FDNY passes La Griffe 101

Back in 2007, the Bush Administration sued the Fire Department of New York, which lost 343 men on 9/11, for disparate impact discriminating against blacks and Hispanics by using a firefighter hiring test that asked fairly hard questions about firefighting. Now, the FDNY has finally learned the lesson that La Griffe du Lion pointed out years ago: If you want to please the feds, you can minimize disparate impact (percentage point differential) of the hiring test by making it extremely easy, then hiring randomly. 

From the NY Daily News:

Scores for blacks and Hispanics soar on newly revamped FDNY test  

More than 42 percent of minority-group members earned grade of 97 or higher and likely to be hired by FDNY over next four years 

Blacks and Hispanics scored significantly better on the newly revamped FDNY exam, a shift that could lead to firefighter jobs for a many as 42% of the minority-group test-takers, city officials revealed Tuesday. 

The would-be minority-group firefighters far outscored those who sat for the previous three exams — the results of which were deemed discriminatory and tossed out by a judge. 

Bravest hopefuls who nail a grade of 97 or higher are considered likely to be hired by the FDNY over the next four years. 

Nearly half — 42.3% — of minority-group members who took the test cleared that hurdle, officials said. 

That’s much higher than top-scoring minorities who took the 1999 exam (14%), the 2002 exam (16%) and the 2007 exam (33%). 

The results of all three earlier tests were thrown out by Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis in response to a 2007 lawsuit from the Justice Department and the Vulcan Society of black firefighters. ... 

The exam’s pass rate was high. Of the 42,231 people who took the test, 40,426 passed with a score of 70 or above. 

FDNY Battalion Chief Paul Mannix, an outspoken critic of the judge’s decision who believes the original lawsuit was bogus, said he still has questions about how the experts scored the exam. 

“On the face of it, I have no confidence in the test and the list that will come of it,” Mannix said.

Now, you might think this could make a good GOP campaign issue, but, of course, it was the Bush Administration that filed the lawsuit against the FDNY in the first place.

De Blasio's $100 million handout in disparate impact FDNY case

From the New York Post:

De Blasio agrees to $98M FDNY discrimination suit settlement 

By Selim Algar, Philip Messing, Beth DeFalco and Bob Fredericks 

Abandoning a legal battle hard-fought by his predecessor, Mayor de Blasio on Tuesday agreed to have the city shell out more than $100 million to a group of 1,500 minority firefighter applicants who sued over FDNY entrance exams that were found to be biased. 

De Blasio made no secret of his desire to settle the controversial case upon taking office in January and the Vulcan Society and its lawyers took full advantage, scoring $98 million out of a $128 million cap on the city’s financial exposure.
The generous settlement amount doesn’t include at least $3.7 million more the city will be on the hook for in fees to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. 

“I think it was pretty clear that they were going to get what they wanted with de Blasio — or something close to it,” said an FDNY union source. “There was no way this was going to make it to court. The only question was the amount and we got that answer today.” 

... If evenly distributed the payout would be about $65,000 for each member of the class action. 

Here's an interesting subject for a social science study: I've joked in the past that suing for discrimination could be called AARP: "African-American Retirement Planning." But somebody really ought to do a study of this question since blacks tend to do a bad job at saving for their retirement, and discrimination payouts are highly publicized in the black community by lawyers and politicians. It would be worth knowing what percentage of blacks expect to win a discrimination settlement at some point in their lives, and for how much. And then compare these expectations to the realities, which I suspect are more paltry.

In a related maneuver that reveals the extent of City Hall’s new orientation, city Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter was granted permission to have controversial Judge Nicholas Garaufis administer the plump payout and determine the lawyer fees. 

Garaufis presided over the case, ruling in 2011 that the FDNY — and then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, specifically — intentionally discriminated against minority applicants. 

But an appeals court tossed the portion of his ruling that characterized the discrimination as intentional and assigned a new judge, citing Garaufis’ lack of impartiality. That key legal point directly impacted financial damages and the reputation of the FDNY. A new hearing with a different judge had been scheduled for later this month but was scuttled with the settlement deal. 

De Blasio, who has pushed a tax-the-rich plan to pay for pre-K, gushed after agreeing to the whopping hit to taxpayers. 

“The brave men and women of the FDNY work tirelessly to keep us safe from harm’s way, and our administration is committed to ensuring every New Yorker who seeks to take on this heroic role has a fair opportunity to join the ranks,” he said in a statement. 

Asked later whether he weakened the city’s ability to negotiate a fiscally responsible settlement, the mayor dodged the issue, saying: “I think the numbers [on hiring] speak for themselves. We strive for a government that really looks like New York City,” he said. “ And that just hasn’t been true at the fire department. So we need to move forward. I think the settlement is part of how we move forward.” 

Vulcan Society attorneys were awarded $3.7 million in fees by Garaufis but are in the process of seeking additional payment.

Here's a 2009 New York Times article explaining why the test was so horribly biased:

Racial Bias in Fire Exams Can Lurk in the Details

By DIANE CARDWELL 

Published: July 23, 2009 

When a Federal District Court judge in Brooklyn ruled Wednesday that New York City had discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants to the Fire Department, he argued that two entrance exams, used in 1999 and 2002, adversely affected minorities and had little relation to firefighting.

On the surface, the tests — versions of which remained in use until 2007, according to the court — do not appear racially biased. Each exam consists of 85 multiple-choice questions about firefighting practices: the order in which a firefighter should don gear in an alarm; what the rear of a building would look like, based on its facade; the right situations in which to say “mayday” rather than “urgent” over the walkie-talkie. 

But a closer look shows that the exams also required applicants to read and understand long passages, often containing technical terms, and then answer questions about them. One question, for instance, follows a 250-word description of the use and maintenance of portable power saws and asks which type of blade must be put out of service. 

The choices: A) A carbide tip blade missing nine tips; B) a carbide tip blade with three broken tips; C) an aluminum oxide blade measuring 12 inches; D) a yellow silicon carbide blade measuring nine inches. (The correct answer is A). 

Here's the old, evil test. Here's the opening of the reading passage about how to pick the right chainsaw to use so that you can rescue people from fiery deaths without ripping your face off because it bucks:

One tool used by firefighters to fight fires is the portable power saw. The power saw improves operational efficiency by aiding firefighters with cutting operations at fires and other emergencies. The portable power saw comes equipped with three cutting blades. Carbide tip blades are used when cutting through tar-covered roofs, wood flooring and similar materials. Carbide tip blades must not be used on steel objects, such as metal security doors, auto bodies, and metal window bars, since the tips of the blade may come loose and cause an injury to the firefighter using the saw or bystanders. Aluminum oxide blades are used to cut through various types of steel, such as metal security doors, auto bodies, and metal window bars. Silicon carbide blades are used to cut concrete and other masonry materials.

The first question was:

Q. Which type of blade must a firefighter use with a portable power saw to cut a metal security door? 

A. A carbide tip blade
B. A silicon carbide blade
C. An aluminum oxide blade
D. A carbide tip or aluminum oxide blade 

The NYT continued in 2009:

In big cities across the country, firefighter entrance exams have tended to favor applicants already steeped in the ways of the job, like “people whose dads and uncles are firefighters,” said Richard Primus, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Michigan. That, he said, has perpetuated the disproportionate representation of whites in those firefighting forces. 

Besides, Professor Primus added, some of that knowledge is not needed to become a good firefighter. “Much of what appears on written exams for firefighters is legitimately material that we should want firefighters to know,” he said, but some of it tends to be knowledge that “firefighting junkies have, even though it is not really necessary for fighting fires.” 

At issue in the New York case, legal experts said, was not so much whether the exams themselves were biased. Rather, the law requires that if a test has the effect of disproportionately excluding minorities, then the skills it measures must be necessary to the job — a standard that the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis, found the city did not meet. 

Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department in 2007, Judge Garaufis wrote that in creating the test, the city convened a panel of firefighters who identified 21 “task clusters” to be tested, like evaluating a fire scene or searching for victims, and 18 “abilities,” like memorization, deductive reasoning and spatial orientation.

In reality, the test could be passed one of two ways: being smart enough to comprehend technical firefighting passages or by studying firefighting techniques ahead of time.

But, that's discriminatory to the tune of a hundred million clams.

   

Contempt of Cop v. Contempt of Court

The fairly arbitrary exercise of judges' power to cite, fine, and even imprison for "Contempt of Court" hasn't much been criticized in four decades. The last time I can recall a harsh spotlight being shone on the institution of "contempt of court" was when the antics of the Chicago Seven (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mr. Jane Fonda, etc.) at the end of the Sixties overwhelmed the irate judge.

As I've suggested before, "contempt of cop" needs to remain in a legal grey area below the certainties of "contempt of court." Yet, the concept can't be dismissed out of hand. Policemen aren't judges, although they need to share in some of the awful majesty of the law to do what needs to be done effectively and safely. Moreover, they deal with people in much more, uh, exuberant settings than a courtroom, so cops should (and typically do) cut people more slack than judges do.

On the other hand, judges don't really need as wide a variety of ways to enforce order as policemen do, since courthouse procedures are carefully planned around order and safety. For example, the last time I served on a jury, when I arrived early in the courtroom, there would often be a defendant there to see his lawyer make some minor motion, such as asking for a delay in the trial. A high proportion of the seemingly harmless defendants were manacled to the 300 pound defense table.

So, I end up where I started: arresting people for contempt of cop is less defensible than arresting people for contempt of court, but it's by no means ridiculous, either. It's one of those gray areas that the law needs, but can't be too proud of either.

By the way, it's striking how the ambiguous Gatesgate case generates so much more media comment than the similar but unambiguous Fire Department of New York disparate impact discrimination decision in Vulcan Society. You might think that conservatives would jump all over this slur of the FDNY, since everybody loves a fireman. Yet, there's been almost total silence. (Other than one particular outpost ...)

Obviously, the vast majority of media types can't deal with statistics, but the FDNY issue suffers from lack of a partisan angle. Both the Bush and Obama Administrations, the GOP and the Dems, have been on the side of slandering the FDNY, so the media have almost ignored the decision, or meekly accepted it, since it doesn't fit in their partisan framework.

Chris Roach writes about how the notoriously unfriendliness of semi-militarized modern cops compared to the amiable cops-on-the-beat of Frank Capra movies is, paradoxically, an outgrowth of the anti-authority movement of the 1960s:

In the name of freedom from oppression, however, we got more crime and disorder. The 1970s was the era of the barricaded front door, deserted streets after dark, occasional urban riots, skyrocketing crime, disorder, and the increased use of force in arrests for a very obvious reason: criminals became unused to submitting to authority after a lifetime of disobedience coupled with mixed messages from teachers, the media, and the culture. Force had to supply what once could be commanded by stern words and police presence alone. The cultural radicals mostly isolated themselves from the consequences of their teachings in gated communities, Upper East Side Co-ops, or some Ivory Tower. The working class people grew uncomfortable, and this discomfort culminated in the Nixon victory and the Reagan Revolution. They never bought the liberal line on law and order, not least because they had to pay a dear price for this “liberation.”

A culture of widespread respect for police guarantees greater public safety and allows the police to use less force. They use less force in such a milieu because suspects are habituated to to submit, know that the community would side with the police, and those troublemakers who are willful and disorderly can be detained before things get out of hand. This both teaches them a lesson and serves pour encourger les autres. This is the world that prevailed before the 1960s. It was a safer world with less violence. Police in those days were unironically praised, respected, honored, and given the benefit of the doubt. This culture of respect paid countless dividends, dividends given short shrift by the courts, the media, and now the President of the United States.

I have a feeling this comes down to who watches Cops versus who listens to NPR.

The rate of cop killings has fallen in half since the 1970s, despite crooks being ever more heavily armed. Technology, such as bulletproof vests, have definitely improved, but cops tend to be better trained and more professional now. (The hit kids movie Paul Blart, Mall Cop affectionately satirized this trend.) Cops don't get shot much when making traffic stops anymore because they've worked out exactly how to do it to minimize the crook's incentive to shoot the cop and make a run for the border.

One interesting aspect is that the friendlier police forces of the past also tended to be more corrupt. Much like in the Scouring of the Shire at the end of Lord of the Rings, where the returning hobbits who battled Sarum drive out gangsters who took over the Shire, WWII vets in the late 1940s cleaned up a lot of crooked police forces. For example, vets played the key role in turning the Santa Monica police force from the outrageously corrupt "Bay City" cops of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels into what it is today.

Similarly, WWII vet William H. Parker professionalized the LA Confidential-era LAPD, turning it from a crooked beat-walking force into a mostly honest quasi-militarized car-mounted Thin Blue Line. Parker, like J. Edgar Hoover, was a PR genius, and, for better or worse, police forces have tended to follow the LAPD's lead.

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

Great moments in privatization

From the New York Daily News on the next phase in the Vulcan Society v. Fire Department of New York disparate impact discrimination lawsuit:

The controversial upcoming FDNY [Fire Department New York] exam will be the most expensive test in the city's history, the Daily News has learned. 

The new civil service test, ordered by a Brooklyn federal judge who declared that previous FDNY exams discriminated against minorities, is expected to cost the city more than $3.3 million to develop and administer, officials said. 

The cost of the previous Fire Department exam, given in 2007, was $1.3 million, according to officials at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. 

The huge jump in cost hasn't sat well in City Hall. "This litigation has forced some very costly mandates on the city for the development and administration of the test," said Julie Wood, spokeswoman for Mayor Bloomberg. "We have to pay for them." 

Judge Nicholas Garaufis last year demanded that the city alter its method of recruiting firefighters and blocked the FDNY - which is 91% white - from hiring any candidates until a new test was created. The judge also mandated that the new test be created by an outside developer, instead of within DCAS - the agency that normally creates the city's exams. 

The city hired California-based PSI Services to develop and give the test, which is expected to be given in the first few months of 2012. 

The requirement to hire an expensive outside consultant has sent costs soaring, City Hall insiders grumbled.

This is the golden age of for-profit psychometrics. A big driving force is the following logic:

- We are unsatisfied with the disparate impact of the current test.

- Since, as everyone knows, it's racist to say that there is anything unsatisfactory about minority test-takers, therefore the test must be unsatisfactory.

- Ergo, we should hire an expensive psychometric consulting firm on a cost-plus contract to finally design a non-discriminatory test from scratch that won't have disparate impact. Obviously, the only possible reason that none of the countless tests already created eliminated disparate impact is that they weren't trying hard enough. So, if we have to spend an extra million or two million dollars to get the Platinum Premium custom-designed test that will finally overcome disparate impact, then it's well worth it. (Subsidiary logic: Pay no attention to results in other cities during the last several decades. Otherwise, you might learning something, and learning is racist. If you do ever let yourself notice that everybody else has failed at what you plan to do, reassure yourself that the reason all these other cities have failed to find the holy grail of the fire department test without disparate impact is because they were not as pure of heart as you are.)

Lather, rinse, and repeat ad infinitum. Hey, it's a living for testing firms.

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

GOP strategic brilliance: Bush Administration posthumously triumphs over New York firemen

From my new VDARE.com column:

Two stubborn individuals have done more than anyone to slow the Obama political juggernaut over the last month: Frank Ricci and James Crowley. ...

Interestingly, both Ricci and Crowley are not the kind of folks the Republican Party has focused upon representing in the 21st Century. They are Northeasterners, civil servants, and union men. Indeed, their unions’ strong opposition to the racial spoils system and to racial blackmail has been one of the keys to their fortitude.

The Bush Administration systematically worked to alienate men like Ricci and Crowley, who had worked hard to pass civil service exams.

For example, on May 21, 2007, Bush's Department of Justice filed suit in the name of Bush Crony/Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales charging the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) with violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act...

May I suggest that as a tiny first step in rebuilding a potentially winning coalition, Republicans stop and rethink whether their President should have attacked the Fire Department of New York as racist?

Sure, these firemen are highly paid civil servants with a pushy union, and they’re New Yorkers to boot. But … 343 of them gave their lives on 9/11.

Last Wednesday, July 22, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, a Clinton appointee, gave Bush a belated going-away present by swallowing the Gonzales Department of Justice allegations wholesale and deeming FDNY’s 1999 and 2002 paper-and-pencil employment exams discriminatory against minorities solely on the grounds of Disparate Impact. ...

The judge found the tests discriminatory despite being unable to find any evidence of actual discrimination. Even John Coombs, the head of the plaintiff organization, the black firefighter’s Vulcan Society, couldn’t identify specific problems. Newsday reported:

“Asked to point out questions he considered discriminatory on the exam, Coombs said, ‘I'm not going to answer that. It's irrelevant.’ He added, ‘It's a bad exam when the exam gives you … results that are abysmal for diversity.’... The Bush Administration’s claim that the test “is not job related for the position in question” was laughable. Each question is flagrantly job related. (You can see the 1999 and 2002 tests here.)

Thus Diane Cardwell of the New York Times reported on July 23 in Judge Finds Racial Bias in Fire Dept. Recruiting:

“New York City used tests that discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants to the Fire Department and had little relation to firefighting, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled on Wednesday.”

Yet, Cardwell’s accompanying feature article in the same issue of the NYT, Racial Bias in Fire Exams Can Lurk in the Details, included numerous complaints that the problem with the FDNY test was that it had too much relation to firefighting:

Besides, Professor Primus added, some of that knowledge is not needed to become a good firefighter. … Some of it tends to be knowledge that “firefighting junkies have, even though it is not really necessary for fighting fires.’”

Those darn “fire buffs” keep studying in their spare time how to save our lives. It’s discriminatory!

Cardwell’s explanation in the NYT of what’s wrong with the test can most charitably be read as heavy sarcasm:

“Each exam consists of 85 multiple-choice questions about firefighting practices: the order in which a firefighter should don gear in an alarm; what the rear of a building would look like, based on its facade; the right situations in which to say ‘mayday’ rather than ‘urgent’ over the walkie-talkie.

“Nevertheless, a closer look shows that the exams also required applicants to read and understand long passages, often containing technical terms, and then answer questions about them.” [Italics mine.]

Cardwell complains:

“One question, for instance, follows a 250-word description of the use and maintenance of portable power saws …”

I’m sorry, but portable power saws, especially the hellacious ones used by firemen to cut through steel and concrete, come with massive instruction manuals much longer than 250 words (owing to decades of product liability lawsuits, as the judge should know).

Read the rest here and comment on it below.

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

La Griffe du Lion's Fundamental Constant of Sociology

I was pleased to receive an email from the Zorro of statisticians, the mysterious La Griffe du Lion. He wants to point out that the Fundamental Constant of Sociology applies even more closely to the FDNY test data than I made it appear:

In your fine article, Professor Gates, Officer Crowley, President Obama—And the New York Fire Department, you illustrate the fundamental constant of sociology using data from the FDNY exams. Your calculation assumes normal distributions with equal standard deviations for each group. (I have often uses these same assumptions.) For most cases they work well.

But on heavily g-loaded tests, the black distribution is usually a bit narrower, being roughly 90% that of the white. We can mostly ignore this difference. But in the tails, e.g., where say 97% of one group passes, the width disparity can be important.

I repeated your calculation with and without accounting for the disparate distribution widths:

For the case where whites and blacks pass at 89.9% and 60.3%, respectively, as on the 1999 FDNY test [when an 85% score was required to pass], the calculated black and white means are separated by 1.01 SD for equal-width distributions and 1.04 (white SDs) when different widths are factored in--hardly worth the effort.

But for the case where whites and blacks pass at 97.2% and 85.4%, respectively [on the 2002 test when the passing score was lowered to 70% to satisfy the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule], the calculated black and white means are separated by 0.86 SD for equal-width distributions and 0.96 (white SDs) when different widths are factored in.

Thus the fundamental constant is somewhat more robust than might at first appear using the simpler calculation.

Best,
--Griffe

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

343

From the New York Post:

With a federal discrimination lawsuit looming, the FDNY announced yesterday that the last firefighter exam had produced the most diverse group of applicants in its history, with minorities expected to account for one-third of future hires.

"We are finally making strides in increasing diversity," declared Mayor Bloomberg at FDNY Headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn.

"This is an unprecedented result," agreed Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta. "The numbers are really quite spectacular."

Of 21,183 applicants who passed the written firefighter exam last January, 38 percent were minorities - nearly double the 21 percent who passed the previous exam, in 2002.

More importantly, according to the mayor, minorities held 33 percent of the slots among the 4,000 highest scorers, the group most likely to be hired off the civil-service list over the next four years.

The test was changed this year, said Martha Hirst, commissioner of the Department of Citywide Services, to reflect "basic aptitude abilities," such as judgment, ability to work with others, reading and memorization skills.

343.

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

Why is the Fundamental Constant of Sociology so fundamental?

La Griffe du Lion's great term for the one standard deviation gap between whites and blacks in just about any measurement that's related in some way to cognition -- the Fundamental Constant of Sociology -- is actually rather mysterious.

Sure, it's easy to understand why we see it in nationally representative samples, but why do we also see it also in highly selected samples, such as folks who showed up to take the New York firefighter's hiring test? (1999 gap: 1.04 s.d. 2002 gap: 0.96 s.d.)

In contrast, consider average height. Chinese people on average are less tall than black and white Americans. Yet, the average height of Chinese NBA players (such as Yao Ming) has usually been well above the NBA average. Short Chinese guys just don't play in the NBA.

So, why don't we see this kind of non-representativeness of the sample among FDNY test-takers? Just as 6'3" Chinese forwards generally decide to continue playing in China rather than try to make the Lakers, would-be minority test-takers could have estimated their scores from practice exams and then decided not to bother to show up and waste their time taking the test if they were likely to only end up way down the hiring list. This kind of self-selecting behavior would reduce the racial gap.

And yet, we saw the usual one-standard deviation gap. Why?

Well, one reason is that affirmative action promotes the more competent sort of minorities into higher realms, the equivalent of Yao Ming skipping playing center in the NBA to play keeper in the Intergalactic Quidditch League, leaving only short Chinese guys to try to make the NBA.

Another reason, however, is that, for a black or Hispanic, taking an FDNY test is like buying a very, very long-lived lottery ticket.

If the damages in Vulcan Society are set at, say, $20 million, the contingency fee lawyers will presumably grab about $7 million, and several hundred or more black and Hispanic test-takers who came close enough on the test so that they would have been hired if there had been no disparate impact will get checks in the mail adding up to $13 million.

Wouldn't it be totally awesome to get a five-figure check in the mail for something you wasted time on and failed at a decade ago? So, you can see why so many minorities who didn't have a chance of getting a good score took the firefighters test -- because there was always a sizable chance under Disparate Impact theory that a judge would change the rules years after the game was played and send them money.

In contrast, dumb white guys wouldn't be as likely to bother showing up because they know nobody is going to change the rules in their favor.

Thus, the Fundamental Constant of Sociology endures.

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

GOP Foot-Shooting

Here we are, a half year after a big victory in the Ricci firefighter Supreme Court case, and exactly what has the GOP done to follow up on that? We're almost a half year out from President Obama being publicly humiliated by a Cambridge cop who dared to stand his ground, and what has the GOP learned from that?

In VDARE.com, "Boethius" makes some points I've made before about places like Chicago and California, where working class and middle class whites tend to wind up in government jobs minding NAMs, and thus voting Democratic:

Gross stupidity within the California GOP’s leadership is certainly part of the answer. But California’s rent-seeking public service unions provide another. What is left of California’s white working class is largely employed by the State and dependent on the largesse of the legislature’s Democratic majority.

I do not believe that the rank and file share the radically pro-immigration politics of their union leaders. Nor do I believe that they consciously welcome the growth of the immigrant population because they calculate it increases the demand for their services. (Why worry about such things if you can’t ever be fired?)

But it seems clear that their own natural inclinations on "social issues" like immigration, which should make them trend Republican, are outweighed by the pocketbook issue of keeping the gravy train on track.

Indeed, the success of the Democrats in dominating a state where they routinely act against the interest of the white working class may point the way to the "anti-Sailer Strategy"—a "California Strategy" if you will—in which permanent political domination by liberal Democrats is founded upon an “iron triangle” of special interests comprising

(1) wealthy whites whose lifestyles are subsidized by cheap labor in their businesses and back yards;

(2) Immigrants who cannot resist the liberal Democratic package of welfare for the working class and affirmative action for the middle class;

(3) Coddled public service unions led by radicals and populated by working class whites who have in effect been bribed into going along with an agenda set by folks who despise them.

The main impediment to widespread imitation of the California strategy is, well, the example of California. Sounds good in theory, but who can afford it?

The obvious wedge issue to get more white government workers to vote Republican is affirmative action. For example, consider yesterday's Vulcan Society court decision that the Fire Department of New York's hiring test was discriminatory because blacks and Hispanics did as badly on it relative to whites as blacks and Hispanics do on all tests relative to whites. That would be a great issue for Republicans to raise a stink about.

Why not side with the FDNY, who lost 343 men on 9/11?

And yet, it was the Bush Administration that filed the Vulcan discrimination lawsuit against the FDNY!

In the wake of Ricci, I wrote many thousands of words about Vulcan last summer, even finding a poster boy for anybody who wanted to run with the issue, a 23 year old New York fireman who passed the 1999 test and died on 9/11. But I don't see anybody on the right who picked up on this as an issue. Yet, the Vulcan case isn't about some obscure backwater that's easy to overlook, it's about the Fire Department of New York. And the case doesn't even have a forgettable name: it's called Vulcan. But who else is talking about it?

The current GOP strategy is offer the worst of both worlds for white government employees:

- We want to cut your pay.

- We want to give your jobs to less qualified NAMs.

You don't have to say we'll pay you more, but would it kill the GOP to take a stand on principle against racial quotas for firemen instead of trying to impose them like the Bush Administration did? Taking a stand on principle won't get the public service union leaders and it might not even get the union members, but it won't hurt with their relatives, friends, and neighbors.

It's just nuts for the GOP to be for quotas and against firemen. Quotas are a lot less popular than firemen.

Apparently, that's the way the modern GOP thinks: anything that has to do with the racial IQ gap, as in Ricci and Vulcan*, is completely off limits as an issue. Unfortunately, practically everything in public affairs touches in some way on that gap.

---------
* By the way, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis's decision in Vulcan is about nothing but the racial IQ gap and whether you are allowed to take account of it in America. Garaufis granted summary judgment for the Vulcan Society and the Justice Department without holding trial on the fact that there was a "statistically significant" racial gap in the results. Hilariously, he rejected New York City's defense that they had met the EEOC's notoriously stupid Fourth Fifths Rule (by rigging the test so that it was so easy that something like 70% of blacks and 85% of whites had passed).

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

Vulcan Society v. Fire Department of New York

In my VDARE.com column yesterday night on the Bush Administration's belated triumph over Disparate Impact in the Fire Department of New York, the ironies were so rich that I didn't have room to analyze the legal reasoning of Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis's opinion in Vulcan Society v. FDNY. Fortunately, a reader has done it for me, so we'll do a tag-team in-depth analysis of this important and stupid decision. (As an intro, please read my VDARE.com column first. By the way, you can take the tests for yourself here.)

Yesterday, I got a copy of a recent decision in the Eastern District of New York about another fireman discrimination lawsuit, this about the city of New York, which is rather larger and more significant than the one in New Haven. I read it and learned that (i) Ricci means nothing and (ii) the 4/5 test is dead—replaced by a simple test for statistical significance. Under the new test, any statistically significant difference between white and minority scores is prima facie evidence of discrimination.

The judge's decision is both insanely important and insane. He is saying that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Four-Fifth's Rule isn't tough enough at sniffing out Disparate Impact. Instead, any "statistically significant" difference in passing rates between racial groups should shift the burden of proof in the case to the employer and make the employer meet the strict "business necessity" burden.

And with a big enough sample size, such as the 10,000 or so who take the FDNY entry level employment test, practically any racial difference, no matter how pragmatically insignificant, can be deemed to have attained statistical significance for purposes of bringing the hammer down legally on the employer under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Judging from media coverage, you might think that racial quotas are an open question in this country. You might even get that impression from reading iSteve some days. But they aren’t. Racial quotas are part of how we live now. This case demonstrates how and why.

You can learn a lot about a case just by looking at the caption. The plaintiff is the United States of America, joined by a black firefighters group and individual black and Hispanic firefighters. The case number, beginning with 1:07 CV, shows that it was a civil case commenced in 2007. From that and the name of the plaintiff we can deduce that this case was brought by the Bush Justice Department in 2007, while Alberto Gonzales was attorney general and, you will recall, there was great worry that Bush was politicizing the Justice Department. In fact, cases like this get brought in every administration, no matter who is the president and who is the attorney general.

Defendants are the City of New York, the fire department, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (which developed the tests at issue) and the mayor and the fire commissioner. No unions and no firefighters. No New York equivalent of Frank Ricci.

Judge Garaufis specifically allowed the Vulcan Society to take over as main plaintiff from the three individuals, and specifically banned the main union, the Uniformed Firefighters Association from joining the defense. The union was worried that the Bloomberg Administration would not put up a stiff enough fight. I can't find online documents showing Bloomberg's defense, so I have a hard time evaluating how true the union's worry was.

Checking the bio of the judge, Nicholas Garaufis, I see that he was appointed by Clinton on Sen. Moynihan’s recommendation and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2000. He has a typical background for a New York federal judge: associate at a white-shoe firm, Chadbourne & Park, nine years as counsel to the Queens borough president, Claire Shulman; five years as general counsel to the Federal Aviation Administration during the Clinton administration. If I had to guess I would say he was politically in the left half of the federal judiciary, but nevertheless he is a completely mainstream guy. In his opinion he cites to a 1972 decision by Judge Edward Weinfeld dinging an earlier version of the firefighters’ exam. Weinfeld was one of the most respected federal district court judges in the country.

The news angle: this decision made the front page of the New York Law Journal, which is basically the house organ of the New York bench and bar. It was a subject of a short article in the Times. It didn’t make the Wall Street Journal at all. It will get maybe one /one millionth of the coverage that Ricci got or that Professor Gates’ arrest is getting.

The Times article is innumerate but informative. There are the expected quotes from the intervenors’ lawyers, including a pious statement from Dana Lossia that, “Really what this decision says is, the exams you were using don’t pick the best-qualified people. What they really don’t do is pick the people who would best protect the city.” Not a word from the Department of Justice.

But it’s the stuff from the city that is really important. The city says: the tests are no longer being used, and since the city began administering a new test in Jan. 2007, minorities are now 38% of the candidates on the passing list and 33% of the top 4,000, who are most likely to be offered a job. They are a third of the most recent class of probationary firefighters. So, in practical terms: racial quotas for New York City firefighters have been in place since January 2007; and all this lawsuit is about is back pay and promotions for black and Hispanic applicants before 2007. Back pay and promotions will be addressed in the remedy phase, which is what Judge Garaufis, the lawyers, and the experts will turn to now.

The critical thing legally is that this case was decided on summary judgment: expert opinions and statistics. The judge did not hear any testimony. Under the law, you are only supposed to grant summary judgment when the losing side has failed to show any dispute about any fact that might conceivably affect the outcome. Or, in layman’s terms, there was no need for a trial, because New York City’s position was so weak that it didn’t deserve one.

Here is what Judge Garaufis said about Ricci in his opinion.

“Before proceeding to the legal analysis, I offer a brief word about the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (June 29, 2009). I reference Ricci not because the Supreme Court’s ruling controls the outcome in this case; to the contrary, I mention Ricci precisely because it does not. In Ricci, the City of New Haven had set aside the results of a promotional examination, and the Supreme Court confronted the narrow issue of whether New Haven could defend a violation of Title VII’s disparate treatment provision by asserting that its challenged employment action was an attempt to comply with Title VII’s disparate impact provision. The Court held that such a defense is only available when “the employer can demonstrate a strong basis in evidence that, had it not taken the action, it would have been liable under the disparate-impact statute.” Id. at 2664. In contrast, this case presents the entirely separate question of whether Plaintiffs have shown that the City’s use of Exams 7029 and 2043 has actually had a disparate impact upon black and Hispanic applicants for positions as entry-level firefighters. Ricci did not confront this issue.”

The obvious corollary of this analysis is that if the City of New Haven had not set aside the results of the exam and simply allowed itself to be sued, it would have lost and racial quotas would have triumphed. I don’t think other municipalities will miss this.

To the numbers.

Disparate Impact

Both tests consisted of 85 multiple choice questions. You had to pass the test in order to get to take the physical test, the PPT. The written test and the PPT were then averaged and the applicants were rank-ordered. Judge Garaufis isn’t so simple-minded as to attach copies of the tests to his opinion, but it is my impression that they weren’t very different in content. [1]

You can see both the 1999 and 2002 tests in their entirety here.

But they were very, very different in passing grade. Test 7029, in effect from 1999 to 2002, required you to get 84.705% right (72/85) to pass. Test 2043, in effect from 2002 to 2007, required you to get only 70% (60/85) to pass. So, under test 2043, passage rates rocketed up and the racial gaps diminished—but not enough for the Justice Department or Judge Garaufis.

Test 7029 -- 1999

Whites passed at an 89.9% rate (11,613/12,915). Blacks passed at a 60.3% rate (1,054/1,749). So, blacks passed at 67% of the white rate. Test 7029 failed the 4/5 rule. An expert said there were 33.9 “units of standard deviation” between the white and the black rate, making it a one-in-a-ridiculously-large-number possibility that the disparity in white and black results were the result of chance. The expert report is not online, and I don’t know what a “unit of standard deviation” is. Obviously the black result is not 34 standard deviations below the white result. But perhaps here “units of standard deviation” simply expresses how far the white-black result is from chance, if you assume no difference in ability between the two groups.

Hispanics passed 7029 at a 76.7% rate, meaning their pass rate was 85.3% of the white pass rate. So test 7029 did not flunk the 4/5 rule for Hispanics. But, an expert found that there were 17.4 “units of standard deviation” between the white and Hispanic results, again making it staggeringly unlikely that the difference in scores between the two groups was the result of chance.

Test 2043 -- 2002

Whites passed this test at an impressive 97.2% rate (13,495/13,877). Blacks passed it at 85.4% (1,190/1,393). So, this is a spectacularly easy test. I would think you’d have to be damn near illiterate not to pass it. Anyway, the black pass rate was 87.8% of the white pass rate. So, the 4/5 rule is satisfied. But, an expert finds that there are 21.8 “units of standard deviation” between the white and black scores, again making it extraordinarily unlikely that the difference in scores between the groups is the result of chance.

The Hispanic pass rate is 92.8% of the white rate, or 95.5%. The 4/5 rule is easily satisfied. But there are 10.5 “units of standard deviation” between the white and Hispanic results, making it extremely unlikely that the difference between the scores was the result of chance.

The opinion then goes on to the rank ordering issue. There is a gap of more than 600 slots between the average white and the average black applicant on the hiring list under test 7029, and a gap of more than 900 slots between the average white and the average black under test 2043, because of course everyone and his cretinous brother are passing 2043 and getting on the list.

The city argues that the judge should deny summary judgment on the prima facie question of disparate impact where the 4/5 rule is satisfied (that is, test 7029 for Hispanics, and test 2043 for black and Hispanics). But the judge says no. Citing to various cases from the Second Circuit (i.e., the geographical branch of the federal appellate courts comprising New York and Connecticut) he says that disparate impact is established any time the racial gap is more than 3 standard deviations—by which he means, not that the black/Hispanic score is more than 3 standard deviations lower than the white score, but where the gap between the races is great enough that the result is almost certainly not caused by chance.

In other words, statistical significance at the .01 level. Assuming the two races were absolutely equal in test taking ability, what is the chance that blacks would do so much worse on average on this test given to many thousands of people just by random bad luck? The answer is of course one in bazillion. Therefore, the FDNY got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

Does the Judge know what "statistical significance" even means? As Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride: " You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means." If you have a huge sample size, you can find "statistical significance" in the technical sense even when there is no practical significance.

I won’t spend a lot of time discussing the legal tests and discussion of precedent, but will try to focus on the basics. The main conceptual flaw of these exams was that they measured cognitive abilities to the exclusion of non-cognitive abilities, even though non-cognitive qualities are clearly important to being a successful firefighter. (Of course, if non-cognitive qualities are equally distributed among the population, and cognitive abilities are concentrated among whites, then the rank-ordering of a test that considers non-cognitive as well as cognitive abilities won’t be different, racially speaking, than the rank ordering of a test that considers cognitive abilities alone. But the law, in its majestic equality, takes no notice of such trifles.)

The judge complains that the cognitive test didn't test for non-cognitive traits such as Conscientuousness and Cleanliness, but doesn't indicate how the city could have efficiently, effectively, and fairly tested these non-cognitive traits among many thousands of job applicants ... and with no Disparate Impact, either!

Perhaps city officials could have sniffed each job applicant and then graded him on Cleanliness?

Written tests of the boy scout virtues aren't bad, but they have a much weaker chain of evidence supporting them than do cognitive tests. So, all the judges' quibbles about this cognitive test would be an order of magnitude larger for any of the virtue tests.For example, pencil and paper virtue tests can be outsmarted. "Ooh, how can I look good on this question?" (This isn't such a problem for firemen, except in the case of smart arsonists like John Orr, but it's a big problem testing policemen, where the last thing you want is somebody out at the extreme of the Smart-Bad quadrant.)

The good thing about IQ tests is that they can't really be outsmarted (outside of blatant copying off the Asian guy sitting next to you). If you outsmart an IQ test, well, then, you are smart.

Nor does the judge cite any evidence that there won't be racial gaps in non-cognitive traits like Dependability, Cooperation, Concern for Others, Persistence, and Self Control. Any kind of valid test for those traits will show large (and embarrassing) racial gaps, so the fire department would be right back in court being charged with Disparate Impact. For example, the judge complains that the City should have tested for "mechanical ability" as if adding a test of "mechanical ability" would obviously reduce the black-white gap.

The main structural flaw in the tests was that the questions were written by firefighters, rather than by testing professionals. The judge made great hay of the fact that some of the questions were supposed to measure inductive reasoning, and several of the firefighters involved in the process had no idea what inductive reasoning was.

Judge Garaufis then engages in a lot of quibbling over how the test was made up -- in house, by NYC civil servants interviewing firemen.

Ironically, Garaufis compliments the New Haven Fire Department's test in comparison to FDNY's, even though Justice Ginsburg's losing dissent went on and on about how bad it is.

Clearly, though, a lot of work went into it, and no evidence is presented of racial bias. (Presumably, the city officials went to extra lengths to get minority firemen to contribute to the test design processs and to buy off on the results.)

NYC's good-enough-for-government-work approach possible isn't the ideal way to make up a fireman hiring test. Nor is the best way these expensive custom-made city-by-city tests like in New Haven. The best way is like in college admissions -- you have a couple of nationally competing companies put out national tests, like the SAT and ACT. But, that's not feasibly under the current law because everybody has to act like the only reason for disparate impact is because the last 37,434 fireman's tests didn't do it right, but this time, we're gonna all roll up our sleeves and, doggone it, get it right!

But if you know anything about test design (which the Judge clear doesn't), you also know that there are rapidly diminishing returns to test design sophistication. When you are just coming up with a test that eliminates the bottom 30% of white guys who want to be firemen, you know, it's really not that hard to come up with something good enough.

Other issues: the reading level of the test was too high (see p. 75); there was an insufficient showing of a linkage between the qualities measured and the abilities necessary to make a good fireman; and so on.

The government’s expert, Siskin, seems to acknowledge the existence of g, see p. 67 of the opinion. But the judge notes this solely by way of saying that the test was unjustifiably focused on the measurement of cognitive abilities.

That's a hilarious part where the plaintiff's statistical genius expert witness rediscovers the general factor of intelligence, like Charles Spearman discovered the g factor in 1904. The test design process identified nine cognitive skills useful in firefighting.

This analysis revealed a pattern showing that the “[questions] intended to measure an individual cognitive ability actually tend[ed] to correlate as or more highly with [questions] intended to measure different cognitive abilities . . . .”

Spearman invented factor analysis, which he used to discover the existence of the g Factor. No doubt wholly innocent of this bit of cognitive testing history from more than a century ago, the judge complains:

To further support his conclusion, Dr. Siskin applied a method called “factor analysis,” which is “a statistical methodology that, based on the empirical data, defines an underlying structure which can explain the correlation among the [questions].” (Id.) “For the results of factor analysis to confirm the test plan, the analysis should find that [questions] group together to comprise nine or 10 factors in a manner consistent with the test plan, such that the Deductive Reasoning [questions] group together to form one factor and the [questions] intended to measure Inductive Reasoning group together to form a second factor, and so forth.” Dr. Siskin’s factor analysis showed that the data did not “factor into nine distinct factors or ability domains,” but instead “seem to primarily measure a general cognitive ability (except, perhaps, Memorization), and to a much lesser extent, a second specific cognitive ability (which is different from any defined by the test developers).”. According to Dr. Siskin, [t]his result demonstrates that the purported intent of the test design (to measure and weight nine distinct cognitive ability domains) was not successful.”

I'm shocked, shocked to discover that this test validates the existence of the g Factor and once again fails to prove the validity of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.

Then the judge says:

This evidence shows that the cognitive abilities intended to be tested on Exams 7029 and 2043 were not the most important cognitive abilities for the job of firefighter.

But, Judge G., you just complained that the test tested g, the general cognitive ability, rather than various hypothesized specific abilities. Tautologically speaking, isn't general cognitive ability the most important cognitive ability?

Interestingly, the use of a cutoff score is very problematic, even when the cutoff is based on the number of firefighters required (I should say, especially when the cutoff is based on the number of firefighters required). See p. 78. I think the obvious takeaway is that the fire department should consider many applicants more than it needs, and hire on a racially balanced basis from that larger pool.

In other words, do what Chicago is doing: hire firefighters largely at random.

We'd be better off with strict racial quotas than with that.

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

NYT: The Yellow Peril threatening Harvard's campus culture: or why two Wongs don't make a White in the Ivy League

The most interesting response in the New York Times to Ron Unz's demonstration that Ivy League colleges appear to have implemented a quota cap on Asian admissions is "Scores Aren't the Only Qualifications" from Rod M. Bugarin, an elite college admissions professional who identifies as Asian-American. He doesn't deny Unz's charge, but tries to explain the reasons top colleges discriminate against Asians:

From my experience of watching college students learn, grow and develop on elite campuses, I rarely found the skills that are validated by standardized tests to be those that enhance classroom discussions or the interpersonal dynamic when doing research with peers and professors. 

Having been one of those students who "enhance classroom discussions" (obviously, I'm biased, but I don't think my assertion that my presence tended to make class discussions livelier and more intellectually interesting sounds all that far-fetched), and having two sons who do the same, I am sympathetic to this viewpoint.

On the other hand, I am not sure that the college admissions process is at all set up to assess this potential accurately. Some colleges do one-on-one interviews, and most ask for letters of recommendation, but it's not at all clear that these vague instruments are terribly successful at identifying individuals who improve discussions and team projects. For example, I had lavish letters of recommendations from high school teachers and college professors about how much I benefitted the educational community, but then so do lots of applicants. I made sure to get a recommendation from my one high school teacher who had a Harvard Ph.D.. He wrote an exceptionally intelligent endorsement, but did it go over the heads of admissions workers?

What really works, I imagine, is for prep schools that have a long and deep relationship with elite colleges to make confidential assessments: "The faculty here at Groton is in near unanimous agreement that this applicant adds more to classroom discussions than any Groton student since Bill Smith four years ago, whom you will have noticed just became a Rhodes Scholar. As you know, we value our relationship with Harvard's admissions' committee over all others, so we would not steer you wrong when we call your attention to this applicant's intangibles." That kind of thing coming from a top 100 prep school would probably swing some weight, while recommendations from teachers and staff at non-elite high schools probably don't get taken too seriously because of small sample sizes.

Policies like affirmative action give admissions officers the liberty to identify those candidates who surpass expectations of what is “qualified,” bringing talents, interests, skills and perspectives that make learning in the college community an enriching experience for everyone. Without practices like affirmative action, admissions officers are constrained to select only those who demonstrate a very narrow set of skills, which is not necessarily what our nation and economy need. 

Bugarin is conflating the terms "affirmative action" and "holistic admission," which isn't unreasonable.

I believe that all students, regardless of their ethnicity, can take pride that when applying to a highly selective institution that embraces the principles behind affirmative action, each document in your file is scrutinized to find subtle reasons that make you a great fit. 

Asian and Asian-American students should embrace affirmative action because it allows you to present yourself as a complete person instead of reducing yourself to a test score. More important, a campus community composed only of students who have aced standardized tests cannot match the dynamic, diverse ethos that currently exists.

More than three decades ago, a teacher at the most elite prep school in Los Angeles (the one in Coldwater Canyon) told me, with approval, that its admissions department routinely discounted the test scores of Asian applicants to keep classes from being overrun by students who only speak up to ask, "Will this be on the test?"

I’m sure that many students, particularly Asian and Asian-Americans, would not find Ivy League schools as desirable if their campus communities only valued competitive, high-stakes testing where only a few are given the opportunity to succeed. 

And that is likely true.

Yet, the unfortunate reality is that highly selective campuses do not have enough room on their campuses to admit every student they find compelling. Affirmative action is one of many tools that helps my former colleagues make these subjective decisions in the most humane way possible.

Are there quantitative studies showing that current admissions procedures can and do identify students who would add more to campus life than their objective measurements would suggest?

You'll notice that the government applies very different standards to different organizations. For example, the theory of disparate impact is applied often and strictly to fire departments. The FDNY's hiring test -- questions about how to fight fires -- was thrown out by a federal court solely because of disparate impact. Now, here is an insider more or less admitting that elite colleges practice disparate treatment discrimination based on the hunch that a Wong is less likely to speak up in class than a Goldman or a Huntington, but where are the demands that Harvard show us the studies they have undertaken to prove this stereotype? I'm not saying they couldn't do that, but I sure would like to read those secret studies ... assuming they exist, which I doubt.

(A generation ago, Harvard let Robert Klitgaard, a statistically sophisticated social scientist who had worked in Harvard admissions, publish a 1985 book, Choosing Elites, recounting various admissions moneyball studies that Harvard had done, focusing most on the Class of '75. But I haven't heard much since then out of the murky world of college admissions. I'd be particularly interested in Harvard's models of what kind of alumni donate the most to Old Harvard's annual fund drives.)

Asians-make-a-duller-campus is the kind of stereotype that's pretty obvious (white Berkeley in the 1960s v. Asian Berkeley in this century is a historical comparison that leaps to mind), but not particularly easy to quantify, and not easy to defend in public.

But, shouldn't the Harvards be asked to at least demonstrate that they've narrowed their stereotypes intelligently rather than painting with a broad racial brush? I can see South Asians in my readership raising their hands, saying, "Hey, us South Asians aren't afraid to talk. Why do we have to get lumped in with East Asians?" And I can see American-born East Asians saying, "I'm not totally shy like the FOB East Asians like my parents." And I can see East Asian children of American-born East Asians saying, "Hey, I'm pretty much like all the white kids I grew up with in our mostly white neighborhood, so don't lump me in with the East Asian kids born in a high test score ghetto like Arcadia." Or, "Hey, I'm only half Asian, and I got white personality genes." Etc Etc

But, in the long run, Harvard will get away with lots of stuff that FDNY wouldn't dream of trying, because it's Harvard.

Strange New Respect for judge in FDNY case

From the New York Times:

For Judge in Firefighter Discrimination Case, an Evolving Opinion 

By MOSI SECRET

One after another, nearly 150 white firefighters approached a lectern facing a federal judge and, voices sometimes trembling with anger, decried what they called a perversion of justice. Years of hard work to make it into the ranks of the department were being tossed aside to make way for unqualified minority candidates, they said, all in a questionable effort to end discrimination.

The target of their wrath sat silently before them: Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, whose expansive rulings have forced the New York Fire Department — “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege,” in his words — to overhaul its practices to hire more minority candidates.
One fireman, Sean Fitzgerald, bluntly accused the judge of playing a “social experiment” and questioned whether he was driven by “socioeconomic problems, personal ambition or inner guilt.” 

The remarkable demonstration of opposition, which played out over four days in federal court last week, underscored the degree to which Judge Garaufis has emerged as the most prominent and provocative figure in New York City’s most contentious integration battle in decades. Critics have dubbed him “Emperor Garaufis” and have accused him of being a publicity-seeking liberal crusader whose imposition of racial quotas has jeopardized public safety. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called for his removal from the case. 

But the case has also highlighted the evolution of his thinking on the government’s role in helping minorities. A product of the machine-driven world of Queens politics, he fiercely opposed federally mandated integration efforts as a young school board member from a mostly white district in the 1970s. Decades later, he pulled aside a black colleague on the federal bench and asked him searchingly, “How does it feel to be a black person in society?”

And then Judge Garaufis asked his black colleague, "May I touch your hair?"

“How does it feel to be a black person in society?” As opposed to ... what? ... A black person living with a family of wolves in the wilderness?

Seriously, judging by the quality of analysis in his Vulcan Society decision, Garaufis appears to be an innumerate dolt (here's my 2009 analysis of his decision). But who cares about that when the New York Times only cares about Who? Whom? and Whose side are you on?

343

It's little understood how immigration drives the spread and potency of racial and ethnic quotas. It's widely assumed, even opponents of affirmative action, that race quotas are just about blacks, even though Hispanics now make up more of the legally "protected groups" than do African-Americans.

Further, it's widely assumed that quotas are imposed solely as a proactive decision by liberals, as in college admissions, and could thus be banned by Supreme Court decision or by referendum. In reality, they are mostly imposed as a reactive decision by fairly conservative organizations to avoid lawsuits.

Your Lying Eyes points to a Newsday article:

Feds sue city, claim biased FDNY exams
U.S. Department of Justice says previous tests discriminated against black and Hispanic applicants
BY ANTHONY M. DESTEFANO

In a 14-page complaint filed in federal court in Brooklyn, attorneys for the Department of Justice alleged that discriminatory hiring practices were rooted in two written tests given to applicants in 1999 and 2002 that, while not purposely or obviously racist, were littered with SAT-like questions that do not test an applicant's ability to fight fires. The suit seeks an injunction and possible damages.

The two "pass/fail" tests resulted in passing rates for black and Hispanic applicants that were lower than those of white applicants in a statistically significant way, the complaint charges.

In the 1999 test, about 90 percent of white applicants had a passing score, but only 61.2 percent of black and 77 percent of Hispanic test-takers passed, according to the complaint.

The rates for the 2002 exam were 97.2 percent for white applicants, 85.6 percent for black applicants and 92.8 percent for Hispanic applicants, court records stated.

According to federal officials, the use of the tests has contributed to the low numbers of black and Hispanic uniformed firefighters when compared with the NYPD.

According to a 1999 city study, there are 11,000 New York City firefighters, of which about 3 percent are black and 4.5 percent Hispanic, compared with 13.4 percent and 17.2 percent, respectively, in the NYPD, the officials said. ...

City Hall fired back with a statement that took issue with the claim by federal officials.

"In fact, the test plan, which resulted in the development of the 1999 and 2002 exams, was developed by active New York City firefighters, including black and Hispanic firefighters, working with experts at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, and was job-related," Assistant Corporation Counsel Georgia Pestana said.

Your Lying Eyes responds:

Provided it requires some cognitive skills, it's basically impossible to design a written exam that won't show these kinds of disparities in test results. By making the test easier and easier, and eliminating questions that test logical or reasoning skills, as was obviously attempted here, you can close the gap somewhat, but the statistically significant differential, which the DOJ points to here, will remain. The DOJ argues that the test is not relevant to the job, which is about all they could argue at this point, since the test has been designed to be so easy that almost every white applicant passes.

Compare these test results to this analysis of the July 2004 Texas Bar Exam (which I chose because it showed up first in a Google search). Among first time test takers, 85% of whites, 69% of Hispanics and 53% of blacks passed. These results are very nearly statistically identical (measured in terms of z-score differentials) to the 1999 NYC firefighters exam. They also are similar to what we find with the SATs, NAEP assessments* - just about any written test requiring cerebral energy. As la Griffe du Lion has pointed out, it's one of the few things you can count on in the social sciences, but count on it you can.

The point I want to make however is the extraordinary chutzpah of the Department of Justice in suing ... the NYFD. Why? Let me sum it up in one number:

343

How soon we forget.

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

A good question about FDNY test questions

Here's a Commenter's question about the Fire Department of New York hiring exams ruled discriminatory in Vulcan Society:

"I have a friend who tells me the test is simply a "dumbed down" version of the SAT with no prior knowledge of firefighting and related topics necessary. At the same time I keep hearing "fire buffs" are skewing the scores for "everyone else." There's a definite disconnect here."

The explanation is that you can pass the test (which you can see for yourself here) in one of two general ways:

1. All the information needed to answer the questions is in reading passages directly above the questions. So, anybody with good reading comprehension can walk in cold and pass the test. For example, here's the question on p. 6 that the New York Times considered to be a smoking gun of "Racial Bias:"

17. Which one of the following portable power saw blades must be put out of service?

A) A carbide tip blade missing nine tips.
B) A carbide tip blade with three broken tips.
C) An aluminum oxide blade measuring 12 inches.
D) A yellow silicon carbide blade measuring nine inches.

Well, I certainly didn't know the answer to that question off the top of my head. However, I could have answered it by reading the 250 word passage on the same page, which includes the sentences:

A saw blade must be put out of service (OOS) and sent to the Technical Services Division when the blade becomes worn or damaged. Carbide tip blades must be put OOS when eight or more tips are missing or broken.

And then I could use Math Skills to recognize that nine missing tips is more than eight missing tips, so I would choose A).

2. If you aren't that good at reading comprehension, you can study ahead of time and learn much of the material asked about so that your poor reading skills won't be a problem. (That's one of the reasons the New Haven reverse discrimination victims chose Frank Ricci as their lead plaintiff -- he's dyslexic, so his reading skills aren't that good, but he just studied hard before the test.)

However, if you are bad at reading and you aren't interested enough in the vocation of firefighting to learn a lot about firefighting ahead of time, well, then, you probably won't do well on the test, much to the outrage of Judge Garaufis and the New York Times.

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

Minority victimhood kicks in at 0.1 percentile

There's a fair amount of national chatter about the U. of Texas affirmative action case, but the far more revealing 5-year-old Vulcan Society v. Fire Department of New York lawsuit remains mostly of interest in the Outer Boroughs. The truth is that "affirmative action" pales in importance to "disparate impact," but practically nobody in the U.S. understands "disparate impact" law. Do you think, say, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, or Maureen Dowd could explain the EEOC's Fourth-Fifth's Rule off the top of their heads?

From the New York Daily News today:

Seven applicants who failed the FDNY written exams that a federal judge tossed out as discriminatory are not entitled to damages because their grade was less than 25. 

The Vulcan Society of black firefighters, the city and U.S. Justice Department lawyers all agree that a score of 25 is too abysmally low to merit compensation. 

“Such a candidate would not have succeeded due to his or her lack of effort and therefore should not be eligible for relief,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elliot Schachner wrote in papers filed Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court. 

Only seven black and Hispanic applicants out of 7,100 who took the tests scored less than 25 on the exams, according to court papers. Of nonminority applicants, 20 scored less than 25. 

The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the city in 2007 alleging the written exams in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against minorities. 

Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis later ruled that minority candidates who were not hired and those whose hiring was delayed as a result of the test scores may be entitled to damages.

Except for the dumbest 0.1% (i.e., 7 out of 7,100) who took the test.

My recollection is that this was a multiple choice test with four answers for each questions. I don't know if 25 means 25%, but if so, that means the only minority applicants not eligible to share in the booty were those who did worse than random guessing.

But, what about firefighting applicants who were unable to finish their exam because they accidentally set their test booklets on fire? Surely, they deserve to share in the loot from the fight against racism, too?

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

Who can take "Vulcan Society" to the Supreme Court?

Last week's federal district court ruling in Vulcan Society v. New York throwing out the written tests used to hire some of the 343 firemen who died on 9/11 should be taken to the Supreme Court posthaste, before Clarence Thomas keels over and Obama replaces him with, say, Henry Louis Gates's lawyer Charles Ogletree. (To understand the political significance of Vulcan, first read my VDARE.com column. Then, to understand the legal significance, read my blogpost below.)

Don't overlook the publicity-garnering value of the case's title: Vulcan Society. The late night talk show monologue jokes write themselves. This case could generate a huge amount of publicity -- after all, many media personalities have a self-interest in competent FDNY firemen.

Another key would be to personalize it by finding firemen who died on September 11, 2001 who wouldn't have been hired under Judge Garaufis's ruling. Personalize the case by showing that he is demeaning and dishonoring their service and sacrifice as being the product of racial discrimination.

It's time to go to the mat.

Not only does Judge Garaufis's decision self-parodyingly demonstrate the idiocy of Disparate Impact theory, but it seems to extend it beyond the EEOC's Four-Fifth's rule to demand lowered hiring standard whenever there is any disparity, no matter how nugatory, in hiring rates by race.

The question is: Who will take the case to the Supreme Court? Can we trust the Bloomberg Administration to appeal and to appeal in an aggressive fashion? After all, the DeStefano Administration in New Haven sure wasn't helpful in defending their firefighter tests, and Bloomberg is under much the same political pressures.

I suspect this shows the key, if unstated, reason that Judge Garaufis refused to let the Uniformed Firefighters Association union become a co-defendant while letting the Vulcan Society of black firefighters come into the case midway through to become lead plaintiff. (Who, you might ask, petitions to be a defendant in a lawsuit? An organization intending to make sure a strong appeal is filed.)

Garaufis likely grasped that the union was much more likely to appeal, and appeal on broad grounds, that Mayor Bloomberg, so if the Judge could keep the union out of the case, he could make up any absurd ruling he wanted with less risk that the political will would exist on the losing side to have him overturned.

Can any lawyers out there explain the necessary strategy for getting Vulcan Society to the Supreme Court?

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

Some people never learn

From the New York Times, an update on the Vulcan Society disparate impact discrimination lawsuit filed by the Bush Administration (thanks, Alberto!):

In a lacerating decision that accused Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of willfully ignoring the racial imbalance in the New York Fire Department, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that a court-appointed monitor would be installed to oversee the department’s recruitment efforts and ensure that more minority candidates are hired.

The decision by the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, comes at the end of four years of bitter litigation in which the city and the Fire Department stood accused of allowing the department to remain almost 97 percent white for decades, despite the fact that the city’s population is about 25 percent black.

Judge Garaufis has been revealing himself to be an innumerate fool for a couple of years now, but do you think anybody he knows has ever pointed this out to him? There is no shame in our society for being a certain kind of idiot. He, in fact, gives off repeated hints that he's immensely proud of himself.

The judge's latest decision is a case study in disparate impact reasoning, such as it is. 

The one interesting thing is a footnote showing that while blacks make up 3.8% of the FDNY, blacks make up 61.4% of the Corrections Department. Why no disparate impact study of that department, where blacks are wildly overrepresented? (Presumably, blacks like working for a black-dominated department where you don't have to run into burning buildings, the technical knowledge requirements are lower, and maybe there are more chances for graft.)

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

Derb on Me in Taki's

John Derbyshire has a very kind essay on me up at Taki's Magazine: "Sailer-ism."

By the way, looking at my picture from last fall illustrating Derb's article, I wanted to mention that I've recently shaved off the goatee. The first famous person in Chicago to wear a goatee in 1991 was the White Sox ace pitcher Jack McDowell, whom I knew slightly because he went to my high school. Jack was a grunge rocker during the offseason and hung out with Eddie Vedder and the like so he brought the Seattle look to Chicago. But it took me years to get around to wearing a goatee. I'm not very fashion forward.

Now, de-goateed, staring at myself in the mirror, I feel like I'm missing something. My face is best seen in limited measure and too much is currently on display. So, I'm thinking about growing a mustache.

Clearly, though, mustaches are around the bottom of the popularity curve. Not even relief pitchers wear mustaches anymore -- I looked at pictures of the Dodgers' and Angels' 40-man spring training rosters and nobody has a mustache without accompanying chin ornamentation, not even the bullpen boys. (Facial hair creativity is found most often in masculine workplaces with a hurry-up-and-wait work schedule such as bullpens, firehouses, and army camps. The Civil War was the great progenitor of facial hair fashions, such as the sideburns of General Burnsides. See Ron Maxwell's movie "Gettysburg" to see what men with too much time on their hands can get up to in the facial hair department.) The older stars like Vladimir Guerrero tend to still sport goatees while the rookies tend to have that weird little chin frizz that Tiger Woods displayed awhile ago.

Do firemen still wear mustaches? Lots of the 343 FDNY guys who died on 9/11 had mustaches, but have they kept up the look? Do homosexuals still wear mustaches or have they hopped off that bandwagon finally? The only people that I'm sure still like mustaches are the illegal immigrants I see riding bicycles.

Attorney General Eric Holder has a mustache. It looks distinguished on him, but it's the same one he's had for years, so it's not exactly a fashion harbinger.

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

Heckuva job, Albertoie!

Back on 9/11, 343 men of the Fire Department of New York gave their lives. Six years later, the Bush Administration (Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General) rewarded the survivors by suing the FDNY on the grounds that the hiring test was an example of disparate impact discrimination because too many white guys aced it.

How's that working out for Republicans, anyway? How many black and Hispanic voters were converted to Republicans by this ploy?

Vulcan

And here's the New York Times illustrating the First Corollary to Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in a Liberal Society:

"The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group's bad behavior."

In the case of today's "intentional discrimination" ruling against the Mayor of New York in Albert Gonzalez's discrimination lawsuit against the Fire Department of New York, we could perhaps offer a Second Corollary:

"The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for not noticing that group's bad behavior."

From the New York Times:

Judge Cites Discrimination in N.Y. Fire Dept.
By AL BAKER

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that New York City intentionally discriminated against black applicants to the Fire Department by continuing to use an exam that it had been told put them at a disadvantage.

It was not a “one-time mistake or the product of benign neglect,” wrote the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn. “It was a part of a pattern, practice and policy of intentional discrimination against black applicants that has deep historical antecedents and uniquely disabling effects.” A remedy will be decided on later.

In his decision, the judge highlighted how “black and other minority firefighters have been severely underrepresented,” characterizing that as a “persistent stain on the Fire Department’s record.”

City officials said that they intended to appeal the decision, but could not do so until the judge had determined what damages the city might face.

Legal experts, as well as lawyers for the plaintiffs and city officials, said the decision was the first in recent memory in which a court had found that the city had intentionally discriminated against a large group of people — racial minorities or women, for instance — in the workplace.

“I can’t recall there ever being a finding of intentional racial discrimination in a pattern-and-practice case against the city,” said Elise C. Boddie, a professor of constitutional law at New York Law School who formerly litigated employment discrimination cases. “I would say this is pretty big.”

In July, Judge Garaufis — acting on a claim being pushed by the United States Justice Department — ruled that the Fire Department used a test in 1999 and 2002 that had a discriminatory effect on black applicants.

In his ruling on Wednesday, the judge found that the city intentionally discriminated against blacks in using those tests and in ignoring calls over the years to change the testing procedure. The suit was brought by three people who took the test and by the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black city firefighters.

At the heart of the case is the Fire Department’s persistent underrepresentation of minorities and the continued use, between 1999 and 2007, of the entrance exams. In 2007, there were 303 black firefighters, accounting for 3.4 percent of the department’s ranks; black residents make up 25.6 percent of the city’s population.

The judge noted that while the city’s other uniformed services “have made rapid progress integrating black members into their ranks, the Fire Department has stagnated and at times retrogressed.”

Judge Garaufis stopped short of finding that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the former fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, had also intentionally discriminated against black applicants. But the judge wrote that he found strong evidence to suggest that they were made aware numerous times that the Fire Department’s entrance exams were discriminatory, yet failed to take sufficient remedial action.

The mayor testified at a deposition in August that he did not recall receiving a report more than six years ago warning him about sharp differences in the pass rates between white and minority candidates for firefighter jobs, lawyers said.

The judge “let the mayor and the commissioner off the hook on the basis of a doctrine known as qualified immunity,” said Richard A. Levy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. He said that doctrine exempts public officials from lawsuits that are based on their discretionary decisions. ...

Some city officials said they found the decision unexpected and deeply perplexing, in part because the judge ruled on plaintiffs’ motions for summary judgment and the city’s motion to dismiss the case without a trial.

Mr. Levy agreed it was unusual to get a ruling based solely on documentary evidence and depositions, but he said “the evidence of a decades-long pattern of discriminating against black and Latino firefighter applicants was overwhelming.”

Ms. Boddie, the New York Law School professor, said such rulings against government entities were rare around the nation, adding, “To the extent there is a finding of liability, it is usually on disparate-impact grounds, not based on racially discriminatory intent.” ...

I wrote about the Vulcan case a million times last summer, so here are a few facts the NYT left out of the article:

1. The discrimination lawsuit against FDNY was brought by the Alberto Gonzalez's Justice Department under the Bush Administration in 2007.

2. The white-black racial gap, as pointed out by La Griffe du Lion, was 1.04 standard deviations in 1999 and 0.96 standard deviations in 2002. In other words, the racial difference on the two test dates averaged exactly the one standard deviation difference that La Griffe calls the Fundamental Constant of Sociology.

3. You can take the tests yourself here.

4. Here's a sample question:

17. Which one of the following portable power saw blades must be put out of service?

A) A carbide tip blade missing nine tips.
B) A carbide tip blade with three broken tips.
C) An aluminum oxide blade measuring 12 inches.
D) A yellow silicon carbide blade measuring nine inches.

You can find the answer on the same page in this excerpt from a 250 word reading selection:

A saw blade must be put out of service (OOS) and sent to the Technical Services Division when the blade becomes worn or damaged. Carbide tip blades must be put OOS when eight or more tips are missing or broken.

4. The NYT should profile some beneficiaries of this bias, such as firefighter Michael Cammarata (1978-2001).

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