Steve Sailer: iSteve: 3/20/05

March 25, 2005

Australians Talk Big, Bleed Small in Iraq

From Michael Duffy in the Sydney Morning Herald:

An American acquaintance - let's call him Hank - has been complaining for a while that the Australian forces in Iraq have suffered no fatalities, while America has lost more than 1500 killed in action. When I suggest this observation is in poor taste, Hank says, "What's in poor taste is the contrast between the tiny number of troops you guys gave and the credit your Government takes for being part of the coalition of the willing. There's a big gap there."

"Maybe," I wonder out loud, "we've just been lucky?" Hank snorts and tells me to go look at the numbers.

At the peak of their commitments to Iraq, Britain had 45,000 people there and the US about 150,000. Relative to population sizes, to match this Australia should have had between 10,000 and 15,000 people in the Middle East at some point. In fact we peaked at just 2000. There are now fewer than 600 Australians serving there, to be joined next month by another 450.

Some of these figures are approximate, as countries use different definitions to reach them. But I doubt this would affect the conclusion that Australia has relatively contributed about one-fifth of the effort that was put into freeing Iraq by Britain and America. Says Aldo Borgu, military analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "There's no doubt our action on the ground doesn't match the Government's rhetoric."

It's an imbalance I've never seen referred to, but it ought to concern both the Government's supporters and its opponents. One would expect conservatives to be worried about the questions of honour and integrity raised by fighting war on the cheap. And those opposed to the war might ask themselves whether John Howard would have gone in if he'd had to pay the full price, not just in numbers but in putting Australian forces into situations of danger, which (as Hank gently points out) we have generally avoided so far.

You've got to admire Australian Prime Minister John Howard's political skills. He gave his most important ally the Big Talk that Bush craved, while protecting his own people's lives.

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

Inside Story on Schiavo Case

A Florida lawyer writes:

I have been following the case for years. Something that interests me about the Terri Schiavo case, and that doesn't seem to have gotten much media attention: The whole case rests on the fact that the Schindlers (Terri's parents) were totally outlawyered by the husband (Michael Schiavo) at the trial court level.

This happened because, in addition to getting a $750K judgment for Terri's medical care, Michael Schiavo individually got a $300K award of damages for loss of consortium, which gave him the money to hire a top-notch lawyer to represent him on the right-to-die claim. He hired George Felos, who specializes in this area and litigated one of the landmark right-to-die cases in Florida in the early 90s.

By contrast, the Schindlers had trouble even finding a lawyer who would take their case since there was no money in it. Finally they found an inexperienced lawyer who agreed to take it partly out of sympathy for them, but she had almost no resources to work with and no experience in this area of the law. She didn't even depose Michael Schiavo's siblings, who were key witnesses at the trial that decided whether Terri would have wanted to be kept alive. Not surprisingly, Felos steamrollered her.

The parents obviously had no idea what they were up against until it was too late. It was only after the trial that they started going around to religious and right-to-life groups to tell their story. These organizations were very supportive, but by that point their options were already limited because the trial judge had entered a judgment finding that Terri Schiavo would not have wanted to live.

This fact is of crucial importance -- and it's one often not fully appreciated by the media, who like to focus on the drama of cases going to the big, powerful appeals courts: Once a trial court enters a judgment into the record, that judgment's findings become THE FACTS of the case, and can only be overturned if the fact finder (in this case, the judge) acted capriciously (i.e., reached a conclusion that had essentially no basis in fact).

In this case, the trial judge simply chose to believe Michael Schiavo's version of the facts over the Schindlers'. Since there was evidence to support his conclusion (in the form of testimony from Michael Schiavo's siblings), it became nearly impossible for the Schindlers to overturn it. The judges who considered the case after the trial-level proceeding could make decisions only on narrow questions of law. They had no room to ask, "Hey, wait a minute, would she really want to die?" That "fact" had already been decided.

In essence, the finding that Terri Schiavo would want to die came down to the subjective opinion of one overworked trial judge who was confronted by a very sharp, experienced right-to-die attorney on one side and a young, quasi-pro bono lawyer on the other.

Nothing unusual about this, of course. It's the kind of thing that happens all the time. But it's an interesting point to keep in mind when you read that the Schiavo case has been litigated for years and has been reviewed by dozens of judges . . . yadda yadda yadda.

By the way, I'm guessing that George Felos is probably quite happy to work the Schiavo case for free at this point since it's making him one of the most famous right-to-kill -- I mean right-to-die -- lawyers in the country. His BlackBerry has probably melted down by now, what with all the messages from the hurry-up-and-die adult children you've been blogging about.

Another reader comments:

The veracity/provability of Terri's wishes has been the main issue driving the whole debate. And it is one the media completely downplayed or missed or mis-reported. Because these supposed wishes of Terri provide the "fact" of the legal matter, all other subsequent legal filings appear to have been doomed from the start because this fact legally has been unshaken. Therefore, all filings proceed from the same premise: Terri said she didn't want to be kept alive in this condition. Once again, if you accept the premise what must follow is predictable.

Because of the time it took for Michael Schiavo to finally assert this fact (when has not been firmly established in my mind: Terri's family suggests seven years after her initial collapse and after he had taken up with another woman), one has to wonder how Terri's family initially challenged, if at all, Michael's claim that these were Terri's wishes. A couple of weeks ago I was struck by the possibility that Terri's family had suffered as a result of bad or ineffective lawyering. With all of the non-stop 24 hour cable coverage, why has no one tried to find out and report what took place legally before this story became a national issue? Were all the friends, who are coming out now talking about the rockiness of the marriage or disputing that Terri would have felt this way, deposed before Michael filed the right-to-die claim? I don't know.

Has the media reported on this and asked these questions? Not that I've seen. I suspect it is because the matter would have to mention Michael's personal relationships at the time of the filing; it muddies the waters for those who so fervently claim that Michael is solely perservering to carry out his wife's wishes. If facts are inconvenient for your position, ignore them.

It strikes me that the only measure taken over the last 15 years that could have challenged the underlying premise of the right to die case was the recent congressional action which called for a de novo review. That this action wasn't supported by the courts is for those experienced in legal matters to argue, i.e., was the legislation properly interpreted by the courts. However, the media have almost exclusively rushed to paint this legislation as religious zealotry, intervention, the proof of an impending theocracy, etc.... every description except what it actually was: the allowance of a de novo review in the federal courts.

The Florida lawyer who started this thread responds

Well, yes, but . . . the law passed by Congress allowed for de novo review only of constitutional law claims, not underlying factual issues. Specifically, the provision adopted by Congress stated that the federal court would have jurisdiction over any suit or claim "for the alleged violation of any right of Theresa Marie Schiavo under the Constitution or laws of the United States relating to the withholding or withdrawal of food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life."

What are the constitutional rights Terri Schiavo is entitled to have reviewed? Well, they're the usual suspects, like due process -- i.e., were there adequate procedures in place to protect her rights, and were they followed properly? Note that these are questions about laws and procedures, not underlying facts. In effect, the only question that can be asked is "Did she get a fair trial?" not "Did the judge reach the right factual conclusion?"

So why didn’t Congress pass a stronger bill, one that would have allowed for a completely new trial on all factual claims? Probably because they realized it would be a very, very dangerous legal precedent to set -- and likely unconstitutional anyway.

Under the US Constitution, federal courts are explicitly limited in their jurisdiction, and can hear only cases that fall within carefully defined boundaries. All other cases are heard by state courts. Allowing a federal court to step in and try a strictly state issue (which the Schiavo case is) from the beginning would pretty much violate every principle of federalism, and open the door to federalizing every case under the sun.

In truth, Congress was probably hoping that the federal courts would find a way to re-try the facts of the Schiavo case under the guise of considering the constitutional issues. But the federal judges declined to bite -- probably for very good constitutional reasons.

Moving away from legal and constitiutional issues, here's my cynical sociological / economic perspective on some underlying social trends ...

Terri Schiavo and the "I Love You But Please Die" Movement: In the uneven recent remake of "The Stepford Wives," Bette Midler plays the author of a bestselling memoir about her relationship with her mother entitled "I Love You, But Please Die."

That book would have sold very well indeed among Academy Award voters, who fell in love with the drab little euthanasia movie "Million Dollar Baby."

The Baby Boom Generation tends to get what it wants in terms of social attitudes and policies, and the first wave of Baby Boomers (the Bill Clinton cohort born in 1946) is now 59. Their surviving parents are mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians, who are getting past the decorative and cuddly part of old age. But a lot of these parents of Baby Boomers are quite asset-rich, especially if they are homeowners in Blue States, where housing prices have gone up much faster over the last 25 years than in Red States.

In Jane Austen novels, the characters hardly ever shut up about inheritances, but in modern America the whole topic is semi-taboo.

So, to summarize, millions of Blue State Baby Boomers, and a somewhat smaller fraction of Red State Baby Boomers, are in line to inherit a bundle ... but not if Mom or Dad lives forever or, especially, if his or her slowly declining health requires a fortune in expensive care. A nice quick fatal heart attack would do the trick, but with Lipitor and the like these days, oldsters are going slower.

So, when you wonder why a lot of people, especially Democrats, are okay with starving Terri Schiavo to death instead of having her kept expensively alive, follow the money.

It's hardly the only reason for the distribution of opinions on this case, but it's definitely one reason, and part of a big topic that almost nobody wants to talk about in 21st Century America.

The "I Love You But Please Die" Syndrome Embodied in Federal Law:

Under the current estate tax law pushed through by the Bush Administration in 2001, the inheritance tax drops from 45% to 0% on January 1, 2010, then rises to 55% on January 1, 2011.

That sounds less like a carefully-considered law than a high concept black comedy movie pitch:

Potential heirs spend 2009 desperately trying to keep their billionaire Granny alive, then spend 2010 desperately trying to kill her by New Year's Eve. It's "Kind Hearts and Coronets" meets "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" meets "Throw Momma From the Train." The script practically writes itself. (The climax is, of course, in Times Square -- hopefully, Dick Clark will be well enough to do a cameo. And we could write in a heroic IRS agent battling to keep Grannie alive in return for the IRS going easy on the film's financial backers' audits.)

How to Avoid "I Love You But Please Die" Syndrome: A reader from Texas writes:

On the issue of estates and killing off the old farts, I think that this is the tip of the iceberg.

I watched (in 1985, when oil went to $12/bbl) people who really should have known better lose pretty much everything, in many cases businesses that their parents and grandparents had built from the proverbial garage and horse cart. That was amazingly stupid and was as much a result of bad planning as the economic crash.

As that generation is getting older (and many have made money again) and their parents are hitting their 80s (and many are still around), I continue to be struck by how few of them actually bother to do estate planning. I hear this a lot from my age cohort (their children) who are saving every penny because they trust their parents about as far as they can spit a rat and (I hear this *all* the time) most would put even odds on their parents winding up broke and moving in with them.

My age cohort (at least the ones I know) are structuring their estate now and most of them have been pushing their parents and grandparents to do the same, and they won't or can't be bothered, guaranteeing a major tax hit and a decent amount of confusion in probate.

Not retirement planning -- estate planning, to leave estates that will survive you more or less intact, which includes life insurance to offset taxes; long term care insurance that was, pre-AIDS, reasonably cheap; shifting assets, sub rosa or not, into the hands of their children and grandchildren, and so on. Trusts are your friend here, as is planning that spans multiple generations and has mechanisms to disinherit junkies, drunks, and idiots.

It amazes me that so many people (and I am sure that it is a horrifying number across the US given that I know a strata of people who really should have this nailed down and generally don't, despite being the perfect candidates) have never structured their affairs to do anything but drop a lump sum of net assets on their children, especially when you have a lot of your net worth bound up in a single thing (like property, as you pointed out, or stock options in a single company or ownership in a single company) and you will die (comparatively) cash poor and asset rich.

I think that you will see a lot more suspicious deaths, a lot more people moving the elderly out of managed care to have them croak three weeks later, and a lot more documented abuse cases as the children start to deeply resent their parents living on and using up money that the kids have earmarked for things.

I have seen this done well (and am a beneficiary of it being done well) and I have seen it done poorly, resulting in people never speaking to siblings again and substantial parts of estates being consumed in attorneys' fees. Doing it right is a lot less painful and in the same way that good manners makes social interaction less stressful, good estate planning makes long term financial security less stressful. And financial stress can make people crazy.

Crazy enough to kill their parents.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that by not locking in any formal estate planning and keeping all the potential heirs guessing as to what the will might eventually say, an oldster can maintain a lot of power over his or her potential heirs.

By one estimate, there will be six million estates of over $1 million settled over the next few decades, so the stakes are high, indeed.

The common law evolved in sizable part to handle inheritance issues, but the Right to Die laws emerged during recent decades when we've largely stopped talking publicly about estates, so there is a potential for contradiction. The question of conflict of interest in right-to-die cases is a very serious one..

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

How to Avoid the "Hurry Up and Die" Syndrome

A reader from Texas writes:

By the way, under the current estate tax law pushed through by the Bush Administration in 2001, the inheritance tax drops from 45% to 0% on January 1, 2010, then rises to 55% on January 1, 2011.

That sounds less like a carefully-considered law than like a high concept black comedy movie pitch: Potential heirs spend 2009 desperately trying to keep rich old Granny alive, then spend 2010 desperately trying to kill her. The script writes itself.

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

How to Get Rid of Mugabe

Nicolas D. Kristof reports from Zimbabwe:

The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's.

"If we had the chance to go back to white rule, we'd do it," said Solomon Dube, a peasant whose child was crying with hunger when I arrived in his village. "Life was easier then, and at least you could get food and a job."

Mr. Dube acknowledged that the white regime of Ian Smith was awful. But now he worries that his 3-year-old son will die of starvation, and he would rather put up with any indignity than witness that.

An elderly peasant in another village, Makupila Muzamba, said that hunger today is worse than ever before in his seven decades or so, and said: "I want the white man's government to come back. ... Even if whites were oppressing us, we could get jobs and things were cheap compared to today."

A friend of mine has a fair amount of black budget experience organizing coups for the U.S. Government back during the Cold War. He says for a reasonable sum, he could put together a unit of his old mercenary pals who could overthrow the racist Mugabe regime and save a lot of people's lives.

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

Baby Name Theory

A reader writes:

So many popular girls' names have followed the same path that it can hardly be coincidence:

place name >
surname >
upper-class boy's name >
upper-class girl's name >
middle-class all-the-rage girl's name >
tired old trailer-trash girl's name >
ewww, we wouldn't touch it with a pole!

E.g.: Tracy Stacy Kimberly Hayley Lindsay Ashley Courtney Whitney Kelly Kelsey

and way back:

Shirley Evelyn Vivian Beverly

A fellow Whitney descendent told me she suggested her daughter and son-in-law name their girl Whitney. They objected that it was too common! This is a seldom-heard argument against fad names-- it ruins the name for those few families who have a legitimate reason to use it.

The French baby name site graphs Claude, Marie and George (no "s") for both sexes. The Romans usually gave their girls feminized versions of men's names. This practice appears a lot less common among Teutons and Greeks, and Hebrew names seem to have avoided it altogether. (Though later groups did it with popular Hebrew boys' names, e.g. Jane/Jean/Joan/Jenny for John, and Jacqueline for Jacob/James.)

So why, in our ultrafeminist, gynocratic age, did we first increase the use of feminized male names-- Patricia, Michelle, Nicole, Danielle-- and then go beyond that to outright giving boys' names to girls? ("Hillary" is particularly weird-- St Hilary was into crushing heresies, as was his namesake Hilaire Belloc.)

What's really odd is giving presidential names like Taylor and Madison to girls. Hell, "Madison" literally means "son of Matthew or Maud". "MacKenzie" means "son of Comely". (Shouldn't she be comely herself?)

Reese Witherspoon's name is actually Laura Jean Reese Witherspoon, so unlike copycat fans her name actually honors a relative. (Of course she's truly a blue-blood, with a street in Princeton named for her headmaster forebear.)

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

Boutiquification of Cities Renders Them Sterile

Portland is an inland city that has artificially created its own Dirt Gap by declaring much of what would normally be its suburbs off limits for development on environmental grounds. This has raised housing prices in the city so much that Portland is not only resisting the illegal immigrant tidal wave, it's ethnically cleansing itself of blacks. In Jonathan Tilove's 2003 book Along Martin Luther King, Portland's MLK Boulevard was the only one he knew of where whites were moving in. Portland is going so upscale that its one of the few cities in the country with a growing Jewish population.

In many ways, this is a successful strategy in response to illegal immigration, but there's just one problem: Portland is just too expensive for families. The NYT reports Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children. Schools are being shut down because, while there are many trendy restaurants, there are few children. (By the way, can we lose the cliché "vibrant cities"? What does it mean? Usually, newspapers use it to imply "a whole bunch of Hispanics live there," but here it's being used to mean the opposite. I don't think it actually means anything.)

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

Sailer Articles 2000

2000 Articles by Me - No, check that, I mean a dozen articles by from the year 2000, never before online:

Sports:

How to Tell If Your Sports Hero Is on Steroids

Kenyan Runners: Nature or Nurture?

Surprisingly, Gender Gap Widening in Olympic Running

Politics and Science of Language and Speech

Can the European Union Be Multilingual and Democratic?

Are English-Only Laws Wrong?

Chomsky, Pinker, & Deacon on Bilingual Education

Does Al Gore Lisp?

Dynasties and Nepotism:

Bush-Gore Race Marks Return of American Dynasties

Political Dynasties Are Thriving

Nepotism: From "Gladiator" to the Clinton Clan

Politics:

2000: The Five Billion Dollar Election

Compassionate Conservative Thinkers Pleased by Bush

***

California Politics: Two of my old articles never before on iSteve.com:

Ward Connerly on the Lessons of Pete Wilson's 1994 Win

Racial Dynamics of Schwarzenegger's Recall Win

***

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

March 24, 2005

A Conversation with Armand Marie Leroi

From the introduction to The Nature of Normal Human Variety:

In the early '90s, I was visiting Cambridge and went out to dinner with the late Stephen Jay Gould. During a long evening of conversation we talked about his ideas concerning race, racial racial differences, racial equality, including his well-known writings on the use and misuse of IQ tests and other such measures. I came away from the conversation with the distinct sense that he believed there were some things better left unsaid, some areas of investigation that were out of bounds if he wanted to have a just society. Nothing strange here. His views were, and still are, consistent with the daily fare of the editorial pages of many of our important newspapers and magazines.

Armand Leroi, a biologist at Imperial College, feels differently. He loves what he calls "the problem of normal human variety".

"Almost uniquely among modern scientific problems, he says, "it is a problem that we can apprehend as we walk down the street. We live in an age now where the deepest scientific problems are buried away from our immediate perception. They concern the origin of the universe. They concern the relationships of subatomic particles. They concern the nature and structure of the human genome. Nobody can see these things without large bits of expensive equipment. But when I consider the problem of human variety I feel as Aristotle must have felt when he first walked down to the shore at Lesvos for the first time. The world is new again. What is more, it is a problem that we can now solve, a question we can now answer. And I think we should."

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

French Baby Names

Here's a website that shows the absolute number of French babies given various names over the years of the 20th Century. Here is Jean, which was hugely popular through 1950, and then just about died. (You can see the Great War's terrible effect on France in the birth trends.)

And here's Dylan, which is now the #15 boy's name in France.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Terri Schiavo and the "Hurry Up and Die" Movement

In the uneven recent remake of "The Stepford Wives," Bette Midler plays the author of a bestselling memoir about her relationship with her mother entitled "I Love You, But Please Die."

That book would have sold very well indeed among Academy Award voters, who fell in love with the drab little euthanasia movie "Million Dollar Baby."

The Baby Boom Generation tends to get what it wants in terms of social attitudes, and the first wave of Baby Boomers (the Bill Clinton cohort born in 1946) is now 59. Their surviving parents are mostly octogenarians and nonagenarians, who are getting past the decorative and cuddly part of old age. But a lot of these parents of Baby Boomers are quite asset-rich, especially if they are homeowners in Blue States, where housing prices have gone up much faster over the last 25 years than in Red States.

In Jane Austen novels, the characters hardly ever shut up about inheritances, but in modern America the whole topic is semi-taboo.

So, to summarize, millions of Blue State Baby Boomers are in line to inherit a bundle ... but not if Mom or Dad lives forever or, especially, if his or her slowly declining health requires a fortune in expensive care. A nice quick fatal heart attack would do the trick, but with Lipitor and the like these days, oldsters are going slower.

So, when you wonder why a lot of people, especially Democrats, are okay with starving Terri Schiavo to death instead of having her kept expensively alive, follow the money.

It's hardly the only reason, but it's out there, and part of a big topic that almost nobody wants to talk about in 21st Century America.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 23, 2005

New Global Genetic Maps

I often emphasize the famous color map of the major races on the cover of Cavalli-Sforza's History and Geography of Human Genes, since that book remains the standard work of population genetics. Yet, it was published back in 1994, and data collection for it was halted way back in 1986, before modern DNA analyses came on line.

Fortunately, a blogger calling himself NuSapiens has constructed a number of attractive maps out of more recent DNA data. I don't see any massive disagreements with Cavalli-Sforza's old map, but they display a lot of interesting new detail.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Sexual Attraction vs. Social Attraction

The BBC reports:

Same face builds trust, not lust

Some characteristics of the student's face were replicated on the man's face Similar facial features make people trust, but not fancy, each other, research has suggested. Of 144 students studied, the majority picked individuals who most looked like them to be the most trustworthy.

But when it came to sexual attraction, most picked those with differing facial characteristics, said psychologists at Aberdeen University, UK. The results suggest that people steer clear of those who "look like family" to avoid inbreeding.

The students were shown a series of paired faces. However, they were unaware that shortly before the experiment many of the photographs had been subtly altered by psychologists to resemble the student before they looked at them.

These results back the notion that people trust kin but avoid them in a sexual setting due to the costs of inbreeding.

"This supports the idea that people - perhaps unwittingly - detect facial resemblance," said researcher Dr Lisa DeBruine. "It means to them, on some level, that this person is 'family' and they are more trusting of them."

The similar faces were also described as sexually unattractive by the students. "These results back the notion that people trust kin but avoid them in a sexual setting due to the costs of inbreeding."

I'm not sure I trust the methodology, but the results make a lot of sense to me. It seems to me that sexual attraction and social attraction tend to work in opposite directions. "Opposites attract" but "Birds of a feather flock together." Either Dear Abby or Ann Landers (or both) used to advise their readers to marry somebody who was your social match but psychological opposite.

A common movie story is the wealthy blonde girl who is supposed to marry the wealthy blonde boy from her country club, but she instead runs off with the dangerous dark haired boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Indeed, the single most popular story in Western culture might be this Romeo and Juliet tale of lovers from warring extended families.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Not Too Brightly

The New York Daily News reports:

A Bronx teacher who repeatedly flunked his state certification exam paid a formerly homeless man with a developmental disorder $2 to take the test for him, authorities said yesterday. The illegal stand-in - who looks nothing like teacher Wayne Brightly - not only passed the high-stakes test, he scored so much better than the teacher had previously that the state knew something was wrong, officials said.

"I was pressured into it. He threatened me," the bogus test-taker Rubin Leitner told the Daily News yesterday after Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon revealed the scam. "I gave him my all," said Leitner, 58, who suffers from Asperger's syndrome, a disorder similar to autism. "He gave me what he thought I was worth."

Brightly, 38, a teacher at one of the city's worst schools, Middle School 142, allegedly concocted the plot to swap identities with Leitner last summer. If he failed the state exam again, Brightly risked losing his $59,000-a-year job. "I'm tired of taking this test and failing," Brightly told Leitner, according to Condon's probe. "I want you to help me."

Along with being much smarter than Brightly, Leitner is 20 years older. He also is white and overweight while Brightly is black and thin. Yet none of those glaring differences apparently worried Brightly.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Spanish Baby Names

Something that jumps out of Baby Name Wizard is how popular Spanish names were in the first half of the 20th Century. For example, Juan is, not surprisingly, growing in popularity, but the interesting thing is how popular it was before there were many Hispanics in America. Today, about 0.5% of all boys are named Juan, but during the first half of the 20th Century, the number of Juans ran consistently at about 1/3 the current rate.

For example, in "The Aviator," Alec Baldwin plays Howard Hughes' archrival Juan Terry Trippe, founder of Pan Am, Yale grad and son of a Wall Street tycoon.

Similarly, Juanita and Juana were fairly popular girls names in the 1920s, but they have since dropped out of the top 1000. Similarly, the upscale girls name Consuelo has disappeared.

Apparently, Spanish first names used to be considered aristocratic and romantic, but now they are considered plebian and depressing.

A reader writes:

In the early 20th Century, there was indeed some Hispanophilia reflected in pop culture. See, for example:, Zorro (created in 1919 by an Anglo pulp writer).

In California, there was a huge Spanish Mission fad in the 1920s, which was responsible for the gorgeous rebuilding of Santa Barbara after the 1923 earthquake. To this day, the Spanish Mission style remains the best architectural style for Southern California landscapes.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

George F. Kennan, Realist

Kennan was a bit of a Gloomy Gus, but he was a true conservative. Here's from David Engerman's article "George Kennan, a conservative's conservative" in the Chicago Tribune:

My one conversation with Kennan, who once was ambassador to Moscow, began with Russia and quickly turned to the depth of his conservatism. Asked what shaped his ideas about Russia, he recalled his professors at the University of Berlin in 1927. They had taught him about Realien, the givens of geography, climate and race that shaped nations and international relations. (The English "realities" doesn't suggest the word's resonance in 18th Century German philosophy.) Realien outlasted ephemera like ideology and even political systems--and should, he believed, be the basis of any foreign policy.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Baby Names from A to Z

March 22, 2005

No Schiavo, None of the Time

I appear to be the only blogger not weighing in on the Terri Schiavo controversy, and it seems to be driving down my hit count. The Derb wrote this morning, asking me to post something penetrating and unique.

So, here goes, ... uh ... Look, here's Noah Millman's take on the subject, which is a lot more profound than you'd get from me. I'm better at seeing the in-front-of-one's-nose stuff.

I'm reminded of when I was having dinner with General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Administration, after he'd given a speech on America's Grand Strategy in the coming century. Somebody asked him his opinion of the Elian Affair, which was just beginning. (Remember Elian, the Cuban boy whose mother died coming ashore in Florida and his father wanted to take him back to Cuba?) "It's a triviaaaaaal matter," he harrumphed.

Not exactly ... Still, a lot of these human interest stories like Elian and Terri Schiavo that capture the national attention do so precisely because they are unique man-bites-dogs stories, and thus not all that instructive about broader issues.

One widespread subject, however, that modern Americans dislike talking about in public but is a very big deal and one of increasing importance is inheritance. It's hard to get any hard data on how much money Mr. Schiavo would stand to collect from his unfortunate wife's life insurance or medical trust fund if she were to die, but that may be an issue here.

In my life, I've seen normal people driven to certifiably insane behavior due to strong emotions tied to inheritance questions. The amount of wealth that is available to survivors is going up with each decade, but so are the odds that it will all be dissipated in terminal medical care. But there is almost no public discussion of inheritance these days.

By the way, I notice that there's not that much support in the polls for keeping her alive. Generally speaking, people find the the deeply ill to be depressing and wish they would go away (which is the unspoken aspect of much commentary about the Pope these days). When I had lymphatic cancer when I was 38, I was treated well by my friends, but I've seen people who were much more popular than me die slowly with practically nobody coming to visit.

My wife said that when she told people that I had cancer, lots of nonsmokers asked if I was a smoker. They were depressed to hear I wasn't, since they couldn't cheer themselves up by saying to themselves that it would never happen to them, only to bad people who smoked. (Smokers, in contrast, were distinctly bucked up by the news that I had foregone the pleasures of tobacco and was on death's doorstep anyway.)

So, back to the really important matters: BabyNameBlogging!

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Everything you know is wrong

"Startling Scientists, Plant Fixes Its Flawed Gene" writes Nicholas Wade in the NYT. Greg Cochran says that if true, only the Flores Hobbits compares to this for weird discoveries in recent years.

In a startling discovery, geneticists at Purdue University say they have found plants that possess a corrected version of a defective gene inherited from both their parents, as if some handy backup copy with the right version had been made in the grandparents' generation or earlier.

The finding implies that some organisms may contain a cryptic backup copy of their genome that bypasses the usual mechanisms of heredity. If confirmed, it would represent an unprecedented exception to the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century. Equally surprising, the cryptic genome appears not to be made of DNA, the standard hereditary material.

The discovery also raises interesting biological questions - including whether it gets in the way of evolution, which depends on mutations changing an organism rather than being put right by a backup system...

The result, reported online yesterday in the journal Nature by Dr. Robert E. Pruitt, Dr. Susan J. Lolle and colleagues at Purdue, has been found in a single species, the mustardlike plant called arabidopsis that is the standard laboratory organism of plant geneticists. But there are hints that the same mechanism may occur in people, according to a commentary by Dr. Detlef Weigel of the Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. Dr. Weigel describes the Purdue work as "a spectacular discovery."

Which reminds me ... it's time to back up my hard disk.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Baby Names Mania

More on Baby Names: After looking at BabyNameWizard.com, readers wrote:

Odd to note that names beginning with a vowel—A, E, I, O, U—all show a very similar “U” shaped pattern over time in the graph, with much higher percentages in the early part of the century, much lower by mid-century, much higher again today. The reverse is not as clear, though it does seems the case that names beginning with sharper stop consonants have an edge in mid-century.

It's also interesting to chart the rise and fall of first letters. For example, A, K and N have been rising steadily while F, H, P and W have been declining; E, G, I and O are reviving from a mid-century trough while D, P and R are declining from a mid-century peak. It's not just one name in any of these cases; though sometimes there's an 800-pound gorilla (like "William") the trend appears to cross many names with the same initial letter. I know that Ashkenazi Jews tend to name kids after departed parents, and if the name in question isn't appealing they typically compromise by using the same initial letter. I wonder whether there's any similar pattern in gentile naming?

You didn't mention one of the most dramatic pop-culture-driven name events of the last few decades: the Jennifer explosion of the 1970s, propelled entirely by the hit movie, Love Story. Jennifer vaulted from #19 to #1 among girls' names from the 1960s to the 1970s. I must have had 3 or 4 Jennifers in every class when I was in school - they were everywhere.

I wonder how often the process works somewhat in reverse. Do novelists and screenwriters look around for (or just absorb through osmosis) names that fashionable young parents are giving their daughters and then apply them to romantic heroines? For example, Jennifer was starting to take off before the 1970s, so perhaps writer Erich Segal gave a shove to a trend that was already in motion.

Another observation is that parents seem to be less concerned about honoring their older relatives by naming their children after them. It's my perception that parents nowadays are more likely than in the past to name their kids something because they simply like the sound of the name or because a cerelebrity has it and therefore they associate good things when they hear it. I don't know why this is. Maybe people don't revere their parents are much anymore? I dunno. It seems the upper classes are more concerned about honoring their ancestors as we see George Herbert Walker Bush, named to honor several different ancestors. Names like Jr, III, IV, more common among upper classes to honor that one ancestor everyone's proud to have on the family tree.

True, although Juniors are also common in the ghetto among the sons of young men who didn't expect to live terribly long and want their names not to be forgotten.

This reminds me of something I meant to write about Julia Roberts' unfortunately named progeny.... her daughter is named Hazel, as you know. Hazel Moder. Which sounds an awful lot like the hillbilly psycho protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's famous novel Wise Blood: Hazel Motes. This rang a bell and I checked: Julia Roberts' stepfather IS surnamed 'Motes.' Her mother is now Betty Motes. so her daughter is named Hazel Moder, whose stepgrandfather is named Motes...I hope little Ms. Moder never goes postal.

One oddity is that perhaps the hippiest of all the 60s names, Donovan (the singer of "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow" didn't actually became popular until the 1990s, and is now booming. The best known Donovan today is quarterback Donovan McNabb, who is probably not a hippie..

What Were The Parents Thinking Dept.? One of the top 1000 boys' names during the 40s, 50s, and 60s was Linda. That makes Sue sound like Rod.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Hypomania Mania!

This psychiatric syndrome is hot, hot, hot according to the New York Times, with books like Exuberance and The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America by John D. Gartner. I've read the latter and it does the best job I've seen yet of explaining the bizarre ups and downs of David O. Selznick, producer of "Gone With the Wind" (and subject of the new comedy play "Moonlight and Magnolias").

In Jay McInerney's fine novel about the leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s, Brightness Falls, one of the characters is a billionaire investor who is considered a genius at timing the market, but in truth his manic phases have simply happened to coincide with the early months of bull markets and his depressive phases with the beginnings of bear markets. A lot of success in business is based on that kind of luck.

Gartner doesn't talk about him, but billionaire H. Ross Perot was obviously cycling through manic-depressive cycles during his extraordinary run for President in 1992. Early in the year he suddenly announced he intended to be elected President as an independent, and by the spring he was actually leading Bush and Clinton in the polls. Then, his mood collapsed and he went into seclusion for the entire summer, muttering paranoid nonsense about government operatives disrupting his daughter's wedding. In the fall, he re-emerged as energetic as before and won an impressive 19% of the vote, the most for a 3rd party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.

But what about hypomania, or being fired up but not to the point of self-destructive mania? The problem I have with this is that it's not so obvious that medical terminology is helpful in explaining every energetic, charismatic individual.

While Selznick was clearly a manic-depressive with major problems, other examples of Gartner's like Alexander Hamilton seem more like an energetic, charismatic individuals. Gartner only gives Teddy Roosevelt a long footnote, but TR is probably the most famous hypomanic, and he was never depressed until his son died in WWI when TR was 58. So, is hypomania, which began as a version of manic depression, a suitable description?

Or consider Bob Hope. He largely invented stand-up comedy (like his friend Bing Crosby in singing, Hope was the first to understand the potential of the microphone for comics). Unlike the many comics who are depressives, Hope was up all the time. It was said of him that when he was walking to the men's room, he was gleefully looking forward to cracking up the attendant. He was enormously successful in comedy, movies, real estate, and charity. He toured until he was 90 and lived to 100.

So, how do you draw the line between a medical syndrome and overwhelming health?

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Name Fads

BabyNameWizard: A reader writes about the website that visually displays the popularity of the top 1000 boy and girl baby names for the last 11 decades:

IMHO, this an excellent use of Java-driven graphics to convey information. You may find it fascinating, as I did. I have always observed how faddish the general run of names is, but this interesting, interactive graph lets you see a name's popularity over time.

For instance, check out Adolf. Around the turn of the last century it was a fairly popular name -- German immigrants, one reckons. However, it drops off the list for reasons that need no discussion.

For a less politically loaded German name, pick Wilhelm or Hermann. See how it dies out with German immigration to the USA. Or Urban or Ole (immigrant names). On the distaff side, Sabina -- a German name -- dies out by the 1930s. And Sabrina first appears after the war. What this means? Beats me with a stick. But it's interesting, even if it is a bit of a tale told by an idiot, etc.

Then check out Adolfo -- it looks almost like bimodal over time, as the Italian Adolfos die out and are replaced after long years with Hispanic Adolfos -- I guess that uniforms and moustaches still have their appeal in the Latin world.

[On the other hand, while Benito did well in the 1920s and 1930s, it never fell too far and even made a sizable comeback in the 1970s.]

Another quirk is people with opposite-gender names. There are apparently some poor women out there named Kevin and William; but I can find no trace of a boy named Sue, which will surely distress Johnny Cash fans.

Actually there are many insights in "Su" territory. At first I thought the name "Summer" had undergone a sex change over the 20th Century, but no, that was an artefact of my aging eyes; the male name Sumner disappeared and the female name Summer showed up.

And there are hippy names -- "Sunny" for one -- that burst into prominence in the sixties and die out steadily.

It would be interesting to graph names against popular songs and entertainments, to see what effect if any they have, but I am too ill-versed in pop culture to pull this off. A few preliminary whacks at it suggest that names namechecked in popular songs and names of popular entertainers are influential. Orville and WIlbur peaked in the teens, Aaliyah (to pick someone whose fortune with flying machines did not do as well as the Ohio brethren) was unheard of before the 1980s and has since exploded into popularity.

I'd add:

- Black girl names beginning with "La-", like Latoya, Latonya, Latonia, Latisha, and Latrice (but no mention of Latrine, which obstetricians claim they have to talk vocabulary-challenged mothers out of periodically), after peaking in the 1980s have practically died out in this decade.

I wonder what has replaced them? Perhaps Mal- names like Malik and Maliyah. These may be variations on Malcolm, which perhaps was popularized in the 1990s by by Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X.

Some famous people bring about a surge in the popularity of a name, such as Dwight in the 1940s through 1960s, while Franklin had a brief spell in the 1930s. Woodrow spiked in the teens, but then fell out of favor. Warren, Calvin, and Lyndon also surged when their namesakes were in office, but John, Richard, Gerald, Jimmy, George, and William/Bill did not.

Clint jumped up in popularity when Clint Eastwood was a big star in the 1970s and 1980s, but Clinton fell in popularity in the 1990s.

Generally speaking, stars don't make common names more popular. Frank fell steadily throughout Frank Sinatra's titanic career. Some very rare names are too associated with a star to get a boost, such as Bing, which never cracked the top 1000 in any decade.

Dylan, however, has moved up to #19 on the boys names list. Does anybody who is having kids these days even remember Bob Dylan? Watch out, parents, because Dylan is catching on as a girl's name.

Audrey fell during Audrey Hepburn's career, but now that she's dead, is in ascent. I suspect that some parents, wisely, like to wait until some time has passed after a star's peak. Dylan and Audrey are now in the permanent firmament, so the names don't sound faddish.

On the other hand, just in the last couple of years has Reese taken off as a girl's name, no doubt due to Ms. Witherspoon. In 2003, there were suddenly about as many girl Reeses as boy Reeses, so the name is probably doomed for boys.

The big worry is that your sons' names will get imperialized by girls, with traumatic consequences as famously described by Johnny Cash. So, I named my sons after Biblical figures. The girls haven't taken over their names in 2000 years so they probably won't anytime soon.

Old Testament names like Jacob, now the number one boy's name, seem to be popular these days. More likely due to fundamentalist Christians than to Jews, who aren't having too many kids.

Why are mountaineers' last names like Hillary and Mallory always given to girls?

The upcoming book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner has an interesting chapter on names, with some demographic data. By the way, in case you were wondering why guys named Steve get written about a lot on iSteve.com (Pinker, Gould, Rose, Jones, Johnson, Olson, just to name ones who write about evolution), Steven / Steve / Stephen peaked in popularity during the 1950s, and has been in steady decline ever since, presumably because as the world has come to realize what an unappealing set of brainiac know-it-alls we Steves seem to be. Here's a cartoon about the swarm of intellectual Steves sent to me by Steve Pinker.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

March 21, 2005

Four more old articles

More of My 2003 Articles never before on iSteve.com:

The Declining Diversity of Immigrants

Judge Posner on Hispanic "Rotten Boroughs"

Q&A with "Out-of-State Agitator" Ward Connerly

Spanish Retards Latino Pop Culture Influence

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

New VDARE column: Race Does Exist, says NYT

"Race Does Exist - New York Times" - My new VDARE column is up. An excerpt:

A common argument of the Race Does Not Exist crowd that Leroi didn't deal with is that, yeah, sure, people differ, but the variations change evenly across the face of the earth, so you can never define the boundaries of separate racial groups.

For example, Science Daily reports on a new population genetics study that says:

"… geographic distance from East Africa along ancient colonization routes is an excellent predictor for the genetic diversity of present human populations, with those farther from Ethiopia being characterized by lower genetic variability."

The Science Daily article ends with the Race-Does-Not-Exist-Pledge that is seemingly obligatory for geneticists who study race (and who don't want their funding cut off by the enforcers of political correctness):

"The loss of genetic diversity along colonization routes is smooth, with no obvious genetic discontinuity, thus suggesting that humans cannot be accurately classified in discrete ethnic groups or races on a genetic basis."

Two fallacies are readily apparent in this statement. First, the whole argument is a little silly. You could walk from, say, Calais on the English Channel to Pusan in South Korea without dying of thirst. At either end of your vast journey, however, the people look quite different. In between you might run into, say, Boris Yeltsin, a blond man with features slightly reminiscent of East Asia, and other people of varying degrees of European and East Asian admixture. But, in the big picture, so what? Frenchmen and Koreans are still different and nobody would mistake one for the other.

Second, the geneticists' statement applies only "along colonization routes," and most possible directions were not major colonization routes. If you walk in the majority of directions, you will eventually fall into the ocean and drown. This reinforces the "obvious genetic discontinuity" that we see with our lying eyes.

For example, one ancient path out of Africa probably crossed the narrow mouth of the Red Sea from Northeastern Africa to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and people have been going back and forth between those edges of Africa and Asia ever since. That's why some Ethiopians, such as the late emperor Haile Selassie, look quite Arabic, and some Arabs, such as the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, look quite African.

In contrast, up through 1492, there was a relatively massive genetic discontinuity between West Africa and South America, which are only 1,600 miles apart at their closest points. Why? Because the out-of-Africa colonization routes went the other way around the world. The Atlantic Ocean got in the way of walking directly from Africa to South America.

With water covering 7/10ths of the earth's surface, the out-of-Africa dispersal pathways were, in reality, few and far between.

Even on dry land, there are vast regions where paths were few and arduous. For instance, between the peoples of West Africa and of the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) there was only a small amount of mating until historic times, because the Sahara got in the way. If you tried to walk from Senegal to the Pillars of Hercules, you would likely die of thirst. The eastern end of the Sahara, though, is more porous because of the Nile and some wetter highlands.

Likewise, the Himalayas form a sharp border even today between Caucasians and East Asians...

I'll try to be methodical about this question of topographical barriers. Let's split the world up into seven effective continents: Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia, Europe, East Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. (Other breakdowns are possible; but the results will all be about the same).

Here is a table showing seven major continents and my guess as to how easy the potential direct colonization routes between each of them were during early human prehistory: A "2" means easy, "1" means difficult but used, and 0 means there was virtually no direct contact between the two continents before historic times. As you can see, it's a sparse matrix:

	W Asia	Europe	E Asia	Australia	N Am	S Am
Sub-Saharan Africa	1	0	0	0	0	0
West Asia		2	1	0	0	0
Europe			1	0	0	0
East Asia				1	1	0
Australia					0	0
North America						2

Of the 21 possible connections between continents, there were 14 where there was virtually no contact until the last millennium. Here is an image you've never seen before: a map of the many intercontinental roads not taken by prehistoric man:

Consequently there are relatively big genetic distances between Australians and Sub-Saharan Africans because the Indian Ocean was in the way. Similarly, Australians aren't closely related to Europeans because Asia, coming between them, was full of tribes that objected to outsiders marching through their lands. [More...]

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com