"Feelings of Discrimination May Hurt the Heart"

This is the surprisingly insightful headline on an otherwise bogus health report:

Stress stemming from discrimination may be causing coronary artery calcification in black women, says a study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The investigators found that the more discrimination the women felt, the more likely they were to have coronary artery calcification, a buildup of calcium in blood vessels that's associated with atherosclerosis.

"We know from other studies in this area that stressful life experiences can have an effect on cardiovascular outcomes," Tene Lewis, a health psychologist in preventive medicine at Rush, said in a prepared statement. "Discrimination appears to be a stressor that has particular relevance for the health of African-American women."

The study included 181 middle-aged black women from the Chicago and Pittsburgh areas. The women completed a questionnaire that assessed their experiences of subtle discrimination, such as being ignored or treated with a lack of courtesy or respect.

"The women reported discrimination in the form of having poorer service in stores or restaurants, being treated as if they were less smart, or being treated as if they were dishonest," Lewis said.

She noted that discrimination today is more subtle than in the past.

"It's rare that someone would use blatantly racist language in public, but that doesn't mean that discrimination is no longer a problem," Lewis said.

The study found that coronary artery calcification was present in 59.6 percent of the women and the more discrimination they reported, the more likely they were to have any calcification.

It's a little hard to understand why some black women would be discriminated against more than other black women. I thought whites were accused of discriminating between races, not among

Of course, this survey isn't reporting anything objective at all about the actual occurrence of discrimination. It's simply reporting subjective perceptions.

Not surprisingly, what this report is really saying is that black women who are angrier at whites have more heart problems.

Anger is bad for your heart.

Further, this suggests that the media's relentless attempts to inculcate black anger at whites over perceptions of discrimination may be killing blacks. blacks.

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

"3-Iron"

Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, who directed last year's Buddhist monk import "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... Spring" (here's my review), is back with another near-silent parable.

"3-Iron" appears to be inspired by the Rita Rudner joke about how the criminally insane aren't the people who break into your house and rape and kill you, they should be the ones who break into your house and do your laundry. A young man breaks into empty homes in Seoul, does the laundry, fixes any appliances on the blink, then leaves. In one he finds an abused wife. When her nasty husband comes home and tries to rough her up some more, the hero batters him with golf balls struck by the hubby's own Callaway Steelhead 3-iron.

I have no idea what it all means, but it's clever and cute.

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

"Eros" - Antonioni, Soderbergh, Wong

"Eros" -- This is a three part / three director art house trilogy movie is intended as a tribute to 92-year old legend Michaelangelo Antonioni.

The three segments can be seen as epitomizing contemporary Chinese, American, and European approaches to sex in cinema. The first segment, directed by Kar Wai Wong ("In the Mood for Love") about a Hong Kong courtesan with consumption, illustrates the current Chinese obsession with glamour. The basic concept is lifted from Greta Garbo's "Camille" (which uses the same Dumas fils source novel as Pucinni's "La Traviata") and the treatment is similar.

The second, directed by the estimable Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's 11 & 12) illustrates how uninterested current American moviemakers are in the erotic. It's a brilliant slice of comedy starring Robert Downey Jr. as NY ad man in 1955 and 70-year-old Alan Arkin as his bored psychiatrist. Together, they invent the snooze button on alarm clocks. Downey, despite all his troubles, remains the American actor I'd pay to hear read the phone book.

Antonioni's own segment conclusively proves that older is not better when it comes to directing naked lady movies. We do see once again how Europeans find pseudo-philosophical dialogue sexy, for reasons that aren't clear to me. In France, to get a college degree, you have to write off the top of your head in a few hours a glib essay on some philosophical topic, so the ability to generate metaphysical cafe chit-chat is a useful signal of one's academic credentials, but why do Italians fall for it too?

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

Chalabi Becomes Interim Oil Minister of Iraq:

Much less surprising news than the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, but also less joyous, is word that Ahmed-the-Thief has weaseled his way into control of Iraq's oil industry. (Here's a great photo showing how Chalabi feels about undertaking the burden of his new responsibilities.)

Last July, I wrote in The American Conservative:

What does Chalabi really want? The simplest guess is that he wants what too many ambitious Iraqis want these days: to be a trillionaire. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq is estimated to hold 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves." At $40 per barrel, Iraq's oil is worth $4.6 trillion. Sure, Iraq's last trillionaire, Saddam Hussein, ended up in a hole in the ground, but he had one helluva ride along the way.

In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer quoted Scott Ritter, the much-reviled but apparently truth-telling weapons inspector, as saying, "[Chalabi] told me [in 1998] that, if I played ball, when he became President he'd control all of the oil concessions, and he'd make sure I was well taken care of."

More generally, Chalabi successfully yanked the neocon chain because they refused to admit to themselves that the age of ideology, in which they usefully argued against communism, ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, to provide ideological justification for their Iraq Attaq, the neocons resorted to neologisms like "Islamofacism," a purported dogma alleged to motivate even Muslims as mutually hostile as Saddam and Osama.

In reality, the end of ideology was not the "end of history," as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed. Instead, after two centuries of occasionally battling over what is the ideal form of government, the human race has reverted to its traditional pastime of brawling over who gets to run the government. In understanding affairs of state in the non-Western world today, neither Mein Kampf nor Das Kapital nor the Gettysburg Address is as insightful a guide as The Godfather.

We're actually better off in our new world where we need to worry more about organized crime clans than about great powers animated by radical ideologies. The Mafia, for all its sins, never targeted a thousand nuclear missiles upon America.

The Chalabi dynasty is old, rich, and unpopular. Nonetheless, Chalabi persuaded the Interim Governing Council to appoint him to the lucrative post of Finance Minister. He then used his influence to fill many of the other top positions with allies. Further, as William Beeman, director of Middle East Studies at Brown University noted, "Chalabi has created extra insurance by installing his relatives everywhere in the post-June 30th governmental structure, in true Middle Eastern fashion. They are the most loyal employees of all, and his potential successors. First and foremost among them are his nephews. The term "nepotism" comes from the Italian nepote -- 'nephew.' Mr. Chalabi has nephews galore." Nor is Chalabi overlooking the private sector. As Newsweek reported, "Today his extensive network of cousins and nephews runs almost every major bank." [More]

So, as you are filling up your gas tank in the future, you can pass the time by trying to estimate how many pennies for each gallon you are buying will wind up in the Chalabi Clan coffers.

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

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker sighted:

Ivory-Billed Woodpecker sighted: Thought to be extinct since the 1940s, this Holy Grail of American birdwatchers, a spectacular black and white beast with a 30" wingspan, has been sighted in a swampy forest preserve in Arkansas. (Here's James J. Audubon's painting.)

As a conservative, this triumph of conservation makes me deeply happy.

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

NFL Draft Correlations:

Correlations for 253 pro football draftees are up over at Mahalanobis' blog, and we find that smartness (as measured by the mandatory 12-minute Wonderlic IQ test) correlates with strength (benchpress), slowness (40 yard dash time), and lack of leaping ability (vertical leap in inches).

I guess wearing lead boots makes you smarter...

Smartest players by position are Tight Ends, Offensive Linemen, and Quarterbacks. Least smart are Defensive Linemen, Running Backs, Wide Receivers, and Cornerbacks.

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

Levitt on the waste caused by legalizing abortion:

The impact of legalizing abortion on the crime rate appears beyond the ability of contemporary social science reliably to tease out from the maelstrom of currents roiling American social life over the last 40 years. If you had started looking at the question in 1996, using crime statistics through 1994, the most likely conclusion would have been that legalizing abortion increased crime. Starting in 1999, using statistics from 1997 compared to 1985 (but ignoring the intervening years), Levitt was able to make the case for the opposite conclusion. Judging from data through 2002, however, Levitt's case is once again eroding as the murder rate for 25-34 year olds goes up as the post-legalization cohort enters that group.

My best guess is that legalization worsened crime, but that this effect faded after a number of years as society adjusted. But, that's just a guess.

Instead, the key fact, the under-appreciated take home lesson from this controversy, the observation that Levitt and I agree upon, is that legalizing abortion greatly increased the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Tim Harford writes in The Financial Times of London:

In fact, [Steven D.] Levitt now says that the research made him more pro-life. “I grew up in Minnesota. Very liberal,” he says. “I was just from birth taught to be pro-choice.” But when he discovered while writing the paper that after Roe v Wade the number of abortions rose to nearly 1.5 million a year, and that while the number of births fell, the number of conceptions rose, he thought again. “One in four of the pregnancies which took place were just because people were lazy,” he says. “That’s a lot. That’s a lot of abortions.”

Of course, that fact undermines the persuasiveness of Levitt's assumption that abortion cut crime by reducing the number of unwanted births. Because legalizing abortion caused tens of millions of conceptions that wouldn't have happened otherwise, the overall impact on who actually got born becomes extremely hard to model. Levitt's simplistic assumption that legalization improved the quality of parents and children, which is the key to the popularity of his argument, thus drops in plausibility from a sure-thing to a nobody-knows.

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

Thomas Sowell on "Black Rednecks and White Liberals"

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is the new book by Thomas Sowell. He provides a taste of it in the Wall Street Journal:

For most of the history of this country, differences between the black and the white population--whether in income, IQ, crime rates, or whatever--have been attributed to either race or racism. For much of the first half of the 20th century, these differences were attributed to race--that is, to an assumption that blacks just did not have it in their genes to do as well as white people. The tide began to turn in the second half of the 20th century, when the assumption developed that black-white differences were due to racism on the part of whites.

Three decades of my own research lead me to believe that neither of those explanations will stand up under scrutiny of the facts. As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.

If this disparity is not due to race, it is equally hard to explain by racism. To a racist, one black is pretty much the same as another. But, even if a racist somehow let his racism stop at the water's edge, how could he tell which student was the son or daughter of someone born in the West Indies or in Africa, especially since their American-born offspring probably do not even have a foreign accent?

What then could explain such large disparities in demographic "representation" among these three groups of blacks? Perhaps they have different patterns of behavior and different cultures and values behind their behavior...

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.

The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.

Perhaps. Yet, when we talk of "redneck culture" today, such as country music and Nashville, we are largely talking of Scotch-Irish culture. And the Scotch-Irish generally stayed away from the blacks. They went to the Appalachian and Ozark highlands where disease was less of a problem for Europeans than in the lowland South. Moreover, the Scotch-Irish disliked having to compete with slave labor and tobacco and cotton slave plantations were uneconomical in the highlands. Today, the state with the least educated whites is the prototypical hillbilly state of West Virginia, which had so few slaveowners that it seceded from Virginia and joined the Union during the Civil War. Other Scotch-Irish redneck states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have limited black populations, too.

In reality, slaves tended to be owned mostly by big slaveowners in the Southern lowlands, who frequently had aristocratic pretensions. Lowland Southerners tended to be descended from Southern England's landowning and servant classes, not from the Scotch-Irish (who actually originated on both sides of the border between Scotland and England). I think it would make more sense for Sowell to point to blacks inheriting lowland Southern quasi-aristocratic prejudices, such as for grandiloquent multi-syllabic words (e.g., Jesse Jackson's style of speaking) and against manufacturing and shop keeping, as for them inheriting Scotch-Irish redneck populism, with which they had limited contact.

For example, free slaves who were sent to Liberia reproduced the Southern lowland social structure, just with themselves as the slaveowning aristocrats and the native blacks as the slaves.

Somewhat similarly, as a boy Sowell absorbed second-hand much from the upper class of New York City. I recently read Sowell's autobiography, and he makes the point that as a boy growing up in Harlem around 1940, he benefited from having two female relations who were maids on Park Avenue who brought home strong opinions about how high-quality folks behaved. (Sowell, by the way, was born in the South but raised in Fiorello La Guardia's NYC when its public schools and other government institutions were at their high point of morale and effectiveness. He disliked visiting the South during Jim Crow times. As an adult, he found himself happiest in California, where he lives now.)

If you look at imprisonment statistics, blacks tend to be better behaved in the South than elsewhere. Oddly enough, the most crime-prone blacks are in Iowa, of all places, where whites have traditionally been well-behaved. (Even though Iowa is very rural, it is so un-redneck in tastes that it voted for Al Gore in 2000.) Wisconsin and even Minnesota are similar. I don't think there has much black migration into these states for quite a few decades, but the local white culture is not rubbing off on the current black generations. My guess is that in those Old Northwest states, blacks get little competition from other groups for filling niches in the criminal economy, so more go into crime. In contrast, in states with more hell-raising whites, fewer blacks go into crime. But, that's just a first guess at this rather odd pattern.

Of course, the least-discussed cultural influence on African-Americans is also the most obvious: Africa. I call this tendency to ignore the African in African-American, to assume that they brought no culture with them from Africa, the Black Slate Theory. For example, when very young, Sowell's parents gave him to his great-aunt to raise (he didn't know he had several siblings until he was about 18). This kind of fostering out of the young is much more common among African-Americans than among whites. It's also much more common in Africa than in Europe, according to James Q. Wilson's book The Marriage Problem.

Perhaps the biggest social problem of African-Americans, as reflected in the very high illegitimacy rate, is that the culture they brought with them from Africa is one of low paternal investment. America's dominant culture had largely succeeded in inculcating monogamy and bring-home-the-bacon norms in blacks by about 1960, when it suddenly lost its self-confidence and began funding, via AFDC, the traditional African tendency toward mothers supporting their children without much support from their fathers.

One interesting sociological question that has been almost completely ignored in the U.S., with Zora Neale Hurston being the only exception I can think of, is the varying influence of different tribes in Africa. Hurston studied this in the West Indies, where tribes maintained more of a separate identity than in the U.S.

The most striking example is Barbados, whose citizens are renown for being the best educated and most civil of all the West Indians. Barbados was the richest and most easterly of the West Indies. According to the PBS series The Story of English, as the first stop for the slave ships coming from Africa, the wealthy slaveowners of Barbados had their pick, and they preferred to buy slaves from tribes they had found to be the most cooperative. Then they'd send the leftovers from the Bad Dude tribes on to be sold in Jamaica and the U.S. To this day, Barbados remains a more cooperative place than most other black communities in the Western Hemisphere.

Obviously, when Sowell points out that African and West Indian blacks outnumber African-Americans at Harvard, he's not mentioning the selection effect. Still, there are so few English-speaking West Indians in the world (maybe about five to seven million? -- there are only 2.7 million in Jamaica, compared to about 35 million African-Americans), their abundance at Harvard is of interest. I'd be particularly interested in seeing how the small number of Barbadians stacks up against African-Americans.

I suspect that the white colonial elite in Barbados and Trinidad did a better job of assimilating blacks into the white culture, without a generating a huge oppositional backlash, than did whites in the U.S. All this deserves closer study that I've ever seen it getting.

Every winter I volunteer to fly off to Barbados to investigate this crucial subject, but nobody has offered to fund my research project yet.

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

How many GOP gunslingers aren't gay?

Following the recent news that famed Republican attack dog political consultant Arthur Finkelstein "married" some guy in Massachusetts comes a long NY Times piece about a less famous gay Republican operative named R. Gregory Stevens who recently dropped dead from drugs in the bed he was platonically sharing with Carrie "Princess Leia" Fisher.

Of course, there are plenty of similar rumors about important White House political functionaries, which were reactivated by the bizarre story of the issuing of a White House security pass and press credential to male whore James Guckert / Jeff Gannon.

***

At least one. Congratulations to Grover Norquist. Earlier this month, the ultra-energetic 48-year-old activist got married to Samah Alrayyes. Norquist had been saying for a long time that he was going to slow down and start a family, but a lot of people thought he was too hard-charging. Good for him.

The Washington Post reported:

A friend of the bride and groom, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, presided and the reception featured a belly dancer. The always-quotable groom told us Friday: "This is fun! I'm wearing a ring and everything."

I presume the ceremony was nondenominational.

***

Love is in the air: The WaPo reports:

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, 40, is getting hitched to Washington businessman James V. Reyes, 42. They got engaged April 2 and plan a Catholic wedding in late May or early June. We hear the happy couple was introduced last year by their mutual friend Dave Pollin, nephew of developer Abe Pollin.

Laura was previously an item with Harvard President Larry Summers, which drove the liberal faculty crazy.

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

The iron fist in the velvet glove of "diversity:"

Many people assume that affirmative action only exists in college admissions, but that aspect of racial quotas is dwarfed by corporations imposing quotas upon themselves to prevent lawsuits like the Sodexho case. The Washington Post reports:

Sodexho Inc., the Gaithersburg-based food and facilities-management company, agreed Wednesday to pay $80 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed it systematically denied promotions to 3,400 black mid-level managers.

The company also agreed to widespread training and a more structured hiring process for its 106,000 employees throughout the country, in an effort to promote more minorities into higher corporate jobs. A panel appointed by the plaintiffs and the company will monitor Sodexho's compliance.

Sodexho officials said they have already implemented many of the remedies included in the settlement, such as tying bonuses for top executives to the company's progress toward workforce diversity goals...

In the years since the Sodexho lawsuit was filed, the proportion of blacks in management positions at the company has remained around 12 percent, Aun said. Currently, 1,921 of Sodexho's 15,532 managers are black.

In contrast, the plaintiffs maintained, only 2 percent of the company's upper management is black. About one-fourth of the company's total workforce is black.

The take home message to corporate executives is that it makes more sense to impose quotas on yourself now, than pay out 80 million and be forced to impose them later anyway. Most sizable companies long ago got the message and quietly put together these kind of programs to racially discriminate against their white employees.

The U.S. initiated racial quotas three dozen years ago when there were about seven whites for every black. The U.S. is a rich country and that ratio of payees to payers under affirmative action has proven affordable as the white to black ratio has been fairly stable over the decades.

But, in 1973, with almost no forethought, the federal bureaucracy added most immigrants to the ranks of quota beneficiaries, and the ratio of whites, who are expected to give up opportunities, to immigrants, who are aided by quotas, has been worsening ever since. As with the Social Security system, the affirmative action system's decline in the "racial ratio" of payer to payee foretells long term trouble, as I detailed here.

A reader writes:

Well, I think I know of the next company lead attorney [and white man] Kerry Alan Scanlon can target: his own law firm, Kaye Scholer, whose numbers are similar to Sodexho's! I just clicked on all their attorneys, about half of whom had pictures on their law fim web pages and half of whom did not. Of the 102 Kaye Scholer attorneys who have photos, guess how many are black? Answer: same as the number of 188 top jobs held at Sodexho, whom Kaye Scholer just successfully sued for their lack of African-Americans in top jobs. Zero.

Same numbers, yet one company is able to extract $80 million from the other. Hmmm.

I suppose the black plaintiffs hardly wanted to risk losing their big payouts by hiring minority attorneys who might only have their jobs due to affirmative action. With that much money at stake, who can afford diversity?

Maybe the Rev. Jesse Jackson could go shake down Kaye Scholer next?

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

Isn't it a logical inevitability that abortion reduces the crime rate?

While the historical evidence raises strong doubts about this popular theory, many people assume it must be true on simple logical grounds. A reader writes:

You began your "Pre-emptive Executions?" article by asking:

Did legalizing abortion in the early 70s reduce crime in the late 90s by allowing "pre-emptive capital punishment" of potential troublemakers?

Steve, the answer to the above question is obviously yes. If you abort a disproportionate number of the fetuses that would grow up to be criminals, you must reduce the crime rate. Of course there may be many other factors that effect the crime rate, as you point out, but these factors don't change the basic fact that elective abortion has reduced the crime rate. To argue otherwise is to make you come off as a doctrinaire conservative, rather than as a scientist.

This seems tautological, but keep in mind that in our country, educated people have a notorious history of misreading how not-so-educated people would react to changes in family structure incentives. For example, all the smart people in 1961 favored raising welfare payments to, say, $300 per month and giving it to unmarried mothers. Nobody they knew would have a baby out of wedlock just to get $300 per month.

Levitt assumes that legalizing abortion reduces the "unwantedness" of the babies who do get born. A close reading of Steven Levitt's book suggests that the reality, however, is not clear at all.

F irst, we certainly didn't see an increase in wantedness by the fathers of the unborn babies that managed to get born. Legalizing abortion reduced the moral pressure on impregnating boyfriends to marry their girlfriends.

The illegitimacy rate grew steadily from 1964 (which, counterintuitively, was the year The Pill was introduced, yet was also the inflection point in the great illegitimacy upswing), until it suddenly somewhat pleateaued in 1995, the year after the violence rate began dropping, and a few years after the abortion rate began dropping, perhaps not coincidentally.

Lots of people assume that illegitimacy and abortion must be inversely correlated, but the historical record in America shows that they are both high at the same time and low at the same time.

The simplest model appears to be that the Crack Era of the early 1990s was when a lot of the offshoots of the Liberal Ascendancy of 1964-1980 -- crime, illegitimacy, abortion, and venereal diseases such as AIDS -- were seen by many people as all coming home to roost, and a broad turn toward more traditional morality began in reaction to the horrors on the streets.

fter the legalization of abortion, there was not a major drop in unwanted births as Levitt assumed when he concocted his theory, and he still implies even though he knows the facts are otherwise. Instead, there was a major rise in unwanted pregnancies. According to Levitt's own words, " "Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …" I know I reiterate this, but it's a stunning fact that you never hear in the abortion debate from either side, and it's a key to grasping what the impact of legalizing abortion was in reality, not theory.

Nor is it clear that this small decline in birthrate improved the quality of upbringing of the survivors.

Imagine a woman who started having unprotected sex because abortion was legalized. She gets pregnant, but then, for one reason or another, doesn't have an abortion.

Perhaps she hopes that having the baby will persuade the father to marry her. Perhaps when the father refuses to marry her she decides that if no man loves her, well, at least a baby would love her and cheer her up. Maybe all her girlfriends are having babies and it seems like the fashionable thing to do in her circle. Maybe it gets her out of having to go to high school and take a lot of boring classes she doesn't understand. Perhaps she finds she can get her own public housing project apartment and move out of her nagging mother's house if she becomes a mother herself, and then she can have sex with all the men she wants. Perhaps she keeps forgetting her appointment at the clinic because she's not too bright. Perhaps every time she gets the cash together for an abortion, she spends it on drugs first.

It's a statistical certainty that millions of babies were conceived because abortion was legalized but then were born for these kind of reasons. How many? I don't know.

But it's not at all impossible that legalizing abortion could have, on the whole, lowered the quality of parents and the upbringing they give their kids. In fact, it seems pretty likely that out of the tens of millions of women who had unwanted pregnancies due to legalizing abortion (tens of millions according to Levitt's own numbers), the ones who went ahead and had abortions tended to be the more ambitious, better organized women, while some the the ones didn't get around to having abortions were the more scatter-brained women.

This model fits what we all saw on the streets a lot better than Levitt's model. Urban black women had huge numbers of legal abortions from 1971 onward, far more than any other group. According to Levitt's logic, that should have improved the black male teenagers of the late 1980s through early 1990s.Yet, what evidence is there from, say, 1990 to 1994 that black males born in 1971-1979 were better behaved than the previous generation? The better behaved generation of black teens actually were the ones born in the early 1980s, yet the nonwhite abortion rate peaked back in 1977.

A reader writes:

Like Steven D Levitt, I am a published economist... I am so heart warmed to begin to see empirical data graphically presented, albeit in a critique of economic theory by your art critic, as to be tempted to forgive his sophomoric understanding of empirical social science. In the discipline's lingo, Levitt has relied upon something called ceteris paribus (all other things equal), an inference presumptively valid unless shown otherwise, to conclude abortion lowers crime.

In his critique, Steve Sailer shows that today's youth are more violent and depraved. But his post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning fails to prove is that abortion has made them so. Rather, in the absence of such proof, ceteris paribus tells us that crime would be worse had it not been "culled" [of] 'the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals.'"

Leaving aside the condescension dripping from this, there are two logical issues here: ceteris paribus and upon whom the burden of proof rests.

I addressed ceteris paribus in my debate in 1999 with Levitt:

Admittedly, it's still theoretically possible that without abortion the black youth murder rate would have, say, sextupled instead of merely quintupling [from 1984 to 1993].

Logically, this is what Levitt must be arguing over these last six years. But you can instantly see why he never makes clear his case. There's two problems: the first is that saying this instantly raises the question of why Levitt refuses to investigate the at least equally interesting question of whether legalizing abortion first drove crime up. As I wrote then:

Still, there's a more interesting question: Why did the places with the highest abortion rates in the '70s (e.g., NYC and Washington D.C.) tend to suffer the worst crack-driven crime waves in the early '90s?

The other reason is the obvious dubiousness of what Levitt is claiming: He is implying that: Although my theory fails its single best test case in catastrophic fashion, I can still separate out the very subtle breeze of the effects of legalizing abortion from the hurricane of other simultaneous events, such as the rise and fall of the crack wars, vast increases in imprisonment, changes in police tactics, the decline in the abortion rate from 1992 onward, changes in the economy, increased sales of guns to law-abiding citizens, increased number of cops, the rise of rent-a-cops, the spread of alarms and video cameras, the rise of marijuana among the urban underclass, the spread of Depo-Provera contraceptive shots, etcetera etcetera...

Well, good luck...

And that brings us to the question of the burden of proof. Upon whom should it rest: Levitt or me?

Levitt is a sympathetic figure, perhaps a heroic one, considering the difficulty of the analytical burden he has undertaken.

I am a less appealing figure: the scoffer, the sniper, the naysayer. I do not offer a complete model of the causes of crime trends as Levitt claims to do. Nor do I feel competent to undertake one. I am merely poking holes in his big theory.

Yet, it's a wise maxim in the sciences that large assertions require large evidence. Levitt's abortion-cut-crime theory is one of the bigger social science assertions of recent times. The weight of the evidence, however, falls far short of the weight of the importance of his claim. So, by all traditions of science, the burden of proof lies upon him, and he has failed to meet it.

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

Crime Misery Index Feedback

A reader writes:

Good work with the crime misery index. I can think of two factors that would affect the index-- one on the imprisonment side and one on the homicide rate (as proxy for crime in general).

To take the homicide rate first, emergency medicine is WAY better than it was 40 years ago (apparently the experience of combat surgeons in Vietnam revolutionized the field). A lot of shooting victims are alive today who'd be murder statistics if they had been treated with 1960 medical technology. Doctors, nurses and paramedics have done more to keep the murder rate down than judges, lawyers and cops. A better comparison (and I wish I could remember where I first read this point) would be adding homicides and armed assaults for any given year. Over time, there would be fewer murders, but the number of armed assaults would stay about the same or go up (as would-be murderers are charged with armed assault).

I think that lousy medical care may explain the high homicide rate in the 1920s during a period of much lower imprisonment rates -- people died often from single bullets or knife wounds due to infections before the introduction of sulfas in the 1930s and the arrival of mass quantities of penicillin around 1944-45. Also, the first hospital blood bank in the U.S. was begun in Chicago in 1937.

On the other hand, criminals' firepower has gone up. Al Capone's gang was notorious for being able to afford automatic weapons ("tommy guns") but by the late 1980s every two bit punk could afford to spray his rivals from a passing car -- drive-by shootings didn't become terribly effective until crooks could just hose bullets in the general direction of their victims.

The good news is that the number of "serious violent crimes" reported by the public in the FBI's National Crime Victimization Survey (taken annually since 1973) is very much down. The total number of estimated serious violent crimes peaked at over four million in 1981 and again in 1993 and 1994, but has been under two million in 2001-2003.

Second, concerning the incarceration rate, let's not discount that before the 70's, cops dished out a lot more "street justice". Someone who gets the crap kicked out of him but isn't arrested (if only to avoid a judge seeing the beat up defendant) isn't counted in any arrest or incarceration statistics. It's unfortunate that race gets mixed up in the whole equation-- but even with a white suspect, cops today are much more careful about respecting the suspect's civil rights.

I think the rise of the crime rate is largely a result in the decline of street justice. When cops are, as they inevitably will be someday, wired with lipstick cameras to monitor their behavior with suspects, the problem will only get worse.

Along those lines, the creator of Deadwood (and co-creator of NYPD Blue), David Milch said something interesting last year:

"And the reason that cops only trust other cops is because they know that they've been hired to lie, they've been hired to beat the balls off people, and get them to confess so they can be excluded from society. That's the first part of their job. The second part of their job is to lie about what they did. And the third part of their job is to know that if they're caught, they're going to be put in jail. So for me, what every cop always told me was, 'Every time I see a guy in a suit, I'm afraid I'm gonna get locked up'."

I just saw a South Korean movie with scenes of how the police over there interrogate recalcitrant prisoners. Travel tip: When in Seoul, obey the law.

Torturing suspects seemed to be fairly routine in Cook County when I lived there.

But, in general, it appears we reduced police brutality in America, but wound up having to replace it with much more imprisonment (which includes brutalization of weaker prisoners by other prisoners -- unfortunately, the prisoner-on-prisoner brutalization is enjoyed by the stronger inmates, so that's the opposite of a deterrent for the most dangerous criminals).

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

Nietzsche on KICS: "Keep It Complicated, Smartie:"

A reader writes:

Nietzsche said: "It's a lie that what thinkers hate most is being misunderstood. They actually love that. They think 'I've spent 30 years trying to understand this; how dare you think you can figure it out in 10 minutes?'"

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

I'm not the only bestseller-hater:

Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat:

I think it was about five months ago that NY Press editor Alex Zaitchik whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new book coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world’s manganese supply. Who knew what it meant—but one had to assume the worst

"It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood there, eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news when it landed. I said nothing.

It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came out would be called The World Is Flat. It didn't matter. Either version suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room... [More]

Taibbi can be quite funny. Perhaps he's the War Nerd.

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

New Tech-Support Caste Arises In India

NEW DELHI—Thanks to widespread outsourcing of telephone-service jobs, a fifth caste has blossomed in India: the Khidakayas, a mid-level jati made up of technical-support workers. "I am happy to be a Khidakaya," said technical-support agent Ranji Prasat, who speaks English with a flawless American accent and goes by the name "Ron" at work. "While we rank below members of the reigning order, those of us responsible for helping Americans track their online purchases and change their account PINs share many privileges not enjoyed by the merchant class below us." Prasat said he expects to marry another tech-support worker. -- The Onion

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

The advantage of going to Harvard:

A reader writes:

You are absolutely right when you say that going to Harvard doesn't make you smart (it certainly didn't in my case). However what going to Harvard does do (at least it did for me) is to instill a sense of confidence and self-assurance that proves to be of enormous advantage later in life, totally apart from how smart or not smart you inherently are (or how much smarter the person who didn't go there is than you are, but since he didn't go there he lacks that confidence and thus "blinks" when the chips are down).

From my limited and admittedly personal experience alone (but confirmed in unscientific and statistically unrealiable connversations with classmates) this Harvard-inspired "bravado" (for lack of a better word) is a widespread phenomenon. On more than one occasion, when I have been confronted with a tough situation about which I have "not a clue" I find myself playing the mind game of "Hey, I went to Harvard, I should be able to figure this out!" and just that seemingly small bit of self delusion carries the day, because the other side in that situation immediately perceives the sense of power and control that this mind game imparts, and he backs down.

You would think that somewhere along the line someone or something would have "called my bluff" and exposed this little (or maybe not so little) charade, but I'll be 65 in a matter of weeks and it hasn't happened yet! Who knows what tomorrow brings, but so far so good.

Another observation about Harvard, the further you are from Cambridge, the more impressive the credential is perceived to be. In Boston, there are Harvard grads driving cabs and pumping gas, but west of the Hudson, across the pond or points east of Suez, a Harvard degree opens doors otherwise closed shut.

One of my most distinguished readers, who was an adornment of the Harvard faculty for many years, writes:

You are right about IQ tests. But see the study by Alan Krueger that shows that elite schools, such as Harvard, do not in fact add to what students learn compared to other, less prestigious schools.

Dan Akst reported in Money:

The economist Alan B. Krueger teaches at Princeton University, but in his view, it’s probably not worth the money it takes to send your kid there.

Not in terms of future earnings, anyway. Krueger ignited a minor furor when he and Stacy B. Dale, a researcher at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, concluded in 1998 that elite colleges do not pay off in higher earnings. They only appear to do so, the researchers contended. Krueger and Dale claimed that, in most cases, the higher earnings piled up by graduates of elite schools were attributable to elite individuals, not their college education. In other words, if you’re smart enough to get into Princeton, you’re smart enough to make a lot of money wherever you go to school...

But, other economists who have looked at the question, disagree. Akst's article has a lot of interesting observations on both sides, and I, personally, remain agnostic on the issue.

I suspect the value of the friends and contacts you make in college differs greatly depending on career. Now that I'm in the opinion journalism business, for example, it's clear that the only sensible career path in this little industry is to go to Harvard, or, failing that, another Ivy League school, and then move to either New York City or D.C. and socialize as much as possible with people who look like they could help you out some day (and cut everybody else dead): i.e., don't do what I've done (go to school in Houston and LA and get real world work experience in Chicago). But this is hardly a representative business.

One general suggestion I have is that, all else being equal, it's a good idea to get your schooling and make your career in the same metropolitan area. For a lot of people, the younger you are, the easier it is to make friends. It's hard to keep up with old friends if you are a thousand miles away, and it's not as easy to make new ones as you get older.

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

Non-Lethal Youth Violence Peaked After Roe, Too

The kids born after abortion legalization didn't just go on a murder spree. Here's a graph of more data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is from the FBI's annual National Crime Victimization Study. It shows that "serious violent crime" (which includes " includes rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and homicide" but not murder, because homicide victims aren't around to be interviewed by the FBI) where at least one of the attackers was perceived by the victim as being age 12 to 17 peaked in 1993 in terms of both absolute number of crimes (1,108,000, as represented by the blue bars above) and percentage of all serious violent crimes (27% of total serious violent crimes, as represented by the red line above). Abortion laws were liberalized in 15 states in 1970 and Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationally in 1973, a full 20 years before the worst year for 12-17 year olds. So, contra Levitt's Freakonomics, the cohort born after Roe v. Wade was the most violent in the last three decades, and perhaps ever.

And don't assume that youth violence is an insignificant share of all violence. Over half of the 28% increase in the total number of serious violent crimes between 1986 and 1993 was due to the increased violence of 12-17 year olds compared to just 42% of the increase for all adults age 18 and over (and 5% for assailants of unknown age).

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

Is the Pope Catholic? New York Times Alarmed to Find Answer is "Yes."

Colby Cosh points me toward this quote from the NYT:

Pope Benedict's well-known stands include the assertion that Catholicism is "true" and other religions are "deficient"; that the modern, secular world, especially in Europe, is spiritually weak; and that Catholicism is in competition with Islam.

Tomorrow, the NYT will reveal the shocking secret of the sanitary habits of bears!

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