What we're really interested in

Science is in the business of making predictions, but the better it gets at predicting anything, the more boring those predictions are for us. For example, I predict that the sun will set at the O'Hare Airport in Chicago today at 7:26 pm CDT. When you think of all the effort that has gone into astronomical observation and prediction over the millennia (for example, Stonehenge), that's an incredible feat the human race has achieved to be able to accurately predict that.

It's also phenomenally boring.

Now, here's a different prediction: Republican nominee Mike Huckabee will outpoll Democratic nominee Bill Richardson 51%-47% in the November 2008 Presidential election. "What an idiot!" you say, "Don't you know that the Clintons will stop at nothing to get back to the White House? Richardson and Huckabee? You don't know anything about the election!" And you're right. I don't. I'm not even sure where Huckabee is from. I think it's that state, you know, the one you drive through to get to that other state.

Now, here are some more predictions. USC will not finish #1 in college football this season. Instead, Rutgers will bring the national title home to Delaware. (Or maybe to Connecticut, depending on where, precisely, Rutgers is located. Assuming it's located somewhere. Maybe it's like the DeVry Institute and is located everywhere. But I digress.) On the other hand, USC will win the NCAA basketball championship next spring behind frosh sensation OJ Mayo.

"What a jerk!" you exclaim, "Everybody knows that USC's linebacking corps is the most devastating in college football since Penn State's back in 1987." Well, I don't know that. In fact, I know barely anything about college football these days.

But the point is that, unlike the sunset forecast, these predictions are interesting, as brainless as they are. The reason that making up nonsense off the top of my head about elections and sports is interesting is because nobody can predict accurately sports and far-off elections with a lot of candidates. Sports, especially, are designed to be hard to predict just so that they will keep our interest. The same with gambling. Randomness isn't natural in the world, at least above the subatomic level. It takes a lot of work to develop gambling devices that are close to random, but a roulette wheel is more interesting than betting when the sun will go down because it's hard to predict.

You often hear that the social sciences aren't real sciences like astronomy because they can't predict anything. But that's not true. Indeed, I'll make a social science prediction for 25 years into the future. I predict that in the year 2032, the students at the schools in Beverly Hills will enjoy higher average scores on statewide and nationwide standardized tests than the students at schools in Compton. Anybody want to bet against me?

I've got a million more predictions like that. For example, in 2032, the children of today's unskilled immigrants will be more of a burden on society than the children of today's skilled immigrants. (That seems like an important use of social science -- to make predictions extremely important for choosing the optimal immigration legislation, right?)

"Well, sure," you say, "Of course. But those predictions are boring. And depressing. In fact, it's in bad taste to mention things that we all sort of know are true but that we really don't want to think about. Who wants to hear predictions like that? Tell us something interesting."

Okay, on December 31, 2032, the Dow Jones Average will stand at 107,391. But just one year later it will have crashed, in the wake of Black Wednesday, all the way to 33,828. But by 2042, during the bubble following a major breakthrough in cold fusion, the Dow will have reached the 201,537 barrier.

"Now that's better! That's the kind of prediction we like: specific and exciting. Of course, you're probably just randomly punching numbers on your keypad, but we forgive you because you're not boring and depressing us anymore."

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

My old movie reviews:

Here are reviews of three 2006 Oscar winners from The American Conservative that have never appeared online before:

- The Lives of Others

- The Last King of Scotland

- The Queen

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

Designer color names

One of the challenges faced by fashion designers is coming up with new names for the same old colors. For example, here is a sandal whose strap color an unfashion-forward individual like myself might describe as "blackish" but a professional designer describes as "Ballistic Anthracite." What the hell is that? It sounds like a weapons system from one of those sci-fi alternate histories of the Civil War in which the War Between the States finally ends in 1887 when Pennsylvania wipes out Virginia's fleet of steam-engine tanks with a salvo of coal-powered missiles.

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

Carol M. Swain

My new VDARE.com column is a review of the anthology she edited:

Yale Law School Professor Peter H. Schuck observes:

"In a polity in which only 17 percent of the public thinks that immigration levels should be higher and 39 percent thinks they should be lower, one would expect that at least some legal scholars who write about immigration issues would favor restriction. If so, one would be wrong. In over two decades of immersion in immigration scholarship, I have not encountered a single academic specialist on immigration law who favors reducing the number of legal immigrants admitted each year." ...

So, Carol M. Swain, a law and political science professor at Vanderbilt, has done the academic world a service (although one it probably won't appreciate) with her new book Debating Immigration. She brings together 16 chapters from academic and think tank luminaries such as Nathan Glazer, Amitai Etzioni, Douglas S. Massey, and Steven A. Camarota, along with lively essays from journalists Peter Brimelow and Jonathan Tilove.

Swain is one of the more unusual and admirable scholars in public policy. Growing up black and poor in rural Virginia, one of twelve children, she dropped out of 9th grade and married at 16. In her mid-20s she started back to school. Eventually, she earned tenure at Princeton as an expert on how Congress operates.

Her views are difficult to categorize politically. I would say she's an advocate of black enlightened self-interest, left of center on economics, right of center on culture. For example, her 2002 book The New White Nationalism sensibly advocated depriving white nationalists such as Jared Taylor of their best issues by restricting immigration and cutting back on affirmative action, especially for immigrants and affluent blacks. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened.
[More]

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

Top 5 scientists ever?

Anthropologist John Hawks offers some good suggestions:

Don't get me wrong, I like physics as much as anybody. But once your list includes Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell, and then you throw in Galileo, well there's not much room for anything else. None at all if you take Darwin as a given.

So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life? Yes, Newton was great, but gravity goes on without him.

Many later discoveries stood on his shoulders, but Newton's achievements were far more intellectual than practical. I'm looking for people whose accomplishments saved lives, prevented wars, stopped hunger, or released people from endless drudgery. This isn't a list of inventors -- if it were, there would be a lot of ancient inventions like the moldboard plow that deserve more attention than anything modern. It's a list of scientists whose impact stretched across many fields, and without whom life today would likely be worse.

1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher's innovations in statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless. All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance of continuous characters.

Fisher strikes me as the Newton of the 20th Century: the scientist / mathematical innovator.

For the rest of Hawks' list, click here.

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

Will the NYT ever report anything bad about their blogger Steve Levitt?

Here's the abstract of a paper in press by economist Ted Joyce, followed by Joyce's cogent explanation of why it's important to keep harping on this subject.

A Simple Test of Abortion and Crime
Ted Joyce
Baruch College and Graduate Center
City University of New York
and
National Bureau of Economic Research

Forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics

A Simple Test of Abortion and Crime

Abstract

I replicate Donohue and Levitt’s results for violent and property crime arrest rates and then apply their data and specification to an analysis of age-specific homicide rates and murder arrest rates. The coefficients on the abortion rate have the wrong sign for two of the four measures of crime and none is statistically significant at conventional levels. In the second half of the paper, I present alternative tests of abortion and crime that attempt to mitigate problems of endogeneity and measurement error. I use the legalization of abortion following the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade in order to exploit two sources of variation: between-state changes in abortion rates pre and post Roe, and cross-cohort differences in exposure to legalized abortion. I ind no meaningful association between abortion and age-specific crime rates among cohorts born in the years just before and after abortion became legal.

I. Introduction

The debate as to whether legalized abortion lowers crime leaped from academic journals to mainstream discourse with the huge success of Freakonomics.1 In the Chapter titled, “Where Have All the Criminals Gone?” Levitt and Dubner summarize academic work by Levitt and coauthor John Donohue, which shows that a one-standard deviation increase in the abortion rate lowers homicide rates by 31 percent and can explain upwards of 60 percent of the recent decline in murder.2 If one accepts these estimates, then legalized abortion has saved more than 51,000 lives between 1991 and 2001, at a total savings of $105 billion. But the policy implications go beyond crime. If abortion lowers homicide rates by 20 to 30 percent, then it is likely to have affected an entire spectrum of outcomes associated with well-being: infant health, child development, schooling, earnings and marital status. Similarly, the policy implications are broader than abortion. Other interventions that affect fertility control and that lead to fewer unwanted births—contraception or sexual abstinence—have huge potential payoffs. In short, a causal relationship between legalized abortion and crime has such significant ramifications for social policy and at the same time is so controversial, that further assessment of the identifying assumptions and their robustness to alternative strategies is warranted.

The New York Times more or less sets the agenda for the rest of the news media. If the NYT decides a story is fit to print, much of the the rest of the press will soon decide, what do you know!, that the topic deserves coverage. But if a tree falls in the forest and the NYT doesn't cover it ... This means the NYT has a particular responsibility to avoid giving in to conflicts of interest, which they have clearly succumbed to over the last two years in their refusal to report on any of the controversies swirling around their star columnist turned blogger Steven D. Levitt.

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

Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study

A reader sends along this table from the Graduate Record Exam from ETS giving average scores by intended field of study in grad school. He includes an estimate of IQ from one of the popular conversion tables, although he didn't tell me which one.

One problem I saw was that the mean score for the Quantitative section is so much higher than for the Verbal section, and the standard deviation is also larger for Quant, that the combined scores were biased in favor of highly quantitative fields. So, I added three more columns on the right that show difference fro the mean in standard deviations and just take the average for verbal and quantitative compared to their separate means. That seems fair, since there's no evidence that verbal intelligence correlates lower with general intelligence, and it may well be the best surrogate for the g factor. So, that's how I sorted it, which moves philosophy up into second place behind physics.

That reminds me of how I wrote a review of a book by David Stove in 1999 making gentle fun of philosophy (well, maybe not that gentle: I referred to the "uselessness of philosophy"). I received a number of superbly articulate and intensely argued emails telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. You'll notice I've drawn in my horns on this topic ever since!

This table may not be fair to business students since perhaps the better ones tend to take the GMAT to apply to MBA schools.

Graduate Record Examination Scores
Mean	465	584
Standard Deviation	117	149
	Verbal	Quant	Sum	IQ	Verbal SD	Quant SD	Avg. SD
Physics & astronomy	533	736	1269	133	0.58	1.02	0.80
Philosophy	590	638	1228	129	1.07	0.36	0.72
Mathematical Sciences	502	733	1235	130	0.32	1.00	0.66
Materials Engineering	494	727	1221	129	0.25	0.96	0.60
Economics	503	706	1209	128	0.32	0.82	0.57
Chemical Engineering	485	726	1211	128	0.17	0.95	0.56
Other Engineering	493	714	1207	128	0.24	0.87	0.56
Mechanical Engineering	469	724	1193	126	0.03	0.94	0.49
Other Humanities & Art	563	599	1162	124	0.84	0.10	0.47
Physical Sciences	486	697	1183	125	0.18	0.76	0.47
Engineering	468	719	1187	126	0.03	0.91	0.47
Electrical Eng	459	726	1185	126	(0.05)	0.95	0.45
Banking & finance	467	711	1178	125	0.02	0.85	0.43
Chemistry	486	680	1166	124	0.18	0.64	0.41
Computer & Infor Sci	466	701	1167	124	0.01	0.79	0.40
Civil Engineering	457	700	1157	124	(0.07)	0.78	0.36
Religion & Theory	541	589	1130	121	0.65	0.03	0.34
Industrial Engineering	440	707	1147	123	(0.21)	0.83	0.31
Earth, Atmos & Mar. Sci	495	636	1131	121	0.26	0.35	0.30
English language & lit	560	553	1113	120	0.81	(0.21)	0.30
Humanities & arts	545	566	1111	120	0.68	(0.12)	0.28
Arts-History, theory, crit	539	572	1111	120	0.63	(0.08)	0.28
Biological Sciences	491	631	1122	121	0.22	0.32	0.27
Political Science	524	588	1112	120	0.50	0.03	0.27
Foreign languages & lit	531	574	1105	119	0.56	(0.07)	0.25
Anthropology & Archeology	533	569	1102	119	0.58	(0.10)	0.24
History	542	557	1099	119	0.66	(0.18)	0.24
Library & Archival Sciences	536	542	1078	117	0.61	(0.28)	0.16
Architecture	475	610	1085	118	0.09	0.17	0.13
Natural Sciences -Other	474	598	1072	117	0.08	0.09	0.09
Secondary	485	578	1063	116	0.17	(0.04)	0.07
Social Sciences	487	565	1052	115	0.19	(0.13)	0.03
Agriculture	458	592	1050	115	(0.06)	0.05	0.00
Arts-Performance & studio	488	553	1041	114	0.20	(0.21)	-0.01
Life Sciences	462	581	1043	114	(0.03)	(0.02)	-0.02
Sociology	488	545	1033	114	0.20	(0.26)	-0.03
Other business	444	599	1043	114	(0.18)	0.10	-0.04
Business	442	592	1034	114	(0.20)	0.05	-0.07
Psychology	472	545	1017	113	0.06	(0.26)	-0.10
Higher	464	548	1012	112	(0.01)	(0.24)	-0.13
Communications	470	533	1003	111	0.04	(0.34)	-0.15
Curriculum & Instruction	459	546	1005	111	(0.05)	(0.26)	-0.15
Health & medical sciences	447	552	999	111	(0.15)	(0.21)	-0.18
Other social Science	465	527	992	110	0.00	(0.38)	-0.19
Business admin & mgmt.	438	561	999	111	(0.23)	(0.15)	-0.19
Education	449	534	983	110	(0.14)	(0.34)	-0.24
Accounting	408	585	993	110	(0.49)	0.01	-0.24
Evaluation & Research	450	530	980	109	(0.13)	(0.36)	-0.25
Public Administration	453	515	968	109	(0.10)	(0.46)	-0.28
Other Education	439	532	971	109	(0.22)	(0.35)	-0.29
Elementary	442	526	968	108	(0.20)	(0.39)	-0.29
Administration	426	522	948	107	(0.33)	(0.42)	-0.37
Home Economics	435	501	936	106	(0.26)	(0.56)	-0.41
Special	431	502	933	106	(0.29)	(0.55)	-0.42
Student Counseling	427	500	927	105	(0.32)	(0.56)	-0.44
Early Childhood	418	497	915	104	(0.40)	(0.58)	-0.49
Social Work	428	466	894	103	(0.32)	(0.79)	-0.55

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