Cash for Clunkers to Crush

Robert A. Heinlein's 1957 sci-fi novel The Door into Summer is about a Los Angeles engineer who, betrayed by a femme fatale in 1970, opts for The Medium Sleep. He awakes from his cryogenic hibernation capsule in the early 21st Century, and finds himself a stranger in a strange land:

The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns -- all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive 'em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! crash! -- scrap iron for blast furnaces.

It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn't own so much as a grav-Jumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my job ... until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn't understand.

"It's a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They're two years old now and they can never be sold ... so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. ... The steel industry needs these cars."

"But why build them in the first place if they can't be sold? It seems wasteful."

"It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?"

"Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad than they are worth as scrap."

"What! -- and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we'd get everybody sore at us -- Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?" He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. "You go down to the public library and draw out some books. You don't have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them."

... I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials such as instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.

The shift boss just stared at me. "Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don't expect them to put their best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before they ever came off the assembly line."

So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too estoteric for me.

Obviously, writing a half century ago, Heinlein got much wrong about the 21st Century, such as his naive assumptions that America today would still have a steel industry in Pittsburgh or an export market for its new cars.

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

Blue Solidarity

The cop tag team of Crowley and Lashley (see posting below) thumped the outgunned Obama-Gates race industry opportunists.

That reminds me of a topic that I've been intermittently circling around for several months: the various differences between policemen and firemen.

For example, it's clear that there tends to be more interracial solidarity among cops, such as Crowley and Lashley, than among firemen, as seen in the Ricci case. It's not a huge difference, but it seems to exist on average.

The irony is that the tendency for cops to be divided from other cops by racial animosity less often firemen are divided by race is directly related to why so many people hate cops and "everybody loves a fireman."

This paradox occurred to me when reading an interview with veteran cop novelist Joseph Wambaugh, whose true crime book Fire Lover I read recently to learn more about firemen v. cops.

Q: Your characters tend to enter their careers full of compassion only to be drained of it as time goes on. This is particularly evident in The New Centurions [Wambaugh's first novel from four decades ago]:

A: Yeah, well, the premature cynicism that overtakes young police officers tends to diminish compassion. The cynicism happens as a result of seeing not only the worst of people, of which they expected to see, but ordinary people at their worst. They develop that minority group mentality where unless they’re with “blue” people like themselves they’re distrustful and think that no one else understands them. The minority group paranoia really takes over young officers after a couple of years and then they have to work through it. ...

Q: I gather the minority group mentality isn’t race specific but rather inclusive of anyone who isn’t dressed in blue, that is, anyone who is not a police officer. Still, in your stories the locker room banter includes a free range of racial slurs among the officers towards other officers.

A: I think it helps a lot for other colours (within the force) to be obliterated and everyone turn blue. But that doesn’t work as well these days because these are very politically correct times. The interracial banter that once flew around the locker room has been curtailed. Now, at least 20 per cent or more of police officers are women and sexist jokes can get people into trouble. [Laughs.] It’s not so much fun anymore, actually.

Q: So that type of banter was viewed as good-natured and rather than being seen as ostracizing it was in fact unifying.

A: Right. It wipes out gender and it wipes out race. We’re all blue.

Cops develop transracial solidarity amongst themselves by despising everybody who is not a cop.

In contrast, firemen battle something impersonal, fire. And everybody loves a fireman, so it's hard for firemen to loathe civilians. So, they end up squabbling more than cops do amongst themselves along racial lines.

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

Ouch

Here's the letter from police officer Leon K. Lashley that James Crowley presented to President Barack Obama at the Beer Summit:

Dear Jim,

Would you be so kind as to mention the following to Mr. Gates and President Obama during your meeting with them:

One of the major problems stemming from the events of July 16 is that I, now known as 'the black Sergeant', have had my image plastered all over the Internet, television and newspapers. Subsequently, I have also become known, at least to some, as an 'Uncle Tom.'

I'm forced to ponder the notion that as a result of speaking the truth and coming to the defense of a friend and collegue, who just happens to be white, that I have somehow betrayed my heritage.

Please convey my concerns to the President that Mr. Gates' actions may have caused grave and potentially irreparable harm to the struggle for racial harmony in this country and perhaps throughout the world.

In closing, I would simply like to ask that Mr. Gates deeply reflect on the events that have unfolded since July 16 and ask himself the following questions:

'What can I do to help heal the rift caused by some of my actions?; What responsibility do I bear for what occurred on July 16, 2009? Is there anything I can do to mitigate the damage done to the reputations of two respected Police Officers?'

Thank you in advance,

Your friend,

Leon K. Lashley

This really didn't work out so well for Obama, now did it?

I imagine that David Axelrod's postmortem to his client went something like this:

1. Never again let slip the truth about how you feel about race.

2. When you violate Rule 1, make a really long and completely incomprehensible speech, like the one you gave after the press finally noticed Rev. Wright. Aim for inducing Total Zen Trance State in the media.

3. Whatever you do, don't put yourself in position where some stubborn bastard like Crowley gets to make a really short speech on national television about you.

4. Your "I Have Understood You" magic only works on people when you start off with it. When you instead start off by insulting some unknown individual, and then try to fob him off with IHUY, then -- if he keeps his cool and doesn't apologize to you -- you are, in effect, admitting you were wrong.

5. "I Have Understood You" only works on people who don't understand you. Crowley is a cop in Cambridge. He's met dozens of guys just like you around Harvard Yard, and he's not that impressed. Don't mess with guys like that.

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

The lesson from Thursday's "teachable moment" ...

When you are falsely accused of racism, don't apologize.

Here are headlines from WashingtonPost.com:

Obama's Backyard Summit
Officer says there was "no tension" at meeting with scholar, but there were no apologies either.

Beer Summit Goes Flat
Milbank: It wasn't a cure for what ales us. | Q&A, noon

NYTimes.com:

Over Beers, No Apologies, but Plans to Have Lunch
President Obama, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley met, drank and agreed to meet again.

(Are you taking notes, Dr. Watson?)

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

Henry Louis Gates, Pointy-Haired Boss

Craig Offman wrote a Salon article in 1999, The Making of Henry Louis Gates, CEO, on the making of the Encarta Africana encyclopedia, "edited" by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah with funding from Microsoft:

On a logistical level, Africana's 15-month gestation was fraught with complications. Grueling deadlines led to overexertion. Editors contended with bouts of plagiarism. Open revolt broke out among nearly a dozen staffers. All this turmoil eventually led to a crippling worker slowdown in the middle of the project. Most startlingly, a very low representation of African-Americans on the core editorial staff (four of 17 writers at the most) inspired a dozen employees to ask the management team to hire more African-Americans. ... What made this project so beset with bitterness?

Perhaps it was the great expectations of Gates the public humanist. Though Gates is only one of four Afropedia partners, he is Africana's front man and biggest personality. Politically, Gates is neither radical nor neo-conservative, but rather a thoughtful, learned voice of black progressive liberalism who has consistently been able to translate his intellectual ideas into books and articles geared toward non-academics. Pundit Adolph Reed Jr. called Gates "the freelance advocate for black centrism," while Time once voted Gates one of the "Twenty-Five Most Influential Americans." An outspoken advocate of affirmative action, the 49-year-old West Virginia-bred Gates also has voiced his concerns about the responsibility of corporations to soften capitalism's rougher edges. "A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get," he told the Progressive last year. "Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am." While the notions of better business practices and affirmative action may mean different things to different people, some Africana employees told Salon Books that when it came to working for Gates the CEO, they encountered a split between Gates' progressive theories and Africana's bottom-line practices. ...

Eventually they would be rejected by publishers at Random House, Simon & Schuster and by new-media companies Voyager and Prodigy.

A publishing industry insider tells me that reference book companies figured Gates' encyclopedia would turn out to be both high profile and a piece of junk, so why trash their corporate reputations over it?

So in 1997 when Microsoft agreed to underwrite the project, the team jumped at the opportunity.

... To lure writers, Africana posted advertisements around Cambridge offering 15 cents a word to temporary writers. The writers who signed up on salary were mostly students between undergraduate and advanced degrees and would receive somewhere between $25,000 and $28,000; editors, some of whom were Harvard fellows or professors, received salaries in the $50,000 range. (For a university town, Cambridge can be costly. One-bedroom apartments generally rent for around $1,000 a month, which would be half a writer's salary, before taxes.) Writers would have benefits packages only if they had a previous arrangement through Harvard as a student. ...

With a large deadline looming at the end of August, the staff grew desperate. Writers had to meet the first milestone by August, a numbing 250,000 words that the group had to submit to Microsoft so that Africana would get its first advance. "It was as if they said, don't worry about quality, just get quantity," the senior employee said. According to one observer close to the project, the writing turned out to be lousy. "I was appalled by the quality of material. The entries were woodenly conceived. They had linear chronologies," he said. "These writers were not very experienced. They were at the low end of the freelance chain." When writers turned over their sources, an editor discovered that some entries were barely rephrased versions of the entries from the Macmillan. In the end, Africana had to hire a temporary staff to rewrite the plagiarized sections, all of which were purged and replaced. "There were huge, huge mistakes that never would have eluded Skip [Gates] had he seen them," the senior staffer contended.

... On Oct. 3, 1997, writer Hendricks and 11 other staffers sent a memo to Gates, Glenshaw and the rest of the management team suggesting significant editorial and personnel changes for Africana. The memo specifically asked Africana for a clearer mission statement, benefits for writers -- which would include medical and dental coverage -- and an employee-matched retirement plan. As Hendricks explains, "We wanted to hold it to a higher standard." Employees also wanted more specialists, and last of all, suggested that Africana hire more people of color.

Some editors now maintain that had Africana spent $10,000 more on writer's salaries, it could have hired more seasoned candidates and tempted more African-American scholars in the process. Among writers on the core staff, African-American representation never reached more than four out of 17 and none of the core editing staff was black. "We took a look around and said, 'Jesus, we're 90 percent here and we're not comfortable with this,'" said the senior staffer about the paucity of blacks. "I wouldn't buy an encyclopedia about women if it were written by men." It seems that despite Gates' formidable reputation, few blacks applied to work on Africana. Moreover, the editors whom Salon Books spoke with say that they were never given any directive by Gates to pursue African-American applicants. Part of the affirmative-action agenda involves seeking out applicants who have been previously denied opportunity.

Yet making an airtight case of hypocrisy against Gates isn't so easy. How far does an employer have to pursue it? How much time, for instance, should be spent searching for diverse candidates before such searches are deemed inefficient? And if such searches don't yield competitive candidates, how important is it to give an opportunity to a worker who is not qualified, but might rise to the occasion if given a chance? Still, it's remarkable that Gates -- a black luminary -- wasn't simply surrounded by bright, ambitious young African-American scholars who could foresee what their participation on this project might mean to them or their resume.

Or, perhaps Harvard blacks had too much sense and better things to do with their time than toil in Skip Gates' sweatshop?

Does the fact that Gates was somehow stymied by the problem of affirmative action hiring say more about him, the shortage of highly educated black candidates willing to work for peanuts or the very problems inherent in affirmative action itself? After all, it may be an easy practice to embrace in the abstract, but when you're running a fast company, who has the time for theory?

For meetings, Gates would have the staff convene in Barker Center, a humanities building where the Afro-American Studies Department is based. Indeed, every staffer interviewed for this story contended that they never once saw Gates step foot in the central Africana office in Vanserg itself, despite the fact that Gates' own house is right across the street. Not surprisingly, such aloof management only exacerbated worker resentments. In October, he drew the staff together and gave them an ultimatum: For those who don't like the project, there's the door. Gates also said that plagiarism would not be tolerated. The Oct. 3 petition was rejected out of hand -- and on the delicate issue of hiring more African-Americans, Gates apparently told staffers: "Affirmative action? I'm Mr. Affirmative Action. You think I'm not all for affirmative action? But look, what we hire here are qualified people, people who can do the work. White people can do this work, and black people can do this work."

Yes, but these are jobs blacks just won't do.

By the way, that reminds me of Ed Rubenstein's recent VDARE.com article on the huge percentage of economics Ph.D. students in American universities who are foreign-born. One reason that tenured economics professors are about as pro-immigration as strawberry farm owners is that they both profit from cheap immigrant labor.

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

What's missing from this picture?

Dear White House Staff:

We've come up with a breakthrough concept for attaining comfort while drinking beer outdoors in July in Washington D.C. while dressed in formal business attire.

We call it "shade."

As part of the implementization, the staff is working on shade-generating technologies, such as "umbrellas," "awnings," and "trees." We'll get back to you about potential deliverables when we have all the focus group reports pulled together.

Trust us, though, "shade" will be huge.

Best wishes,
The Marketing Department

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

Obama's IQ: A Clue from a 1966 Joan Didion Essay

I'm reading Joan Didion's 1968 collection of articles, Slouching towards Bethlehem, one of the influential minor masterpieces of early New Journalism, along with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the works of Tom Wolfe.

Didion's characteristic tone is that of an un-self-medicating Hunter S. Thompson. On a hot night in Death Valley, she writes:

There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.

That kind of thing is a lot funnier coming from Thompson than Didion. But I shouldn't make fun of her since Slouching Towards Bethlehem is, as she would say in her Hemingwayesque prose style, a good book. There is good writing in it, and good reporting. (For example, her depressing 1967 title story about Haight-Ashbury hippies was written three months before the Summer of Love).

I stumbled upon a classic iSteve nugget in Didion's 1966 Saturday Evening Post article about how WWII changed Hawaii socially, which would have made an amusing addition to America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."

It's not that Punahou is not still the school of the Island power elite; it is. "There will always be room at Punahou for those children who belong here," Dr. John Fox, headmaster since 1944, assured alumni in a recent bulletin. But where in 1944 there were 1,100 students and they had a median IQ of 108, now there are 3,400 with a median IQ of 125. Where once the enrollment was ten percent Oriental, now it is a fraction under thirty percent. And so it is that outside Punahou's new Cooke Library, where the archives are kept by a great-great-granddaughter of the Reverend Hiram Bingham, there sit, among the plumeria blossoms drifted on the steps, small Chinese boys with their books in Pan American flight bags.

Obama entered Punahou as a fifth grader a half-decade later. By all accounts, he was seen by everybody during his eight years there as a normal, average Punahou student. I recall one girl talking about the speed and facility of his writing, but that's about it for anybody noticing much distinction.

So, since we lack test data on Obama himself, that 125 Punahou average sounds like a good starting point for thinking about Obama's IQ. He fit in at Punahou, but didn't stand out.

If reasonable, that would would place the average Puhahou student above John F. Kennedy (119) and John F. Kerry (115-120), a little above George W. Bush (120-125), and below Al Gore (134, 133), John McCain (133 and ?), and Richard Nixon (143).

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

Less beer, more cigarettes for Obama

Obama's pseudo-regular guy Beer Summit raises an interesting angle:

A responsible press would encourage Obama to smoke more and drink less.

Obama comes from two long lines of alcoholics: His father died driving drunk. His half-brother David died driving drunk. His half-brother Roy was an alcoholic before discovering teetotaling Islam and changing his name to Abongo. His maternal grandfather Stan was a barfly.

Back during the Pennsylvania primary, Hillary was always gulping down boilermakers, hoping (I imagine) to provoke Barack Jr. into responding in kind to demonstrate his regular guyness and then going off on a Barack Sr.-style bender. (Barack Sr.'s standing order at his favorite Nairobi bar was two double shots of Jack Daniels as soon as he walked in the door.)

With that kind of genetic background combined with his stressful job, the President should avoid drinking.

On the other hand, the President does need to self-medicate his fragile emotional state right now, so let him do it with cigarettes. So what if he dies of lung cancer at 75 rather than of something else at 85? We're paying him to be President in his 40s.

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

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

Breaking into your own house

Throughout StupidGate, whenever anybody rhetorically says, "Officer Crowley should have left as soon as Professor Gates showed ID demonstrating he'd broken into his own house!" I've had in the back of my mind a vague recollection that I've heard something somewhere about a man who broke into his old house after his wife had changed the locks on him.

Therefore, a cop shouldn't just leave, especially when the angry, agitated man is acting much like a man whose wife has changed the locks. And, when the man won't answer the cop's question about who else is in the house, the cop has to hang around while Dispatch checks the name of the householder he called in for restraining orders, warrants, and the like. (Maybe they should have thicker skins, but cops really don't like it when you loudly hurl abuse at them while they're on the radio checking on these matters.)

I couldn't remember the story, so I kept coming up with thought experiments scenarios in which a rich Texas oilman breaks into his old house in order to hurt his future ex-wife.

But then it finally occurred to me that this isn't just a thought experiment. In fact, it was not only one of the most notorious crime stories of my lifetime, but , heck, I even worked for the man's legendary Houston defense attorney Racehorse Haynes in 1980 as a research assistant, pulling together his scrapbook on this case for use in an autobiographical book Racehorse planned to write with Rice sociologist William Martin.

It's the story of oil heir T. Cullen Davis, who may still be the richest man ever tried for murder in the United States. In 1976, he broke into his former $6 million dollar mansion and settled down to wait for his separated wife and her new boyfriend to get home.

When his young stepdaughter surprised him, he took her to the wine cellar and executed her. He then waited for his primary targets. When the couple walked in, Davis shot both, killing the man but only wounding his tough, gold-digging wife.

Two young people who were friends of the family walked up the driveway of the 180 acre estate. Davis shot one, and the girl ran off and flagged down a passerby. The wounded wife crawled off down the hill on the other side. Both witnesses immediately and separately told neighbors, "Cullen's up there shooting everybody."

Racehorse Haynes got Cullen Davis acquitted.

A few years later, Davis was back in jail for paying a hitman $25k to kill the judge in his divorce settlement case. The man went to the FBI, who got the judge to climb in the trunk of a car, covered him with ketchup, and took a Polaroid. They then wired the supposed hitman for sound and filmed him on video as he showed Davis the picture of the supposedly murdered judge and accepted the cash in return.

Racehorse got him off again.

I lost track of Cullen Davis after that, although I do recall one year the Forbes 400 issue did a Where Are They Now? feature on former members. Davis was now recognized as America's Poorest Man based on having the most negative net worth of anybody in America. The funny thing is, though, that when you are worth $-800 million, you still live pretty well.

Racehorse is doing fine in his early 80s. He told the ABA Journal:

For instance, he’s represented three doz­en women in what he refers to as “Smith & Wesson divorces,” which are cases where the husband had been abusive, leading the wife to kill in self-defense. “I won all but two of those cases,” he says. “And I would have won them if my clients hadn’t kept reloading their gun and firing.”

I remember some of those very Texan cases from my job summarizing Mrs. Haynes' scrapbook of his newspaper coverage: like Sicilian grand opera set to the twang of steel guitars.

After a meeting at Racehorse's house in Houston in 1979, he insisted on driving me back to my car, which was only parked a block way. That's because he had just bought a whale-tail Turbo Porsche. He floored it and we accelerated down his quiet street (in River Oaks?) for three blocks, topping out at 85, then, like a rocketship in a Robert Heinlein novel, decelerated for three blocks back to zero. I pointed to some random car, got out, thanked him, then, after he had turned the corner, walked the five blocks back to my Datsun 310.

Sen. Fred Thompson played Racehorse in a 1992 miniseries "Bed of Lies" about a doctor client of his who was accused of poisoning his wife, the daughter of a very rich, very angry man. Racehorse got the doc off, but a hit man rubbed him out later. Haynes and Thompson are equally charming, but Haynes is a high-energy bantamweight, while Thompson, as we saw in the Presidential primaries last year, is not.

Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue played Racehorse in a 1995 miniseries about Cullen Davis, aptly entitled "Texas Justice." Once again, curious casting.

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

My new Taki column: Gates, Obama, and the Black Overclass

The beginning of my new column in Taki's Magazine:

Countless pundits have debated whether the Henry Louis Gates Jr. brouhaha is about race or class.

In truth, Barack Obama’s maladroit but heartfelt interjection of his own prejudices into the controversy stemmed from a quite precise intersection of race with class. Obama spoke out in defense of Gates’s tantrum because they are both members of the tiny (but increasingly potent) black overclass.

Obama’s feelings of class solidarity haven’t been widely discussed, largely because they are rather boring. In a world bedazzled by black entertainers and athletes, and troubled (but intrigued) by black criminals, the black upper class goes almost unnoticed as they engage in respectable rituals such as relaxing at Martha’s Vineyard, where “Skip” Gates has summered for 27 years and the Obamas will be vacationing next month.

This Affirmative-Actionocracy’s access to power and wealth stems largely from their claim to theoretically represent 40 million African-Americans, particularly the foreboding and puzzling black underclass. Yet, they try to associate with less lofty blacks no more than necessary, and they especially don’t want their daughters to marry them. Hence the constant inward socializing.

Read the rest there and comment on it here.

Thanks to commenters for finding the picture of Henry Louis Gates riding his "adult tricycle" while summering on Martha's Vineyard.

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

How much does Mayor Bloomberg want to be President?

Billionaire media monopolist Michael Bloomberg, the Silvio Berlusconi of America, recently had the law amended so he could run for a third term as mayor of New York this fall.

Bloomberg is now 67, so if he wants to take a shot at the White House, 2012 is his best bet because in 2016 he'll be two years older than John McCain was in 2008, which was too old.

Still, what could he run for President upon, other than his personal billionaireness and his popularity with the press? How does a billionaire connect with voters who don't trust Barack Obama?

How many voters across the country even know who Michael Bloomberg is?

And, yet, public ignorance could be a good thing for his political career because it allows him to forge an image suited to the emerging circumstances. Assume Obama has the high and low segments of the electorate locked up in 2012. What kind of image could galvanize the vast middle to show up at the polls?

The Vulcan Society case has dropped in his lap what at first glance appears to be an unfortunate hot potato. Because Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis excluded the firefighter's union from the case, the decision whether or not to appeal Garaufis's finding of racial discrimination in testing due to disparate impact appears to be almost solely up to Mayor Bloomberg (barring some creative legal reasoning).

The Bloomberg Administration has announced that it won't decide whether to appeal until after it finds out how much the damages will be. (One estimate was up to $20 million.) A very pragmatic and prudential course of action ...

What if, however, instead of passively waiting around to learn the dollar amount, then weighing it versus estimated expenses in legal costs and political capital, Bloomberg simply announced next week,

"I'm taking this rotten ruling all the way to the Supreme Court to erase the insult to the honor of the Fire Department of New York. If the Obama Administration wants to defend this slur upon New York's Bravest, they can see me in court."

A divisive gesture, to be sure... Bloomberg's media admirers would be aghast.

Yet, re-inventing himself as the Battling Billionaire might be the only route to the White House available.

I think Harry Truman would have liked my political advice. "I've got it, Mr. President! You can catch up in the polls by challenging Dewey to a knife fight in the Jefferson Memorial, on tele-vision!"

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

Pilots and g-Force

As I've mentioned, one of the rules of polite journalism in discussing testing firefighters is to assume that paper and pencil tests must be irrelevant to the obviously moronic job of spraying water on burning buildings. Never refer to the voluminous data assembled over the decades by the Pentagon on the relationship between performance on paper and pencil tests and performance on similarly physical jobs.

When researching my 2004 article on John F. Kerry's and George W. Bush's IQ scores judging from their performance on the Officer's Qualification Tests they took in the later 1960s (Bush 120-125, Kerry 115-120, which turned out to fit with their GPAs at Yale), I read a lot of studies from the 1960s by the military's psychometricians documenting the predictive validity of these exams. I then tried to track down the authors to help me understand Kerry's and Bush's scores.

I spent two hours on the phone with a very helpful gentleman, now a college professor of statistics, who had retired after many years as the head psychometrician for one of the major branches of the Armed Services.

Among much else that was interesting, he mentioned that in 1990 he had provided to Charles Murray the U.S. military's scores from the renorming of its AFQT enlistment test. In 1980, the Pentagon had paid the Department of Labor to give the AFQT to all 12,000+ young people in its National Longitudinal Study of Youth database. The middle section of The Bell Curve is devoted to tracking how these ex-youths, now 25 to 33 in 1990, were doing in life in relation to their IQ scores a decade before.

My source had nothing but praise for The Bell Curve.

The psychometric expert said something that seemed puzzling to me. He said that the General Factor of intelligence completely dominated job performance as a pilot to such an extent that it really wasn't worthwhile to give multiple intelligences tests of specific piloting skills, such as the one George W. Bush took in 1968 to measure his 3-d visualization skills.

For example, a question might ask:

Which picture represents how the horizon would look straight-ahead out the cockpit window when you are in the midst of turning from flying north to flying east while banking 60 degrees?

A. _
B. /
C. \
D. |

Bush only scored, I believe, at the 25th percentile on this test, but I don't think this kind of thing came up much in the Oval Office.

My source said that he recommended getting rid of flying-specific tests for admission to pilot-training, but the brass wouldn't go along with it because they insisted their had to be pilot-specific skills separate from the g Factor.

Listening to him, I certainly agreed with the brass. After all, I have a decent IQ, but I'd make a terrible pilot during the brief interval before I became a smoking crater due to making some stupid mistake.

And, this is not something I only recently realized. I can vaguely recall being 16 and looking at the catalog from the Air Force Academy and deciding that, based on my experience driving a car, riding a bike, playing sports, and generally bumbling about in the physical world, that I wasn't cut out to pilot Air Force jets.

I've wondered about this expert's finding over the years, and I think I've finally started to figure it out: People with high IQs who would be bad pilots generally figure out for themselves that they would be bad pilots; so, they never take the tests to be pilots. Thus, the high correlation between the g Factor and pilot performance: high IQ individuals are already selected for having pilot-specific skills.

Similarly, high IQ guys who would make lousy firemen already know it, so they don't take the firemen's test much.

Thus, a hiring test like the New York ones ruled too discriminating by Judge Garaufis tend to work well. They are combination aptitude and achievement tests with all the questions solely about firefighting, but all the information needed to answer the questions given on the test. Still, under pressure, it's not too easy to decipher passages about technical details of chainsaw maintenance.

Thus, to score perfectly on these kind of tests, it's helpful to be both reasonably bright and to have studied firefighting guidebooks. High IQ guys who wouldn't make good firemen tend to figure out while they're studying that this isn't the career for them and thus don't take the tests. So, these kind of aptitude/achievement tests work quite well.

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

Sailer's Law of Female Journalism

A cover story on Slate.com today (#4):

Hair Raising:
Can a shocking YouTube video of a girl getting her curls brushed change attitudes about black hair?
By Teresa Wiltz

This is another example of Sailer's Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

Technically, it might seem highly possible that somebody named "Teresa Wiltz" has naturally straight hair and is just writing out of a disinterested interest in the topic. But, decades of reading female journalism at its most passionate suggested to me that Ms. Wiltz's own looks would turn out to highly germane.

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

Alberto Gonzales Versus a Beneficiary of Bias

Michael Cammarata
October 5, 1978 - September 11, 2001

Last week, Federal District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis upheld the Bush Administration's 2007 Vulcan Society lawsuit, which was filed in the name of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Judge Garaufis ruled that the Fire Department of New York racially discriminated in its 1999 and 2002 hiring tests by asking questions that blacks and Hispanics less often answered correctly. Judge Garaufis held:

"From 1999 to 2007, the New York City Fire Department used written examinations with discriminatory effects and little relationship to the job of a firefighter ... These examinations unfairly excluded hundreds of qualified people of color... Today, the court holds that New York City’s reliance on these examinations constitutes employment discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

Thankfully, we now have heroes like General Gonzales and Judge Garaufis to protect us from the likes of young Cammarata. In our society's total war against racism and Disparate Impact, we must not only honor the General and the Judge by making firefighter exams less discriminating; but we must also admit the power of their logic and publicly dishonor those who profited from this shameful violation of civil rights. For example, Cammarata's white male privilege permitted him to "earn" a perfect score on that 1999 exam that Judge Garaufis determined, by drawing upon his vast statistical sophistication, was racially biased and irrelevant. The New York Times reported on December 16, 2001:

A day after Michael Cammarata died in the attack on the World Trade Center, his brother, Joseph, went through his things looking for a birth certificate. On the top drawer of Michael's night table, Joseph found a letter -- the kind of letter that a brother never wants to read. It was a what-to-do list in case something happened to him.

No. 1 on the list: "Take care of Jenna," referring to his girlfriend of seven years.

No. 2: "Don't mourn me. This is the career I chose."

Michael Cammarata, 22, was a firefighter with Ladder Company 11 in Manhattan. He died on the ninth week of a 14-week training program. He lived with his parents in Huguenot, Staten Island.

No. 3: "Make my spirit live on."

No. 4: "Remember I love you all and will be waiting for you upstairs."

From the time he was 7, Michael Cammarata wanted to be a firefighter. He was fascinated by fire engines and trucks. In his fireman's test, which he took with his brother, Michael got a perfect score; Joseph did not.

"They wanted to be together," his mother, Linda Cammarata said of her two sons. "Thank God they didn't."

Joseph, 24, is a police officer. On Jan. 14, he, too, will join the Fire Department.

From the New York Times, June 8, 2003:

The funeral yesterday, at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic church on Staten Island, was the first in many months for a firefighter. Yet the rawness of the emotions on display -- as firefighters stood in the pouring rain while taps played, a police helicopter flew overhead and a powder-blue coffin was lifted onto a ceremonial firetruck to be carried to the nearby cemetery -- served as one more demonstration of the enormous pain caused by the Sept. 11 attack.

Mr. Cammarata's family had waited almost 21 months for word that the remains of the 22-year-old probationary firefighter had been recovered and identified. Unwilling to put off the funeral any longer, yesterday they buried a vial of blood Mr. Cammarata had donated before he died, along with his department uniform, letters to his girlfriend, hockey sticks and baseball gloves, the funeral director said.

To date, 208 of the 343 firefighters killed on Sept. 11 have been positively identified. Firefighter Cammarata, who lived with his parents on Staten Island, was the first to be buried in a department ceremony in which the ''recovered remains'' consisted of nothing more than a vial of donated blood, city officials said.

Mr. Cammarata, nicknamed ''The Face'' by his fellow firefighters for his movie-star looks, achieved a perfect score on the Fire Department's written exam and physical. He was last seen going into the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel on the morning of Sept. 11 to try to evacuate any guests or staff. It had only been four months since he was sworn in as a firefighter and assigned to Ladder Company 11 on East Second Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The hotel was nearly flattened when the towers collapsed.

His family wrote in Little League Online:

On Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:54 a.m. from the firehouse on East Second Street in Alphabet City, Ladder Company 11, a phone call was made to the Cammarata family from their youngest son Michael. He left a message on his father’s voicemail stating: “I am going to the World Trade Center, a plane just hit it. Just tell everyone I am all right.”

Those were the last words he said to his family.

Michael was born on Oct. 7, 1978. He was only 22 years old on the date of the attack.

He was looking forward to graduating the fire academy and being permanently assigned to Ladder 11. Michael was given the gift to carry on his uncle’s shield number of 33 years, No. 1138.

Playing Little League Baseball as an all star, he competed in the Little League World Series, reaching second in the United States and third in the world. ...

Michael was scouted by the Wagner College Hockey Club on Staten Island, soon to be named Rookie of the Year in 1996. In 1997, as a sophomore in college, he was the youngest to be named MVP in Wagner College history. In 1997, he led his team to the Metropolitan Collegiate Conference Championship title. In 1998, he led Wagner to another championship.

In 1999, Michael left college to work in the building industry with his father. During this time, he was anxiously awaiting a call to be accepted for a job as a fireman. This he wanted since he was a little boy. Michael scored an impressive 105 perfect score on the New York Fireman’s Test, with a list number of 345. He was quickly called to duty and sworn in as a firefighter on May 3, 2001. He had a passion and love for the job. He was in his 14-week training program awaiting official graduation. ...

Michael had an extreme love and closeness for his family, friends, and fellow firefighters. His personality made light of any dark situation, ... with his brother saying, “You can never find a better best friend.”

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

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

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

Global Warming Awareness Campaigns

Much of the popularity of Global Warming Awareness stems from the fact that almost nobody is capable of noticing Global Warming without benefit of Global Warming Awareness Campaigns.

For example, I have fairly decent pattern recognition skills. And I've been hiking the same trails on the north side of the Hollywood Hills for the last 45 years. Having grown up in a dry region, I am a big fan of verdant nature, so I pay careful attention to how green the hillsides are at each point in the season.

Now, you might think that I would have noticed evidence in these wooded canyons and sagebrush hillsides of long-term Climate Change. But I haven't.

I am not saying it's not happening. Perhaps there is a long-term trend that remains invisible to me under the much more visible seasonal cycles and the random noise.

What I am saying is that, at least so far, a highly observant and statistically-minded citizen such as myself hasn't noticed Global Warming going on in his own environment. Without the aid of Global Warming Awareness Campaigns, I would never have become aware of Global Warming just by hiking in the same environment decade after decade.

I think that explains a lot of the Gnostic appeal of Global Warming Awareness. When you become Global Warming Aware, you are superior to the unenlightened masses. You have access to evidence of things unseen. You are one of the elite who are aware of knowledge that can only be gathered through the most esoteric means and analyzed by the most profound scholars.

In contrast, much of the things that I notice in my daily life, such a racial differences in crime rates and intelligence, are the kinds of things that are so overwhelmingly obvious that many people take pride in not knowing about them. (At least, they don't know about them when discussing public issues. They seem to know about them just fine when choosing where to buy a house or when deciding where to school their children.)

In fact, many popular people actively engage in Anti-Awareness Campaigns intended to increase ignorance. (For example, the President of the United States likes to boast of his long fight against awareness of racial crime rate gaps.) For this, they are showered with public approbation.

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

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