Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Tyler Cowen links to Ron Unz's The Myth of American Meritocracy, saying:
There is a new and stimulating piece by Ron Unz, in The American Conservative. The article covers plenty of ground, but I took away two main points. The first is that there is massive and quite unjustified bias against Asian and Asian-American students in the U.S. admissions process. Yes, I already thought that but it turns out it is much worse than I had thought. Yet many people support this aspect of our current admissions systems, either directly or indirectly.
The second point is the claim that Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end, in relative terms at least.
For reasons which are possibly irrational on my end, but perhaps not totally irrational, I am not entirely comfortable with the religious and ethnic and racial “counting” methods applied in this piece (blame me for mood affiliation if you wish). Still, it is an interesting read and after some internal debate I thought I would pass it along, albeit with caveats.
I’d like to hear more from Tyler about why he had to struggle with his comfort level. After all, he is in a quantitative field, and vast amounts of quantitative analyses are published annually based on data collected about race and ethnicity. On the other hand, almost nothing quantitative is published in the mainstream about what is, arguably, the most influential ethnic, racial and/or religious group in 21st Century America.
On the other other hand, Jewish publications and organizations keep close tabs on quantitative measures of Jewish accomplishment. For example, the venerable Jewish Telegraph Agency estimated in 2009 that about 35% of the Forbes 400 were Jewish. (Here's a more careful count of the ethnicity of the 400 richest people in America.)
Similarly, in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, the prominent social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, pointed out:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp 26-27]
Finally, would Tyler have linked to Unz’s article about Jewish achievement if Unz wasn’t Jewish?
The article covers plenty of ground, but I took away two main points. The first is that there is massive and quite unjustified bias against Asian and Asian-American students in the U.S. admissions process..... The second point is the claim that Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end, in relative terms at least.
ReplyDeleteUnz's article notes that white gentiles, who comprise the majority of the country, are even more underrepresented than Asians.
Why doesn't Cowen take away this point from the article? Did he not read carefully? Does he not care? Is he afraid to acknowledge this?
would Tyler have linked to Unz’s article about Jewish achievement if Unz wasn’t Jewish?
ReplyDeleteTo an ever-increasing extent, all public discourse in the US is conducted between Jews. Part of the reason for this is that Jews consider the opinions of other Jews to be worthwhile and important - unlike their view of the opinions of non-Jews.
If Steve was Jewish his ideas would have much greater public prominence. Are you SURE you don't have some great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent from Eastern Europe, Steve? If we can all be Hispanic now, why can't we all be Jewish?
This article actually moved me. This article hit on many things I felt as a straight white male from a middle class home at an Ivy. You stop and look around and ask yourself 'where am I?' When you come home, you think, "I'm back in the regular world".
ReplyDeleteThe Jewish section I found most interesting was how poorly the Jewish applicants fared when looking at schools that admitted strictly on merit. If Caltech doesn't care for legacy admissions, that could be a big part of the gap. The class of 2002 at Harvard was over 25% legacy students and 15% foreign students. That left 60% of the slots for regular students.
Unz's article notes that white gentiles, who comprise the majority of the country, are even more underrepresented than Asians.
ReplyDeleteI'd go over there and point that out .. if those brave free-thinkers had not banished me for Thought-Crime. But you can try posting that comment there and see how long it lasts.
"Are you SURE you don't have some great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent from Eastern Europe, Steve?"
ReplyDeleteI'm sure I do.
mebbe asian numbers remain down at yale and harvard for geographical factors. asians are concentrated in the west coast and so they may prefer going to ucla than to east coast schools. in contrast, most jews arrived and settled first in the east coast.
ReplyDeleteNo. Unz points out that NYC has the highest percentage of Asian residents of any city; Asians dominate the student body at the NYC elite high schools; yet Columbia has the same Asian quota as Harvard & Yale.
DeleteSeymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University,
ReplyDeleteIsn't there another quote somewhere from Earl Raab celebrating population change and how we are now past the point of no return where any European group could ever exercise control over the USA?
Leave it to tyler cowen to find the asian-american angle as one of two "most interesting" points. That's a relatively "safe" argument which has been made publicly many times in a variety of publications.
ReplyDeleteI think the mind blowing bombshell behind this article which unz buries in the latter half of the article is the possibility of systematic discrimination against gentiles, which he infers based on the distribution of national merit semifinalists. That is a novel and compelling argument I haven't seen anywhere else.
However, this argument is so inflammatory that I'm wondering if this article will have any real impact. If this article were taken seriously, I think unz would be in for savage criticism, perhaps literally burned at the stake, for daring to deviate from orthodoxy. Burning at the stake might even be fair because taking the article at face value could otherwise lead to some kind of nasty revolution. I suspect the article will instead get snarky and wonky criticism in a minor league publication like slate and then disappear down the memory hole.
I can see the article already: start with the counting of last names as a cute but stereotypical and hence unscientific place to start, talk about how the decline of achievement is "obviously" false by a variety of metrics, and the entire argument is now bogus. Perhaps the best way to cap of this hypothetical slate article would be to note that even the most sophisticated anti-semites (like unz) are jewish hence it is another example of how they are in fact at the top of their game. Case closed.
"I'd go over there and point that out .. if those brave free-thinkers had not banished me for Thought-Crime. But you can try posting that comment there and see how long it lasts."
ReplyDeleteYou're exaggerating. Tyler lets the comments flow freely over there.
"To an ever-increasing extent, all public discourse in the US is conducted between Jews. Part of the reason for this is that Jews consider the opinions of other Jews to be worthwhile and important - unlike their view of the opinions of non-Jews."
ReplyDeleteNo, it's worse. Jews are pretty sure other Jews don't want to shove them into an oven. Even being half-Jewish gets you off, because being a Mischling, first class, sometimes (but not always) got you sent to the ovens.
I agree, we're pretty paranoid, but: how would you behave if someone had wiped out all of your relatives in the Old World in similar circumstances?
Pat Buchanan wrote an op-ed about this back in the 90's that was furiously denounced by Jews and neocons.
ReplyDeleteIf Chinese are the new Jews, are Jews the new WASPs? So Steve, who are the new Indians, that's the part that's got me scared. I'm thinking the new Indians are middle age White guys like me. But who then are the Cowboys?
ReplyDeleteIf Jews intermarry at a high rate (and they do), that would tend to depress Jewish achievement (fewer Jewish names) and increase non-Jewish achievement. That 25% of the Ivy League is Jewish probably includes products of mixed marriages that inflates the number of Jews but might not get added to white non-Jews. In other words, the 2% probably undercounts Jews and the 25% number probably overcounts Jews and undercounts whites.
ReplyDeleteIf Steve was Jewish his ideas would have much greater public prominence. Are you SURE you don't have some great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent from Eastern Europe, Steve? If we can all be Hispanic now, why can't we all be Jewish?
ReplyDeleteIsn't Steve half-Jewish by descent?
Unz's claim about discrimination against gentile whites is highly interesting, but knowing Unz's track record in quantitative analysis, I would take it with a grain of salt.
If Jews intermarry at a high rate (and they do), that would tend to depress Jewish achievement (fewer Jewish names)
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't result in fewer Jewish names. It results in the possibility of a mismatch between "Jewish" names and their owners.
If we can all be Hispanic now, why can't we all be Jewish?
ReplyDeleteIf Judaism is merely a religion and not a racial or ethnic category by legal standards, is there anything to stop anyone from forming a new denomination of Judaism? Perhaps call it the American Jewish "Church" of ....
And demand/sue for full acceptance as Jews and for Law of Return rights. Maybe then, Judaism would be recategorized as an race/ethnicity.
It could be that most college admissions are not about science and math. They are about sociology, psychology, political sci, law, business, etc, etc, and most asian geeks show little interest in that.
ReplyDeleteCowen says that he is uncomfortable with the counting methods used, not the idea of counting itself. My family, though Jewish, has an ambiguous name, so they were presumably not picked up by Unz's count. My daughter's roommate has an Asian mother but her father is of English descent so her name didn't get picked up either. On the other hand, many "Cohens" and "Levys" today have Christian mothers and may even be church goers themselves (Senator Cohen of Maine). There is nothing wrong with saying you are uncomfortable with crude counting methodologies. I realize that crude ones are all that we have and may be better than nothing, but you run the risk of touting results that don't fully represent reality.
ReplyDelete"There is nothing wrong with saying you are uncomfortable with crude counting methodologies."
ReplyDeleteI don't think Cowen's discomfort stems from methodological quibbles about how the counting could be made more precise, but about whether anybody should count Jews at all.
In this country, counting Spanish-surnamed people is A-OK, but counting Jewish names is considered just not done.
Isn't Steve half-Jewish by descent?
ReplyDeleteOnly in the sense we all are.
If Jews intermarry at a high rate (and they do), that would tend to depress Jewish achievement (fewer Jewish names) and increase non-Jewish achievement.
ReplyDeleteThat thought makes zero sense. There is no logical reason why intermarriage should tend to depress Jewish achievement, even in the vague sense of causing fewer Jewish named people. After all, for every Jew/non-Jew marriage featuring a Jewish wife, there should be another such marriage featuring a Jewish husband.
"A very recent 2012 survey found that Americans believe Protestants outnumber Jews in this country by only 2.5 to 1, when the actual ratio is ten times greater."
ReplyDeletewow
"I suspect that the combined effect of these separate pressures, rather than any planned or intentional bias, is the primary cause of the striking enrollment statistics that we have examined above."
ReplyDeleteBUT THE PRESSURES WERE INTENDED AND CONSCIOUSLY COORDINATED.
I'm Scots-Irish.
ReplyDeleteAnonydroid at 5:01 PM said: Jews get away this because they count as white. They sacrifice white gentile numbers to increase 'diversity' while boosting their own numbers.
ReplyDeleteHunsdon commented: Yup.
Unz's "strange decline of Jewish academic achievement" only makes sense from an outdated perspective of academic achievement. Unlike students in previous generations, today's students see college and professional school admissions as the greatest (and probably only) measure of academic achievement. While their parents may see admissions as a means to an end, to the student, it is the end. And using this criteria, Jews are as successful as ever.
ReplyDeleteSure, it's somewhat circular reasoning if Jews are in fact not "deserving" of this high admission rate, but either way I cannot be denied that they have maintained their success.
And the truth is we have no idea what Jewish SAT numbers at top schools are since no such school has released them. Unz's whole claim is based on the PSAT- a test that counts for virtually nothing. No doubt it's possible that its indicative of a decline in sat scores, but that is pure speculation.
These days Jews seem to have dispensed with their desire to win at science competitions and are putting all their efforts in completely canvassing Wall Street, law firms and the media. Heck, who are the top up-and-coming superstar pundits? Why, Nate silver, Ezra Klein, and matt yglasias. All, at least, partially Jewish.
While their parents may see admissions as a means to an end, to the student, it is the end. And using this criteria, Jews are as successful as ever.
ReplyDeleteYou're missing the point rather badly. The point is that Jews are "as successful as ever" due to discrimination.
who are the top up-and-coming superstar pundits? Why, Nate silver, Ezra Klein, and matt yglasias. All, at least, partially Jewish.
They are not "up-and-coming superstar pundits" because of the intelligence of what they have to say, to put it mildly. They have that status because they are Jews, and because they are favored by other Jews who dominate the media.
Intermarriage doesn't stop at the first generation and leads to extinction of surnames (how many blacks vs. whites are named Washington? How many Crowninshields or Saltonstalls are still around?) Wikipedia says this is called the Galton-Watson process. At the same time, more people can be described as Jewish. Hence the disparity between the 2% and 20% figures. Unz simply takes the 2% and 20% numbers for granted.
ReplyDeleteTwo of the four people whose last names are Cohen that are incarcerated in the Illinois penitentiary system (IDOC) are black guys. Names sometimes can be misleading.
ReplyDelete"You're missing the point rather badly. The point is that Jews are "as successful as ever" due to discrimination."
ReplyDeleteI specifically addressed that. these days academic success has one meaning - getting into Ivys (preferably hyp). So regardless of whether they deserve it, they are successful. You play to win the game you're in, not the game unz remembers from when he was a kid.
To put another way, if tomorrow the meaning of "academic achievement" changed to "getting a high PSAT score" you would start to see a lot more Jewish names on the list.
Bottom line, both of unz's points turn out empty:
1) using this generations definition of academic success Jews are doing better than ever.
2) he has provided zero proof that Jews are actually getting any kind of admission boost at top colleges.
Unz clearly states there is no bias against Asians favoring whites in general.
ReplyDelete"When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.
However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.
Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews."
Really, I am truly beginning to think that much of what I thought was just libertarian 'applied autism' is really (self-directed) anti-white animus.
The Jews are changing into another has-been white demographic. Their migration to the Republican Party should happen any day now.
ReplyDeletewho are the top up-and-coming superstar pundits? Why, Nate silver, Ezra Klein, and matt yglasias. All, at least, partially Jewish.
ReplyDelete---They are not "up-and-coming superstar pundits" because of the intelligence of what they have to say, to put it mildly. They have that status because they are Jews, and because they are favored by other Jews who dominate the media.
Yes, clearly the gay nerd Nate Silver has not achieved anything due to his intelligence, but due to his overabundant charisma and social grace, and the jews let him into the hollywood club to party with them.
The argument that, say, a "Cohen" or a "Levy" these days just doesn't capture whether someone is Jewish because of intermarriage misses the point.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, if a Cohen is counted as Jewish when he/she is only, say, half Jewish, then one might say instead that counting each Cohen as fully Jewish is pretty fair on balance, because, on average, there is going to be a matching student who is half-Jewish whose mother's maiden name was Cohen, but whose last name doesn't seem Jewish.
In general, there should be about as many students with Jewish surnames around as there are, well, full Jewish equivalents (two half Jews making up one full Jewish equivalent). Possibly intermarriage by itself might be said to be responsible for the decline (though very unlikely, given assortative mating), but otherwise it would seem fair to judge the overall academic achievement of Jews by those with Jewish surnames. And it should likewise be quite fair to focus only on some well known Jewish names, such as Cohen, etc., because they should represent the larger class quite well.
As I had said in an earlier thread, the exact methodology might make a difference if the differences were only slight. But the differences between Jewish representation today at the upper levels of achievement compared to in the past are often in significant multiples.
clearly the gay nerd Nate Silver has not achieved anything due to his intelligence
ReplyDeleteAll right then - remind what exactly he has "achieved"?
I specifically addressed that. these days academic success has one meaning - getting into Ivys (preferably hyp). So regardless of whether they deserve it, they are successful.
ReplyDeleteThat's remarkably dense of you.
he has provided zero proof that Jews are actually getting any kind of admission boost at top colleges
Sounds like the claims that "nobody has provided proof of vote fraud" even when certain precincts end up with more ballots cast than there were voters.
There may not be "proof" which would satisfy a Jewish lawyer, but there is some pretty overwhelming evidence that Jews are getting a big leg up in the admissions process.
You don't really dispute this - you just say essentially that "Cheating and nepotism is the new genius".
“For example, the venerable Jewish Telegraph Agency estimated in 2009 that about 35% of the Forbes 400 were Jewish. (Here's a more careful count of the ethnicity of the 400 richest people in America.)”
ReplyDeleteThe more careful count has 36% for Jewish or part-Jewish. For example Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer, and John Paulson are half Jewish by descent.
Also, not sure what makes them think that James Simons is Jewish. There is a newspaper that listed him in a rich jews list, but not clear where they came up with that info.
There are probably more guys on that list that are considered Jewish because some website over counted. For example not much info online about ethnicity of Charles Ergen, Charles Brandes.
if tomorrow the meaning of "academic achievement" changed to "getting a high PSAT score" you would start to see a lot more Jewish names on the list.
ReplyDeleteYou mean as opposed to the current meaning of achievement, which consists of getting Uncle Schmiel to pull some strings to get you into Yale - because according to you, for the current generation just getting accepted there, by hook or by crook, is the "achievement".
With your blind obsession with us the Jews, you are missing the most important insight of Ron Unz's paper. The elite universities have been trying for a century to fit their student-population with that of the country as a whole, and they failed and are failing. He also notices that with the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union and then of Yugoeslavia, the last multi-racial State standing is the United States. Ethnically heterogeneous countries are unsustainable and tend to fall apart. Let's meet here in one hundred years from now and see what happened.
ReplyDeleteThese days Jews seem to have dispensed with their desire to win at science competitions and are putting all their efforts in completely canvassing Wall Street, law firms and the media.
ReplyDeleteRight. I dont know why Unz completely ignores this change in aspiration.
On the flip side, Asians are far more focused on math and science so understandably their percentages in Caltech and MIT are much higher than in the Ivy League Colleges which have a broader liberal arts curriculum.
Lets also not also forget that the 15-16% Asian representation in the Ivies is more than 3 times their proportion of the population.
The one conclusion of Unz's essay that sticks is that the Ivy League is practicing affirmative action for Jews at the expense primarily of gentile whites.
I agree, we're pretty paranoid, but: how would you behave if someone had wiped out all of your relatives in the Old World
ReplyDeleteThe problem with "Jewish history" is that it's distorted at best and a complete fabrication at worst.
"There may not be "proof" which would satisfy a Jewish lawyer, but there is some pretty overwhelming evidence that Jews are getting a big leg up in the admissions process.
ReplyDeleteYou don't really dispute this - you just say essentially that "Cheating and nepotism is the new genius"."
Unz's proof of Jewish affirmative action is non-existent. PSAT? thats it? We don't know how many Jews are applying and we don't know their SAT scores. Without this info, unz is doing nothing more than taking a shot in the dark.
Take a step back from unz's flurry of stats and lists that play no role in the admission process, and think about what he is saying. Do you honestly think that if the Ivys let you look under the hood of their admissions you would find that Jews had lower avg SATs than non-Jewish whites? Because that's what unz is claiming. And he does this without ever seeing any jewish SAT scores, or applicant volume.
The only kind person who would beleive this grand a claim, without seeing any actual admission data is someone who would prefer that it were true in the first place.
Do you honestly think that if the Ivys let you look under the hood of their admissions you would find that Jews had lower avg SATs than non-Jewish whites?
ReplyDeleteIt's statistically a near certainty that this is the case. The more sensible critics have moved on to the argument that the explanation lies in Jews "wanting it more".
Unz's proof of Jewish affirmative action is non-existent. PSAT? thats it? We don't know how many Jews are applying and we don't know their SAT scores. Without this info, unz is doing nothing more than taking a shot in the dark.
ReplyDeleteHe assumes that PSAT scores are predictive of SAT scores. There has to some correlation. You can see that in Asian performance in the 2 tests.
On what basis do you imagine that Jews are different and perform much better on the SATs than in the PSATs?
"'s statistically a near certainty that this is the case. The more sensible critics have moved on to the argument that the explanation lies in Jews "wanting it more"."
ReplyDeleteYou presume this without even a single piece of statistics on Jewish applicants. Are high scoring non Jewish whites even applying to the Ivys at anywhere near the rate of high scoring Jews? We have no idea. What are each pools avg sat scores? Again, we can only speculate.
Regarding the usefulness of the PSAT, I'm not denying a correlation between it and the SAT, after all, they test the same thing. But when you're talking about movements in the high 90 percentiles, it's only a handful of questions here and there. And given that the PSAT is taken before most applicants start with their real serious SAT studying, it's just as easy to assume that there is considerable movement within close percentile range.
Bottom line is much like me, unz is making a boatload of assumptions to prove his point.
With your blind obsession with us the Jews, you are missing the most important insight of Ron Unz's paper. The elite universities have been trying for a century to fit their student-population with that of the country as a whole, and they failed and are failing. He also notices that with the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union and then of Yugoeslavia, the last multi-racial State standing is the United States. Ethnically heterogeneous countries are unsustainable and tend to fall apart. Let's meet here in one hundred years from now and see what happened.
ReplyDeleteYour off-the-charts mendacity isn't the most impressive thing about you, J; the most impressive thing is the versatility and flexibility of your mendacity. You clearly have no problem telling two wild and completely contradictory lies within figurative seconds of each other. I mean, you've just got to love the way this guy invades HBD-right blogs and insists that immigration is a good thing and that race-replacement isn't anything to be concerned about, and then does an immediate about face and pretends he's been trying to warn you about it for years, castigating you for ignoring his warnings.
Not only is J impressively mendacious, he may also be impressively stupid, although his incredibly ignorant statements that the USA is the last multi-racial state standing (never heard of Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela?) and that Yugoslavia was "multiracial" (multi-ethnic, but rather homogeneous racially, actually) might just be a consequence of his non-English speaking background (he is an Israeli obsessed with American affairs, which means he naturally sees it as his right to accuse this blog of being obsessed with Jews).
ReplyDeleteYou presume this without even a single piece of statistics on Jewish applicants. Are high scoring non Jewish whites even applying to the Ivys at anywhere near the rate of high scoring Jews? We have no idea. What are each pools avg sat scores? Again, we can only speculate.
Notice the standard of proof demanded of people who stand up for whites. In contrast, when it comes to attacking whites, the mere fact of "too many whites" somewhere (ie "disparate impact") is itself more than sufficient to bring down the wrath of Uncle Sam.
their real serious SAT studying, it's just as easy to assume that there is considerable movement within close percentile range.
ReplyDeleteClose percentile range is irrelevant since Ivy League admissions are not based so strictly on merit.
There is no getting around the conclusion that the Ivy League is practicing affirmative action for an already over-represented group.
If Jews intermarry at a high rate (and they do)
ReplyDeleteDo they?
"Unz's proof of Jewish affirmative action is non-existent. PSAT? thats it? We don't know how many Jews are applying and we don't know their SAT scores. Without this info, unz is doing nothing more than taking a shot in the dark."
ReplyDeleteFrom my point of view, the most compelling argument that Jews are, based on merit, vastly overrepresented at, say, Harvard, is the much smaller number of them who now achieve PBK distinction compared both to their past performance and to the performance of White Gentiles. Of late, Jews are outperformed both by their previous counterparts, and by today's White Gentiles, by a factor of roughly between 3 to 1 to 5 to 1. Even assuming some inaccuracy in the counting here, it's hard to get around numbers like that.
One wonders if part of the issue with the decline of Jewish performance isn't even so much their own decline, but the far greater pressures felt by others to get into an elite college and do well. And it may not be just the Asians who are "the New Jews". It may be that upper middle class White Gentiles have become "the New Jews".
I think my earlier attempt at this comment got eaten.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, bjdubbs asked how many Crowninshields or Saltonstalls are still around. Oddly enough my wife and I were just talking about how many Saltonstalls are around, having just met another family of them a couple of weeks ago. They're pretty plentiful in the Northeast.
Don't know any Crowninshieldses, though.
I'm curious as to how widespread knowledge of how to get into these kinds of schools is.
ReplyDeleteLet's say you are from a small town in Kansas. You love math and read everything you can about it. You've had a 4.0 since forever, and have SAT scores that are very good, as good as others that have been admitted.
I guess he could google up information on what kinds of things go into the admission process. But at what point does someone tell him "Hey you need to go to Harvard. Here are the hoops you need to jump through to get in."
I kind of doubt a guidance counselor in a small rural school district is going to be very knowledgeable about the admissions process to elite schools. Or even know that this particular kid could get admitted if he played his cards right.
It just seems to me that a lot of people in the fly-over states just don't know how the system works.
I think if you are an Asian kid in California that kind of knowledge is all around you, and someone is going to let you know at an early age what you should focus on.
Meanwhile our kid in Kansas is driving a combine after school and reading every math book at the library. He probably wouldn't even have a chance or even know about stuff like the math olympiad unless he sought it out. Then he would have to jump through a lot of hoops to enter that a kid in San Francisco wouldn't.
I forgot to add this to the above.
ReplyDeleteWhat does an admission guy do with a kid like this from Kansas? Say he applies to Harvard. He has a perfect 4.0, and very respectable SAT's.
But you have a lot of guys like this applying.
He doesn't play an instrument, hasn't volunteered for Habitat for Humanity or something. He's pretty much worked around the farm after school his whole life.
This system is pretty much just biased against kids like this, regardless of political views or ethnic biases. An Asian kid, or even Jewish one with the same profile probably wouldn't get in either.
...that the USA is the last multi-racial state standing. Ron Unz wrote that.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read that "Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end" I assume Unz means that there are fewer top scientists who are Jews, or that Jewish scientists publish fewer highly cited articles, or something like that. Instead, he talks about PSAT and Math Olympiads. Meh.
ReplyDeleteThe only response I've seen so far to Unz's article is by Daniel Luzer of the Washington Monthly. Luzer:
ReplyDelete"Who cares about the admission criteria for the upper class?
In truth it doesn’t really matter who goes to Yale or Dartmouth. Such people, to extend Unz’s (somewhat debatable) claim, get a chance to enter the American aristocracy. Good for them. But admission to the elite is necessarily unfair.
The important things here is how most people live and are educated. It’s true that a Yale degree might help a great deal with securing a good job at Goldman Sachs. But all we need to worry about from a policy perspective is what you need to be a bank branch manager in suburban Atlanta.
Admission to the upper class is, for all societies and throughout all time, unfair and based on some combination of talent, luck, and favoritism.
Real affirmative action pertains to admission into federal jobs and public universities, the avoidance of systemic discrimination. Discrimination, however, is the essence of the operation of the upper class; it’s not supposed to be fair."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/fake_and_real_justice.php
"An Asian kid, or even Jewish one with the same profile probably wouldn't get in either."
ReplyDeleteBut you are far, far less likely to find a kid like that with an Asian or Jewish background.
Throw a dart at Gentile america. Odds are, he's going to be brought up in a value system that says "after school, you should do your homework, then play sports with your friends and have dinner with your family."
Throw a dart at Jewish america. While not a certainty, relative to Gentiles, this kid is *much* more likely to be brought up in a value system that says, "After school, you should do your homework, then seek a leadership position in a trendy cause, play sports that you can WIN, practice violin, study some more, work on your spanish for that trip to Argentina we have coming up, etc..."
(I say this as a guy with a foot in both Jewish america and Gentile america, but really, is this such a controversial observation that I have to play my part-Jew card? I hope not.)
One could say that "well see, the jews just want it more." Ok. But another way of looking at it is that "assessing more than GPA and SAT score provides a way of signalling Jewishness."
Both of these statements can be true. It's possible the bigger issue is how our meritocracy is currently defined. Would we be better off with the Oxford model, where academic performance is all that counts in admissions? (As I understand it.) I'm inclined to think so, because I expect that Murphy's law applies to corruption and nepotism (if it can happen, it will happen), and it's pretty clearly that the inclusion of non-academics in the admissions process opens the door to corruption and nepotism. As it stands right now, elite schools select for students who are much more than intelligent and conscientious, but also adhering to a particular value system -- one that is pretty obviously Jewish (playing that card again pre-emptively if I have to).
Another way of looking at this is that Jews are smart enough to game their way into high places - this is a type of "smarts" that is often more important than the underlying substantive skills. Hey Mr. SAT 2400 Chinaman, hey Miss Christian Conservative Hayseed - if you are so smart, how come you can't figure out a way to get yourself into Harvard?
ReplyDeleteI have some experience getting my kids into Ivy type schools. They were both genuinely smart and part of that last-of-the-Jewish-Mohicans group that Unz says has (almost) disappeared from the list of National Merit finalists, etc. BUT, I knew that wasn't enough. Places like Harvard & MIT now have admissions percentages in the single digits. For every person that gets in , 10 or more end up on the reject pile. Of those 10, maybe a couple are manifestly unqualified but the rest are every bit as good as the admitted class in terms of SAT scores and grades. [BTW, what sort of business turns away 90? of its potential customers?] What differentiates the winners from the losers (other than skin color, size of donation check, etc.)? The way these schools look at it, they are NOT going for the highest possible SAT scores. They have a cutoff below which they won't go except in rare cases (football quarterback) but once you meet that cutoff it hardly matters to them if you have a 2200 or a 2400. They tell this to applicants over and over but for some reason (I assume cultural reasons) applicants (Asian applicants especially) don't believe them - by their logic higher is better. What the schools are looking for (especially if you are white or Asian) is a whole "package" - leadership, participation in sports, doing cool SWPL type things. The type of person the admissions officers (who are often young themselves) would like to hang out with. So if you spend all your after school time at a cram school trying to get your SAT up from 2200 to 2400 when you are not taking violin lessons, you are doing the wrong thing. You should be playing on the squash team instead or start a rock band. Unfortunately, a lot of Asian parents are clueless about this, because this is not at all how things work in their native countries.
"When I read that "Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end" I assume Unz means that there are fewer top scientists who are Jews, or that Jewish scientists publish fewer highly cited articles, or something like that. Instead, he talks about PSAT and Math Olympiads. Meh."
ReplyDeleteWell, we already know (from a study reported by the professor who wrote Farewell to Alms) that the proportion of Jewish MDs has gone down dramatically, so that their proportion is roughly only about 60% of what is was before.
And one has to believe even that number is something of a lagging indicator.
ReplyDeletecandid_observer said...
The argument that, say, a "Cohen" or a "Levy" these days just doesn't capture whether someone is Jewish because of intermarriage misses the point.
In fact, if a Cohen is counted as Jewish when he/she is only, say, half Jewish, then one might say instead that counting each Cohen as fully Jewish is pretty fair on balance, because, on average, there is going to be a matching student who is half-Jewish whose mother's maiden name was Cohen, but whose last name doesn't seem Jewish.
It's even better/worse than that. Mismeasuring an independent variable (Jewish, here) usually results in attenuation bias. That is, the true effect is bigger in absolute value than the measured effect. So, if the criticisms of name-counting are correct, then actual Jewish over-representation is probably greater, not less, than estimated.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said . . .
And the truth is we have no idea what Jewish SAT numbers at top schools are since no such school has released them. Unz's whole claim is based on the PSAT- a test that counts for virtually nothing. No doubt it's possible that its indicative of a decline in sat scores, but that is pure speculation.
and
Unz's proof of Jewish affirmative action is non-existent. PSAT? thats it? We don't know how many Jews are applying and we don't know their SAT scores. Without this info, unz is doing nothing more than taking a shot in the dark.
I doubt anyone is buying your schtick anyway, but . . .
The facts, if they were facts, that the PSAT doesn't count for anything while the SAT does would be a powerful argument for using the PSAT and not the SAT in the type of analysis that Unz is doing. If you are interested in the truth of academic performance, then you want an un-gamed measure of it.
This is the same reason nobody sane pays attention to the big improvements on high-stakes no-child-left-behind tests of student/school performance. Rather, they pay attention to the flatness of the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests: tests which don't count for anything.
This isn't a hard point to see, so pretending not to see it makes you look both stupid and dishonest.
ReplyDeleteGalvani's Frog Dance Theatre's Orchestra Conductor said...
When I read that "Jewish academic achievement in America is collapsing at the top end" I assume Unz means that there are fewer top scientists who are Jews, or that Jewish scientists publish fewer highly cited articles, or something like that. Instead, he talks about PSAT and Math Olympiads. Meh.
The collapse he is talking about dates to around 2000, i.e. to people who were 18 in 2000. People who were 18 in 2000 are only 30 today. You are not going to see big changes in scientific output until that cohort ages all the way through their careers. Not for another 20 or 30 years. And that's assuming that, though meritocracy is absent in undergrad admissions, it magically re-asserts itself further up the academic food chain.
ReplyDeletesunbeam said...
I'm curious as to how widespread knowledge of how to get into these kinds of schools is.
It just seems to me that a lot of people in the fly-over states just don't know how the system works.
Yes, that's one of the ways the discrimination works. In fact, it would not surprise me if, on learning what hoops he has to jump through, Mr Kansas says "fuck that." Other ways involve string-pulling and bribery, the networks for which non-Jews have worse access to.
What's your point, though? You want to call this non-discriminatory?
Steve makes a lot of fun of disparate impact, and the US gvt applies this doctrine in clumsy, stupid ways. However, disparate impact discrimination is not "not discrimination at all."
Saying, "you don't have to be Jewish to get into Harvard, but having an extensive record of volunteer work at your local Yeshiva sure helps!" is not discrimination for you?
"'s statistically a near certainty that this is the case. The more sensible critics have moved on to the argument that the explanation lies in Jews "wanting it more"."
ReplyDeleteYou presume this without even a single piece of statistics on Jewish applicants.
The only statistics necessary are the contradiction between Jewish intelligence and the number of Jews admitted to "elite" institutions. Jews would have to be much, much smarter than they actually are to justify the discrepancy on purely merit-based grounds.
As I say, the more intelligent critics - of whom you are clearly not one - have already conceded the point that Jews are overrepresented relative to their intelligence and moved on to trying to come up with other explanations for this. Nobody worth listening to is still trying to deny the obvious.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/meritocracy-jews-and-the-liberal-arts/
ReplyDeleteWhy do we concern ourselves with what Ron Unz writes? I wrote him off after reading his "IQ - Race, IQ, and Wealth", in the American Conservative July 18, 2012. Even after rebuttals by Lynn and Nyborg, respected cognitive scientists, he refuses to admit there is a genetic basis to IQ. He is too pigheaded to entertain.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone is reading this site and has actually attended a top college, you know perfectly well that many of the top students were Jewish. And many of those went on to top medical and law schools, having done well on the objective measures of a) grades and b) LSAT/MCAT. To claim otherwise is to "tell a big enough lie that people will believe it."
ReplyDelete"It just seems to me that a lot of people in the fly-over states just don't know how the system works."
ReplyDeleteYou're probably right, but that just begs the question: why don't they know? The information is out there, so if they don't know, it means they don't care about it as much as the people who do.
A joke you'll hear in fly-over country: A kid from Missouri (or wherever) goes to visit Harvard. While there, he uses the bathroom. As he's walking away from the urinal, a guy says (in the snobbiest northeastern voice you can mimic), "We from Hahhhvard wash our hands ahfter we urinate." The kid looks back and says, "Oh yeah? Well, we from Missouri don't piss on our hands."
So I wonder how many kids in the fly-over states want to go to Harvard. I was one, and I don't think I ever met a smart kid who was particularly Ivy-obsessed. The one girl I remember who hated the Midwest and wanted to get to the big city went to Columbia, because she wanted to be the next great screenwriter.
My impression is that smart Jewish kids (or maybe their parents) really, really want to go to Harvard and company, because that's how you get the kind of career they want. Smart Asian kids want to go to MIT or some other top math/science school because that's how you get the kind of career they want.
Smart white kids don't agree nearly as closely on what career they're after, so they target all sorts of different schools. They're also more likely to consider the military academies. Unless a white kid in the Midwest is dead-set on being a politician or a high-flying attorney, why would he go to some stuffy Ivy school where everyone will look down on him?
Steve --
ReplyDeleteJEWS ARE NOT THAT IMPORTANT.
Jews are totally absent from the US military. I'd say Ike, Patton, MacArthur, Ridgeway, Schwarzkopf, and for better and worse, Petraeus along with Halsey, Spruance, and LeMay were more important and critical than Louis B. Mayer and Justice Frankfurter.
Jews are nearly absent from entrepreneurial stuff. They didn't found Apple, or EDS, or Wal-Mart, or any other large corporation that dominates US life. Sure, Facebook. But that's a fad struggling to survive. Its not Amazon. Which has its own ecosystem. Or Wal-Mart, spread across the globe even to Bangladesh.
Jews are focused on highly structured, formalized, and risk-averse Universities, media places, infotainment, government, law, and finance. And Jewish collapse in science and math achievement (from Oppenheimer and Einstein and Teller to ... Zuckerberg?) is stunning. IMHO indicative of a massive preference for status in mating than scientific nerdiness.
But Jews don't really matter.
You don't like hearing this, but America's strength is founded on force of arms, and entrepreneurial creation and destruction. Neither of which involve Jews.
Jews clearly have made a bad bet, as have women, in moving towards status-focused jobs: media, punditocracy, law, finance, and other what Half Sigma calls value transference jobs. Where you occupy a middle-man position and extract rent.
ReplyDeleteThat's sustainable only so long as the economy produces ever greater wealth. That production of wealth does not just happen -- it requires both "big state" stuff like a national highway system, a national electric grid, aerospace, nuclear power, and nuclear weapons (others cannot attack you -- a security premium in wealth). AND the small stuff, the Apple Computers, the Microsofts, the Wal-Marts, that start small, as a risky gamble on changing fundamentally business or technology or use, and growing dominant. Only to be overthrown by an ever more efficient, radical, or different method or means.
Jews (and Women) have made a bet on eternal buggy whip manufacturing. Yet the world is wider than America. The Swiss, or Japanese, or South Koreans, maintain the ability to create something world-changing (like say a DNA shot that raises your IQ) and completely disruptive.
Harvard matters only because it gets you into the top of value transference. Harvard mattered not at all in WWII, where nerdy engineers and Eastern European Jews in physics and chemistry along with brave guys willing to fight and die staved off total disaster. Harvard didn't matter to Lockheed and the Skunk Works. Harvard did not matter to Steve Jobs. Or Sam Walton.
In fact, distance learning, MITx, Stanford's model, allows mass-elite stuff by having web-enabled, virtual students who take the same tests and professors as physical students in non-lab classes like accounting or finance or even law. THAT is disruptive, particularly if big money shifts from a value-transferrence to value creation.
Imagine for example a commercial space flight used to supply a space station making new materials in near zero-G, say a rustless steel, lighter than Aluminum. And stronger than any metal.
There is no special reason Harvard won't end up like Heidelberg. Past is not always prologue.
You can push white students out of the best colleges and no one will know it if Jews are counted as white and fill up the slots left by actual white people. White identity can be used at a group's convenience.
ReplyDelete"Imagine for example a commercial space flight used to supply a space station making new materials in near zero-G, say a rustless steel, lighter than Aluminum. And stronger than any metal. "
ReplyDeleteI'll have some of what Whiskey is drinking. Meanwhile, back on Earth....
.....no one will know it if Jews are counted as white and fill up the slots left by actual white people.
ReplyDeleteYou mean Jews are not "actual white people"? Are we virtual or what?
I suppose no one will know except YOU. I'll bet you can smell a Jew at 500 yards. We'll appoint you Chief Jew Sniffer so that you can unmask all the Joos masquerading as white.
You mean Jews are not "actual white people"? Are we virtual or what?
ReplyDeleteYou can never seem to make up your mind whether you are "white people" or not.
If anyone is reading this site and has actually attended a top college, you know perfectly well that many of the top students were Jewish.
ReplyDeleteGiven your frequent resort to logical fallacies, I think we can safely assume that you're not one of those "top students".
The only response I've seen so far to Unz's article is by Daniel Luzer of the Washington Monthly. Luzer
ReplyDelete"Who cares about the admission criteria for the upper class?
In truth it doesn’t really matter who goes to Yale or Dartmouth. Such people, to extend Unz’s (somewhat debatable) claim, get a chance to enter the American aristocracy. Good for them. But admission to the elite is necessarily unfair.
It sure is swell of a Jewish guy like Luzer to tell us to just grow up and get over the fact that we have an unfair system which works to the advantage of Jews!
Ron Unz wrote that.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess he's never heard of Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico and so on either. It's always interesting to observe his adversarial relationship with the truth playing out.
Unz points out that NYC has the highest percentage of Asian residents of any city; Asians dominate the student body at the NYC elite high schools; yet Columbia has the same Asian quota as Harvard & Yale.
ReplyDeleteThe NYC elite schools he mentions are science schools while Columbia is a liberal arts college.
That is the big flaw in Unz's thesis. The Ivy League colleges are not focused on science and technology like Caltech and MIT. So it is irrational to assume that Harvard should have just as many Asians as Caltech just because Asians dominate the Math and Science Olympiads.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete"If Chinese are the new Jews, are Jews the new WASPs? So Steve, who are the new Indians, that's the part that's got me scared. I'm thinking the new Indians are middle age White guys like me. But who then are the Cowboys?"
Well, if you want to get rid of a people, it helps to dehumanize them first. I think Honey Boo Boo and other shows of that ilk are well designed to do that. (Goebbels would be proud of them.) As for who are the new cowboys, it wasn't the cowboys who did away with the indians. It was (in addition to disease) the US military and settlers. The first is still around and so are the second, except that they come from the South rather than the East.
Getting a genome scan from companies like 23 And Me is getting cheaper and cheaper. I'm not really doing anything with my spare dollars, so I hereby pledge to pay for Sailer's on the condition that him & Razib blog about the results. Googling, the price appears to be $299 as of May, which is significantly lower than I thought.
ReplyDeleteYou presume this without even a single piece of statistics on Jewish applicants. Are high scoring non Jewish whites even applying to the Ivys at anywhere near the rate of high scoring Jews? We have no idea.
ReplyDeleteAnd why would that matter? Other "underrepresented" groups have their numbers bumped up to match their proportion of the population regardless of the number or quality fo applicants.
It's quite likely that Whites apply at lower rates because they know they are discriminated against in regard to admission and financial aid, which often amounts to the same thing. We don't want to give you financial aid under our bogus "need-blind" admissions policy, so we won't admit you. That's what happens all too often at the Ivies.
If Jews intermarry at a high rate (and they do),
ReplyDeleteNo, they don't. They intermarry at a low rate. These things are relative, and relative to English marrying Poles and Irish marrying Spaniards, etc., Jews marry English and Spaniards, etc., at a low rate. The fact that Jews even keep track of this, when nobody else does, is suggestive.
If anyone is reading this site and has actually attended a top college, you know perfectly well that many of the top students were Jewish.
ReplyDeleteYou are wrong. College isn't law school. You don't share six classes with the same 100 people for a full academic year. To be sure, the fact that a TA accused me of plagiarism simply because I wrote a paper that seemed too "sophisticated and highly polished" to have been written by a student at this Ivy League school suggests that I qualified as a "top" student, but I left my alma mater without knowing who any of the other "top" students were.
Presumably -- since 40% of all students were Jewish -- many of them were Jewish, although an East Asian girl was the only one of my fellow students who ever impressed me.
Real affirmative action pertains to admission into federal jobs and public universities, the avoidance of systemic discrimination. Discrimination, however, is the essence of the operation of the upper class; it’s not supposed to be fair."
ReplyDeleteDiscrimination is the essence of the operation of life in general, but that doesn't stop the government from outlawing it when it helps Whites. I think it's safe to say that this pervasive double standard constitutes "systemic discrimination".
Why do we concern ourselves with what Ron Unz writes? I wrote him off after reading his "IQ - Race, IQ, and Wealth", in the American Conservative July 18, 2012. Even after rebuttals by Lynn and Nyborg, respected cognitive scientists, he refuses to admit there is a genetic basis to IQ. He is too pigheaded to entertain.
ReplyDeleteObviously, there is a genetic basis to IQ, but, even if Unz believes there isn't, you're still making an argumentum ad hominem.
Their contributions to America's prosperity, soft and hard power are heavily disproportional to their minuscule percentage of the population.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is a great example of Jewish Supremacist book-cooking, wherein only black ink may be used in the Jewish ledger. The bad they've done outweighs the good, leaving them well in the red, but accounting that involves both Jews and subtraction is ANTI-SEMITISM!!!
Wow, where to begin? I'll give some of my background to color my comments. I grew up partly in an upper middle class Jewish urban neighborhood - Mt. Airy, Philadelphia and part of the time in the midwest. I was a National Merit Scholar Finalist based on PSAT scores (a 1450 in 1990, which I followed up with a 1390 [690M/700V] SAT in 1992 with no test prep or study, and later a 750/740/710 GMAT in 1996). I attended Carnegie Mellon in engineering, and I still volunteer with the Admissions office to interview prospective students and participate in college admissions fairs, so I interact with a variety of guideance counselors and students.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the Jewish admissions preference is far more widespread than "just" the Ivies, even if it is most noticable there. However, at every top 25 private college, top 50 private university, and the top 25 public universities, Jews are generally 10-15% of the student body both by statistics shown at Hillel, and what you see "on the ground" at the schools. This means slots not just at the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, and MIT but also elite liberal arts colleges like the the Seven Sisters and Swarthmore, and all over flyover country, at places like UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Tulane, and Case-Western are excessively occupied by Jews at the expense of flyover country/Christian whites.
This is a far larger issue than just Jews dominating Harvard. That is also why dismissing it as a professional vs. STEM bias in career paths between Asians and Jews is incorrect. Aside from Harvard, which uniquely ignores STEM among the elite schools and focuses on feeding Wall St., Law, Medicine, Media, Religion, CEO/CFO's and the Senior Executive Service mainly because it can, the other Ivies have well known and well regarded science and engineering programs that compete with the likes of MIT, Cal Tech, and CMU to feed the elite managerial ranks in consulting engineering, research science, computer/software industry, and industrial management. There is no question, for example, that a Princeton, Yale, Cornell, or Penn engineering degree has incredible cachet in the industry just from its name, and places the degree holder on a level plane with a tech school or Stanford/Northwestern engineering graduate. So to say Asians are more STEM focused and thus excluded by that from the Ivies is wrong.
Asian underepresentation may be less real than shown statistically because the category comprises many disperate peoples. When people discuss high intelligence Asians, it usually refers to Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians, and generally exlcudes the 40% of Asian Americans who tend to the lower itelligence side of the population - Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, Hmong and Filippinos. Once you account for the realities of the SE Asian groups, the high intelligent end of East/South Asian groups are probably NOT underrepresented at elite universities.
To continue...
ReplyDeleteWhite underrepresentation is concentrated among elite disfavored white populations - urban Catholic ethnics like Italians, Poles, Ukranians, "Bohunks" and Irish, and back-country Scots-Irish/"American" ethnics from the Appalachian/Ozark/Southwest areas. True WASP's (Episcopalian/ Presbyterian/ Congregationalist English/Scots and French Huguenot ancestry) are not underrepresented given that they are less than 5% of the population. What I will call the "American Modal Haplotype" - the mid-atlantic/midwest/northwest Anglo-German-Scandanavian population is only underrepresented to the extent that it chooses to not overly focus on Ivies given its access to elite public universities like the Big 10/Big 12/Pac West and the lack of desire of many of these people to move back east to Ivy-land. The Ivies should be judged more harshly on access provided to elite disfavored groups back east between Maine and North Carolina, given how much of the white population of the Northeast, Mid Atlantic, and Mid South they form. Its easy to count Italian and Polish surnames at the Ivies and see that they are notably reduced vs. the local population.
Regarding identification of intelligent students in flyover country, let me give examples from my college admissions work. Guidance Counselors at every school may not be aware of exactly how to get their best students into the Ivies, and the students even less so, but they are obviously aware of which are the elite 100 colleges and universities, and they know who their smart students are. They steer highly intelligent students to those of us involved in elite school admissions outreach at college fairs and through the interview process. These two forms of outreach aided by the school counselors provide a good enough ability to find plenty of intelligent students for consideration. Overall, some part of the elite university/college system just needs to get in touch with the top 10-50 students at most high schools. With 100 top elite universities/colleges by definition, this is a relatively simple task for each school. It only needs to consider an average of two close to top of class students from 25% of American high schools to have an admissions pool of 10,000 very competitive students. Because of regional preferences in schooling, these samples will not match the US population closely.
With his sketchy statistical arguments, mistaken facts (e.g., re average Jewish intelligence), eagerness to find (intentional or unintentional) Jewish conspiracies, and conclusion that Harvard should have largely random admissions, I think (the Jew!) Unz proves his point that at least some Jews aren't as smart as they think. The irony is that almost every scholar he relies on is Jewish.
ReplyDeleteMore seriously, as to the question of whether there has been a decline in intellectual Jewish achievement, I ask you to look at perhaps the most important intellectual field in today's world: computer science.
Observe the winners of the Turing Prize--both in the past and in recent years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
Here's an attempt to count the Jews:
Alan Perlis (1966)
Marvin Minsky (1969)
John McCarthy 1 (1971)
Herbert Simon 2 (1975)
Michael Rabin (1976)
Richard Karp (1985)
Robert Tarjan 3 (1986)
William Kahan (1989)
Edward Feigenbaum (1994)
Manuel Blum (1995)
Amir Pnueli (1996)
Adi Shamir (2002)
Leonard Adleman (2002)
Robert Kahn (2004)
Barbara Liskov (2008)
Leslie Valiant (2010)
Judea Pearl (2011)
And as has been mentioned, two of the most important companies today, Google and Facebook, were founded by (young) Jews--and this doesn't even include the numerous other Jewish engineers and computer scientists who run these companies. Wikipedia, MySpace, Digg, and RealNetworks were also founded by Jews. PayPal was co-founded by a Jew. Irwin Jacobs is the creator of Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), which is probably the most widely used wireless calling technology in the U.S. Mark Cuban is the founder of Broadcast.com and HDnet, pioneers in the streaming of video over the internet. Israeli computer scientists likely played an instrumental role in creating the Stuxnet virus (the most important military technology today?). And so on.
And speaking of Israel, which Unz doesn't mention, the country is fourth in the world in scientific activity as measured by the number of scientific publications per million citizens. Its percentage of the total number of scientific articles published worldwide is almost 10 times higher than its percentage of the world's population.
Something else Unz doesn't discuss is graduate schools, particularly law and medicine, which are heavily g-loaded, and heavily Jewish--especially among the top of the class. (This is especially obvious if you've attended these schools recently.) Jews make up something like 30% of Supreme Court law clerks.
And speaking of law school, Asians are highly underrepresented. As a result, they are highly underrepresented in American leadership (as Tocqueville said, lawyers are our aristocracy). If Harvard College wants to admit future leaders, it makes sense to admit far more Jews and Asians. Verbal ability is far more important than spatio-visual for leadership.
One last point, other relatively new fields of study, moral psychology and positive psychology, are heavily dominated by Jews.
And lastly ....
ReplyDeletePSAT scores should be thought of as a reliable indication of elite intelligence status, and not dismissed with the thought that Jews are not focusing on dominating them.
Most SAT/ACT test takers will take the PSAT simply because it is a prep test for the one that counts, and it offers the opportunity for scholarships.
Additionally, the PSAT is generally taken prior to heavy involvement in biasing test prep study, the score does correlate with the range the student can expect to score on the SAT, and it is a widely taken test with a huge sample size among the upper half of the bell curve.
I would expect and suspect Ron Unz does also that the PSAT scores mostly represent natural ability and talent, as opposed to an SAT score which might be the third or fourth test try by a student, and which is subject to bias from test prep and gaming and cheating. Just because the results are not favorable to Jews does not make it untrue.
If Jewish achievement in our time were fully attributable to networking and social biases (Jews helping other Jews), then snagging that plum job or that college admission would be as easy as changing one's last name to Goldberg. And we all know that it isn't.
ReplyDeleteHa, ha. I've heard of fake Indians (Senator Warren) but not fake Jews. We Jews would surely be able to sniff them out. It would be like finding the fake American soldiers that the Germans sent in the Battle of the Bulge, but instead of asking about baseball, we'd ask them trick questions about Jewish cuisine. Which goes with corned beef - ketchup or mayonnaise? Neither, you impostor! Gotcha.
ReplyDeleteHow much of our deficit is due to foreign policy mistakes linked, directly or indirectly, to the neocons/Israel. I saw the figure $5 trillion recently--of all the recent wars. Something tells me that if our top foreign policy advisors were Asian-American (or, god forbid, WASPs) we would not have wasted all that money.
ReplyDeleteBesides that, of course, there's no reason to care about the high proportion of Jews in the establishment!
Svigor:"No, they don't. They intermarry at a low rate. These things are relative, and relative to English marrying Poles and Irish marrying Spaniards, etc., Jews marry English and Spaniards, etc., at a low rate. The fact that Jews even keep track of this, when nobody else does, is suggestive."
ReplyDeleteI'm fairly sure that the rate at which American Jews intermarry with American White Gentiles is substantially higher than the rate at which Spaniards marry Poles, etc.
to say Asians are more STEM focused and thus excluded by that from the Ivies is wrong.
ReplyDeleteYou willfully, or irrationally, misrepresent what I wrote.
Asians are not excluded from the Ivies because they are STEM focused. The point is that there are fewer asians in the Ivies than at STEM focused colleges like Caltech and MIT for obvious reasons. Asians probably dominate the STEM departments at the Ivies, but those departments do not enroll the majority of students at liberal arts colleges.
To the anonymous commenter citing Israeli scientific achievement against Unz, I don't think that works. Unz seems to have an implicit theory of IQ in which culture plays a very big role. His previous article on "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" used the changing scores of nations over time to argue that IQ was quite malleable, with factors like urbanization playing a role. His current piece is arguing that Jewish Americans PREVIOUSLY were an exceptionally intelligent group, but they've slacked off recently while Asians have driven ahead. Israel is a very different country and the "Sabras" pride themselves on having a different culture (tougher, more driven?) than diaspora Jewry. My personal opinion is that Unz' previous piece on IQ is wrong, Lynn was sloppy with data treats all samples the same regardless of size, in the imperfect world of social science there's lots of noise in data. Whether Jewish Americans have declined at the right tail while Asians have greatly improved is something I'd like to see others investigate (StatSquatch did a good job of checking Unz on IQ, maybe he could look into it).
ReplyDeleteWonder what Tyler would think of this. Since poor whites don't open up hip ethnic restaurants, I guess he doesn't care?
ReplyDeleteRussell K. Nieli on study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford (mentioned by Unz):
“When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low.”
"Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.”
ReplyDeleteStatements like this are often paired with the observation that Jews are 2% of the population, and I wonder if that's comparing apples and oranges. If the 2% is arrived at by counting synagogue attendance or by how many people check "Jewish" on a census form or something like that, a lot of the people you're counting as Jewish when you look at the list of Nobel Prize winners won't be included.
Also, not all people with Jewish-sounding names are in fact Jewish. In college, I once met a girl who gave her last name as "Berg-I'm-not-Jewish", spoken so quickly it sounded like one word.
One after the other of Jewish posters matter-of-factly stating European people should be discriminated against. It's fine. It's kosher. I guess we know who enemy number one is in their minds.
ReplyDelete