Physicist Geoffrey West explains in the NYT Magazine, "A Physicist Solves the City," that he now understands cities:
In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
... As [Jane] Jacobs pointed out, the layout of her Manhattan neighborhood — the short blocks, the mixed-use zoning, the density of brownstones — made it easier to cope with the strain of the metropolis. It’s fitting that it’s called the Village.
In recent decades, though, many of the fastest-growing cities in America, like Phoenix and Riverside, Calif., have given us a very different urban model. These places have traded away public spaces for affordable single-family homes, attracting working-class families who want their own white picket fences. West and Bettencourt point out, however, that cheap suburban comforts are associated with poor performance on a variety of urban metrics. Phoenix, for instance, has been characterized by below-average levels of income and innovation (as measured by the production of patents) for the last 40 years.
Yet, what could account for the lower rates of patents in Riverside or Phoenix than in equally suburban Silicon Valley or North San Diego County?
It's a mystery!
Posts
72 comments:
I suppose it's natural that since physicists have proved unable to "solve physics" they should branch out a bit. In my experience, they tend to be awfully good at claiming credit for re-inventing the wheel.
Yeah, this is a variation on the Jared Diamond theory that innovation (in antiquity) was proportional to how much time people had to sit around and think, after doing the necessary work of producing food.
As if producing or acquiring food took more time in Africa than in Japan.
Clearly, it's the white picket fences.
" that cheap suburban comforts are associated with poor performance on a variety of urban metrics. "
As usual, Leftists confuse cause and effect. Obviously, "poor urban metrics" increases the desire of middle class people to live in suburbs with single family houses.
Because the institutions of the automobile and the suburb are the working man's way of escaping the underclass.
Once again, PC makes you stupid.
The ability of many if not all people to ignore evidence that goes against their arguments is remarkable. Another win for Sperber and Mercier's "Argumentative Theory of Reasoning".
The Mayan civilization collapsed about what, 1000 AD? They had the excuse at least of not understanding soil science. Undoubtedly countless human sacrifices were made, but still the crops failed.
Today they pass the DREAM Act and repeal DADT! Civilizational collapse continues apace!
Jane Jacobs championed cities as drivers of innovation, and she championed the traditional city form as promoting characteristic urban virtues. But unlike many of her fans, she recognized the non-traditional, even sprawling cities could drive innovation.
Most people know her from her defence of Greenwich Village-style urbanism in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, but a few years later, in The Economy of Cities, she was singing the praises of postwar Los Angeles with its strip malls as the model of a thriving city economy. As urban design, it was crap, of course.
BTW, as attentive reader of The Death and Life will notice that, again, in contrast to many of her fans, she did not hate suburbs. She saw dense, urban, mixed-use neighbourhoods as a successful urban model. She saw the less-dense, zoned "gray belts" that made up large parts of 1950s cities as a failed, neither spacious enough to be true suburbs nor dense enough to be true urban districts. And I don't think she like the ultra-zoned suburbs of the 1960s and onwards.
Cennbeorc
Yeah, and how many patents from blacks living in liberal cities?
Steve did u watch Tron Legacy? I suggest you do... the whole plot is blatantly a crypto-religiously Jewish. Hubris never goes unpunished.
~ raj
Not much new here.
Forty years ago I went to graduate school in Urban Planning. Everything Professor West reveals today as a new insight was recognized as a problem way back then. Except of course for the metric of new patents.
Jane Jacobs was avoided in the official curriculum so we read her on the sly and didn't bring her up in class. She didn't fit in well with the zeitgeist which was sort of nuovo-Corbusier. Still she ascribed to the central fallacy of city planning - people's behavior is a product of their immediate physical surroundings. You as a planner can control people's behavior and the people won't catch on.
Planning is fundamentally anti-humanist. People don't count and certainly their individual characteristics don't count. To the planner you can always get whatever behavior you want by adjusting the street layout. Stated baldly and plainly that idea is preposterous, but it is still central to all city planning theory.
I remember we made a visit to Columbia Maryland to see one of the great monuments to planning - the other one in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area being Reston Virginia.
Like Fremont California in California it was hard to see the influence of planning - it looked just like any other suburb. It was explained to us that in order to promote "community" the planners had moved all the mailboxes from in front of the individual single family houses down to a central area. This wasn't done to help the mailman it was make the residents meet one another. Powerful thinking, what?
Washington had recently been burned out in the Martin Luther King riots. Our class was charged by the local government with helping "plan" how to restore the wasteland. We invited in local black activists and ministers (i.e. race hustlers). No plan of course was allowed to mention race.
My preliminary plan to brick up all the first floor windows like violent Renaissance Florence was met with disapproval. My second plan called "Benign Neglect" which said: do nothing, just wait - was even less well received.
I had to get out of Urban Planning. It's just as well because planners live lives of despair because no sensible person pays any attention to them.
Albertosaurus
Yes, Latinos/Hispanics are pretty lethargic people by nature. Just getting by seems to be their operational model. Which is why south Texas and New Mexico are so sleepy. Compared to nose-to-the-grindstone Asians/Indians or ultra ambitious (at least in sports, music, fashion) blacks or well rounded yuppiesh whites, Spanish-speaking people are much less energetic. That's just a reality. unfortunately.
Their neighborhoods are livable, but tacky and low brow. In a lot of ways, they're comparable to lower income whites.
There's also an interesting distinction you could make between Carribean Latinos (Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Meztizo South Americans. Culturally, the Carribeans are sort of intermediate between blacks and Mexicans.
Immigrants almost never want to live in the city. They'd prefer the suburbs, so they can buy a huge house to impress their coethnics and relatives back home. I've seen this trend among Indians, Chinese, Lebanese, and almost every immigrant group you can think of.
My plan for America: every single person will be either a creative, offbeat, edgy graphic designer, an insightful, self-deprecating epochal genius who files twenty patents a year, or a dynamic columnist who daily praises both of the above.
No more of these thick-necked, hypo-patentiferous plumber, shelf-stocker, textile worker, and refrigerator maker hoi polloi, thank you very much! Yuck!
This way, everything will be so great. Obviously, GDP per capita will double, but actually I'm thinking more of aesthetics.
Not a very good physicist, that's pretty obvious.
The ones that don't have what it takes often spill over into less demanding disciplines, the social "sciences" especially.
Economics, in particular, I've noticed, is plagued by 3rd rate physicists. Paul Samuelson being exhibit number one. Throwing logic and common sense aside, they use their facility with mathematical analyses to overawe ordinary language economists, with results that are plain to see.
Like African bees they have taken over the colony.
Go watch "Connections" (the 1970's series) on Youtube. Its up there.
You will find, over and over and over again, that innovation consisted of one guy, taking disparate things that other people had done, and put them together, that sort of worked, and then got done decades later, better, by someone else.
This happened in cities, in rural mines, in the countryside, and all over the place. With the advent of postal systems there was no need to be direct face to face. Even less now.
Hispanic/Latino is misnomer. Marco Rubio has very little in common with typical Mexican Amerindian. Amerindian is more accurate.
Anyone read a typical patent today?
Yeah complete and utter garbage is patented.
Happy to help, guys.
LoL@innovation being measured by patents
lullll
The city that Jane Jacobs championed, the high density WALKABLE city, is a thing of the past, the 19th and first half of the 20th century past to be precise. And even then it only existed in New York City and to a limited extent in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. A city has to reach a certain size and must also be a center of some sort, in other words a World City - New York, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin - for its streets to act as a magnet, to be interesting enough, exciting enough to make it a walkable and walked in city. But all that is either ending or over and for no other reason than the fact that the great romantic phase in man's development has ended. Yes, all the hard headed so-called realists will deny this but the great driver has been and will always be what is in man's heart...which is no longer romantic, merely materialist. As man's heart has shriveled so has his cities. Oh, the buildings will be there but the action, such as it is, will be...elsewhere.
If every American became a New York Times columnist, we wouldn't have all these problems.
@Anon
"But if there is evidence to the contrary I respectfully would be happy to see it. But for now, I think all the evidence is that in general lower IQ whites are much more likely to want to move to an all white ethnostate than high IQ whites."
I think that Steve Sailer has always been extremely sensitive to the criticism that high IQ whites generally tend not to care as much about white nationalism as their lower IQ white American counterparts, i.e. they're more likely to be cognitive elitists.
My personal suspicion is that you have quite a few IQ 100-120+ whites who are all for white nationalism, but if you examine say IQ 130+ whites, they're far more likely to be cognitive elitists.
"In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
Spencer Bachus, incoming chair of the house financial services committee.
Ireland is 97% white, and hasn't been on economic fire lately. They also had a large housing bubble, but the government (unlike Iceland's) took responsibility for unbelievably large debts that private banks owed to foreigners, and the IMF has been squeezing the Irish public hard to get this money back.
"The city that Jane Jacobs championed, the high density WALKABLE city, is a thing of the past..."
Chicago is highly walkable these days. The safe areas are growing as blacks are pushed to the suburbs.
In a lot of ways, they're comparable to lower income whites.
If I was a genetic determinist, I'd say the best comparison is the other historic area of white/yellow mixing, central/south Asia.
Not exactly going out on a limb, comparing white/yellow mixed with white/yellow mixed, but for some reason people just seem to not get that central Asia exists.
I guess the Anime Islanders are hoping to improve on the model.
Perhaps another way to look at this, with all respect to all sides of the debate, is that the "all white" cities and states of the USA are very interested in recruiting high IQ people to move there. By and large these "all white" cities and states fail to persuade high IQ whites to move in.
On the other hand, expensive cities that are filled with high IQ asians and brahmins seem to have no trouble recruiting high IQ whites.
In the medical field, thousands of high IQ whites complete their medical training and are ready to practice as surgeons. White surgeons by and large have high IQ. How many of them want to move to the all white cities and states vs how many want to move to cities and states where they will mix with asians and brahmins? How many of the most talented white technology venture capitalists want to live in an all white ethnostate?
You bring up observable points. But I think we have a chicken/egg issue. It appears that you are suggesting high IQ whites are moving to successful areas BECAUSE they are inhabited by NE Asians and Brahmins. I think it is the opposite. I think it is NE Asians and Brahmins moving to partake in the creation of high IQ whites.
High IQ whites are going to these areas because these are epicenters of high tech jobs. Remember, Silicon Valley and the Boston area were high tech strongholds before the Asians even arrived. And it's not as if you can just pack up and move the tech base of Silicon Valley. So whites who have high IQs and wish to work in those fields will head to those areas, but I wouldn't ascribe it to a desire to live among Asians.
Also, refer to an earlier iSteve post on Bentonville, AR, home of Walmart. Once a redneck, white backwater, Bentonville is now becoming more cosmopolitan because a more diverse crowd is coming to town due to the enormous success of Walmart. Just like Silicon Valley attracted the elite of the world, many are now heading there too.
So high IQ whites will continue to head to tech epicenters that were more than likely created prior to Asian immigration. And whites that remain in the hinterlands who create new and thriving businesses will once again be joined by those NE Asians and Brahmins.
Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia are pretty sleepy places themselves. So are the ethnic Mongols and North Asian ethnic groups that inhabit Russia.
Interesting that the Japanese could be so different from racially similar populations, but I suppose the selection varied tremendously within the Asian continent.
Patel and Singh, 2 most common Indian-American surnames, are not Brahmins. Lots of Indian-Americans are though.
2
The opportunity is there to move to all white cities and all white states.
Are we not supposed to notice that you pulled a bait and switch? "Ethnostates" for "all white"? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Please go on. (Though I have to point out (I just can't help myself), I do like how you didn't just pull a bait and switch and compare apples to oranges; you doubled down and compared hypothetical apples to hypothetical oranges; and passed the whole thing off as apples to apples. Nice work!)
if there is evidence to the contrary I respectfully would be happy to see it. But for now, I think all the evidence is that in general lower IQ whites are much more likely to want to move to an all white ethnostate than high IQ whites.
You have provided overwhelming evidence that hypo-apples are not hypo-oranges. Thanks for taking the time; consider me sold.
Since you're so "CG" it strikes me as odd that you haven't mentioned the possibility of experimentation. You know, so we can all test our theories? You're definitely not more interested in preventing experimentation; that much is obvious.
P.S., what's your take on my ideas for improving Israel? Obviously they're suffering, due to their dearth of "CG" immigration. How do we alieve their pain? I can recapitulate if you missed them the first time 'round.
P.P.S., what do you say to people who say you can stuff your characterizations of history and peoples; that they'd rather know whether you acknowledge or deny their rights and freedoms? Crazy question, I know, but...humor me?
I mean, what's really with all your windage? I say "I want my rights," and you say, "but you want to do dumb stuff with them," as if you addressed my statement. And you preface it all with blabbing about how you "respect" my "preferences," even while you serially insult my intelligence.
What gives? WTF is your point? What's your deal? You do see why I'm asking, right? Oh, and, have we met? You seem awfully familiar.
My personal suspicion is that you have quite a few IQ 100-120+ whites who are all for white nationalism, but if you examine say IQ 130+ whites, they're far more likely to be cognitive elitists.
I'll send Israel the memo. The world's most "cognitively elite" population, and "cognitive elitists"; a perfect fit! What's not to like? They go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
I think we need to do some "cognitively elite" calculations. 'Cuz I'm this close to sold on this thing, I'm telling ya!
But before we move populations around, we need to take a census, right? And since demographic facts on the ground in any given location determine what kind of immigration will actually be locally cognitively elite (you get very different answers for Tokyo and Nairobi, for example), we need a pretty detailed census. Especially since once the peanut-butter-and-chocolate obviousness of "cognitive elitism" catches on, all those "cognitive elites" are to be very much in demand; we need to know precisely how much of this precious resource actually exists!
We need to at least know the figures for China and India. But I confess, the effort involved in assaying even that limited set is beyond what I can muster. But if I'm going to buy in, I need to see the math first. I'm a sale waitin' to happen, fellas - get crackin'!
My preliminary plan to brick up all the first floor windows like violent Renaissance Florence was met with disapproval.
Having recently visited that part of DC, that's close to what most people have adopted.
I used to live in Phoenix and hated it. You get all the drawbacks of living in a big city (crime, pollution, traffic, ...), but you don't get the conveniences (short walk or bike ride to stores or attractions, easy connectivity with others to foster ideas and innovations, ...). Urban sprawl sucks.
As for patents, what a silly thing to bring up - Mexicans don't patent. They might innovate, but patents and intellectual property rights just aren't high priorities in third-world cultures.
below-average levels of income and innovation = Vibrancy!
Seriously though, proximity to research centers (universities and federal labs) has a lot to do with it. For example, but for the NASA Center in Huntsville, no one in Alabama would ever be confused with being a rocket scientist.
High IQ white people also aren't having very many children. What family life they still have is rapidly assimilating to East Asian/European elite norms: intense early academics, delayed social puberty, delayed marriage and childbearing, calm and controlled emotional tone to the household, desire for adventure or romance rigidly subordinated to drive to achieve status in civil service, the professions, or academia.
This is one of the many results of the destruction of the upper middle class American housewife's power and her replacement with the female yuppie. No woman wants to see her beloved children slaving away in a Kumon crammer at 7 or 8. No woman wants to socialize her children in such a way as to defer or possibly prevent the birth of her grandchildren. This behavior has come about because high status women are required to act like men in order not to lose caste.
"On the other hand, expensive cities that are filled with high IQ asians and brahmins seem to have no trouble recruiting high IQ whites."
Umm... you've got it backwards, dude. The cities filled with high IQ whites attract the Asians. Of course I seriously doubt that you actually forgot who was here first, because you're obviously just trolling. The cities filled with high IQ Asians are in Asia, and they're not attracting many whites of any kind.
The opportunity is there to move to all white cities and all white states.
You should people be forced to continually migrate to abandon the infrastructure they have built and the optimal geographic positions they have attained rather than simply creating barriers to entry?
If they made success anywhere else, on their reservations, which would be harder having to build fresh infrastructure on bad land, they would be followed by continual trains of new migrants, particularly since internal migration is even more hampered by current rights setups than external immigration. Any putative "ethnostate" would be trivially bullied into opening up to internal immigrations from other groups in the name of civil rights.
It's simpler and better just to set up barriers.
When it comes to the preferences of the high IQ, I would be unsurprised if high IQ White people who gave the matter any thought whatsoever, which is to say, not many of them (most being able to "self control" themselves into ignoring any issues), had a strong preference ceteris paribus for mostly White with an allowance made for a few refugees, tourists, geniuses and great artists, but otherwise no real immigration (which is as things should be). I think very few high IQ White people want anything from other cultures other than food, frankly - to the extent they are interested in other cultures, it is in their "pure" form and sightseeing this. I think it is simply the case that the advantages of cognitive centralisation, metropolitan prestige and job opportunities simply wash out the bias they might have to living in cities of their own people.
@ben tillman
As a high IQ white who enjoys associating with East Asians, I find your comments to be presumptuous. It's amazing how someone like you can presume to speak on behalf of all high IQ whites and know exactly what their preferences are.
This is another reason why WNs annoy me. They act as if all white Americans are united by a common set of values, when clearly that isn't the case. I'd gladly deport you in exchange for a high IQ East Asian any day.
"...if there is evidence to the contrary I respectfully would be happy to see it. But for now, I think all the evidence is that in general lower IQ whites are much more likely to want to move to an all white ethnostate than high IQ whites."
Aren't white people - at least some of the smart ones with enough money - starting to flee California now that it has had the opportunity to bask in the bountiful benefits of multiculturalism for 2 or 3 generations, while creating a sunburned multicultural mortgage meltdown, as well as high multicultural crime and dynamically diverse multiculturalist corruption?
But whither they doth flee escapes both me and thee.
- Rudy
Patel and Singh, 2 most common Indian-American surnames, are not Brahmins.
Could you give us some URLs which would help us to learn about various name-to-caste correlations?
Thanks.
As a high IQ white who enjoys associating with East Asians, I find your comments to be presumptuous. It's amazing how someone like you can presume to speak on behalf of all high IQ whites and know exactly what their preferences are.
If you're a high IQ white, surely you can see your own error? Ben was speaking of whites in general; surely you're high IQ enough to argue with his actual position, and not your straw man ("all high IQ whites")?
This is another reason why WNs annoy me. They act as if all white Americans are united by a common set of values, when clearly that isn't the case. I'd gladly deport you in exchange for a high IQ East Asian any day.
Whites are pretty united in having the kind of moral value system that would precluded deporting Ben in exchange for a high IQ east Asian. You're the outlier.
Which works out well, because there's no conscionable political system that would try to recruit someone like you.
HA HA,
All you "HBDists" think you've discovered some new information. In reality, all the "elites" you complain about know the score. Do you think they spend their time in Hyde Park or New Haven without getting an idea of blacks?
The fact is, we don't care. Why should a white with an IQ of 100 be entitled to earn five times as much as a Mexican with an IQ of 90 because of an accident of geography? This is simply socialism and racism, two things acknowledged to be bad even by conservatives.
Steve,
Anon wrote
..."This is another reason why WNs annoy me"
Steve, a while back you outlined a citizenist manifesto that was pretty clear and easy to understand. Thank you for that.
Similarly, the White Nationalists on this board have been kind enough to clearly explain their vision for the community they would like to live in. I appreciate the clarity and honesty of their position.
I am grateful to you for outlining citizenism and I am also grateful for the white nationalists in outlining their own vision.
I want to take the discussion to the next level by talking about what these two competing visions look like in real life.
Steve, I believe that the nation that best embodies your view of citizenism is Singapore. The founder of Singapore repeatedly and publicly has said that different groups have different IQ levels and that all the citizens of Singapore benefit from encouraging high IQ people of all races to immigrate to Singapore and become permanent residents. Singapore aggressively tries to persuade high IQ people to move there from Asia, North America, and Europe and put down roots. at the same time the government of Singapore has explicitly and repeatedly made it clear that low IQ people are not welcome to become permanent residents. low IQ people are allowed to spend some time as temporary guest workers but they are explicitly not allowed to put down roots. Singapore is blunt and clear about the fact that the current citizens of Singapore benefit when high IQ people settle in singapore permanently and that the current citizens of Singapore are hurt when low IQ people settle in singapore permanently.
The white nationalists want to live in a nation that is nearly 100% white. Since some white nationalists are nordicists, let's focus on those countries that are today nearly 100% Northern European, countries where the common people AND the elite are united in acting to prevent any non white immigration. The point would be, what countries that currently exist today would most satisfy the white nationalists that post here at i steve? I think the best examples of countries run according to the white nationalist / nordicist prescription are Iceland and Poland. Again, if the average white nationalist who posts here visited Iceland or Poland I am pretty sure they would be happy with what they saw.
So there are two clear crisp competing visions for the future, the citizenist vision and the white nationalist vision.
The point is that citizenists and white nationalists are both 100% united in wanting there to be almost no immigration from South of the Border.
Steve, you doing a post on how crummy Phoenix or Riverside is really doesn't bring out the debate between Citizenists and White nationalists.
Please consider posts that allow the citizenists and the white nationalists to debate out their differences and ennunciate their competing visions.
Huh. I lived in San Marino when it was lily white. My father lived on Gainsborough for decades. My cousin still lives there, on Warwick.
I never liked the place because it was so hyper-planned and stifling. No way would you see a taco stand or miniature golf course there or anything else kids liked. You never saw anyone on the street, no kids playing. All the businesses closed early. It was like a little Beverly Hills. The only Asians were the Japanese gardeners.
Whiskey said:
Go watch "Connections" (the 1970's series) on Youtube. Its up there.
Whiskey had better watch out. Saying anything about James Burke other than worshipful praise is dangerous.
I once made a comment from the audience at one of his talks. I told him his chronology was wrong (it was). The word got back to my job and I was shunned as an apostate. There was much muttering when I walked by.
People seem to think history really went that way.
It's easy to spot his biases. He's a promoter of Britain and its days of industrial glory. He's Northern Irish - a people more British than the Brits.
I thought it odd that he would overlook the Irish megaliths that predate the Egyptian pyramids. New Grange is quite crude compared with the pyramid at Saqqara but it is older. Burke however isn't interested in the works Celtic or pre-Celtic peoples just Anglo Saxons.
For example, Burke has a section on the Rosetta Stone, whose de-encryption he attributes to the Englishman Thomas Young and never mentions Champollion - that accursed Frenchman.
After Connections he made another series about Global Warming. This one seems to have been sent down the memory hole. He got the future as wrong as he got the past.
Albertosaurus
@ben tillman... This is another reason why WNs annoy me. They act as if all white Americans are united by a common set of values, when clearly that isn't the case. I'd gladly deport you in exchange for a high IQ East Asian any day.
Gee, I dunno.
Evil genius Bill Gates seems to prefer the lily-white environs of Redmond, WA.
#1-in-his-Yale-Law-School-class Ben Stein has been singing the praises of Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, for years [decades?] now.
Diabolical nihilist Warren Buffet even chooses to dwell amongst monosyllabic, knuckle-dragging, red-sweatershirt-wearing Cornhuskers, for God's sake.
I don't see any of these guys making a bee-line for the local Chinatown or little Bangalore.
[Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, did snag himself some fine-assed yellow action - although, judging from her Wikipedia entry - he might want to keep an eye out for being cuckholded.]
There is nothing stupider than a physicist who thinks he's smart.
As a high IQ white who enjoys associating with East Asians, ... I'd gladly deport you in exchange for a high IQ East Asian any day.
It would be cheaper and easier for you just to move to an East Asian city. No white nationalists over there. Plenty of Han, Korean and Japanese supremacists, but definitely no white nationalists.
As has been pointed out, you got things exactly backwards: high IQ whites create an innovative, entrepeneurial area which attracts high IQ NE Asians. That's as far as your little multi-cult bubble extends.
All the inhabitants of cities, such as New York, London and Paris, exchange valuable ideas to each other non-stop ?
Must be fun.
This is another reason why WNs annoy me. They act as if all white Americans are united by a common set of values
No they don't.
My comments aren't presumptuous; I consciously chose not to speak categorically about all Whites; I was thinking of guys like you who think their masculinity quotient precludes them from operating successfully among Whites.
But most high-IQ Whites aren't like you.
"As a high IQ white who enjoys associating with East Asians, I find your comments (Tilman's) to be presumptuous."
My sister works in a computer company, in an east coast city, owned by Indians. Even now, during the depression, their HR is importing yet MORE Indians. My sister (white) and her friend, (black with an ex-military husband), are the minorities, in their own country. Both are competent programmers with years of experience. While they like their employers and most of their co-workers, they are not getting the work the Indians do, though they have the experience and know-how. This is what happens. But we tell anyone not white that they are protected minorities when many are well-heeled professionals, choosing to come here, from a country to which the American taxpayers owe nothing. While they have the right to legally immigrate, there is exactly 0 reason to allow any sort of affirmative action (though I don't know if that's what's happening.) How the hell could the country that invented the computer industry need to import anybody? If the school system would stop holding back the bright kids so no child is left behind, they'd have more than enough brains to take ET home. And if you are really set on a multi-racial, high iq environment, then everybody has to let go of the race-politics and race-id, not just whites, because sooner or later, people realize they are suckers.
Asians come because they can and because there's a freakin' two billion of them where they came from. But whites do not move to Silicon valley just for their company. They end up there because they've been going there since post-WWII, long-before any Asians; and continue to go despite Asians. As in any group, amicable relations form in varying degrees, but inevitably demographics become political. The whites are not allowed to look out for their own interests in their own country, yet we are expected to look out for the interests of non-whites, who are already looking out very well for their own interests with all the power that U.S. Constitutional law and pc sentiment, provides for them.
Something's got to give in that scenario.
I think Ben and some others were just responding to the presumption that whites seek out cities with high iq Asians so they can be with other like-minded individuals, when in fact, whites started it all (why, after all, are the Indians and Chinese coming here?), and it was the Asians who sought out the U.S.
As far as high-g elites favoring Asian company, I don't think most care and do not want to be overwhelmed demographically. Non-whites think the socially clueless, Aspergized whites who can't wait to be a minority in their own country are insane. Or at least naive.
Steve: "Yet, what could account for the lower rates of patents in Riverside or Phoenix than in equally suburban Silicon Valley or North San Diego County?"
Well, knowing Steve I assume his implied reference is to the overwhelming percentage of so-called "NAMs" in those two cities.
'Cept it just ain't so! If you simply consult the Census website, you'll discover that Phoenix is 40% "NAM" while Riverside is 45%. Meanwhile, San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, is almost 35%, as is San Diego, generally considered another "innovation" city. And NYC is about 55% "NAM". Offhand, these racial differences don't seem enormous, and hardly seem to explain much about the alleged innovation-deficit in Phoenix & Riverside.
In fact, if you just have a little familiarity with America's national demographics, you'd realize that both Phoenix (58% white) and Riverside (50% white) are both actually much quite a bit *whiter* than the average major American city, which is only around 41% white. So maybe Steve's actually administering a subtle poke to his WN readers or something. Personally, though, I think the key factor about both Phoenix and Riverside is that they're basically non-elite, working-class cities, and it's not too surprising that working-class people---white and "NAM" alike---don't file too many patents.
But here's a general rule. Not all theoretical physicists or ex-physicists are totally stupid, and if one of them makes a claim, maybe you should check your own data before you just make fun of him...
The cities filled with high IQ Asians are in Asia, and they're not attracting many whites of any kind.
===
I hate to admit this, but Singapore and Hong Kong do attract a significant number of whites. (Of course those cities were planned by the Brits). Also, among current twenty somethings, it seems China (particularly Beijing and Shanghai) has become what Eastern Europe was to my generation -- a place to hang out a few years, teach English, maybe do some business.
I'm surprised by Cennbeorc. Jane Jacobs seemed to have a quite negative view of sprawling car-centric Los Angeles in "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".
There's an intra-libertarian dispute between the "Market Urbanist" blog and "the anti-planner" Randal O'Toole. The latter derides Jacobs as ignorant of the suburbs relative to Herbert Gans here.
RS said
>My plan for America: every single person will be either a creative, offbeat, edgy graphic designer, an insightful, self-deprecating epochal genius who files twenty patents a year, or a dynamic columnist who daily praises both of the above.[...] Obviously, GDP per capita will double<
LOL - wonderful.
Anon. said
>the evidence is that many of the most talented people (as discussed in Richard Florida's books) really don't want to move to an all white ethnostate.[...] if there is evidence to the contrary I respectfully would be happy to see it. But for now, I think all the evidence is [snip]"
Richard Florida? You mean this flake?
http://preview.tinyurl.com/22k7br2
http://preview.tinyurl.com/24tvlgx
>Steve, your readers talk frequently about how terrible Los Angeles is, but how many of the highest IQ whites in America really would choose to live in an all white ethnostate instead of living in San Marino (50% Northeast Asian) just East of Downtown?<
The white flight out of California to such states as Northern California (heh heh) and Colorado and others must mean those people are not bright. Or maybe, not homosexual or Jewish.
You left out DuPage County, Illinois, Suburban Boston, and the Research Triangle of North Carolina for patents. I agree with Jane Jacobs though that traditional cities and towns promoted a sense of community more than huge government planned housing projects and suburban sprawl do. I think that given time people in any area want the sense of community. As for patents, I really don't know what cities have to do with them since all intellegent people anywhere have access to the same information that leads to new innovation.
"RKU said...
Steve: "Yet, what could account for the lower rates of patents in Riverside or Phoenix than in equally suburban Silicon Valley or North San Diego County?"
Well, knowing Steve I assume his implied reference is to the overwhelming percentage of so-called "NAMs" in those two cities.
'Cept it just ain't so! If you simply consult the Census website, you'll discover that Phoenix is 40% "NAM" while Riverside is 45%. Meanwhile, San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, is almost 35%, as is San Diego, generally considered another "innovation" city. And NYC is about 55% "NAM"."
More mendacious squid-ink from RKU, of the same kind he's been spouting on Mangan's website. Since when is San Jose "The Heart of Silicon Valley"? It never has been and isn't now. "Silicon Valley" consists of Palo Alto, Mountain, Los Altos, and Santa Clara. And you claim to have lived there?
And then you cite population figures for San Diego. Steve wasn't even talking about San Diego city - he was talking about north San Diego county.
"Why should a white with an IQ of 100 be entitled to earn five times as much as a Mexican with an IQ of 90 because of an accident of geography?"
Why should a physician with an IQ of 130 be "allowed" to earn three times as much as an engineer with an IQ of 130? Why should your salary be subsidized by massive government spending, when you can essentially be replaced by recorded lectures online?
As a high IQ white who enjoys associating with East Asians, I find your comments to be presumptuous. It's amazing how someone like you can presume to speak on behalf of all high IQ whites and know exactly what their preferences are.
This is another reason why WNs annoy me. They act as if all white Americans are united by a common set of values, when clearly that isn't the case. I'd gladly deport you in exchange for a high IQ East Asian any day.
Actually, what was really presumptuous was the way you fellows ganged up and declared that any positive white self-identification was immoral and did your damndest to make it all but illegal.
Fine by me. I identify more with my ethnicity (which is sort of white, sort of not). If it wasn't for the way your spiritual sickness is penetrating even there I'd find it utterly hilarious the way you clowns celebrate your own demise. "We did it! We succeeded! We destroyed ourselves! Hooray for us!" I can't be the only one thinking that either.
"This is another reason why WNs annoy me. They act as if all white Americans are united by a common set of values, when clearly that isn't the case. I'd gladly deport you in exchange for a high IQ East Asian any day."
Gee and all these years we've been told WNs are moral lepers because they want to deport people based on race. Turns out there are lots of moral lepers who disagree about who to deport based on race.
steve there are some interesting ideas here in west's work. putting aside the fact that his work, like an economist's work, ignores any HBD, there is stuff to study here.
of course the easiest way to get around the lack of attention to HBD, is to control for it. compare the "west math" of various cities with very similar demographics. does city A, with demographics extremely similar to city B, operate with all the same observable, measurable functions? i would assume his math is expressed as functions, could be wrong though.
of course the answer is gonna be no for some phenomena, but i bet the answer will also be yes with regard to other phenomena. those would be your "true", immutable "rules for how a city works".
naturally, even the criteria get bonked by HBD. west talks about how the sewage system works in every city. LOL. lots of third world cities barely have any functional sewage system. infrastructure, and how it varies wildly by which group has built a city, is one of THE key differences between groups. think about how traffic control works in various places around the world. a chaotic mess in some places which might barely even have such a thing as traffic control, versus an ordered, almost draconian attention to schedules and timetables in other places.
"If the school system would stop holding back the bright kids so no child is left behind, they'd have more than enough brains to take ET home."
Yeah. I think there's a lot of high-IQ white talent in the midwest that gets pissed away in the football-and-beer culture.
"Personally, though, I think the key factor about both Phoenix and Riverside is that they're basically non-elite, working-class cities, and it's not too surprising that working-class people---white and "NAM" alike---don't file too many patents."
Yup. Practically speaking, there's no research university in those cities. It's not just outliers like Silicon Valley and Boston--you see patents coming out of Raleigh-Durham, for example. Practically speaking, research is done at universities--companies aren't doing it anymore. (Bell Labs has shrunk quite a bit.)
"Evil genius Bill Gates seems to prefer the lily-white environs of Redmond, WA.
#1-in-his-Yale-Law-School-class Ben Stein has been singing the praises of Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, for years [decades?] now. "
And in other news, Doctors overwhelmingly choose to live where rich people live:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/12/20/132198557/u-s-has-plenty-of-doctors-to-treat-kids-but-many-arent-where-theyre-needed
Thanks NPR!
"Fine by me. I identify more with my ethnicity (which is sort of white, sort of not)."
Care to elucidate?
All I can say is that the white race would be in much better shape if low-IQ, average-IQ, and slightly- above-average-IQ whites would have some respect for their high-IQ kin. Asians have that respect; that is what makes them so socially attractive to anyone of high IQ.
And in other news, Doctors overwhelmingly choose to live where rich people live:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/12/20/132198557/u-s-has-plenty-of-doctors-to-treat-kids-but-many-arent-where-theyre-needed
The issue is where the doctors work, not where they live. How many doctors work out of their homes?
Someone above wants to suss out the differences between citizenists and racial nationalists.
I'd like to figure out WTF is up with the "cognitive elitists." Obviously the difficulty here is that "cognitive elitists" is a name the Majority Rights bloggers took for these folks and ran with it; it's not something they call themselves.
But that's the point! They don't call themselves anything. They don't have a Web page. They don't have a manifesto. They don't have tables for their "cognitively elite" populations, breaking them down by IQ percentile. They don't even hang the means and SDs so we can calculate them on our own.
I've been looking for an outline of "cognitive elitism" for a couple days now, and I've got bupkiss to show for it. They seem full of crap to me. I've done all the math myself so far.
Just look at this thread. I asked the CogElites for some details three days ago, and still haven't heard back. Not even a "will do."
Crickets chirping here. Over at Mangan's blog, I'm having to pull teeth just to get Kato to come forward with details - and he's been drumming "cognitive elitism" there non-stop for weeks! It's getting harder and harder for me to take the "cognitive elitists" seriously.
Anonymous said...
As a high IQ white who enjoys associating with East Asians ....
I've read your comments here and at Mangans, where you cut-n-pasted the same thing, and you really don't come across as being a very "high IQ" person.
For instance, the mind-blowing illogic in the claim that "expensive cities that are filled with high IQ asians and brahmins seem to have no trouble recruiting high IQ whites" suggests that your IQ is rather low.
Svigor's comment makes me wonder: Where are the identifiable high-IQ neighborhoods in the US? Are there any?
The ones I can think of are driven by work or school. That is, it sure seems like there are a lot of really smart people wandering around in Cambridge, MA, and in much of the Bay Area, and in tech-heavy towns like Hillsboro, OR or Rochester, MN. To some extent, you get this in any really expensive neighborhood--if you have to be making $300K a year to live in this neighborhood, well, most people who can do that are pretty bright, the cardiologists and partners at law firms and investment bankers and such. But I'm not sure how much that colors the neighborhood.
Without some strong draw centered on work or school, though, are there any communities or neighborhoods that somehow bill themselves as high-IQ places? I can't think of any, but maybe I've just missed them.
It's not quite clear to me how you'd go about appealing to a high-IQ demographic, other than locating someplace where most of the jobs are high-IQ jobs. And in practice, that usually seems to mean that the whole social support network (policemen, nurses, cooks, etc.) can't afford to live in the expensive part of town, so they live a few miles down the road. That kind of segregation of the community never seems healthy to me.
Further, most of us can choose whom to spend time with. My (overwhelmingly very smart) coworkers don't live in my neighborhood, they're spread out several miles from our office in all directions. But it's not like we can't have them over for dinner. By contrast, I know several families on my block, but don't really know anyone even the next block over, so maybe they're all geniuses over there and I'll never find out.
"For instance, the mind-blowing "illogic in the claim that "expensive cities that are filled with high IQ asians and brahmins seem to have no trouble recruiting high IQ whites" suggests that your IQ is rather low."
well, either that or English is just not his first language. Most of us sound stupid writing in a second language.
Expensive cities indeed. "Filled" with Indians." Silicon Valley aside, would that be Edison, New Jersey? You know, that city named for the famous American genius Thomas Edison.
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