used to, so maybe I'm missing out on a trend that's obvious to Krugman in which we see NFL and NBA players increasingly suffering from rickets and stunted growth. I don't know, though. For example, linebacker James Harrison of the Steelers is one of 14 children, but he seems full grown to me.

Seriously, is there something substantive I'm missing in the growing handwaving about "poor nutrition" causing inequality?

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

Affinity scams and subprime

2012-01-08T21:21:00.001-08:00

Here's a good NYT article on one example of what seems like a general pattern in the subprime disaster: affinity scams in which immigrant brokers fleece their co-nationals.

Financial Ruin of Immigrants Tied to Broker

By ADAM B. ELLICK

For years, a self-made real estate magnate named Edul Ahmad personified the collective dreams of Richmond Hill, Queens, which is populated by many immigrants from Guyana, in South America. Mr. Ahmad drove a yellow Lamborghini, sponsored a cricket team and held white-glove parties at a lavish banquet hall that he owned. At a prominent intersection near the border of Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park, his smiling face looked down from a large billboard that promoted his real estate services.

Many residents responded, taking out high-risk mortgages that they were told they could readily afford.

In July, it all came crashing down. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mr. Ahmad, charging him with masterminding a $50 million mortgage fraud that seemed to exemplify a nationwide phenomenon of celebrated immigrant brokers who were accused of preying on their own. ...

Mr. Ahmad, 44, is charged with luring buyers into subprime mortgages, inflating the values of their properties and concealing his involvement by using straw buyers, like his wife and the Guyanese-born captain of the United States cricket team, Steve Massiah.

Guyana, by the way, is supposed to have the highest percentage of its nationals living in the U.S. of any country. The organization GuyanaUSA argues that so many Guyanese have moved to America that the U.S. might as well take over the whole country.

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

"Breaking Bad"

2012-01-08T01:04:00.001-08:00

I finally got around to watching Vince Gilligan's Emmy-winning AMC TV show Breaking Bad, and I like this dialogue from the first season. Two DEA agents in Albuquerque, one white and one Mexican-American, are searching drug dealer Krazy-8's lowrider car and discover the control box for making it bounce up and down:

Hank: "Ay yi yi, Gomey. It's a culture in decline."

Gomez: "It's a rich and vibrant culture."

Hank: "It's a car that jumps up and down. What the hell, you people used to be conquistadors, for Christ's sake."

It's a theme of the show that whites also are in cultural decline, as suggested by character names. The two meth cookers are Cal Tech grad turned high school chemistry teacher Walter White and an old student he flunked named Jesse Pinkman, who calls himself "Cap'n Cook" in burlesque of that most admirable of middle class Englishmen.

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

Tokyo not actually stomped flat by Godzilla

2012-01-07T19:48:00.003-08:00

Eamonn Fingleton writes on "The Myth of Japan's Failure." We've all heard a million times about how since 1990 Japan has turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by the Humongous, but it actually looks okay. A friend who moved to Japan in 1980 said that back then it was full of ugly buildings and poorly dressed people. Now, it's full of nice buildings and well-dressed people.

That brings up a general question I have about economic statistics. It strikes me that one of the overlooked factors in comparing wealth over long periods of time is that buildings don't burn down as much as they used to. For example, one reason Japan in 2012 is better off than in 1990 is that it has now been 67 years since the B-29s last firebombed the place rather than 45 years.

But even in places that haven't been ravaged by war or earthquake-caused fires, like Chicago, the rate of fire loss is way down. Assets accumulate when they don't burn up. People can devote economic resources to new stuff instead of replacing old stuff that went up in smoke. Has this ever been measured?

I wonder what percentage of all property (excluding land) burned up in, say, the year 1875? Off the top of my head, I'd guess, oh, say, 0.5%. I mean, they used to have to use flames for lighting at night. (It's hard to grasp how scary that would be to a 21st Century sensibility.) A half percentage point loss due to fire per year would compound over the generations into a sizable difference in wealth.

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

Teen mothers

2012-01-07T17:46:00.001-08:00

The standard assumption is that teen mothers are less likely to have healthy children than older mothers. But my late father-in-law, who knew a lot of teen mothers as a public high school teacher in Chicago, questioned that conventional wisdom. Sure, if a malnourished 16-year-old peasant girl who weighed 90 pounds and had just gone through puberty at 15 got pregnant, that didn't bode well for the baby. But in his experience, the girls who got pregnant at 16 tended to be robust 150-pounders who had gone through puberty at about 11. He hypothesized that, say, NBA power forwards or NFL running backs would tend to have younger mothers than the average man.

Has anybody done a study along these lines?

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

What do these P-cities have in common?

2012-01-04T20:46:00.001-08:00

From the Washington Post:

Portlandia, your 15 minutes are up. Long live Pittsburgh
By Maura Judkis

Out: Portland
In: Pittsburgh.

This year’s List has spoken, and writers Dan Zak and Monica Hesse have laid their anointed hands upon my hometown for 2012. Pittsburgh, Pa., is cool now. Sorry, Portland hipsters!
Portland, Ore., is the land of microbreweries, indie bands, bicyclists and rose gardens.

Pittsburgh is often reviled by outsiders for its abrasive-sounding accent and rabid football fans. Portland has Portlandia, the hit comedy sketch show, while Pittsburgh just subs in as other cities in movies. Why did Listmakers Hesse and Zak bestow their blessings upon the latter?

“Portland has overextended its welcome as the destination for hipsters who want to find themselves, while frolicking in beautiful scenery and reasonable rents,” says Hesse. “Pittsburgh is reasonable-rents, nice scenery, nice downtown, and the people are, in general, just far less insufferable.”

Coincidentally, among the "core cities" with the whitest populations, Portland is first at 74% and Pittsburgh is second at 67%. In contrast, Pittsburgh's Robber Baron-era rival Cleveland is only 37% white. But that doesn't have anything to do with why Pittsburgh is slowly becoming hip while Cleveland is stagnating. Don't even think that.

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

Assortative mating among movie stars

2012-01-04T00:43:00.006-08:00

Here's an economics paper by Gustaf Bruze on assortative mating among movie stars: "Marriage Choices of Movie Stars: Does Spouses' Education Matter?" He looked at the top 400 movie stars in 2006 by "bankability" and then tracked down education levels for 140 of the stars and their spouses who are well enough known to have biographical data readily available on them. He finds a moderate level of correlation -- 0.40 -- between spouses' years of education. Movie stars have a lot of options in whom to marry and are seldom married to their school sweethearts, so this is a modestly interesting test affirming that like tends to attracts like.

Indeed, the correlation would probably be higher except that movie stars tend to drop out of school because it's too hard less often than other people and more often because they've got something better to do with their time (like being a movie star).

Here are the couples with 19 years of education each (with the celebrity designated with an asterisk).

Elizabeth Cohen 19 Paul Giamatti* 19
Katherine Borowitz 19 John Turturro* 19
Meryl Streep* 19 Donald Gummer 19
Sigourney Weaver* 19 Jim Simpson 19
Tamara Hurwitz 19 Bill Pullman* 19
Tonya Lewis 19 Spike Lee* 19

Giamatti's father was a Dante scholar who was appointed president of Yale before becoming the baseball commissioner.

Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver got their last three years of formal education together at the Yale Drama School in New York, much to Weaver's regret. Like quarterback Steve Young stuck on the bench behind Joe Montana, Weaver constantly lost starring roles at Yale to Streep, in part because Streep is just a few inches above average in height while Weaver is taller than most men, even without wearing heels. That's a bigger problem on stage than in film.

(Streep and Weaver are rare cases of movie stars who went through a long stretch of professional education. Both were born in 1949 and didn't get their first film roles until 1977, with Streep instantly becoming a star with Julia, while Weaver became a star in 1979 as Ripley in Alien. That's kind of the standard upper middle class life cycle model these days -- invest heavily in accredited education up through about age 25. It worked fine for Streep, who was a legend before she ever set foot on a movie set, and it worked out well for Weaver, although she (a Stanford English major) has had to put up with sci-fi nerds her whole career. But it doesn't seem to work very well for movie stars in general.)

Spike Lee is a third generation graduate of Morehouse.

The couple with the least years of education is Nicole Kidman (11) and country singer Keith Urban (9.5).

The biggest gaps between the 140 couples are around a half dozen years. Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman have six years less education than their less-well known wives, while TV writer David Kelley has six more years than Michelle Pfeiffer. Alfred Molina has six more years of schooling than his wife, an actress turned novelist, who is 16 years older than him.

Among male celebrities, the least educated include, unsurprisingly, the great elderly British working class stars Sean Connery (9.5 years -- he never owned a business suit until he got the role of James Bond, so he slept in a suit to learn to feel comfortable in it) and Michael Caine (10 years). Also at the bottom of the list at 9.5 years is aristocrat / director Guy Ritchie. I presume he got kicked out a lot of posh schools.

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

"The Iron Lady"

2012-01-03T20:11:00.001-08:00

From my review in Taki's Magazine:

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the first of her three terms as Britain’s prime minister. By 2012, however, no American woman has yet reached the presidency. The only woman to make a serious run was considered presidential timber mostly by having been First Lady. Why are women still underrepresented in high office?

Judging by The Iron Lady, a Margaret Thatcher biopic starring a superlative Meryl Streep, one reason might be that women, on average, aren’t that fascinated by politics. For example, the three Englishwomen who wrote, directed, and edited The Iron Lady appear remarkably uninterested in the affairs of state that captivated their main character. ...

While a political nullity, The Iron Lady is a first-rate women’s picture, a poignant depiction of a happy marriage, a sad widowhood, and the frustrations of eldercare.

Read the whole thing there.

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

A bad idea: Supersonic flight

2012-01-03T19:36:00.002-08:00

The Pentagon is supposed to cut its budget mildly as part of last summer's debt reduction agreement, and a lot of attention is finally being paid to the current plans to spend a trillion dollars or so on the new Lockheed-Martin J-35 supersonic stealth fighter / low altitude ground attack aircraft / dessert topping / floor wax. (Scott Locklin has a dyspeptic review of the Pentagon's goal of having the J-35 replace the slow-flying, ugly, but effective A-10 Warthog in Taki's Magazine.)

The J-35 sounds a lot like the F-105 Thunderchief, a big, heavy one-engined supersonic fighter-bomber which started out in the 1950s with the mission of penetrating Soviet airspace carrying a nuclear bomber, but in Vietnam was shifted over to ground attack. It was not very successful at it and acquired the nickname "Thud," perhaps because it kept crashing.

In retrospect, most supersonic jets designed in the 1950s were kind of nuts. The whole idea of supersonic flight has turned out to be, at best, a luxury. We have this cliche of the 1950s as a carefree, innocent time, but to grown men who held positions of responsibility then, the 1950s were terrifying. Pearl Harbor and the blitzkriegs had shown the feasibility of the Sneak Attack, which was then multiplied in terror by the advent of the atomic bomb. Hence, the pursuit of jet designs that pushed the envelope of performance with the crude technology of the time to levels that seem crazy today.

My dad worked for years trying to keep the Mach 2 Lockheed F-104 Starfighter from crashing so often. As a little kid, I can remember begging my dad to come play with me but he couldn't because he had the kitchen table covered with papers describing the latest fatal failure of a West German pilot to successfully handle this "missile with a man in it."

Wikipedia disagrees, but my dad's recollection is that the Starfighter was originally designed for more or less Kamikaze interceptions of Soviet nuclear bombers. This jet with one huge engine and stubby wings only 7-feet long was intended to get from the ground to the stratosphere and shoot down Soviet bombers over the Arctic before they took out Seattle or Chicago. If the pilot then managed to turn it around and land it safely, well, that was a definite bonus, but not completely essential to a successful mission.

Thus, the F-104 could climb like a bat out of hell. Everything else, like turning, not stalling, being able to safely eject, not flaming out, was secondary. It was a handful to fly: the closing minutes of the movie The Right Stuff show an F-104 damn near killing the most famous pilot of all time, Chuck Yeager.

The Air Force flew the F-104 for a little while, then decided that a kamikaze interceptor wasn't exactly what they had in mind and handed it to the Air National Guard to deal with. The Starfighter would be a good thing to have if the Soviets attacked America, but in the mean time, well, it was a bit much.

Somewhere along the line, Lockheed decided to sell it to NATO ally air forces as a ground-support fighter-bomber. The West German defense minister Franz-Josef Strauss supposedly pocketed $10,000,000 in the Deal of the Century. Not surprisingly, the West German air force, which had been out of business from 1945-55, wasn't better at not crashing Starfighters than Chuck Yeager. Nor did flying it at low altitude over hilly West German country in cloudy weather prove ideal, not crashing-wise. My dad, a low-level engineer, spent a lot of hours trying to get fixes to work that would take turn this Mach 2 interceptor intended for Dr. Strangelove scenarios into an all-purpose aircraft.

Last summer, my father told me that he once was speaking to an Italian air force general whose unit had scores of F-104s. My father asked the Italian what their secret was. The West Germans were always complaining about how lethal the F-104 was to their pilots, but the Italians never did.

"Oh, our pilots die too," the Italian general replied. "We just don't complain about it."

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

The Olajuwon Shortage

2012-01-02T22:02:00.002-08:00

Why was I wrong?

More than 30 years ago, in the fall of 1981, I first heard about a freshman basketball player at the U. of Houston, Akeem Abdul-Olajuwon, a center generously said to be a seven footer who would post big numbers one night, then nothing much the next night: hardly unexpected for a kid who had only been playing basketball at all for about three years.

He was the first African basketball player I could remember, and my thinking at the time was that he wouldn't be the last. After all, American-born blacks were pretty good at basketball and there were a lot more where they came from in Africa, so Olajuwon would likely be only the first of a long line of African-born stars.

This wasn't an unusual concept at the time -- for example, a Rice U. professor in Houston named Max Apple wrote a 1994 movie starring Kevin Bacon, The Air Up There, about a scout looking for the next big thing in Africa.

Olajuwon continued to improve and Houston went to the NCAA Final Four all three years he was there. The Houston Rockets picked him over Michael Jordan (and Sam Bowie) as the first choice in the NBA draft. He posted some spectacular numbers (the only player ever to have over 200 blocks and 200 steals in one season, I believe) , then started to fade on offense, then, after changing his first name to Hakeem to signify his renewed Muslim faith, he made a resurgence. He led Houston to two NBA championships ('94 and '95) during Jordan's weird minor league baseball sabbatical, winning a season MVP award and two NBA Finals MVP awards, which might be the higher honor. A most satisfying career. Olajuwon is widely admired as an unquestioned Hall of Famer. In his retirement, he has become a well-known businessman in Houston.

In early 2010, there were said to be 25 African basketball players in the NBA, which is about 1 out of 14. If true, that's quite a few, but looking at the Wikipedia page, it looks more like there 25 in history.

The odd thing, though, is that Olajuwon, the pathfinder, remains, by a significant distance, the best black African basketball player ever. (The only born-in-Africa player since him to win MVP awards is Steve Nash, who is white.) That's what I wouldn't have expected in 1981. If you had told me then that he would be an NBA superstar, I would have guessed that somebody even better would have come along from Africa since then.

But, that hasn't really happened.

How come? Here are some speculations:

First, Olajuwon was really, really good. And he kept perfecting new moves up into his 30s. So, the first being the best was just a fluke.

Second, basketball may have changed a little since his time, away from being a game for big galoots from wherever toward players who are more sophisticated basketball players. Most sports have become more technical, with more tutoring used early in life.

Third, Africans tend to be quite short due to poor nutrition and poor health.

Fourth, AIDS, although the West African countries weren't hit as catastrophically.

Fifth, soccer is just a steamroller in Africa (as in most of the world), so even big galoots aren't playing basketball.

Sixth, maybe there are differences between African-Americans and Africans that weren't apparent in 1981.

Also, African stars in the NBA tend to be from the upper classes in Africa: Olajuwon's father was a big businessman, Dikembe Mutombo's father graduated from the Sorbonne, and Luol Deng's father was a Sudanese cabinet officer and diplomat in Sudan and Deng mostly grew up in London.

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

Evolution of African American genes

2012-01-02T11:33:00.002-08:00

Nicholas Wade, who is retiring from the New York Times, has an NYT article on recent evolution among African-Americans since arriving in the New World. The most obvious is for a decrease in the sickle cell gene variant, because the worst kind malaria is much less of a problem here, so the crude and dangerous sickle cell defense is overkill.

There is tentative evidence for evolution of more defenses against influenza -- in general, blacks had a hard time surviving in the North due to respiratory tract infections, which is one reason slavery faded out in the North, which something they ought to teach you when you study the Civil War.

There is some arguable evidence for selection in a direction associated with particular African-American medical problems, such as hypertension and prostate cancer. Presumably, there were more than offsetting benefits. Prostate cancer correlates somewhat with higher levels of male hormones and hormone receptors, which (and this is a real stretch) might suggest that something (whether medical, climate, social, or cultural) in New World or North American environments was selecting for more masculinity among black men (or selecting for something else for which the cost was higher prostate cancer rates).

The chain of evidence for my surmise is extremely tenuous, but might go some way toward explaining a little bit about how some African-Americans wound up as global pop culture icons of masculinity.

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

The wheels of justice grind slowly

2011-12-31T14:47:00.003-08:00

I've never had a very strong opinion on the lawsuit of the man in Connecticut who scored too high on an IQ test to be a cop, but I've been hearing about it for 15 years, So, for completeness sake: here's the final outcome:

Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Most Cops Just Above Normal The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

Jordan alleged his rejection from the police force was discrimination. He sued the city, saying his civil rights were violated because he was denied equal protection under the law.
But the U.S. District Court found that New London had “shown a rational basis for the policy.” In a ruling dated Aug. 23, the 2nd Circuit agreed. The court said the policy might be unwise but was a rational way to reduce job turnover.

Jordan has worked as a prison guard since he took the test.

If he were really smart, he'd have figured out he needed to tank the test.

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

If I say so myself

2011-12-30T21:18:00.000-08:00

The NYT features an essay by Thomas Vinciguera, "30 Years Later, Revisiting 'Brideshead,'" on the famous 1982 miniseries of the Evelyn Waugh novel. The last paragraph includes a particularly insightful quote, if I say so myself.

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

Are Republicans or Democrats fatter?

2011-12-30T17:33:00.004-08:00

I got to wondering about this crucial question while sipping on an eggnog and reading an L.A. Times article about the most and least obese communities in Los Angeles County. The skinniest is Manhattan Beach, south of LAX at only 4% obese. It's popular with NHL players and others who like to run on the beach between zipping to the airport. Manhattan Beach went for Obama in 2008, but until then it had been a rare reliable Republican outpost on the West Side.

The fattest town in L.A. County is Bell Gardens, a 96% Latino inland city, at 36% obese. Bell Gardens consistently votes Democratic.

In general, people in L.A. are not terribly fat by modern American standards. At 6-4 and 200 pounds (which sounds pretty good, because you are used to reading height-weight combinations for broad-shouldered, low-body fat athletes, not for narrow-shouldered pundits), I feel like Gozer the Gozerian reincarnated as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man when I waddle down Ventura Blvd.

Much of Democrats' feelings of superiority are tied into the observation that Red States are generally fatter than Blue States. But, that's a lot like the popular Red State - Blue State IQ hoax that went around after the 2004 election: Blacks and Latinos simply aren't considered in the average white Democrat's mental picture of why Democrats are better. Moreover, among whites in Red States, Republicans tend to be better educated and, likely, skinnier.

On the other hand, Republicans are more likely to be married. As comedian Emo noted back in the 1980s: "My sister and her husband just found out they haven't been legally married for the last ten years because the minister who married them was a fraud. It's really sad. Now, she'll have to lose all that weight."

So, it's hard to say for sure. There's probably something in the GSS about this. Joseph Fried's book on Republicans and Democrats says that the weight of evidence suggests that Democrats are a little fatter, but it's probably a pretty close run thing.

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

The politics of Ron Paul's foreign policy

2011-12-30T16:29:00.001-08:00

Richard A. Oppel of the New York Times offers a commendable article on the appeal of Ron Paul's foreign policy:

One recent national poll by ABC News and The Washington Post found that 45 percent of Republicans and independents who lean Republican said Mr. Paul’s opposition to American military interventions overseas was a major reason to oppose his candidacy, compared with the 29 percent who saw it as a major reason to support him. ...

... He also said military service members favored Mr. Paul in donations to Republican candidates. While there is no way to prove this because only itemized donations over $200 require occupations to be listed — information that is self-reported — a review by The New York Times of federal contributions suggests that active-duty and retired service members overwhelmingly lean to Mr. Paul. He received at least $115,000 in itemized contributions through Sept. 30, almost double that of all other Republican candidates combined.

So, Paul's stance on the military interventions abroad represents almost 1/3rd of the right half of the electorate who have a strong opinion on the subject, including a significant fraction of politically engaged service members: a losing total, but still a significant segment of public opinion that is represented by few other voices.

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

Waiting for SuperMandarin

2011-12-30T13:42:00.002-08:00

A reader writes:

"Can you call 'em or what? I just happened to re-read your review of the education documentary Waiting for Superman last night. You talked about how the director [Davis Guggenheim] drove past 3 public schools in his area [the L.A. beach community of Venice] because they supposedly had "bad teachers" to send his kid to a private school. You said that instead of "bad teachers", the reason he avoided those schools was likely because their enrollments were nearly all NAM. And you pointed out that one of the schools was starting a Mandarin immersion program, and that they might be doing that to attract higher scoring kids.

"Now, today's LA Times has an article about that very program, and how popular it is, and guess what? Almost everyone in the immersion program is white or Asian:"

Broadway Elementary last year joined the ranks of more than 200 schools across the state to offer a dual-language immersion program in which students learn in two languages with the goal of becoming academically proficient in both. In the school's "50-50" program, teachers who use Mandarin in the classroom and those whose instruction is in English are paired, and students spend half their day with each.

Broadway began the program to help boost plummeting enrollment — the school had reached a low of 257 students in 2008-09. The experiment worked — maybe too well.
With about 130 students in the Mandarin program so far, school enrollment is now at 330. Principal Susan Wang is concerned that the dual-language learners will outnumber the students in the regular school classes. And, by 2013-14, she figures that the Mandarin program will need a bigger home.

The newcomers to the Mandarin program also changed the demographics of the little neighborhood school. In 2009, 81% of Broadway's students were Latino, 15% were black, six were white and none were Asian. The next year, the new classes of Mandarin immersion students were almost exclusively white and Asian.

I don't disapprove of the contortions that affluent beach-town liberals go through to keep their kids out of classrooms dominated by the children of illegal Mexican immigrants. What I do disapprove of is how those same people demonize less-privileged Americans who want a little of the same thing for their own children when they ask for our border laws to be enforced.

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

iSteviest movies of 2011

2011-12-30T02:11:00.003-08:00

It's always fun to try to guess who is influenced by your stuff, whether directly or indirectly. In 2011 movies, If I had to guess, I'd look to the screenplays of three of the more interesting movies of the summer: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class, and Bad Teacher. (By the way, all three made at least $100 million at the domestic box office.) And maybe a little bit toward two fine indie films: The Guard and Win Win.

On the other hand, even I can't see much of my influence on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but, who knows?

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

NYT's Question "Should the World of Toys Be Gender-Free?"

2011-12-30T01:21:00.000-08:00

Children of the World's Answer: "No."

(You can read the NYT's op-ed there, but it never answers every parent's question: How do you get children to want gender-free toys? You can read about my failures trying here.)

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

Tonight's biggest WaPo story

2011-12-28T19:46:00.001-08:00

Here's the banner headline across the top of WashingtonPost.com:

In Washington, wide gaps in school discipline

Donna St. George 6:15 PM ET

Data suggest African American students are two to five times more likely to get suspended or expelled as their white peers, and that the gap exists across the region's urban, suburban and rural school districts.
Infographic: Comparing student suspension rates by groups in area schools

Fortunately, the Obama Administration is on the case!

Seriously, this article is a classic in the genre of Nobody Ever Learns Anything.

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

NYT starting to get it?

2011-12-28T12:52:00.001-08:00

The Washington Post has an article on a Pew Hispanic Center poll that gives the usual Rolodex Spin garnered from talking to self-proclaimed Hispanic Leaders about What Hispanics Want (More Hispanics!):

President Obama holds a wide lead among Hispanic voters when matched against potential Republican challengers, even as widespread opposition to his administration’s stepped-up deportation policies act as a drag on his approval ratings among these voters, according to a new poll.

Surprisingly, Julia Preston of the New York Times' article on the same poll comes out and says something I've been saying since 2002: When you ask Hispanic likely voters which issues are their priorities, Immigration generally comes in down around The Environment. The NYT explains

The Pew Hispanic poll offers some clues to why Mr. Obama’s immigration policy, which has been loudly criticized by many Latino organizations, has not done more to hurt his standing with Latino voters.

Among registered Latino voters, immigration is not a primary concern. For Latino voters, immigration is sixth in importance, the poll found.

Their top three issues are jobs, education and health care, the same issues identified as most important by Latino voters before the midterm elections in 2010 and the presidential vote in 2008, Pew pollsters found. On these issues, Latinos appear to trust Democrats more.

For years, a small number of unimportant, uncharismatic, uninfluential Latino "leaders" have been -- mostly by promptly returning phone calls from East Coast reporters -- conniving with the national media to whip up Hispanic racial fury. But, not many Hispanics read the Washington Post, apparently, so this seemingly dangerous campaign has had relatively little real world impact. In the world of campaign strategy talk, however, it has become mostly unchallenged wisdom.

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

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:" Fight the (Imaginary) Power

2011-12-27T21:17:00.004-08:00

From my review in Taki's Magazine of David Fincher's remake of the hit Swedish movie:

The more popular it is to worry over some organized threat, the less of a danger it likely is in reality. After all, if some group or institution were truly fearsome, most people would be terrified into silence or admiration.

For example, Dan Brown made a fortune off his The Da Vinci Code pulp novel during this low ebb of the Catholic Church’s powers with a tale of how a nearly omnipotent Church conspires to cover up the golden age of pagan feminism.

Of course, actual pagans traditionally complained that Christianity was too female-friendly. But Brown is practically Edward Gibbon compared to his successor as a global publishing sensation, the late Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or as it was originally titled in Sweden, Men Who Hate Women). Himself a hate-filled lefty nerd, Larsson concocted an elaborate fantasy world for true believers in the conventional wisdom.

Read the whole thing there.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo mania is one of these giant phenomena that is pretty funny when you get the joke, but almost nobody gets the joke (or, in this case, jokes).

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

The future of football

2011-12-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, the NFL signed gigantic new contracts with some of the TV networks that carry its games. The NFL's deep pockets are now reminiscent of those of the cigarette companies a generation ago, which attracted huge lawsuits. Legal battles over brain injuries appear inevitable.

Football is a helluva game, but it's time for its fans to start thinking about what parts of the game should and could be preserved to keep football from going the way of boxing.

For example, football is traditionally built around huge interior linemen colliding, but only the more knowledgeable fans watch line play. Most fans care most about passing and open field running. But the rules make the five interior linemen to be ineligible to receive passes, so, rather than spread linemen out where they could try to get open to catch passes, it makes sense to bunch them shoulder to shoulder for trench warfare. Perhaps an everybody eligible to receive rule would spread the game out. Or, perhaps, in the long run, there will be fewer players on the field and something resembling summer passing league play will emerge.

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

Obama's Popguns of Singapore

2011-12-21T19:58:00.009-08:00

From the NYT:

Countrywide Will Settle a Bias Suit

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday announced the largest residential fair-lending settlement in history, saying that Bank of America had agreed to pay $335 million to settle allegations that its Countrywide Financial unit discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers during the housing boom.

The British defense of Singapore after Pearl Harbor is famously (although not necessarily all that accurately) said to have suffered from the long-held assumption that Singapore's big guns must point out to sea to defeat an attack by an enemy navy. Yet, the Japanese army, not the navy, came by way of the Malaysian mainland.

Similarly, for decades, the conventional political wisdom was that the main problem with the mortgage business was its irrational refusal to do enough business with blacks and Hispanics. Thus, the government laboriously constructed legal and political guns to pound down this intractable problem.

Over time, the more politically nimble sort of lenders, such as Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, came around to the government's point of view that they were leaving money on the table. In 2003, Mozilo trumpeted in a Harvard address that Countrywide was going to lend $600 billion (with a b) to minorities and low income communities. And then in early 2005, Mozilo upped the commitment to a trillion bucks, with Countrywide's board member Henry Cisneros (Clinton Administration HUD secretary) delegated to advise him upon it.

When the mortgage system went into the ditch in the Sand States in 2007-2008, however, it turned out that the problem was largely one of lenders lending too much to minorities, which had driven up home prices to unsustainable levels.

Here we are in late 2011, and the Obama Administration has just fired one of its guns at the most notorious symbol of mortgage mania: Countrywide. Of course, its guns are still pointing in the wrong direction. More amusingly, the big gun turns out to be popguns.

A department investigation concluded that Countrywide loan officers and brokers charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk. Countrywide also steered more than 10,000 minority borrowers into costly subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit profiles received regular loans, it found.

Let's do some math: $335 million divided by 200,000 minority mortgage borrowers equals a $1,675.00 payout per victim of racism. That's out of 2.5 million mortgages examined, according to Business Insider. Hhmmhmmmhmm ... Keep that in mind as you read onward.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the settlement showed that the Justice Department would “vigorously pursue those who would take advantage of certain Americans because of their race, national origin, gender or disability,” adding: “Such conduct undercuts the notion of a level playing field for all consumers. It betrays the promise of equal opportunity that is enshrined in our Constitution and our legal framework.”

The settlement is subject to approval by a federal judge in California; according to the proposed consent order filed Wednesday, Countrywide denied all of the department’s allegations.

Dan Frahm, a Bank of America spokesman, stressed that the allegations were focused on Countrywide’s conduct from the years 2004 to 2008, before Bank of America purchased it. ...

The problems stemmed from a Countrywide policy that gave loan officers and brokers the discretion to alter the terms for which a particular applicant qualified without setting up any system to comply with fair-lending rules, the department said. Lending data showed that Countrywide ended up charging Hispanics and African-Americans more, on average, than white applicants with similar credit histories.

So, if you are Asian or white and you got cheated by Countrywide's boiler room operation into paying higher fees on your mortgage than you should have, you are out of luck because you are the wrong race?

Basically, Countrywide and independent mortgage brokers were running high pressure boiler rooms during the peak of the housing bubble. To up commissions, their salesmen often stuck a bunch of extra fees in the fine print. Moreover, they talked about 5% (10,000 out of 200,000 minority borrowers who extra fees) into getting subprime loans with higher interest rates who would have qualified for prime loans.

In 2007, for example, Countrywide employees charged Hispanic applicants in Los Angeles an average of $545 more in fees for a $200,000 loan than they charged non-Hispanic white applicants with similar credit histories.

Of course, the joke is that $545 in rip-off fees is a pittance compared to how much was lost on these loans on average.

Of course, it's not as if Countrywide tried to keep secret that they were going after minority borrowers.

For salesmen whose commissions pay off when fees are paid at closing, not when the borrowers write their monthly checks, being told to rope in marginal minority customers is like telling hyenas to eat raw meat. Countrywide's office in high-IQ Santa Monica was notoriously hard to make money at, but their Inglewood office in the 'hood brought in huge margins.

This is highly reminiscent of the argument between Malcolm Gladwell versus Judge Richard A. Posner and myself about whether or not car salesmen consciously exploit blacks and Hispanics. As Gladwell wrote in 2006:

One of the most bizarre reactions that I received from reviewers of Blink is an absolute inability to accept the notion of unconscious prejudice. Here is an example from a fairly well known writer named Steve Sailer. Sailer, in turns, quotes from a very hostile review of Blink in The New Republic by Richard Posner.

Posner and I said that of course car salesmen rip off blacks and Latinos consciously. While Gladwell claimed that the car salesmen who charge blacks and Latinos higher prices are, when you stop and think about it, the real victims. If only they had read Blink and realized that they were unconsciously assuming that blacks and Latinos were easier to rip off than, say, Armenians or Koreans, then they would have stopped doing it, and the car salesmen would have made more money!

Independent brokers processing applications for a Countrywide loan charged Hispanics $1,195 more, the department said. ...

Of course, a much higher fraction of the independent brokers exploiting Hispanics were Hispanics themselves. This shouldn't be a surprise: Countrywide issued many press releases over the years patting itself on the back for all its hiring of Hispanic salesmen and its efforts to find independent Hispanic brokers. The mortgage meltdown has some of the attributes of a classic affinity scam, like Mormons getting suckered by a Mormon conman.

“Chances are, the victims had no idea they were being victimized,” said Thomas E. Perez, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights. “It was discrimination with a smile.”

In addition, from 2004 to 2007 — the peak of Wall Street firms’ demand for subprime loans that they purchased, bundled and resold as securities, a major cause of the ensuing financial crisis ...

And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's peak demand, too, or that was more like 2005-2008. Countrywide was famously in bed with Fannie.

...— Countrywide allowed its brokers and employees to steer applicants who qualified for regular mortgages into a riskier and more expensive subprime loan.

The odds of a minority applicant being steered into such a loan were more than twice as high as those for a non-Hispanic white borrower with a similar credit rating, the department said. About two-thirds of the victims were Hispanic and one-third were black, the department said.

Oddly enough, steering into a subprime loan apparently only happened to about 5% of these minority victims of higher fees, and to only about 0.4% of all Countrywide borrowers examined by the Justice Dept. I'm surprised that percentage isn't higher. We've been hearing for years about how the foreclosure crisis was caused by minorities getting forced into subprime loans, but with notorious Countrywide, it was quite rare.

Now the Justice Department quantifies the discrimination and comes up with a price tag of $1,675 each -- a distinct anti-climax. I mean $335,000,000 is about Angelo Mozillo's compensation during the last decade even after his SEC mini-fine.

If a judge approves the settlement, victims will receive between several hundred and several thousand dollars, with larger amounts going to those who were steered into subprime mortgages despite qualifying for regular loans.

Let's repeat that: "several hundred and several thousand dollars:" not exactly a home run for Eric Holder's theory of what caused the meltdown; more like a foul tip.

... Under federal civil rights laws — including the Fair Housing and Equal Credit Opportunity acts — a lending practice is illegal if it has a disparate impact on minority borrowers. Against the backdrop of the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration has made a major effort to step up the laws’ enforcement.

So, it's a disparate impact case. I guess that's why white and Asian victims of being cheated by Countrywide can't get any compensation. The blacks and Hispanics are evidently getting paid the difference between what they paid in points and other mortgage fees and the average of what whites paid, not the difference between what they paid and what an honest broker would have charged them. What Countrywide should have done was rip off whites and Asians even more so then the Obama Justice Dept. wouldn't have a complaint.

In early 2010, the division created a unit to focus exclusively on banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority mortgage applicants, a type of litigation that requires extensive and complex analysis of data.

While they were crunching the numbers, perhaps they could have calculated the default rates on these loans. My guess is that even with the surplus origination fees Countrywide / Bank of America came out the loser in the long run due to defaults. (Of course, other losers include Fannie and the public.) To have had these risky mortgages make sense as paying propositions, Countrywide would have had to charge vastly higher fees.

Working with bank regulatory agencies and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the unit has reached settlements or filed complaints in 10 cases accusing a lender of engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination.

The Federal Reserve first detected statistical discrepancies in the loans Countrywide was making and referred the matter to the Justice Department in early 2007, according to a court filing disclosed in 2010 as part of a civil fraud case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide.

In other words, the normal federal regulatory system noticed this disparate impact problem in early 2007, well before Countrywide cratered in 2008. Good to know that the Feds were on the watch against the really important mortgage lending problem!

In summary, there's a general problem with rip-off sales practices, whether in mortgage lending or auto sales. Experience, however, shows that fighting rip-offs by focusing on discrimination is a losing proposition. What happens is that clever people rip off not clever people, which has disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics.

But the problem can't be explained that way, because then it leads to the inference that blacks and Hispanics are less clever on average. So, enforcement tapers off because the whole subject becomes too embarrassing.

Clearly, the anti-discrimination method of regulating mortgage lenders turned out to be extremely bad as a way to prevent boiler room fraud and excess. It was not uncommon for lenders to respond to complaints about predatory lending to minorities by saying, "Okay, we'll lend more to minorities. (Fannie is buying!) And we'll hire some of your NGO's foot soldiers as loan counselors. And maybe make a donation to your fine organization. After all, we all have to do our part in fighting racist redlining."

We need instead to say that the clever shouldn't rip off the clueless, and it doesn't matter what races the clever and the clueless belong to. We all get clueless in the end.

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

"Nature's Tory"

2011-12-21T16:06:00.001-08:00

In Taki's Magazine, I offer an assessment, mostly appreciative, of Christopher Hitchens' literary criticism:

There wouldn’t seem to be much left to say about the late Christopher Hitchens after the countless tributes paid by other journalists about the night (or afternoon or morning) they got drunk with Hitch. Still, I want to call admiring attention to his taste in English literature.

Unable to boast of having downed a few with Hitchens myself, I tended to find much of his voluminous output over the last decade reminiscent of the legendary Private Eye reporter Phil Space. Yet in at least one venue, Hitchens demonstrated distinction. Just before 9/11, Benjamin Schwarz hired Hitchens to write a long monthly literary column for The Atlantic that showcased Hitchens’s combination of panache, pedantry, and lifelong conservatism.

Read the whole thing there.

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

New News!

2011-12-20T16:24:00.004-08:00

A reader writes:

Today's New York Times has a prominent article essentially transcribing an attack on Ron Paul by James Kirchick (Marty Peretz's boy toy) that just appeared in the Weekly Standard (which was itself a rewrite of an old piece from the New Republic). Funny how publications of the left (the Times), the center (TNR) and the right (the Standard) all find common ground when someone like Paul emerges ...

Here's the News Story that was splashed heavily at the top of NYTimes.com last night:

New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters

By JIM RUTENBERG and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Emerging as a real Republican contender in Iowa, Representative Ron Paul of Texas is receiving new focus for decades-old unbylined columns in his political newsletters that included racist, anti-gay and anti-Israel passages that he has since disavowed.

The latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative publication, reprised reports of incendiary language in Mr. Paul’s newsletters that were published about 20 years ago.

A 1992 passage from the Ron Paul Political Report about the Los Angeles riots

which largely stopped on May 1, 1992

read, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”

Disrespect toward looters and race rioters is beyond the pale!

A passage in another newsletter asserted that people with AIDS should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva”;

When everybody knows (or at least has been told, over and over) that AIDS can be transmitted by heterosexual sex as easily as by homosexual practices. What, do you think the HIV virus discriminates? To say that would be insensitive toward the HIV virus, libeling it by making it sound like Ron Paul.

in 1990 one of his publications criticized Ronald Reagan for having gone along with the creation of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which it called “Hate Whitey Day.”

In contrast to December 1st, International AIDS Day, which the press celebrates annually as Hate Ronnie Day because Ronald Reagan caused the AIDS epidemic. (If you have doubts that it was Reagan's fault, then who are you going to blame? Gays? I don't think so.)

Here's the good part of New York Times article:

The magazine article largely matched a similar report in The New Republic in 2008, and it was written by the same author, James Kirchick.

Hey, I've got some four year old articles I'd like to recycle, too! Can I republish them in the Weekly Standard and then get them hyped in the NYT?

The passages were plucked from a variety of newsletters that Mr. Paul’s consulting business published during his years out of Congress, all of them featuring his name: Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report and Ron Paul Investment Letter.

Mr. Paul did not respond to an interview request, but repudiated the writings in 2008. Likening himself to a major news publisher, he said he did not vet every article that was featured in his newsletters. “I absolutely, honestly do not know who wrote those things,” Mr. Paul said in an interview on CNN at the time, adding that he did not monitor the publications closely because he was busy with a medical practice and “speeches around the country.”

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

DSK: "La danse de joie"

2011-12-19T22:36:00.006-08:00

Here's Sofitel security camera video from the day of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest last May. It was broadcast on France's BFM-TV. Starting a little after 3:00 minutes into the video, you can see what BFM calls "The Dance of Joy:" after Sofitel management calls the NYPD to have the IMF supremo / French presidential frontrunner arrested, two burly Sofitel employees in suits who had been escorting the complainant maid step into a back room and celebrate. The big black guy wraps the big white guy in a bear hug, lifts him into the air, spins him around, and then does what looks like either an NFL touchdown dance or the Charleston.

The Daily Beast reports:

The two employees said they couldn’t recall the exact reason for their fleeting celebratory behavior but that they believed it may have involved sports, which they frequently talked about, the source said.

Okay, well that clears that up. Glad we won't have to listen to conspiracy nuts yammering on about their crazy conspiracy theories. Amy Davidson at The New Yorker in "A Dance to the Music of Conspiracy" finds the sports talk explanation more plausible than the suspicion that DSK might have been set-up:

Once you’ve accounted for the jerkiness of the video, it doesn’t seem outlandish, given the sorts of things men do in New York, particularly when talking about sports.

A commenter at The New Yorker adds that Edward Jay Epstein, who brought up the dance of joy in a New York Review of Books article, is a conspiracy theorist:

Many years ago, Mr. Epstein had written about the diamond industry. I knew a top adviser for De Beers,who couldn't believe how Mr. Epstein had invented so many details to support his claims. The adviser decided then that he would never again read anything written by this conspiracy theorist. He called Epstein a "sensationalist". I myself wonder why the NYRB would publish an article that had nothing to do with books.

If you can't trust "a top adviser for De Beers," who can you trust? Certainly not a wacko investigative journalist like Epstein who published some nutty theory in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982 that De Beers was a giant conspiracy to prop up the price of diamonds via a global diamond cartel. After all, the reason De Beers top executives never set foot in America during the second half of the 20th Century is, well, you know, just one of those things. I can't recall the exact reason for De Beers executives' fleeting behavior of avoiding anywhere they could have been served with a subpoena for Sherman Anti-Trust Act violations, but I believe it may have involved sports.

P.S., a commenter points out that Epstein's website has more videos that allow you to better evaluate the competing theories.

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

Somebody else finally picks up the Indian PISA score story

2011-12-19T21:19:00.007-08:00

Last week, the Australian Council for Education Research put out a glossy, voluminous report updating the 2009 PISA school achievement test conducted by the deep-pocketed OECD. ACER reported on ten more "economies," including two middling Indian states, which came in next to last out of 74 countries or regions.

Since I've been interested in China v. India for years, that struck me as pretty big news (so I blogged about it at length here), but it didn't impress the rest of the Internet, apparently. Finally today, according to Google News, somebody else mentioned it. Here's an editorial from an Indian publication called LiveMint that draws an appropriate lesson: India needs to get its act together.

There are few urban legends about India quite as destructive as the one that leads us to believe that the education system is doing a good job of educating our children. Coming on the heels of a comprehensive study, which exposed how poorly our kids were doing in some of the country’s best schools, is an international study that evaluates 15-year-olds’ skills in reading and mathematical and scientific literacy on a comparative basis—and India didn’t do any better here.

... In India, only two states, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, were part of the survey. Now, these are both states that are thought to offer the best educational infrastructure to schoolchildren in the country. But the results on a global scale are abysmal, with Himachal Pradesh recording the lowest reading score in PISA 2009 and 2009+, on a par with Kyrgyzstan. Tamil Nadu did slightly better with its overall score, which was nonetheless lower than any other country’s, besides Kyrgyzstan. One shudders to think of the results in states with worse general indicators than these two, such as Rajasthan or Bihar.

... A lot of success stories we hear are despite the system, not because of it, and the sooner we recognize that, the better the chances that we’ll do something to fix the status quo.

The current state of affairs will lead to a future where we will have let down millions of young Indians, who will be shut out of the job market because they were failed by the state. The demographic dividend we keep talking about— the one that’s going to give us an edge over China in the decades to come—is going to be more of a demographic disaster if we cannot equip our young people with the skills required in this new global economy. The government must make school education a priority if it is to arrest the decline of this most valuable of institutions.

My vague impression is that Indians tend to make more sophisticated marketers than Chinese do. One American consultant said that the typical Chinese factory owner's idea of marketing is: "Real cheap! You buy now!" But it's important for Indians not to fall for their own marketing. India needs less spin and more China-like grim determination if it's going to improve its fundamental institutions.

By the way, all the talk in the press about Indian benefiting from a "demographic dividend" of a rapidly growing population is respectable Davos Man craziness at its craziest.

More generally, India conforms to the Davos model of elite advancement while not talking about the masses because we, uh, don't want to hurt their feelings. In contrast, Dengist China conforms more to old-fashioned nationalism -- the kind of thing that worked in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Germany, and, perhaps most of all, in pre-1846 England and in pre-1960s USA.

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

PISA: What about the rest of China?

2011-12-18T23:01:00.001-08:00

The news that two states in India took the PISA test of 15-year-olds' school achievement in 2009 and bombed raises the question once again of China. As everybody remembers from a year ago, 2009 scores from Shanghai were released and they were higher than any country in the world. But what about the rest of China? Obviously, Shanghai is a dazzling place, but a lot of China is still stuck knee-deep in rice paddies. What about them?

I stumbled upon this year-old blog post by Anatoly Karlin of Sublime Oblivion, which relays a big hint:

As regular blog readers know, I think that educational capital and more broadly average IQ levels are one of the key – and frequently under-appreciated due to political correctness – determinants of economic development and whether or not convergence to developed country levels is even possible. Its much higher educational capital is one of the key reasons why I think China will continue doing much better than India in development, regardless of its “democratic deficit.” However, many people argue that China’s human capital must actually be quite low, because it doesn’t spend much on education, resources are bare in the provinces, statistical fudging under unaccountable governors, etc.

The recent results from the international standardized PISA tests in math, reading and science will make this an increasingly untenable position. Shanghai got by far the best results out of all the OECD countries (never mind the developing ones). . Now while you might (rightly) argue Shanghai draws much of the elite of the Yangtze river delta, the Financial Times has more: “Citing further, as-yet unpublished OECD research, Mr Schleicher said: “We have actually done Pisa in 12 of the provinces in China. Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average.””

Since countries like the US and France get scores “close to the OECD average”, this means that the workforces soon to be entering China’s economy, even from its poorest regions, will be no less skilled than those of leading Western economies (note too that the numbers of Chinese university graduates are soaring). And with China’s massive population, four times bigger than America’s, its road to superpowerdom must be all but guaranteed.

Okay, there are a few leaps of faith there, but that's still news worth knowing. At minimum, it reduces the chances that the Shanghai numbers were a con job. At median, it suggests that we check twice before reflexively equating China and India. At maximum, it suggests, as Karlin says, that "resource constraints" are going to be perhaps the big issue of the 21st Century. It's a little hard to be certain what "Even in some of the very poor areas you get performance close to the OECD average" means, but it sounds pretty good.

The logic of using international test scores to predict future wealth is not that the causation runs only in one direction, from high test scores to wealth. Obviously, it runs in both directions. (For example, affluent Chinese have traditionally hired tutors to raise their children's test results.) But, if there are a whole bunch of poor farm kids in inland China who are scoring like kids in Europe and North America right now, well, that's worth knowing.

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

Who says there are few Spanish-surnamed rich people in Silicon Valley?

2011-12-17T17:36:00.003-08:00

From the NYT:

Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, with her husband, Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder, says that she was drawn to philanthropy because of her mother's early death from cancer.

John Arrillaga, her real estate developer dad, is one of the two Spanish-surnamed people on the Forbes 400. His parents were Basques born in Spain. Last I checked, the other Spanish-surnamed billionaire is billboard king Arte Moreno, a genuine Mexican-American, who, as owner of the California Angels, is going to pay a quarter of a billion to slugger Albert Pujols.

Here's Razib on the distinctive Basque DNA, although I must say that Ms. Arrillaga-Andreesen doesn't look too different from most rich men's wives / daughters.

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

The typical opening line of a Christopher Hitchens tribute

2011-12-17T16:20:00.005-08:00

From Slate, a representative example from this insiders' orgy of name-dropping and one-upmanship:

I first met Christopher on the set of the Charlie Rose show at a low point early in my career of provocation.

In other words, did I mention I was on the Charlie Rose show? With Christopher? (As we Charlie Rose show regulars / close friends know, only his first name is necessary.) Did I point out how provocative I am? And did you notice that my fabulous career is no longer at a low point? And did I make clear that even at that low point, I was still getting on the Charlie Rose show?

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

Mexican mediocrity quantified

2011-12-17T15:03:00.002-08:00

Something I noticed last year when looking at 2009 PISA school achievement scores is the virtual non-existence of Mexico's intellectual elite. Mexico's average scores on this school achievement test of 15-year-olds were mediocre, but the lack of high end scores was startling, compared to a similar scoring country like Turkey, where there is a definite class of very smart Turks. Obviously, there is a stunning shortage of very high-achieving Mexican Americans in the U.S., but I had tended to assume that the really smart guys who run things in Mexico were just foisting off their mediocre people on the U.S. Yet, it's hard to find test score evidence that there are many really smart guys in Mexico at all. This is not to say the average Mexican is all that uneducated by global standards, just that the far right end of the bell curve in Mexico is a lot thinner than you'd expect.

Perhaps this is just an illusion because all the schools in Mexico with smart students refuse to participate in international tests? The public school teachers union in Mexico is hilariously awful: many teaching jobs are hereditary, and if your heirs don't want your teaching job after you die, they can auction it off to the highest bidder. But the overall performance of Mexican students on the PISA isn't terrible (it's a lot worse than the performance of Hispanics in the U.S. on the PISA, but not miserable by Latin American standards).

Yet, here's a 2008 paper on the same subject that takes the lack of cognitive superstars in Mexico seriously:

Producing superstars for the economic Mundial: The Mexican Predicament with quality of education

Lant Pritchett and Martina Viarengo
Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government
November 19, 2008

Abstract. The question of how to build the capabilities to both initiate a resurgence of growth and facilitate Mexico’s transition into a broader set of growth enhancing industries and activities is pressing. In this regard it seems important to understand the quality of the skills of the labor force. Moreover, in increasingly knowledge based economies it is not just the skills of the typical worker than matter, but also the skills of the most highly skilled. While everyone is aware of the lagging performance of Mexico on internationally comparable examinations like the PISA, what has been less explored is the consequence of that for the absolute number of very highly skilled. We examine how many students Mexico produces per year above the “high international benchmark” of the PISA in mathematics. While the calculations are somewhat crude and only indicative, our estimates are that Mexico produces only between 3,500 and 6,000 students per year above the high international benchmark (of a cohort of roughly 2 million [which is about half America's cohort of around 4 million]). In spite of educational performance that is widely lamented within the USA, it produces a quarter of a million, Korea 125,000 and even India, who in general has much worse performance on average, produces over 100,000 high performance in math students per year. The issue is not about math per se, this is just an illustration and we feel similar findings would hold in other domains. The consequences of the dearth of globally competitive human capital are explored, with an emphasis on the rise of super star phenomena in labor markets (best documented in the USA). Finally, we explore the educational policies that one might consider to focus on the upper tail of performance, which are at odds with much of the “quality” focus of typical educational policies which are often remedial and focused on the lower, not upper tail of performance.

I don't know what the full story is here. Perhaps Mexican elites are just lazy, and they set a bad example for the Mexican masses?

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

PISA scores: 2 Indian states flop

2011-12-17T01:05:00.007-08:00

The conventional wisdom expressed in Obama Administration speeches and the like is that American students get crushed by kids in China and India on international tests of school achievement. But the evidence for this is not as abundant as you might assume ... especially not for India. While the city of Shanghai shot the lights out on the 2009 PISA, test scores haven't been released for other parts of China.

But, Westerners going back to Marco Polo have generally assumed the Chinese have a lot on the ball, so they are likely to do pretty well.

What about India, the other giga-country? I first noticed in early 1981 that there were a lot of smart Indians in the U.S., and over the decades this has become a cliche.

But, what about India itself? India has never participated as a country in broad-based international tests.

The future of India is A) an intrinsically interesting subject; B) one that could make or lose you a lot of money; C) could make or lose the whole world a lot of money (just as the widespread assumption that the population of the Sand States could pay back those big mortgages proved costly for everyone, so could an unrealistic assumption down the road that the Indian masses are ready for big loans could spark a future global bubble and bust).

Last year, I pointed out in VDARE that TIMSS had been given unofficially in two Indian states, Orissa and Rajasthan, and both had done badly.

Now the OECD has released 2009 PISA test scores for 15-year-olds for ten more places, two of them Indian states. The new news is that the Indian states, Tamil Nadu in the southeast (east of Bangalore, the technology center) and Himachal Pradesh, a Hindu state in the Deep North, did miserably, fighting it out with Kyrgyzstan for last place out of 74 countries or regions on all three tests: reading, math, and science. (Not surprisingly, the southern state beat the northern state on all three tests.)

And there isn't much inequality in the Indian scores: it's not like some geniuses in these states score high but the places are dragged down by illiterates. There are a lot of illiterates, of course, but almost nobody scores at the top level, at least not in the schools where these tests were given. (Allow me to insert here my usual caveat about testing, which is that an 80/20 rule applies to methodology: it's pretty easy to get a crudely accurate picture, but really hard to get a highly accurate one. For example, how representative were the tested students in India? Beats me.)

Here's the 13 meg PDF.

India ought to be able to do better than score at sub-Saharan levels. Indians in other countries do better. For example, this same report has Mauritius, a mixed race country in the middle of the Indian Ocean where 52% of the population is Hindu, scoring like a Latin American country rather than a sub-Saharan African country.

But, India itself has a long way to go. It's likely to take 1-2 generations to get India up to speed, and we don't really know what up to speed for India means yet.

In other news from this report by Australians on the additional ten marginal places to take the test, Costa Rica does pretty good for a Latin American country (as stereotypes of Costa Rica as a nice place would suggest), Malta does okay, the rich United Arab Emirates do pretty good for an Arab place, and Moldova and Georgia do very bad for white countries.

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

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

2011-12-16T15:19:00.031-08:00

Slate today has 26 articles on the late Christopher Hitchens. For an "iconoclast," he seems awfully popular with everybody who is anybody.

Perhaps I may be forgiven for offering a more critical assessment of the critic and pundit.

Hitchens getting the Iraq War catastrophically wrong evidently had minimal impact on his celebrity. Of course, it's fair to ask: has anybody's career suffered from getting Iraq wrong? Has anybody's career prospered from getting Iraq right, other than maybe Obama for giving a single speech against it?

On the other hand, as a long-time Trotskyite critic of American imperialism, Hitchens' accomplishment in getting Iraq wrong was a singularly epic own-goal. It's almost as ridiculous as it would have been if Noam Chomsky had suddenly decided in the early 2000s that the single American foreign policy effort he would support in his lifetime would be stupidest one of all. Of course, Chomsky didn't get Iraq wrong, and he is deeply resented in the Washington Post-owned media for finally being clearly right. Hitchens did get Iraq wrong, and is a saint to the mainstream media.

More generally, English journalists tend to be better than American journalists at using the English language, whether on paper or in person, whether sober or drunk. Thus, I must confess that I could never quite grasp why Christopher Hitchens, out of all the talented English journalists in the world, was so celebrated. He was quite good, but they're all pretty good (his uncelebrated brother Peter Hitchens is the obvious contrast). After awhile, I guess, C. Hitchens was famous for being famous. By random luck, somebody has to be.

It certainly helped that he kept shifting around -- moving to America, deciding he was ethnically Jewish, becoming a neocon, etc etc -- so he could keep picking up new audiences who hadn't been so exposed to his Traditional English Journalist shtick and who weren't bored with his writing yet. (Like some other neocons, however, he retained part of his Trotskyite faith well into his neocon years. Here is Hitchens' 2004 tribute to Trotsky in The Atlantic.)

Perhaps the secret of Hitchens' fame was that he was at least satisfactory in both his roles as a journalist for hire and as a heavy-drinking celebrity. His many, many articles were, typically, more or less worth reading, even if I can't remember at the moment much of anything he's written. What is exceptional about Hitchens is that he managed to churn them out at great pace and with a level of quality okay for the Internet age while also going to endless parties, lunches, dinners, debates, symposiums, and television appearances. In other words, Hitchens was good enough at the conflicting duties he undertook.

Other English journalists have crashed and burned while trying to do both. For example, Anthony Haden-Guest (the illegitimate brother of mockumentary maker / aristocrat Christopher Guest, who is the Fifth Baron of Saling) made a huge splash on the New York literary party circuit when he arrived a generation ago. Tom Wolfe was so amused by him that he sponsored his entry into New York cafe society, but both Haden-Guest's writing and charm fell off under the strain of non-stop partying. Wolfe wound up turning him into the character of the poisonous English journalist Peter Fallow in The Bonfire of the Vanities. (You'll sometimes see it stated that Hitchens was Wolfe's model for Fallow, but Haden-Guest was much more the original. But, Wolfe's larger point is that there are a whole bunch of English journalists of this ilk. Journalism is like acting in this regard: English culture is better at developing acting talent than is American culture.)

In contrast, Hitchens managed to walk the tightrope of being good enough at both celebrityhood and journalism, which speaks well of his energy and resilience.

Hitchens' long track record of sniffing out the current most lucrative ideological position in the Anglo-American journalism industry wasn't, so far as I can tell, driven by mercenary motives. He seemed sincere, but his underlying motivations for his ideological changes tended to be absurdly personal.

For example, Christopher's conversion from scourge to advocate of American imperialism was related to his sibling rivalry over his parent's affections that he waged with his level-headed brother Peter, who took after their level-headed father. In contrast, Christopher identified with his troubled mother, who killed herself in Cyprus. Christopher later discovered that their mother was about 1/8th Jewish, but solely through the female line, thus giving him a rabbinically orthodox claim to Jewishness. From the Jewish Telegraph Agency's obituary: "Despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to Halacha, he was Jewish."

His brother Peter found this deduction about their mutual ethnicity to be eye-rolling. But this genealogical discovery helped grease the skids for Christopher's conversion to neocon invade-the-worldism.

Here is the remarkable 2005 transcript of the first meeting of the Hitchens Brothers after years of estrangement. As I remarked at the time:

I've pointed out that what might look like ideological clashes on the surface are often actually just rationalizations for ethnic clashes between extended families, but the Hitchens Brothers represent an interesting case of an ethnic clash between brothers within a nuclear family. Peter was the favorite of their English father, Christopher of their [slightly] Jewish mother. Christopher is still an atheist, but as Paul Johnson pointed out in his "History of the Jews," it's been common down through the centuries for young atheist intellectuals to become more focused on Jewish ethnic interests as they age, without necessarily becoming theists. The conversion to the ideology of neoconism of Christopher, who, despite his hatred of religion, has taken to dropping in to synagogues as he travels to express his ethnic solidarity, is a good example of this venerable tendency toward gerontocratic ethnocentrism.

As a journalist, Hitchens always struck me as fairly comparable to his former colleague at The Nation, Alexander Cockburn. (In fact, I got them confused a lot up through about 1999, partly because their views were similar and because there are three Cockburn Brother journalists and two Hitchens Brothers journalists.) Hitchens would have killed to be the first cousin once-removed of Evelyn Waugh like the Cockburn Brothers are. (And Alexander's niece is movie starlet Olivia Wilde.) Being the son of communist Claude Cockburn and the relative of the reactionary Waugh is the epitome of Hitchens' combination of bloodthirsty politics and conservative literary culture.

But, Cockburn was right about Iraq, so don't expect him to get one-tenth of the same sendoff from the mainstream media when he kicks the bucket.

P.S., from Cockburn's "Farewell to C.H.:"

I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff.

That seems reasonable. Hitchens was a talented, energetic, clubbable fellow who wanted to be an insider and got what he wanted. So, he's worth studying to understand what is Inside these days.

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

Good news that nobody knows

2011-12-15T23:47:00.001-08:00

The black teenage birthrate has fallen sharply since the annus horribilis of 1991. Back at the peak of the Crack Era, 86 of every 1000 black girls from 15 to 17 gave birth, versus only 32 in 2009:

It's important, however, to note that the 1991 number represented a spike in teen fertility among blacks, up over the 1980s and well above the late 1990s. Nobody seems to know why that happened. One guess is that black girls in 1991 found crack dealers sexy, but changed their minds rather quickly. Another is that the FDA's approval of the Depo-Provera shot in 1992 was the turning point. The welfare cutbacks of the mid-1990s certainly played a role.

Among 18-19 year olds, the fall hasn't been quite as steep:

The subprime bubble of the middle of the last decade appears to have inflated Hispanic teen fertility -- thus the sharp drop among Hispanics from 2007 to 2009.

Nobody these days seems to know anything about fertility trends, although it's hard to think of anything more important.

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

Was DSK set up by Sarkozy?

2011-12-15T20:59:00.004-08:00

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn brouhaha of earlier this year, in which the most likely opponent of Sarkozy in next year's French presidential elections was thrown in jail on a charge of rape that was later tossed out, remains unexplained.

In the New York Review of Books, veteran investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein tries to connect the dots back to Sarkozy:

According to several sources who are close to DSK, he had received a text message that morning from Paris from a woman friend temporarily working as a researcher at the Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozy’s center-right political party. She warned DSK, who was then pulling ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris.1 It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming.

As I pointed out last Spring, surely the Sofitel management must have contacted management in Paris in the hour between the maid (or whatever she was) talking to management and the time the hotel called the NYPD. Epstein has the same suspicion, although he can't quite prove it:

Shortly thereafter the hotel’s own security team was augmented by John Sheehan, a security expert who is identified on LinkedIn as “director of safety and security” at Accor, a part of the French-based Accor Group, which owns the Sofitel. Sheehan, who was at home in Washingtonville, New York, that morning, received a call from the Sofitel at 1:03 PM. He then rushed to the hotel. While en route, according to his cell phone records, he called a number with a 646 prefix in the United States. But from these records neither the name nor the location of the person he called can be determined. When I called the number a man with a heavy French accent answered and asked whom I wanted to speak with at Accor.

The man I asked to talk to—and to whom I was not put through—was René-Georges Querry, Sheehan’s ultimate superior at Accor and a well-connected former chief of the French anti-gang brigades, who was now head of security for the Accor Group. Before joining Accor Group in 2003, he had worked closely in the police with Ange Mancini, who is now coordinator for intelligence for President Sarkozy. Querry, at the time that Sheehan was making his call to the 646 number, was arriving at a soccer match in Paris where he would be seated in the box of President Sarkozy. Querry denies receiving any information about the unfolding drama at the Sofitel until after DSK was taken into custody about four hours later. ...

Interesting, but when you go high enough up the pyramid, everybody knows everybody else, so that's not convincing.

At 1:28, Sheehan, still on the way to the hotel, sent a text message to Yearwood [the hotel engineer]. And then another text message to an unidentified recipient at 1:30. At 1:31—one hour after Diallo had first told a supervisor that she had been assaulted by the client in the presidential suite—Adrian Branch placed a 911 call to the police. Less than two minutes later, the footage from the two surveillance cameras shows Yearwood and an unidentified man walking from the security office to an adjacent area. This is the same unidentified man who had accompanied Diallo to the security office at 12:52 PM. There, the two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes.*

Three minutes?

The NYRoB footnote reads:

Editors’ note: The article entitled “What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn,” by Edward Jay Epstein, which appeared in our December 22, 2011, issue, contained a description of what “looked like” a “dance of celebration” by two employees of the Hotel Sofitel in New York City at approximately 1:35 PM on the day that Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in connection with an alleged sexual assault. Security camera recordings have established that the episode, as described, lasted approximately thirteen seconds, not the three minutes mentioned in the article.

Well, 13 seconds sounds more plausible. But I can imagine how Epstein must have felt watching the Sofitel security camera tapes when suddenly these two Sofitel guys start high-fiving right after the cops are called. It must have seemed like 180 seconds to him.

He then implies that maybe the whole thing was coordinated by somebody in the room down the hall from DSK, which the complainant visited right before and after her encounter with the energetic DSK. And DSK's missing Blackberry has never turned up. Its GPS tracking device was turned off during this sequence of events.

So, no smoking gun, but it's pretty interesting. I imagine Julian Assange and Elliott Spitzer are reading this with some interest, too.

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

Municipal coup

2011-12-15T17:35:00.003-08:00

I've long been interested in the topic of municipal coups, in which somebody overthrows a corrupt and incompetent local government and then afterwards, everybody acts as if nothing out-of-the-ordinary happened. For example, the feds setting up Mayor Marion Barry of Washington D.C. in 1990. After WWII, returning veterans organized to rid more than a few hometowns of corrupt mayors and police, much like Frodo and friends do in the Scouring of the Shire conclusion to Lord of the Rings. San Francisco and New Orleans had major coups in the 19th Century.

The NYT Magazine has an article on an expensive new golf course, hotel, and housing development, Harbor Shores, that has opened in the micro-Detroit of Benton Harbor, a black slum city on Lake Michigan a couple of hours from the South Side of Chicago. As Rachel Maddow often complains, the state of Michigan suspended democracy in Benton Harbor and turned all responsibility over to an appointed city autocrat. The Whirlpool Company, which maintains its headquarters in Benton Harbor, has promoted the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course (greens fee for non-residents on summer weekends: $150), which will host the 2012 Senior PGA Championship, and the gentrifying Arts District. The writer interviews a quasi-homeless former city councilman who thinks, with some reason, that what's going on is a municipal coup.

This development is another high-low team-up:

Given Benton Harbor’s unfavorable history and demographics, no private developer would likely be willing to take on such an ambitious project there. But there was another way: Robinson’s group, along with other nonprofits supported by Whirlpool, could secure enough federal and state grant money to help remediate the land, build the golf course and at least get Harbor Shores off the ground. The project’s complicated financing deal closed in May 2008, right around the time that the national real-estate market crashed.

On the Thursday morning that we played Harbor Shores, the course looked virtually empty.

The West Coast of Michigan is a great place for golf because the steady winds blow cool air across Lake Michigan, making it vastly more pleasant in summer than Chicago's suburbs, and that has piled up big sand dunes along the shore. There's nothing golfers love more than playing through sand dunes with a view of big water.

Until the last couple of decades, this coastline has been underserved with quality golf courses. Alister Mackensie designed the fantastic Crystal Downs course in Frankfort, MI in the 1920s, but almost nothing else was built on the forested dunes until the last 15 years. Back in 1990, I bought a a couple of dozen topographic maps of the southwest Michigan coastline and drove up and down looking for a piece of undeveloped shoreline that I could put a team of investors together to buy and turn into a great course. But, just about every bit of cliff along Lake Michigan had cabins on it, so I left it to more enterprising people to do the heavy lifting of buying out existing homeowners. About a half dozen spectacular courses such as Arcadia Bluffs have gone up along this coastline since then at vast expense.

My question about this new development in Benton Harbor would be, however: are all the responsible grown-ups crazy? Has anybody made a nickel off of a new golf course development in the last ten years (outside of China?). Back in 2005 a California real estate developer I know told he he'd never invest in a golf course-centric housing development again, and I can't see much that would have made him change his mind since then.

The sad secret of golf is that it's a youngish man's game, not the game for retirees that everybody thinks. It peaked economically in the 1980s and 1990s when Baby Boomers were between, say, 25 and 50. There was a huge overbuilding of outstanding new golf courses that came online about a decade ago, and times have been tough for golf course owners ever since.

Moreover, how does a resort provide work for the black underclass? The article says:

This is the competing narrative of what’s going on in Benton Harbor: It’s being converted into a resort town for wealthy weekenders and Whirlpool employees — that, when all is said and done, its struggling black population will either be driven out by the development or reduced to low-wage jobs cleaning hotel rooms, carrying golf bags or cutting grass.

As I pointed out in 2003, practically no black guys have taken up caddying since the Civil Rights era. Only Hal Sutton of all tour golfers still had a black caddie. The usual caddie on tour might be a former college golf teammate of the pro who dropped out of law school. Similarly,

Poor urban African-Americans hate servile work, so is the resort, assuming it ever gets any guests, going to have to bring in immigrants to be maids?

And who are the target customers? Judging by the models in the ads, they're aiming for a half black clientele. I think that would be interesting -- is there a large enough black middle class in Chicago to support a heavily black resort? The number of black men who play golf in Chicago is by no means small, and they tend to be big spenders when they play, but I've never heard of them flocking to one single upscale course. Usually, huge cities have one municipal course that is, by common agreement, the black course where blacks are socially dominant: Chester Washington in LA., Joe Louis in Chicago, etc. In the Northeast, there are a number of summer home communities, such as The Oaks on Martha's Vineyard, that have been upper middle class black for generations, but I'm not familiar with new golf or beach destinations for upscale blacks forming in recent decades.

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

Crops rotting in fields due to undocumented worker shortages

2011-12-15T16:33:00.002-08:00

As all know from reading the newspapers, food in America would cost more per ounce than gold if we weren't lucky enough to have a constant stream of undocumented workers to do all the work. Without a vast influx of newcomers each year, our poor farmers would be ruined, ruined I tell you. It's economically, and perhaps biologically, impossible to grow food in America without an endless supply of semi-literate but highly fertile foreigners.

As we also all know, the influx of undocumented workers is down in 2011 from the good old days, what with all the racist bigots refusing to pass amnesties and whatnot. It's probably that awful Sheriff Joe Arpaio's fault that famine stalks the land. Thank God Obama is going to get him before we all starve.

Therefore, mathematical logic proves that crops must be rotting in the fields and America's impoverished farmers must be packing up their Model T's and fleeing.

Except, as commenters have pointed out here, the farming business is enjoying a most lucrative 2011:

A new report shows it's been a good year to be a farmer in the USA. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says farm profits are expected to spike by 28 percent this year to $100.9 billion. Most farmers say they're using the extra cash to pay off debt and put some money aside. But, they're also investing in new tractors, combines and land.

You might almost think that the big agricultural interests have been, with the collusion of the press and the politicians, trying to mislead the public about just how essential a huge flow of uneducated peons is to America avoiding famine.

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

RIP: Soviet rocket scientist, 99

2011-12-14T22:39:00.006-08:00

Here's the NYT obituary for 99-year-old Boris Chertok, who was deputy to the great Korolev during the 1950s and 1960s.

When you think about contemporary engineering fiascos like high-speed rail in California, it's hard not to be stunned by how fast America got to the moon. But, then, think about how a bunch of almost unknown guys in the otherwise pervasively cruddy Soviet Union beat America in the the first two laps of the Space Race (first satellite and first man in space). Jerry Pournelle spent a long time staring at spy photos during this era, counting things like mule-drawn wagons, and eventually concluded that the Soviet Union was "Bulgaria with nuclear missiles." And while the Soviets got a copy of the German V-2 blueprints, the Americans got most of the best German rocket designers like von Braun, who had the good sense to surrender to the Americans.

Chertok's boss Sergei Korolev was a giant of the 20th Century who remains almost unknown in the U.S. The Soviets kept his identity secret until after his sudden death during an operation in early 1966. In The Right Stuff, the Project Mercury team doesn't even know his name, just that he's got them spooked. He's like a comic book supervillain to them. Heck, most of the Russians working on rockets didn't know his name. They called him "Chief Designer."

Korolev's life was absurd: he spent 1938-1944 in prison, apparently having been denounced by a rival in the rocket business. Moscow sent him to the notorious Kolyma gold mines in Siberia. After awhile, they figured out that they really didn't want to beat or work their best rocket engineer to death in Siberia and brought him back and locked him up in a First Circle-type camp for scientists. His health was never good after Kolyma. He pretty much worked himself to death in the 1960s, figuring that if the Soviets ever fell behind the Americans, Khrushchev would cancel the program. If he'd lived, would the Soviets have gotten to the moon first? Probably not -- his giant N1 moon rocket turned out to keep blowing up catastrophically -- but he'd pulled a lot of rabbits out of his hat before, and maybe he would have again.

And there were other Soviet rocket designers competing with Korolev who did big things, too, like Mikhail Yangel, whose rockets are still being used. The Soviets weren't all that into central planning for something as important as the Space Race.

Tom Wolfe concluded that the Space Race was a form of ritual single combat, like David and Goliath. In an age of nuclear weapons, that is a very good way to find out who is stronger.

And the Soviet space engineers were more David than Goliath.

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

The decline in generational style changes

2011-12-14T13:38:00.001-08:00

A reader writes:

One thing I noticed when I was looking through my mom's 1973 high school yearbook was how similarly everybody was dressed. Compare that to my (late '90s/early 2000s) high school experience, where there were different subgroups who dressed differently from one another.

If you ever watch either of the MTV series 16 and Pregnant or Teen Mom, you'll notice how many of the dads dress similarly to one another: solid-color oversized baseball caps, usually turned to one side, and baggy clothes. That's basically the style of lower-class white teenagers (you see those clothes all over the men's section at Wal-Mart.) On the other hand, my cousin, a conservative 17-year-old from an upper-middle-class family, would never be caught dead dressed like that.

In other words, what's changed is that in the past, people had a common culture, and teenagers dressed to distinguish themselves from 40-year-olds. Now teenagers dress to distinguish themselves from other teenagers.

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

Great Moments in Invade the World

2011-12-14T13:37:00.004-08:00

I've long felt that Americans aren't really cut out for world domination. We tend to be a cheerful, positive-minded, naive, and insular people, while the imperial mission demands vast reserves of worldliness and cynicism.

The Derb points me toward this Washington Examiner article by Sara A. Carter, "Afghan Sex Practices Concern U.S., British Forces" and related blog commentary on the popularity of homosexual pedophilia among those Pathan soldiers and interpreters who claim to be our allies. (Although the British officers who are old public school boys might be less baffled than they are admitting to their American counterparts.) In from the Cold comments:

And, the impact of those experiences is already being felt in portions of Afghanistan, putting American forces squarely in the middle of complex moral, social and sexual issues. A source at Army Special Operations command tells In From the Cold that Afghan women, emboldened by the presence of U.S. troops. have complained about beatings they've suffered at the hands of their husbands. The domestic violence reportedly stemmed from the inability of the women to become pregnant and produce sons, highly valued in Afghan society.

When U.S. civil affairs teams (and other special forces units) quietly investigated the problem, they quickly discovered a common denominator. Virtually all of the younger men who beat their wives (over their inability to become pregnant) had been former "apprentices" of older Afghan men, who used them for their sexual pleasure. Upon entering marriage, whatever the men knew of sex had been learned during their "apprenticeship," at the hands of the older man. To put it bluntly, some of the younger Afghans were unfamiliar with the desired (and required) mechanics for conception.

To remedy this situation, the Army called in its psychological operations teams, which developed information campaigns in Pashtun areas, explaining the basics of heterosexual relations and their benefits, in terms of producing male offspring. It may be the only time in the history of warfare that an army has been required to explain sex to the native population, to curb the abuse of women and young boys--and retain U.S. influence in key geographic areas.

Army psy op specialists declined to discuss their efforts in great detail. But one of the "preferred sex" campaigns was (reportedly) a direct result of the 2009 survey, and the problems encountered by NATO troops working with their Afghan counterparts.

I'm not sure I totally believe this (although the "dancing boys" stuff is definitely true -- the Taliban are more averse to it as being un-Islamic, which is one reason they got popular in the 1990s when two major pre-Taliban warlords started a civil war over a youth), but this example of Your Tax Dollars at Work is too good to pass up.

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

Are styles stagnating?

2011-12-14T02:39:00.001-08:00

In Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen picks up a theme we've kicked around here lots of times over the years in "You Say You Want a Devolution:"

Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. ...

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992.

In Taki's Magazine, I respond:

One of 2011’s hottest trends is middle-aged pundits announcing that compared to the good old days when they were spry, nothing much is changing anymore. Or at least nothing worth noticing.

Economist Tyler Cowen kick-started this fad of bemoaning stasis by publishing one of those newfangled e-books, The Great Stagnation, in which he lamented today’s lack of technological change. Now, 57-year-old Kurt Andersen, co-founder of Spy magazine back in the 1980s, has announced in Vanity Fair that, so far as he can tell, styles are stuck. Practically everything—cars, movies, music, men’s clothes, and haircuts—seems about the same to him as when he was a stripling of 37. Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, he’s still hip; it’s the times that have gotten square.

As another one of these writers of a certain age who seldom gets out much anymore, I heartily agree. Well, except, of course, for that handful of fields where I actually know a little bit about what's going on. Those are clearly getting worse.

Read the whole thing there. I offer a theory for one major fashion phenomenon of recent decades that, while it may not be right, is at least fairly new.

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

Pinker and medieval murder rates

2011-12-13T18:03:00.003-08:00

The medievalist blog Quod Libet has a number of posts up disputing the estimates of historical violence levels in Steven Pinker's big book The Better Angels of Our Nature.

For example, was An Lushan's 8th Century revolt in Tang Dynasty China really one of the bloodiest event of all time? How can we confidently count the Mongol death toll? How about the Albigensian Crusade?

And are Pinker's estimates of the murder rate in the high middle ages reliable?

I took the opposite tack of pointing out that our having any statistics from the late medieval period suggests that those years were more orderly than earlier Dark Ages periods from which we don't have any numbers. In many ways, I subscribe even more to Pinker's hypothesis of a general trend toward orderliness than he does. Unlike Pinker and his wife, however, I don't see that trend as largely restricted to the Enlightenment. As I wrote in The American Conservative:

Pinker then skips the long Dark Ages, during which the Catholic Church tried, with the slowest success, to turn the illiterate Conan the Barbarian warlords who had overrun Europe into gentlemen. He lands next in the high medieval period. To Pinker, feudalism must represent anarchy because there is no overweening Leviathan to enforce order. To Europeans alive at the time, however, their newly mature feudalism provided them with “stationary bandits”—to use economist Mancur Olson’s term—who protected them from the more terrifying “roving bandits.” The French monk Raoul Glaber exulted in the 11th century that it was as if “the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.”

To the visual historian Lord Kenneth Clark, host of the 1969 PBS documentary “Civilisation,” the construction of towering Gothic cathedrals demonstrated that the 12th and 13th centuries were self-evidently better ordered than the wasteland centuries that had preceded them. But Pinker can’t plot the Middle Ages’ improvement over the Dark Ages on his charts because there is no data from the Dark Ages. So he feels free to ignore the considerable progress that Christendom made.

Here's Pinker's FAQ on his book, which is well worth reading because he attempts answers to many common objections there, most of which he already included in his book. He really has thought longer and harder about this topic than most people have and has anticipated most of the objections.

By the way, I'm quoted on p. 82 (in the galleys) of Better Angels:

The journalist Steven Sailer recounts an exchange from early 20th-century England: "A hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages. When asked, "How did your ancestor become a Lord?" he replied sternly, "With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!"

The secret to being quoted in important books is poor sourcing: although that anecdote made a vivid impression upon me, I have no idea anymore where it's from. So, at the moment, I'm the best source!

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

Can TV subtitles help teach reading?

2011-12-13T17:05:00.001-08:00

The NYT has a run-of-the-mill article on Finland's high PISA test scores. Here's something interesting that my Finnish commenters have brought up before:

Besides high-quality teachers, Dr. Sahlberg pointed to Finland’s Lutheran leanings, almost religious belief in equality of opportunity, and a decision in 1957 to require subtitles on foreign television as key ingredients to the success story.

The notion that subtitling TV shows might improve reading doesn't strike me as obviously absurd. It seems like the kind of thing that could be tested in a controlled experiment: give 100 poor families with a first grader a big flat screen TV with subtitles permanently turned on and 100 poor families a TV with subtitles permanently turned off. Check back each year for a few years to make sure they haven't sold it or broken it and track reading scores. Not a cheap experiment, but hardly overwhelming for, say, the Gates Foundation to pay for.

In the meantime, Univision should be required to subtitle all its Spanish language programming in English.

Critics say that Finland is an irrelevant laboratory for the United States. It has a tiny economy, a low poverty rate, a homogenous population — 5 percent are foreign-born — and socialist underpinnings (speeding tickets are calculated according to income).

But according to Sandra Day O'Connor's 2003 decision in the Grutter affirmative action case, a "homogeneous" student body makes for lousier learning.

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

Strange New Respect for Newt

2011-12-12T15:22:00.006-08:00

"The Good Newt" by recently retired NYT supremo Bill Keller is a classic example of how immigration has become the central issue for the mainstream media dividing Good from Evil. Keller's conclusion:

There are plenty of reasons the thought of President Newt Gingrich makes me shudder. But on this hard, defining American issue, he’s shown a combination of brains, heart and guts that puts the rest of his party to shame.

Here's the opening:

Immigration is a subject that brings out the best and the worst in Americans.

As taught to my fourth-grade daughter this semester, the story of the peopling of America encourages us to celebrate our identity as the land of e pluribus unum. It reminds us of the tolerance required to coexist in a culture of many cultures. It honors the courage to uproot your life so your children can have a better one.

Thank God that the brain trust of the New York Times takes its guidance on this complex issue not from intellectually unsophisticated sources, but from textbooks for fourth graders. And bonus points for the historically accurate usage of e pluribus unum.

As it is practiced in our politics, the subject often dredges up darker feelings: tribalism, xenophobia, envy, a pull-up-the-ladder stinginess. This is not new. The English and Dutch colonists resented the immigrant waves of Irish and Germans, who resented the later waves of Italians and Poles and Jews.

If mass immigration was good enough for the Mark Hanna and the other Robber Barons, it should be good enough for us! You know what would also be good for the economy: the 12-Hour Day. Hey, isn't Newt in favor of Child Labor, too? What a state-of-the-art thinker!

But wait. Why are we even talking about this?

Right. Why doesn't everybody shut up about immigration? How can we have the needed national conversation on immigration if people insist on talking about it instead of listening to me explain what my fourth grader thinks? How come everybody doesn't dummy up and listen to the New York Times like they're supposed to? What's wrong with people these days?

I hate to distract you with actual facts, but here are a few that have been overlooked in the din of alarm: illegal immigration is falling ...

Similarly, have you noticed how over the last few weeks, global warming isn't anything to worry about anymore? The weather has been distinctly nippy this month, so why are we even talking about global warming?

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

How long is this supposed to take?

2011-12-12T13:57:00.005-08:00

There's a consensus among all responsible opinion-molders that a leading solution to today's unemployment, low wages, growing inequality, and the like is to Fix the Schools. For example, this headline appeared recently in World Net Daily: "Zuckerman: Improve Education to Create US Jobs." I'm sure that Zuckerberg would say the same thing in public, as would Obama, Romney, Friedman, Gingrich, Duncan, Gates, and, for that matter, Jobs if he were revivified.

In contrast, immigration restriction is derided, on the rare occasions when it is even considered as a policy response to high unemployment and low wages, as taking too long to deal with the current crisis.

But, how long would Improved Education take to Create US Jobs? Say the average worker is 40 years old. Furthermore, as we hear from all responsible commenters on The Gap in school achievement, the problem is that The Gap exists from the first point it is measured -- in kindergarten -- so therefore Fixing the Schools must include taking children likely to suffer low achievement away from their mothers or grandmothers for most of their waking hours and put them in intensive (and presumably Fixed) preschools by age 3 or so. (Or perhaps age 2 or 1 or zero or in utero ... the age when intervention is determined to be necessary seems to creep backwards over time.)

So, if we could Fix the Schools tomorrow, we'd have Fixed 40 year old workers within about 37 years, or by 2048. Too bad about people who will be 41 in 2048, of course. They will remain doomed. So, Fixed Schools will take about 62 years in toto to work their magic on the entire labor force. So, you can see why all sensible thinkers agree that Fixing the Schools makes much more sense than Enforcing the Border. Of course, nobody yet quite knows how to Fix the Schools, but no doubt that breakthrough will come Real Soon Now.

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

A tribute to "Moneyball"

2011-12-12T02:15:00.000-08:00

A reader writes from the shores of the Bosporus:

Hi Steve

I just saw a baseball movie named "Moneyball" and I loved it. Even though I'm bored to death of "success story" movies -- be they on sports, music, movies, or whatever. And even though I know nothing about baseball.

It tells the story of how the "statistical" approach got into baseball and proved its worth.

You know why I loved it?

Because there's something in the statistical approach that maps to the essence of the Republic.

Winner-takes-all is feudal. It is primitive, neolithic, scales very poorly, and is the natural tendency of humans that refuse to grow up. Primates like gorillas are much better at that type of social organization than us. If they weren't, they would have evolved in another direction -- or we wouldn't have evolved into humans.

And yet, misguided fools all over the planet still aspire to be silverbacks.

The thing with the statistical approach is this:

Say we're talkin' music. You can either be a freak of nature like Paco de Lucia -- who probably comes once in every two hundred years, and is absolutely brilliant SOLO -- or you can be four blokes from a working-class neighbourhood with mediocre instrumental skills at best, get a good coach, and make fantastic music.

Same with sports.

Same with technology.

Same with everything in the Republic.

You DON'T have to be the Chuck Norris of every skill known to man to score. (Totally OT but if you can chuckle to half of these Chuck Norris jokes, you've worked as a programmer at one point in your life.)

I don't much care for discussions on "barbaric" vs. "civilized" -- especially if concepts like "kleptocracy," "dusky races," "buggery," "stable society," "brutal treatment of women" etc. are sprinkled all over it. They bore me to death since more often than not (regardless of their factual accuracy) they express the typical fears of a lower-beta/omega Western male with an oversized brain. I -- like most other half-intelligent and decent carbon-based life forms on this planet -- have suffered all my life from the political shenanigans, pathological ideologies, and never-ending machinations of these types to be the top dog neolithic-style in a republic. Fuck 'em. All of them.

I only care about the "average," and the "good life" that the average CAN manage in a Republic.

The gist of it is, if you're half good at anything, and if you can team up with a bunch of guys who are also half good at what they do who complement each others' skillsets, you have a shot at a good life, and don't have to worry about being a silverback to pass on your genes.

Why don't people get this very simple fact?

Right. Like when I was a kid I used to go to the scrubby ranch of this family that my mom and dad knew from Lockheed to play hide and seek with their six kids. Their dad was the chief designer of the fastest airplane of all time, the SR71. Get a good group of fellows together all working on the project rather than their political positions and you've got a chance to go far (or in this case fast).

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