Showing posts sorted by relevance for query unz. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query unz. Sort by date Show all posts

December 19, 2012

NYT debate on Unz's charges of anti-Asian quotas in Ivy League

Here's the debate in the New York Times on Ron Unz's research suggesting Ivy League colleges keep Asian numbers down and Jewish numbers up:
Fears of an Asian Quota in the Ivy LeagueWith a disproportionate number of Asian-American students acing standardized tests, are top colleges limiting the number they admit? Read More »DEBATERS
I haven't read through this yet, but a couple of quick points:

First, this shows the overwhelming importance of the New York Times as first mover in the mass media echo system in determining What Is, and What Isn't, News. College admissions is a topic of tremendous interest to the kind of people who write the news, and of some interest to the kind of people who read the news, but Unz's research wasn't news until the New York Times said it is. If you go to Google News and type in Unz college, you get three articles over the last three weeks before the NYT decided to feature it today:

I devote a fair amount of energy to critiques of New York Times coverage both because of its power, but also because it influence is by no means wholly undeserved. The NYT employs people smart enough to get it, and sometimes they do. For example, Nicholas Wade, the NYT genetics reporter, spent a decade dismantling the Clinton Era myth that Race Does Not Exist. I haven't seen any evidence of anybody apologizing for propagating bad science, but Wade's dogged work has taken a little of the wind out of the sails of the zeitgeist.

Second, the really interesting aspect of Unz's research is his inference that not only are Ivy League colleges discriminating against Asians, they seem to be discriminating in favor of Jews. Now, that's pretty interesting. But, that's only going to leak out as a secondary aspect of the now-approved story of discrimination against Asians.

P.S., I see a rumor that the New York Times will be for sale in 2013. I think it would be nuts for politically dependent billionaires (i.e., most billionaires) to evaluate buying the NYT solely based on net present value of cash flow. Do you think Carlos Slim regrets the money he spent bailing out the NYT in 2008? The Mexican telecom monopolist bought himself years of being not considered terribly newsworthy, while Americans who want to reduce the profits Slim makes on calls to and from illegal aliens were recurrently demonized. And any connection between Slim's bailout and the NYT's virulence against immigration skeptics is simply Not News.

Money well spent.

By Steve Sailer on 12/19/2012 64 comments

June 3, 2014

iSteve at The Unz Review

I’m happy to say I'm teaming up with my old friend and fellow 1970s Valley Dude Ron Unz to publish my long-running iSteve blog on Ron’s relatively new Unz Review at:


My long-time readers should make sure to check out all the other interesting stuff on The Unz Review while you are there. 

Like they used to say at MBA school in 1980: Synergy!

I’ve been doing a “soft opening” for several days there, and you’ll find 13 new posts that haven’t appeared on my old iSteve.blogspot.com site. There is so much new material for you to read that it doesn’t all fit on the front page there. You’ll have to hit “Older Items” at the bottom left of the page. Here are the last few days' new posts:

Attn. Dr. Piketty: Two Ways Old Money Dwindles

BY  • JUNE 2, 2014 9:33 PM • 1,400 WORDS • 4 COMMENTS

Old White Men: Who? Whom? Chapter MLXVII

BY  • JUNE 2, 2014 7:06 PM • 700 WORDS • 1 COMMENT

Why Is Hamlet Tall and/or Thin?

BY  • JUNE 2, 2014 8:20 AM • 300 WORDS • 3 COMMENTS

Piketty's Reclusive Billionaires v. Howard Hughes

BY  • JUNE 2, 2014 5:34 AM • 1,400 WORDS • 2 COMMENTS

World War HIV

BY  • JUNE 2, 2014 5:12 AM • 400 WORDS • 1 COMMENT

Pretty Fly for a White-Ified Guy

BY  • JUNE 1, 2014 4:41 AM • 400 WORDS • 1 COMMENT

Welcome to ISteve on the Unz Review

BY  • JUNE 1, 2014 4:16 AM • 100 WORDS • 1 COMMENT

Pinker on Genealogy

BY  • JUNE 1, 2014 4:03 AM • 1,900 WORDS • NO COMMENTS

The Atlantic Discovers the Real Racism

BY  • JUNE 1, 2014 12:10 AM • 700 WORDS • NO COMMENTS

Race and the Roads Not Taken

BY  • MAY 31, 2014 11:11 PM • 1,100 WORDS • 2 COMMENTS

The Bonfire of the Inanities

BY  • MAY 31, 2014 8:30 PM • 200 WORDS • NO COMMENTS

IQ, the Death Penalty, and Witness-Murdering

BY  • MAY 31, 2014 8:14 PM • 1,200 WORDS • 1 COMMENT

On the Possible Extinction of the United Kingdom

BY  • MAY 31, 2014 8:08 PM • 500 WORDS • NO COMMENTS

The Tedium of American Cultural Dominance

BY  • MAY 31, 2014 8:00 PM • 200 WORDS • 4 COMMENTS

Commenting seems to work pretty well over there, but it will of course be subject to the usual unpredictable lags in when I get to my desk and start moderating. (Note: I sleep largely on Transylvanian Time.) Check out how it works for you.

One thing I don’t like anymore at my age is changing platforms often. I used to love playing around with the latest computer technology, but it’s not 1996 anymore. (The switch to Blogger about six or eight years ago was stressful for me). I’d rather write new blog posts for you than fiddle with the pipes under my blog (or, come to think of it, do my dishes). But this modern WordPress system offers a lot of new capabilities that I intend to utilize over the coming weeks.

Of course, there will be glitches and transition issues. For example, hyper-aggressive spell-checking: in the title of the similar post on the new site, it’s supposed to be “iSteve” (of course), not "ISteve," but so far the new system insists upon capitalizing the “i” no matter how many times I correct it. No doubt, if I were 25 I would have already found the keystroke combo or whatever that temporarily subdues the raging WordPress spellchecker, but at my age, I'd rather compose rueful blogposts about my ineffectuality at dealing with new tech than study up on what to do about it. But we’ll get there …

More substantively, we will add a low bandwidth and small screen-friendly mobile option, which will probably take the rest of the week. Until then, you might want to set it to not show images.

I’m told that the little orange rss button on the top blue bar over there will give you your RSS feed. If you have a Reader, you can reset to the new address for blog activity:


And, of course, I’m having difficulty getting my Paypal buttons for my ongoing fundraising drive to show up over there. It wouldn't be iSteve without panhandling technical troubles. (The new Paypal Buttons are still working fine here on the old site, hint hint.)

Your hardcoded links to old posts on iSteve.blogspot.com should continue to work.

Anyway, take a look around and let me know what else you’d need or want. 

Thanks for your patience over the weekend and I think you’ll like what we will be putting together here.

  
By Steve Sailer on 6/03/2014 66 comments

December 26, 2012

Sidney Award

From the NYT:
The 2012 Sidney Awards I 
By DAVID BROOKS 
At the start of the 1980s, about 5 percent of Harvard students were Asian-American. But the number of qualified Asian-American applicants rose so that by 1993 roughly 20 percent of Harvard students had Asian heritage.
  • Read All Comments (152) »
But, according to Ron Unz, a funny thing then happened. The number of qualified Asian-Americans continued to rise, but the number of Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard fell so that the student body was about 16 percent Asian. Between 1995 and 2011, Harvard’s Asian-American population has varied by less than a percentage point around that 16.5 percent average. Not only that, the percentage of Asian-Americans at other Ivy League schools has also settled at a remarkably stable 16 percent, year after year. 
This smells like a quota system, or at least that was the implication left by Unz’s searing, sprawling, frustrating and highly debatable piece, “The Myth of the American Meritocracy,” in The American Conservative. It wins the first of the 2012 Sidney Awards, which go to the best magazine essays of the year. 
You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. The fanatical generations of immigrant strivers have been replaced by a more comfortable generation of preprofessionals, he implies.

It was moderately brave of Brooks to devote a paragraph to the other aspect of Unz's article, the Jewish side.

He's been wanting to go there for some time. (Here are a couple of columns I wrote in 2010 in response to a Brooks: column on "The Power Elite: First and second, in which I elaborate the concept of noblesse oblige.) As I pointed out earlier this year in response to a Brooks column contrasting the behavior of current "meritocratic" elites with old WASP elites:
Now, you know and I know that what he's trying to do here, under the guise of talking about "meritocrats," is to get through to his fellow American Jews that they need to stop conceptualizing themselves so overwhelmingly as History's Greatest Victims and start developing a sense of noblesse oblige about this country in which they have become predominant, in which they dominate the worldview of the educated classes. ... 
In career terms, obviously, Brooks' euphemistic approach is better than my plain-spoken one. And it would be easy to argue that my frankness is too abrasive, that Brooks' vague euphemisms are better for getting our mutual message out. 
But, here's the rub: What evidence is there that Brooks' readers grasp what he's talking about at all? I've read through a fair fraction of the 527 comments on his column, and I don't see many (if any) examples suggesting that Brooks' readers comprehend his underlying message. 
What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought. 

And I noticed one comment from a sympatico observer:
Unz is right. University admissions offices are run by bigots who think the Civil Rights Acts do not apply to them. They aren't even embarrassed about it; it isn't a matter of a sub rosa thumb on the scale. It is official announced policy at almost every university in the country to engage in racial discrimination among applicants (and job candidates). There are offices and staff whose proclaimed purpose is to ensure that bigotry pervades every decision that is made. 
Jonathan Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University
St. Louis, Mo. 63130

As you may recall, back when the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was the biggest story of all time, the Obama administration put together a team of superbright scientists to advise, but Katz was quickly discovered to hold politically incorrect views about, among much else, what caused the spread of AIDS in America in the 1980s (he did not blame Ronald Reagan!). The Party of Science and Reality immediately fired him.
By Steve Sailer on 12/26/2012 48 comments

May 2, 2012

$10,000 First Prize in The Unz Historical Research Competition

Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, announces:
As some of you already know, I recently released a content-archiving website, www.unz.org, which had absorbed most of my time and effort over the last few years. 
The website makes freely available a vast quantity of high-quality content material, including the archives of numerous important publications published during the first half of the 20th Century and earlier. Most of this important source material---millions of pages---has never previously been available to anyone except on the dusty shelves of major research libraries. 
The Wilson Quarterly recently ran a brief description of the project entitled The Periodical Table. 
As a means of publicizing this new website and the research value of the unique content material which it contains, I am announcing The Unz Historical Research Competition, offering a $10,000 First Prize for the most interesting and important historical research project derived from the website source materials. The competition begins today, lasts until August 31, 2012, and is open to students, academics, independent scholars, or other interested individuals, both in the United States and around the world. 
The exact details of the competition may be found on the Unz Competition website, which includes a partial listing of the periodical archives.

By Steve Sailer on 5/02/2012 13 comments

December 13, 2009

"English Lessons"

My March 23, 2009 article in The American Conservative on the first decade after the demise of mandatory bilingual education California was never fully on line, so here's the whole thing.
I was visiting a typical Southern California public high school, one in which the student body is close to three-fourths Latino, when it dawned on me that virtually all the kids’ hallway conversations with friends were conducted in English. Indeed, most of the students spoke English without an accent. Well, to be pedantic, they had teen accents -- it’s practically impossible for a high school girl to roll her eyes and exclaim “That is so gay” without sounding a little like Moon Unit Zappa in Valley Girl -- but only a minority of the Hispanic students had Spanish accents.

Nor, I recalled, had I heard teachers lecturing in anything but English. I found out later that a couple of percent of all the classes were conducted in Spanish for the children of parents who requested it, but few parents did.

I realized then that I had barely heard any public discussion in half a decade about the once contentious topic of bilingual education. Yet, it had been promoted adamantly by America’s educational and political establishment from 1968, when Congress passed the first of five Bilingual Education Acts, through the 1990s.

I went home and read up on bilingual education. I quickly discovered the topic of educating “Limited English Proficient” (LEP) students is buried under a bureaucratic jargon that appears to consist of literal translations from some distant language unknown to Earthlings. For example, when an LEP child masters English, he becomes a Reclassified-Fluent English Proficient (R-FEP). His R-FEP status is tabulated at the federal Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students (OELALEAALEPS).

Eventually, I discovered that bilingual education is by no means dead. Yet, it has clearly lost the momentum, the sense of inevitability, it long enjoyed.

That means that America may have dodged a bullet, a long-term threat to our national unity, because nothing divides a country more than multiple languages. In contrast, a shared language enables shared sentiments.

In the three decades when America’s great and good actively promoted Spanish in the public schools, giving official blessing to a second language, it seemed plausible that our country was inflicting upon itself something that could turn into another Quebec a generation or two down the road. Or worse, a Kosovo, which was plunged into war in the 1990s by decades of unassimilated illegal immigration from Albania into a Serbian part of the republic formerly known as Yugoslavia.

And, it struck me, the man who did more to head off the dangers posed by bilingual education is a friend of mine. In fact, he’s my boss: The American Conservative’s publisher Ron Unz.

Okay, I’m biased. But a decade after the 61-39 landslide victory of Ron’s initiative, Proposition 227, put bilingual education on the ropes in California, America’s forerunner state, it’s time to review how the seemingly predestined triumph of bilingualism was knocked off track.

The history of educational plans in America is notoriously littered with broken dreams.

Unintended consequences predominate because the reigning dogma of the education industry—the intellectual equality of all students—is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.

Thus, for example, George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy got together in 2001 to pass the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, which mandates that by the 2013-2014 school year, every student in America’s public schools score on reading and math tests at the “proficient” level (roughly, a B+). This, I can assure you, won’t happen.

Yet, the terrible irony about the decades wasted pushing bilingual education is that the conventional wisdom that no child need be left behind is much truer for young children learning English than for anything else in American education. That’s why the otherwise often zany NCLB has helped consolidate the progress initiated by Unz’s pro-English initiatives.

The most popular public rationale for bilingual education -- that the children of immigrants need to be taught in their native language so that they don’t fall behind academically while they spend many years learning English -- sounds plausible as long as you forget how remarkably good small children are at learning a new language.

Most little kids can pick up a language simply by being immersed in it. But if they wait until high school, it becomes a struggle that many will never overcome.

Linguist Noam Chomsky’s 1950s research showed that very young people have an innate language-learning ability. As he noted by email, "There is no dispute about the fact that pre-puberty (in fact, much earlier) children have unusual facility in acquiring new languages.”

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of the bestseller The Language Instinct, told me, "When it comes to learning a second language, the younger the better…. People who began to learn English at six ended up on average more proficient than those who began at seven, and so on." Pinker pointed to the famously thick Bavarian accent of Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America at age fifteen. In contrast, his one-year younger brother acquired a nearly perfect American accent. (Walter Kissinger, though, has suggested another reason for the fraternal accent difference: “Because I am the Kissinger who listens.”)

Judith Rich Harris, author of the The Nurture Assumption, pointed out, "The problem with bilingual education is that these programs create peer groups of children who do not speak English well. They don't have to learn English in order to communicate with the children they want to play with, and they don't have to learn English in order to be accepted by their classmates. So, their motivation to learn English is no different from their motivation to learn the state capitals or the multiplication tables.”

The hidden reason why bilingual education supporters wanted to drag out the learning of English over many years was to keep Latinos from ever being fully adept in English. The chief donor to the campaign against Proposition 227, for example, was the Republican Italian-American billionaire Jerry Perenchio, then-owner of the giant Spanish-language Univision television network. As Perenchio evidently reasoned, bilingual educations keeps Hispanics chained to Univision.

Similarly, Hispanic political leaders want American-born Latinos to go through life marked by Spanish accents so that they will feel isolated from the American majority … and thus in the need of Hispanic political leaders.

Bilingual education was always widely disliked by the public (a national Zogby poll in 1998 found that 84% of Republicans and 72% of Democrats favored requiring schools to use English immersion), but the bilingual industry succeeded in branding it a civil rights issue, intimidating most would-be opponents.

Unz, a theoretical physicist (who had studied under Stephen Hawking) turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, had debuted in politics at age 32 by challenging incumbent California governor Pete Wilson for the GOP nomination in 1994. Wilson beat him (and went on to win re-election by 15 points), but Unz garnered 34 percent of the vote. Since Ron may have the least stereotypically political personality I’ve ever come across, I’m still amazed by that percentage, which seems as unlikely as would, say, Babe Ruth having won a bronze medal at the 1928 Winter Olympics in Men’s Figure Skating.

With the help of immigrant parents tired of having their children not taught English, Unz’s English for the Children organization put on the ballot Proposition 227, which made one year of “sheltered English immersion” instruction the default. (Bilingual instruction was only allowed upon a parent-initiated request.) It passed easily, and even won 37 percent of Latinos and 57 percent of Asians.

Unz’s Proposition 203 campaign in Arizona in 2000 showed this was no fluke. With 29 months to learn from their California mistakes, the best that bilingual advocates could come up with for the rematch was to ignore Spanish and campaign against Prop. 203’s impact on the right of Navajos and Hopis to school their children in their own languages. Native Americans didn't decide to come to the U.S.; instead, the U.S. had decided to come to the Native Americans. This clever tactic cut Prop. 203’s 50-point lead in half, but it still wound up winning 63-37.

Ron’s initiatives were a rare example in recent years of an assertion of cultural self-confidence by the American majority. Proposition 227 meant that California schools were finally told to sell to immigrants what the world wants to buy: the English language.

Immigrant parents understand that English is the language of money, the lingua franca of the global economy. (In Switzerland, for instance, 24% of the work force speaks English on the job). And their children have reacted positively to schools asserting the primacy of English. After all, English is the world’s coolest language, the mother tongue of blockbuster movies.

When the No Child Left Behind bill came up for debate in Congress shortly after Unz’s victory in Arizona, proponents of bilingual education were in disarray. Not a single member of the Hispanic Caucus voted against dumping the 1994 Bilingual Education Act (which had called for "developing the English skills ... and to the extent possible, the native-language skills" of LEP students) in favor of a new English Language Acquisition Act as part of NCLB, in which all references to “bilingual education” and “bilingualism” as goals were stricken.

The 2001 NCLB legislation wound up muddled. For example, the law directs that by 2014 every student in the Limited English Proficient category be proficient in English, which isn’t even theoretically possible. Still, the NCLB’s obsession with testing for progress in math and “English language arts” achievement (and penalizing school districts that fall behind) had the salutary effect of making long, drawn-out bilingual programs an expensive luxury.

At least some of the government funding incentives have finally started pointing vaguely in the right direction. Consider Garfield H.S., the 99 percent Latino high school in East L.A., once home to famed calculus teacher Jaime Escalante (played by Edward James Olmos in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver”). Back in the 2002-2003 school year, before the effects of NCLB were fully felt, exactly zero students were reclassified as having become proficient in English. In other words, the Garfield administration wasn’t in the mood to see students learn English. In 2006-2007, though, 155 students were reclassified. This is out of 1862 “English Learners,” so progress isn’t quick. Still, you can at least say it’s up ∞ percent.

[A student, no matter how accent-free in English, can't get reclassifed as no longer being an English Learner until he achieves at least a Basic score on a scale running from Far Below Basic to Advanced on the California Standards Test in all subjects, including math. So, lots of students remain locked into classification as English Learners not because they haven't learned English but because they are below average in intelligence -- a problem, unlike not speaking English, that schools can't do all that much about.]

This de-emphasis on bilingual education hasn’t solved all problems. The test score gaps between ethnic groups remain substantial, and the huge number of illegal immigrants means that many communities are de facto Spanish-speaking.

At least, though, in the decade since Prop. 227, the country has slowly been cutting back on the schools using the taxpayers’ money to make America’s dual language problem even worse.

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

By Steve Sailer on 12/13/2009 36 comments Labels:

November 28, 2012

Counting by ancestral background: Mandatory for some, forbidden for others?

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?

By Steve Sailer on 11/28/2012 100 comments

January 28, 2012

The Forgotten

The career of journalism is not one conducive to having your name go down in history. Most journalists are forgotten within a week of their last byline. Your best hope of being remembered might be to write for a periodical that happens to outlive you and thus has an interest in dredging up your name now and then.

Much of what we think we know about controversies of the past is filtered via this "survivorship bias." The current editors of The New Republic or The Nation or National Review or The Atlantic explain that the key intellectual breakthrough of the past age came in some article they happened to have published. But a huge amount of influential journalism was published in periodicals that aren't around anymore.  

Having been an enthusiastic reader of opinion journalism going back to the late 1960s, it strikes me that much of our current pictures of what people thought back then is warped by which publications happened to endure. For example, when I began high school debate in 1972, one of the magazines that was most quoted as "evidence" was the liberal intellectual weekly, The Saturday Review of Literature. It was a huge presence in the national discourse, having something like 600,000 subscribers (trust me, that's a lot). And it had been a big magazine for decades. In fact, it was so big that various financial engineers tried to make a lot of money off it, which eventually led to its demise. 

The Saturday Review's editor, Norman Cousins, ranked not far behind William F. Buckley as the most famous opinion magazine editor of the 1970s. Cousins even became a household name far beyond intellectual spheres when he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine recounting how, when suffering an illness, he attempted to induce a placebo effect in himself by reading funny books and watching his favorite Marx Bros. movies.

When I had cancer in 1997, I more or less followed Cousins' advice. Many people try to heroically combine doing their jobs with undergoing chemotherapy, but with Cousins' theory in mind, I immediately went on disability and just did whatever I liked. I reread all Robert Heinlein's novels, took long walks along the Chicago lakefront, played golf, and carefully polished perhaps my best article Is Love Colorblind? And I slept 12 hours per day. (Nice work if you can get it.)

Did it work? I dunno, but 15 years later, I'm still here.

You can now find all 2,646 issues of The Saturday Review at Unz.org, along with over 100 other magazines. Ron Unz's trove of opinion journalism and the like is a great resource for historians and the historically-minded. You can search the Unz.org archive in Google just by starting a search with

site:Unz.org

When reading up on Norman Cousins, I saw this quote in his NYT obituary:
"That made it apparent to me that there was a new breed in America," he said, "people who were business executives, or in science, say, who were interested in ideas but not interested in intellectual cliques or literary gossip. I recognized that this was one of the most exciting intellectual developments of our times -- but its manifestations hadn't been acted upon by those in the world of communications."

I suspect Cousins' had one particular business executive / scientist foremost in mind when he said that: Everette Lee DeGolyer, who owned The Saturday Review and bequeathed it to Cousins when he died in 1956. 

This picture of a young DeGolyer, tired and muddy but rightly happy, is my favorite in Daniel Yergin's monumental history of the oil industry, The Prize. The caption reads, "The geologist Everett Lee DeGolyer, sitting on a porch near Tampico after his discovery in 1910 of what became Mexico's Golden Lane. By 1921, Mexico was the world's largest oil producer." It's a great picture of the Enterprising Young American.

DeGolyer would be high on the list of Most Valuable Americans whom nobody these days has ever heard of. The oil industry is a massive contributor to the wealth of America, and DeGolyer contributed as much to the success of the American oil industry in the first half of the 20th Century as anybody. Yergin writes:
No man more singularly embodied the American oil industry and its far-flung development in the first half of the twentieth century than DeGolyer. Geologist -- the most eminent of his day -- entrepreneur, innovator, scholar, he had touched almost every aspect of significance in the industry. Born in a sod hut in Kansas ... while still an undergraduate, he took time time off to go to Mexico, where in 1910, he discovered the fabulous Portrero del Llano 4 well. ... It was the biggest oil well ever discovered ...  
That was only the beginning. DeGolyer was more responsible than any other single person for the introduction of geophysics into oil exploration. He pioneered the development of the seismograph, one of the most important innovations in the history of the oil industry ... 

He put together one big oil firm, Amerada, then started the premiere oil engineering consulting firm, DeGolyer and McNaughton. He made $2 million per year during the Depression. In 1943, FDR sent him on a top secret mission to Saudi Arabia to figure out how important that hunk of desert was. One of his staffers reported back, "The oil in this region is the greatest single prize in all history."
Eventually he grew bored with making money and gave a lot of it away. ... He was a founder of what became Texas Instruments. He was a considerable historian of chili. He built an extraordinary collection of books. He bailed out the Saturday Review of Literature when it was about to go bust, and became its chairman, though he never did care much for its politics.

By Steve Sailer on 1/28/2012 32 comments

November 7, 2013

The Unz Review

Ron Unz has debuted a nice-looking website at Unz.com:
The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection 
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media

This isn't your usual Pepsi v. Coke partisan bickering. It's the UnzCola!

I've told this story a million times, but in 1991 I was in the expensive Dean and DeLuca grocery store in Manhattan. Ahead of me in line was a huge, bald black man, both imposing and cultured in demeanor: Geoffrey Holder. The checkout clerk looked up at him and said, "Hey, you're ... you're ... "

Holder interrupted him genially in that deep, deep voice : "That's right! I am James Earl Jones. But don't tell anyone. I'm traveling in ... cog ... neeeeeeee ... to!" And then he laughed like an erupting gas main and strolled out.

By Steve Sailer on 11/07/2013 34 comments

December 7, 2012

Who is interested in elite college admissions? Right: nobody.

As you may have noticed, articles about elite college admissions are a staple of the national press. For example, a parody in The Awl began:
The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever 
David Parker | January 20th, 2011 
It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog, José Saramago, to use an iPad.

And goes on to touch on other favorite topics of New York Times readers such as Obama's dog, black-Jewish relationships, Mandarin-immersion programs, and neuroscience, but revolves back to conclude with Topic One:
Six months ago, Anna started her own bocce club. It’s already one of the most popular extracurricular activities at her school. 
Will bringing bocce to the Upper East Side be enough to get Anna Williams into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? She’ll find out next week. Until then, she’s got her hands full: José Saramago just learned how to use Twitter.

So, you might think that Ron Unz's "The Myth of American Meritocracy," which is crammed with more info about elite college admissions than anything published in years, would have made quite a splash. And, indeed, when mentioned, it tends to elicit voluminous comments (e.g., 363 on Marginal Revolution). So, since the news media lives for traffic, they must be all over this, right?

Meh.

At Google News, if I type in 

Unz college

I get:

  1. Elite College Admissions Are Unfair, Sure... We Still Shouldn't Care

    Huffington Post (blog)-Nov 29, 2012
    In fact it might be utterly the wrong thing to worry about. Many argue that the inequity of elite collegeadmissions is really important. As Ron Unz ...

  1. For Third-raters Who Want to Get Into Harvard, It Helps To Have ...

    Forbes-Dec 1, 2012
    Although virtually every paragraph in Unz's long essay is brimming with controversy, if I were 18 again and trying to get into a good college, ...

And that's it of late December 7: two stories on Google News.

By Steve Sailer on 12/07/2012 30 comments

August 20, 2012

$10,000 bucks

Under two weeks left for submissions for the Unz Prize:
As a means of publicizing the vast quantity of high-quality content material uniquely available on its recently released website, UNZ.org is announcing a historical research competition. 
A First Prize of $10,000 and several other cash prizes will be awarded for the most significant and interesting discussion or analysis of some historical issue based on the published source material provided at UNZ.org.  All entries must be received by August 31, 2012, and awards will be made by September 30, 2012. 
Interested participants should examine the rules, read the description of the available content source material, and then register for the competition. 
Good luck!

By Steve Sailer on 8/20/2012 12 comments

September 22, 2009

My VDARE.com column on Ethnic Equality: Ethnicity for Everybody or for Nobody

Here's part of my VDARE.com column outlining a potential breakthrough in long-term political strategy:

Although we are constantly instructed in the teeth of all the evidence that race is “just a social construct,” the reality is that “Hispanic” ethnicity is certainly less of a natural inevitability. Instead, it’s just a bureaucratic construct of the Nixon Administration’s Office of Management and Budget.

While the government allows all individuals to self-identify as a member of a wide selection of races (including “Guamanian or Chamorro” on the 2000 Census short form), it only recognizes a single ethnicity: Hispanic. Nobody else is allowed an ethnicity. All others get lumped together as a nullity: merely Non-Hispanics. ...

The Hispanic electoral tidal wave you always hear about actually consists of an artificial agglomeration of people who don’t share the elemental ties of race, looks, national origin, cuisine—or even language ...

What “Hispanics” do share now is legal privilege. By granting Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Paraguayans etc. etc. preferences for being “Hispanic,” Nixon and the federal bureaucracy conjured up a pan-Hispanic political class dedicated to uniting together to defend this special treatment. ...

As long as Hispanic-only ethnicity exists, this Hispanic elite will side overwhelmingly with the party more favorable to affirmative action, the Democrats. Thus, while Republicans typically lose about 2 to 1 among Latino voters, they are outnumbered 12 to 1 among Latino elected officials.

Nevertheless, decisive action can declaw and defund a seemingly powerful lobby. For example, for 30 years “bilingual” educators grew more numerous and better organized off the taxpayers’ money. Essentially no politicians, least of all the hapless California GOP, dared take on this ever-growing lobby. In 1998, though, Ron Unz’s Proposition 227 put the abolition of bilingual education directly to the voters of California. And they agreed with Unz 61-39.

With the bilingual Ed lobby’s myth of inevitable triumph punctured, the Bush Administration’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act—otherwise so softheaded—cut back on bilingualism’s federal mandates. Today, bilingual Ed is far from dead, but Unz’s well-placed blow has left it close to dead in the water politically.

How should we offer Ethnic Equality?

- Either, everybody should be allowed to choose an ethnicity—Italian, Okinawan, German, Guatemalan, Barbadian, Navajo, or whatever—and all laws and regulations, including the EEOC's Four-Fifths Rule, should apply equally to all ethnicities. (Administratively, data collection would be simple: the Census Bureau currently asks about “ancestry,” which could simply be renamed “ethnicity.”)

- Or, nobody should have a legally recognized ethnicity. Ethnicity would be treated by the government like religion rather than like race. You can win a discrimination lawsuit over disparate treatment due to your religion, but you can’t win one based on disparate impact on your co-religionists -- the government doesn't collect statistics on religion, so statistical impact can't be calculated. Hence, there are no religious quotas.

Note that the public doesn’t have to understand the concept of “disparate impact.” (How many New York Times columnists do you think understand it?) All that voters need is to have an opinion on the unfairness of one ethnicity being more equal than all other ethnicities.

And unfairness is something that people can’t help having feelings about.

Which form of Ethnic Equality should we have: Ethnicity for Everybody or for Nobody?

Well, in the spirit of bipartisanship upon which Barack Obama ran for President, I think we should let him make the choice between Everybody and Nobody.

What could be more just than that? It’s like when you have to divide one desert between two children. The fairest way is to announce that one will cut and the other will pick which piece he wants.

To make the deal even better, I’d go so far as to offer the President a historic compromise: permanent racial preferences for the descendants of American slaves (and for tribally registered American Indians, while we’re at it) in return for Ethnic Equality.

Mr. Obama, you can achieve a historic victory for the black race, you can fulfill the “dreams from your father,” just by choosing either Ethnicity for Everybody or Ethnicity for Nobody.

Take your time, Mr. President. Talk it over with the public! Let’s have a national conversation on ethnic preferences!

After all, as an old discrimination lawyer, that’s your field of professional expertise.

Seriously…taking preferences away from Hispanics in return for preserving them for blacks is the last thing David Axelrod wants Obama to talk about—an “alliance of the diverse” always threatens to dissolve into an oxymoron (which is exactly why making him talk about it should be a GOP priority).


Read the whole thing at VDARE.com and comment about it below

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

By Steve Sailer on 9/22/2009 78 comments Labels:
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