The Malcolm Gladwell debate appears to have inspired another new aphorism in the style of G.C. Lichtenberg from Deogolwulf at the Joy of Curmudgeonry website:
"Many have devised for themselves an additional criterion of knowledge: that it may not offend their sensibilities or disturb their repose."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Tonight in the NYT:
From my 4/4/04 VDARE article:
"The survey notes, for example, that iron shortages are driving down national GNPs by lowering national IQs:
"In most developing countries today, iron deficiency is now estimated to be preventing 40% to 60% of children from growing to their mental potential… In the last 10 to 15 years, iron deficiency has assumed even greater importance as evidence accumulates linking iron deficiency with mental impairment. In various tests of cognitive and psycho-motor skills, for example, lack of iron has been found to be associated with significant levels of disadvantage—affecting IQ scores by as much as 5 to 7 IQ points."
"Similarly, iodine shortages cause the swelling of the thyroid gland called goiter, which can lead to what the U.N. report calls "cretinism."
"In the U.S., these two problems were almost completely solved decades ago—by fortifying salt with iodine and flour with iron and other micronutrients. Similar methods should work in the Third World.
"Of course, the expense and organizational challenges are greater. In Pakistan, for example, there are 600 commercial salt producers. Getting each to iodize is a sizable undertaking.
"Yet it can and must be done.
"Even if we all have to start mentioning the dread letters "IQ.""
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Malcolm Gladwell keeps picking away at his self-inflicted wound:
Bad Stereotyping ...
This is my third (and last) comment on the Ayres study. My first point, as those of you who have been following my thoughts on this know, is that price discrimination against black males by car salesmen is morally wrong. My second point is that it is a bad business strategy. My third—and in some ways most important point—is that its lousy stereotyping.
Let’s go back to the study. The male and female, black and white testers who Ayres sent out to car dealerships all gave the salesmen the same set of facts. They were all roughly the same age (late twenties). They all drove the same kind of car into the lot. They all dressed neatly and conservatively. They identified themselves as college-educated professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank). And they said they lived in the upper-income Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. The car salesman, then, has several pieces of data from which to create his stereotype. He has the gender, race, age, occupation, educational level, and class (or at least a class proxy) of his potential customer. And what did he do? With the black men, he zeroed in on age and race, and ignored everything else.
In his critique of my analysis of Ayres, Judge Posner did the same thing. When he says that it may be “sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group,” the “group” he’s talking about is race. But why is Posner—like the car salesmen—so hung up about race? Wouldn’t it be just as sensible, in the case of black men, to define their “group” as the group of college-educated, upper income professionals? So too with Steve Sailer. He says that car salesman are acting rationally, based on the fact that black men—as a group—like to be seen overpaying for cars. I have made my feelings known about what I see as the motivation behind that particular comment. But let’s just focus here on its appropriateness. Why is Sailer—like Posner and Ayres’car dealers—so intent on zeroing in on what is only one of many available and relevant facts about the customer?
The short answer to that question, I think, is that this is what racial prejudice is: it is the irrational elevation of race-based considerations over other, equally or more relevant factors.
But let me make two other points. First, thinking of the Ayres study this way gives us, I think, some insight into the anger that continues to be felt in the African-American community over discrimination. Put yourself in the shoes of one of those black males in Ayres study. You go to college. You get a good job. You make a lot of money. You move to a posh neighborhood. And when you walk into a car dealership all of those achievemens—and what they signal about you—vanish, and the salesmen only sees the color of your skin. Can you understand now why I’ve been hammering away on this subject?
Second, some of the commenters to my previous posts seem to have been of the opinion that price discrimination represented a kind of shrewd, profit-maximization strategy by salesmen. Shrewd? Tell me what’s so shrewd about being given four critical facts about a potential customer, and deciding to discard three of them?
The logical implication of Malcolm's argument is that Americans need to cultivate more sophisticated stereotypes, which is what I've been pointing out for years. In 2003 I wrote:
"I think it would be good for society if whites become more aware of black social class markers. Something that drives black anger is when a young black man with a college degree is crossing the street and he hears from inside all the cars at the stoplight the "ka-chunk" of white motorists locking their doors to keep him from carjacking them.
"For about a decade, I've assumed that a younger black man wearing those small, typically round wire-rimmed glasses is making a statement about his social class and aspirations, indicating something like "I'm no nerd, but I have definitely been to college. I'm hip-hop, but I'm not ghet-to. I'm cool, but I'm a thinker."
"The first celebrity I can remember with this look was John Singleton, director of "Boyz 'n the Hood," back about 1992. Laurence Fishburne's guru Morpheus in "The Matrix" (above) is another example. (The head doesn't have to be shaved and the lenses don't have to be tinted, but that doesn't hurt the image). You often hear a particular accent from wire-rimmed glasses wearing black guys, too: it sounds both black and educated, but rugged, not prissy."
In the past, the educated black man would adopt a white accent and white visual styles. But, the more recent generations of college-educated black men don't want to do that. They want to assert their blackness. On the other hand, they also want to assert their social class. So, they've adopted some subtle clues that other blacks can easily pick up on. Unfortunately, the little glasses and this new accent are too subtle for many whites to notice.
So, what America needs is More and Better Stereotyping!
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
On Sunday, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker wrote on his blog:
"I think we can all agree that comments like "black men enjoy being seen as big spenders" or black people "possess poorer native judgment" can be accurately described as examples of racism, and the kinds of people who say things like that can be accurately described as racists. Do those examples work better for you, Steve Sailer? Oh--wait. I forgot to say the name of the reviewer who wrote those two racist statements: Steve Sailer.
"Is there anyone who would object, at this point, if I made this blog a Steve-Sailer-free zone? I suggest that we vote on it. A simple "in" or "out" will suffice, although any accompanying commentary would, of course, be welcome. I promise to abide by the result."
One commenter counted up the votes on Malcolm Gladwell's own blog in response, and as a couple of days ago, I was winning 98-36.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Readers respond about car salesmen and price discrimination: A reader writes:
Gladwell fails to understand that it is the existence of the trait within a group that attracts the sharks, not a particular animus towards that group. The car salesmen couldn't care less if the trait is possessed primarily by blacks or Asians or whites. It's the fact that some traits/vulnerabilities do exist within groups that gives them their edge. He's making the issue black when it is green$$.
Example: I live in Utah, a state that is 70% Mormon, most of them white. The religion is weird, but the people are decent, hard working and trusting. Utah is known as the scam capital of the world; pyramid schemes, downline schemes, penny stock swindles, etc.
Why is this the case? Because Mormons have two traits easily exploited by con-men: thriftiness and gullibility. They save money and they trust people who are members in good standing with the Church. Almost all of the scam artists in Utah history have pulled off their swindles by attending LDS wards, getting in close with the bishops (think priests) and presenting themselves as faithful followers of Joseph Smith. Once you're in tight with one ward, it spreads like wildfire because of the tight-knit, trusting nature of the community. Indeed, those are the traits that the cons count on. And again, the LDS membership is overwhelmingly white.
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About 15 years ago, we had a hilarious exchange in The Washington Post and The New Republic on a startling discovery by a team of crack Post investigative reporters. In downtown DC, it seems, many jewelry shops have locked doors during business hours. Owners have to 'buzz' new customers in through the door before these customers can check out the sparkling wares. The Post investigators found that young black males were buzzed in at a slower pace and less frequently than were other shoppers.
Much kibitzing followed. At least two-thirds was composed of either: 1) outrage at the insult to young black males undoubtedly looking for wedding rings; or 2) Gladwell-esque lectures on the unconscious biases that governed the behavior of the doltish jewelers. Only a few people pointed out that jewelers: 1) prefer to live; and 2) know nothing about new customers except their physical appearance. Thomas Sowell, who has heard all the BS before, called it a matter of "Bayesian inference" under fairly high-stakes circumstances.
I would distinguish between jobs where you can get killed by your customers, like jewelry store employee and taxi cab driver, and jobs where you can't, like car salesman (it's impractical to violently steal a car from a dealership).
Back in the early 1990s, several dozen cabbies were being murdered each year in New York City alone. When the government tried to force them to pick up black males, they would stage huge protest parades down Fifth Avenue. Too bad Malcolm Gladwell wasn't employed at the New Yorker back then to explain to the cabbies (many of them black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean) that it wasn't really their fault they were discriminating; they were just suffering from "unconscious prejudices" against black males. Obviously, he would have told them, it would be completely irrational for a cabdriver to decide who it would be safer to pick up at 3 AM based on their skin color, so there can't be a rational explanation for the drivers' reprehensible conduct. I'm sure the slain cabbies' widows and orphans would have appreciated Malcolm's views.
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Here's a quote from a very long and informative article entitled "Confessions of a Car Salesman" by a writer who went undercover and got a job as a new car salesman at a California dealership peddling Japanese models:
"My manager had, at one point, described the different races and nationalities and what they were like as customers. It would be too inflammatory to repeat what he said here. But the gist of it was that the people of such-and-such nationality were "lie downs" (people who buy without negotiating), while the people of another race were "roaches" (they had bad credit), and people from that country were "mooches" (they tried to buy the car for invoice price).
"I'll repeat what Michael, my ASM, told me about Caucasians. He said white people never come into the dealership. 'They're all on the Internet trying to find out what our invoice price is. We never even get a shot at them. I hate it. I mean, would they go (to a mall) and say, "What's your invoice price on that beautiful suit?" No. So why are they doing it here?'"
You wrote:
“Of course, a 99th percentile salesman would be precisely the one most likely to figure out what Mr. Gladwell wants to hear about the car business and feed it back to him.”
Maybe Borat should be sent to talk to the car salesmen.
Too bad Borat (or Ali G) didn't interview Malcolm.
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The Inductivist blogs:
Do blacks bargain hunt as much as whites? This debate between Steve Sailer (I like) and Malcolm Gladwell (I'm indifferent to) has been very interesting. As is usually the case, my response to this sort of thing is what does the crystal ball (i.e., General Social Survey) say? Are blacks big spenders or bargain hunters, the same as whites?. (By the way, their reputation for cheapskate tipping suggests the latter).
According to the GSS, 51.5% of whites (138 out of 268) who bought a car in the past 5 years chose a particular dealership because, after searching out the best price, they decided that it was the place to go. The number for blacks: 47.8% (22 out of 46). A small difference. As much as I'd hoped these data would back up Steve, there's not much evidence here. Keep in mind the black sample is small, and doing one's homework before buying a car is a bit different than face-to-face interactions with a salesman.
I'm pretty much a penny pincher, and I do seem to see quite a few blacks shop where I frequently shop: Walmart, dollar stores, Big Lots. I don't care that being seen there makes me look like a tight wad, and some blacks evidently feel the same. (Of course, this is anecdotal, and I don't know if blacks are truly over-represented or under-represented in these stores. I believe there is a lot of data that blacks typically spend a lot more of their income on clothes than do whites.
Across Difficult Country cites a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of inner city black spending habits that finds poor blacks like spend a lot on ostentatious purchases:
"African-American inner-city shoppers are 35 percent more likely than the population as a whole to buy women's dress shoes. They're also 54 percent more likely to purchase teen boys' clothing, and 64 percent more likely than average to buy fine jewelry... "
While American households in general spend an average of $1,069 annually on apparel, inner-city African Americans spend $1,502."
This question of wanting to be seen as a big spender versus driving a hard bargain is extremely circumstance specific. Ethnic groups differ -- a friend who is a small businessman in LA tells me the most difficult customers tend to be Armenians, Koreans, and Israelis, while the most aristocratically insouciant tend to be South Americans.
But even within ethnic groups, the classes differ, with the hereditary rich and the poor tending to be more embarassed about being seen as overly concerned with getting their money's worth.
And then even within each class, whom you are supposed to impress with your largesse differs. For example, among Oxford undergrads back in the Brideshead Revisited days, honor demanded that gambling debts be paid immediately and in full. But it was perfectly gentlemanly to ignore bills from your tailor, since he was just a tradesman. In contrast, an American corporate executive who is hard as nails negotiating in the board room might tip his caddy lavishly. To him, the golf club is the place to spend the money you save at the office. Social rules vary a lot.
That's what makes Malcolm's frenzied denunciation of me -- "Is the comment malicious or intended to wound? Again, yes" -- for mentioning that black males tend to "enjoy being seen as big spenders" so hilarious. Malcolm betrays his extremely bourgeois upbringing. An awful lot of people around the world prefer being seen as big spenders that as tightwads. And just about everybody likes to be seen as a big spender at some time and place.
African-Americans tend to be poor tippers of service workers. Ian Ayres, who did the car salesman study, went on to document:
We collected data on over 1000 taxicab rides in New Haven, CT in 2001. After controlling for a host of other variables, we find two potential racial disparities in tipping: (1) African-American cab drivers were tipped approximately one-third less than white cab drivers; and (2) African-American passengers tipped approximately one-half the amount of white passengers (African-American passengers are 3.7 times more likely than white passengers to leave no tip).
Many studies have documented seller discrimination against consumers, but this study tests and finds that consumers discriminate based on the seller's race. African-American passengers also participated in the racial discrimination. While African-American passengers generally tipped less, they also tipped black drivers approximately one-third less than they tipped white drivers.
Of course, car salesmen work hard to establish in the eyes of male customers that they aren't lowly waitresses you can stiff and still feel good about yourself. They are real men, major players. Are you man enough to earn their respect? Or are you some wimp who doesn't expect to ever earn much money, so you haggle down the price of the crummy DX model and refuse the undercoating? Blacks tend to have the large but fragile male egos that are particularly vulnerable to this sales approach.
One of the major themes of Tom Wolfe's work from The Right Stuff onward is the interpersonal power of masculinity. When I mentioned to him that I had to be on the lookout all the time not to be intimidated or cajoled into doing something I didn't want to do by more masculine men, Wolfe replied that they also were always on the lookout for opportunities to intimidate guys like me.
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If Malcolm would move away from the typical American thinking about race, that there are only two, black and white, and observe a culture outside the continental United States, you'd see that the car salesman discrimination phenomenon is alive and well in other places and (gasp!) with other races.
Take Hawaii, for example -- car salesman there who I've talked to have a whole system of who-will-buy-what-at-what-price, and it has nothing to do with blacks and whites -- it's exclusively about the various types of Asians which are so richly represented in Hawaii. I.e. Chinese are the most difficult to do a deal with, the hardest to rip off, while Japanese are the easiest, etc. Wake up, Malcolm -- racial and ethnic diversity exists, and those in the trenches will make assumptions based on their observations about various groups out of necessity (and greed) even when the subjects are not black and white.
There's a big difference between Japanese and Chinese on the sensitivity v. brusqueness dimension. I wonder why?
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Am tremendously enjoying your fisking of Gladwell. (Perhaps with a bit too much Schadenfreude on my part.) Wanted to point out a couple things.
It is clear that Gladwell, sadly, does not really understand business and/or sales. When he writes:
"This is the context for Ayres' study of car salesmen. Cars are high-ticket items with an awful lot of discretion built into their price—and because of a variety of cultural and historical quirks in the car marketplace there isn't a lot of freely available information about who paid what for what. (Imagine, for example, if we bought cars the same way we bought real estate. You would ask the salesman about the Passat, with the sport package and the leather interior, and the salesman would give you "comparables" for every Passat sold in the United States in the past six months with the sport package and the leather interior. End of story. But for the inability of car dealers to join the 21st century, we wouldn't be having this discussion about price discrimination)."
He is actually undercutting his own argument. Both markets, real estate (and especially real estate) and automobiles, are characterized by strong information asymmetry. The seller has all the info (costs, market conditions) and has been through the process hundreds of times, you, the buyer, have very little info (depending on how much research you have done/purchased), and probably don't purchase that many homes or cars throughout your lifetime, so don't have the equivalent experience either.
Regarding his comparables example, this is laughable and a horrible fit. As if the selling real estate agent would actually seek to not maximize his commission and show comps that don't suggest the highest price possible for his product? Neither is the buyer's agent always properly incentivized either. The buying agent will always show the highest price-point comps to gain the business of the prospective seller -- what the market will bear might be a bit different. (Plus, you don't have the equivalent of a buying agent in car shopping.)
Anyhow, keep on keepin' on.
Perhaps Gladwell should try reading Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics, which has a chapter on real estate agents as the source of all evil in this world. Of course, Gladwell provided the front cover blurb for Freakonomics, but maybe he didn't have time to read it.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
The New Yorker writer calms down, takes a few deep breaths, and tries to salvage what he can from his spat with me:
"More Thoughts On Selling Cars."
"I would like to take one more pass at the car dealer study, because I think it raises a few, additional, interesting questions."
As you'll recall, on Sunday he demonized me as a "racist" from "the lunatic fringe," citing my review of his bestseller "Blink." In it, I had quoted Judge Richard A. Posner who also scoffed at Gladwell's claim that even though car salesmen had been shown to offer higher prices to blacks and women during negotiations, that they weren't consciously discriminating. Car salesmen were instead, according to Gladwell, the victims of "unconscious" prejudices that, sadly, prevented them from making even more money.
Malcolm goes on today:
"My initial response to that study [by Ian Ayres] was simple: it’s wrong to try and charge someone more for something because of his or her gender and skin color. Reading the comments to my earlier posts, I was somewhat surprised to learn that for some people that is a controversial position. I’m guessing a lot of those who are indifferent to this kind of price discrimination are not black males. Oh well."
Malcolm is distorting the record here to make himself look morally superior to me. I always contended that car salesmen were mercenaries who would consciously exploit any edge, including race, to make more money. In reality, in a 1,000 word answer that Malcolm posted on his website about a year ago to the criticism made by Judge Posner and myself, Gladwell wrote:
"My interpretation is that the reason the car salesmen quote higher prices to otherwise identical black shoppers is because of unconscious discrimination. They don't realize what they are doing. But buried prejudices are changing their responses in the moment. Sailer and Posner, by contrast, think that the discrimination is conscious and, what's more, that it's rational. … Now, I suppose it's possible that salesman believe this ludicrous statement to be true. But not on a conscious level. I refuse to believe that all of the car salesmen of Chicago are so stupid as to believe that by virtue of having a slightly darker skin color a human being becomes somehow predisposed towards higher prices. Sailer and Poser have a very low opinion of car salesmen."
As I responded last February to Gladwell in VDARE.com:
"You must be one of the few people in the country who claims not to have a low opinion of car salesmen. A 2005 Gallup poll asked 1002 adults nationwide to rate the honesty and ethical standards of 21 occupations. Nurses came in first, with 82% rating them high or very high. Last were telemarketers at 7%. Next to last were car salesmen at 8%."
Gladwell's defense of salesmen reflects his own self-interest. I wrote :
"In summary, Malcolm, I have to scratch my head: You get paid $40,000 per speech to corporate sales forces?
"Obviously, you don't want to insult salesmen, who butter your bread. But I've spent a lot more years in the corporate trenches with sales guys than you have, and most of them have a good sense of humor about what they do. They can put up with some ribbing.
"What gets on their nerves is a pompous fool."
This is not an isolated example. As I explained in VDARE.com:
"Gladwell is important, however, because he's pioneering a new hybrid genre. There are three obvious ways to get rich as a nonfiction writer:
- Flatter conservatives that they are more moral, patriotic, and practical-minded than liberals.
- Flatter liberals that they are more ethical, cosmopolitan, and high-minded than conservatives.
- Give people advice, especially on how to make more money.
"Although once a conservative, briefly working for The American Spectator, in recent years the Canadian-born Gladwell has been perfecting a spiel that unites the latter two approaches: he appeals simultaneously to his audience’s liberal snobbery and capitalist greed.
"His reply to me, quoted above, is a perfect example of this. He asserts that car salesmen would make even more money if they overcame their primitive biases and started to offer blacks and women lower prices.
"In other words, become more politically correct and wealthier at the same time.
"Hey, it sure worked for Gladwell!"
Malcolm writes today:
"So let’s move on. A good deal of the commenters made the point that the behavior of the car salesmen was rational. This was the position of Judge Richard Posner, who gave “Blink” a spanking, when he reviewed it in the New Republic two years ago...
"I am not one, ordinarily, to take issue with Judge Posner, who knows a great deal more about economics—and most everything, I suspect (except maybe the Buffalo Bills)—than me. But let’s take a little closer look at this idea: is it really in the economic self-interest--is it really rational-- of car salesmen to draw inferences about individual car-buyers from the group to which those car buyers belong?
"When I was reporting Blink, I talked to a number of car salesmen about this very question. They were all top salesmen—99th percentile—since it struck me that it wouldn’t be terribly useful to quiz mediocre salesmen about their strategies. (One of the salesmen I interviewed, Bob Golomb is quoted extensively in the book)."
Of course, a 99th percentile salesman would be precisely the one most likely to figure out what Mr. Gladwell wants to hear about the car business and feed it back to him. As I've said before, Malcolm is too nice a guy. He's too gullible to be a reliable business reporter. He trusts his sources way too much. It never seems to occur to him that they have self-interested reasons for telling him what he wants to hear.
Malcolm goes on today:
"First, that one of the things you quickly learn, in selling cars, is that your ability to draw inferences about individuals’ buying preferences based on surface characteristics of race, gender, dress, age, hairstyle or manner isn’t nearly as good as you think it is. …
"Second, that price discrimination—quoting a higher price to one customer more than another—is a risky strategy, because if it backfires you lose the sale. …
"And three—building on point two—that the incentive structure of car salesmen, in recent years, has changed."
This post of his is an improvement in rationality over his recent ones, and the last is an especially good point (although it may not be relevant to Ayres' study from the early 1990s).
But Malcolm is leaving out that Judge Posner had already answered some of the arguments he makes in this post. From Judge Posner's review of "Blink" in The New Republic:
"Golomb, the successful auto salesman, is contrasted with the salesmen in a study in which black and white men and women, carefully selected to be similar in every aspect except race and sex, pretended to shop for cars. The blacks were quoted higher prices than the whites, and the women higher prices than the men. Gladwell interprets this to mean that the salesmen lost out on good deals by judging people on the basis of their appearance. But the study shows no such thing. The authors of the study did not say, and Gladwell does not show, and Golomb did not suggest, that auto salesmen are incorrect in believing that blacks and women are less experienced or assiduous or pertinacious car shoppers than white males and therefore can be induced to pay higher prices. The Golomb story contained no mention of race or sex. (Flemington, where Golomb works, is a small town in central New Jersey that is only 3 percent black.) And when he said he tries not to judge a person on the basis of the person's appearance, it seems that all he meant was that shabbily dressed and otherwise unprepossessing shoppers are often serious about buying a car. 'Now, if you saw this man [a farmer], with his coveralls and his cow dung, you'd figure he was not a worthy customer. But in fact, as we say in the trade, he's all cashed up.'"
Gladwell also writes today:
"The study is described in Ian Ayres’ Pervasive Prejudice?: Non-Traditional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination, which is a book that had a great deal of influence on my thinking when I was writing “Blink.” Ayres’ project in the book is in exploring non-traditional sources of discrimination—that is, the discrimination that persists because of some flaw or condition of the marketplace in which it is operating."
Ayres' study of price discrimination by car dealers had a big impact on me as well. It is an excellent piece of work. I found it quite disturbing when I first read it in the mid-1990s, and I spent a lot of effort trying to discover a flaw in the methodology to no avail.
At the time, I was a libertarian fellow traveler and had just published a cover story in National Review ("How Jackie Robinson Desegregated America: Competition v. Discrimination") trumpeting the Milton Friedman-Gary Becker theory that a competitive market would squeeze out racial discrimination because it was irrationally expensive. (I showed how the baseball teams that integrated first, such as the Brooklyn Dodgers, went on to great success. In contrast, the two teams that met in the World Series the year before Robinson's debut, the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, were the last to integrate, and thus ended up wasting the last decade and a half of the stupendous careers of Ted Williams and Stan Musial, never allowing those two all-timers to get back to the Series).
But then along came Ayres' study that shows how, in certain circumstances, racial discrimination can prove profitable decade after decade, even in a very free market. That was quite unsettling to me because it showed that the free market wasn't the cure for all forms of racial discrimination. I hadn't really thought about the economist's concept of "statistical discrimination" much before, so Ayres' study was a real eye-opener for me.
By the way, in the study black salespeople discriminated against blacks just as did white salespeople. Same for saleswomen -- they offered female customers higher prices. The most plausible explanation is that salespeople know exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it because it makes them more money than not discriminating.
Economist Robert J. Stonebraker writes:
"While dealers and/or salespeople may know little or nothing about a particular customer, they know quite a bit about statistical differences among races and genders. They know that women and African-Americans typically enter the showroom with less information and less proclivity to bargain. Although white males often salivate at the chance to lock horns with car dealers in a bargaining struggle, females and African-Americans may be unaware that bargaining is even possible. Ayres and Siegelman cite a Consumer Federation of America survey that discovered that many female respondents, and more than one-half of African-American respondents, believed that sticker prices were non-negotiable. Armed with such knowledge, salespeople will rationally adopt a more stubborn stance while bargaining with female and African-American customers."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader wrote last February:
I sold cars on assorted lots during my summers off from college. What you're saying [in debunking Malcolm Gladwell's theory that car salesmen are unconsciously offering higher prices to blacks and women] is true.
As a matter of fact, because of this phenomena of black men wanting to appear to be big spenders, I reflexively used what is called a "negative sell" approach. When a black man would tell me what car he was interested in, I'd "try" to dissuade him. "That's kind of an expensive model. Not everyone can swing that. Maybe you should take a look at a Ford Focus? Obviously, it isn't like the car you're interested in, but they're easier to finance."
Most often, he would say, "Oh no! I can afford what I want, no problem." I'd reply with plenty of enthusiasm, and show his car of choice. Back in the office, if he gave me any objections, I'd remind him that I told him it might be a little too expensive for him to handle, and he told me it would be no problem. That usually squelched any lowballing efforts.
Where did I learn this? Through experience, and the advice of mentors who had been selling cars for decades. Nothing unconscious about it. We all just wanted to make money. What race a fellow was being irrelevant except as it may pertain to getting them out with one of our cars under their butts. If I'd been told blacks enjoy English tea and crumpets, and I found it to be true, all my black customers would be sipping Earl Grey.
Race did not matter to me. Making the sale did. Matter of fact, professional sales is all about psychological self-discipline. Generally for a professional salesman, being a racist is not cost effective. Being observant of human behavior, and accurately identifying how to exploit it... is.
It's striking how often those who denounce me for noticing some racial difference so often assume that I must be saying it's 100% genetic in origin. For example, to my mind, where a group falls on the urge to drive a hard bargain vs. to be seen as a big spender appears to be far too variable over time, place, and situation to be purely genetic. Earlier this year, I quoted one of America's most insightful social observers on his own tribe's cheapness:
"We're talking about an ethnic cultural trait. And the simple fact is that the urge to drive a hard bargain famously varies between ethnic groups. As Dave Barry notes in his new book Dave Barry's Money Secrets (Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?):
"I'm the world's worst car buyer. I come from a long line of Presbyterians, who get their name from the Greek words pre, meaning 'people,' and sbyterian, meaning 'who always pay retail.' … My idea of an opening tactical salvo is to look at the car's sticker price and say to the salesperson, 'This looks like a good deal! Are you sure you're making enough profit on this?'"
Quite true today, but I suspect that a few centuries ago, Barry's Scottish Presbyterian ancestors were viewed by English Anglicans as tight-fisted cheapskates.
Groups can change. The point, however, is that change is frequently slow enough that clear patterns can be discerned and exploited by the knowing.
It doesn't do black car buyers any good for Malcolm Gladwell to tell them that car salesmen are not consciously trying to get them to pay higher prices. Blacks are better off knowing the truth -- that they are being intentionally discriminated against by dealers who use their own typical behavioral patterns to extract more money from them.
Blacks should get mad at this situation and take steps to end it. Buy Saturn's that come with a no-haggling single price. Practice not falling for dealers' playing tricks on delicate egos about their financial situations. Complain. Criticize other blacks who fall for gimmicks like the ones described above. Do something.
The truth shall set you free.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
From the NYT:
Study Detects Recent Instance of Human Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE
A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found. The finding is a striking example of a cultural practice — the raising of dairy cattle — feeding back into the human genome.
It also seems to be one of the first instances of convergent human evolution to be documented at the genetic level. Convergent evolution refers to two or more populations acquiring the same trait independently.
Throughout most of human [pre]history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.
Such a mutation is known to have arisen among an early cattle-raising people, the Funnel Beaker culture, which flourished some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago in north-central Europe. People with a persistently active lactase gene have no problem digesting milk and are said to be lactose tolerant. Almost all Dutch people and 99 percent of Swedes are lactose-tolerant, but the mutation becomes progressively less common in Europeans who live at increasing distance from the ancient Funnel Beaker region.
Geneticists wondered if the lactose tolerance mutation in Europeans, first identified in 2002, had arisen among pastoral peoples elsewhere. But it seemed to be largely absent from Africa, even though pastoral peoples there generally have some degree of tolerance.
A research team led by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland has now resolved much of the puzzle. After testing for lactose tolerance and genetic makeup among 43 ethnic groups of East Africa, she and her colleagues have found three new mutations, all independent of each other and of the European mutation, which keep the lactase gene permanently switched on. [More]
Similarly, the mutation for fair skin color is different in Europeans than in Northeast Asians.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I read your blog fairly often so was quite surprised to see you talking about my book. I'm sorry you thought I was being "slippery" in not specifying more often when I was talking about the area north or south of the Rio Grande. You probably saw an artefact of my struggle with terminology. Problem is, the way we divide things up now (splitting the area north of Colombia into North America and Central America) doesn't fit very well with how things were then, when you had a bunch of related, highly urbanized societies in a region extending from about the Honduras-Nicaragua border to the American SW, and then everything else. In earlier drafts I tried saying when referring to the not-as-urbanized places something like "the area north of the Rio Grande except for the Southwest," but this was shouted down by my editors. I tried not using that kind of label as much, and hoping the reader would catch on to what area I was talking about, but obviously that didn't work for you. My apologies .
No, I should apologize. I was rushing to feed the blog beast after a spell of computer troubles and I posted something quick and dirty about an impressive book that Mr. Mann had clearly worked on for years, a topic where experts hold conflicting views, which he rightly refused to oversimplify.
I would say, though, that you're not quite right about Cahokia. Cahokia was by far the biggest of the mound cities of the SE and Mississippi Valley, but there were many thousands of these places--ten thousand is the estimate I've heard most often. Most of them probably held 3-10,000 people, so they weren't huge places. It's as if the moundbuilders went straight past urbanization to suburbanization, skipping the cities and going right to the strip malls. A lot of these places are just a few miles apart, and presumably would have had maize fields between, exactly the sort of situation that most urban historians think would have led to cities.
The other thing is... ten thousand of these places. If you do the math, 3K x 10K = 30M = far more than the total number of people supposed to be north of the Rio G (<20m).>
Another interesting topic would be the population of California Indians -- how dense can a population in a pleasant climate but fairly dry get without agriculture? We know the Northwest Indians were pretty thick on the ground due to fish, even without farming, but California Indians didn't leave a lot of relics behind.
I would argue with you a little that urban life was MORE feasible in the New World than the old because of the lack of pathogens. A lot of archaeologists think that it was LESS feasible because of the lack of draft animals, which made communications and infrastructure-creation much harder. It seems to me that the situations were so different that it's hard to make useful comparisons. Mesoamerica was almost freakishly urbanized, with some geographers claiming it was the most urbanized place on Earth in 1000-1400. But the second most urbanized place was China, which was absolutely swimming in disease. You can look to Africa for insight, as you do, but the situation is muddy. In Sub-Saharan Africa you certainly had major cities--Great Zimbabwe, Ingombe, Mbanzakongo, Loango. But there weren't as many packed in as Mesoamerica, that's for sure. A good book on this is Chris Ehret's Civlizations of Africa.
The Yucatan Peninsula is a horrible place -- not just hot and humid, but the limestone soil means that water sinks into the ground almost immediately. It's completely flat, with no rivers or lakes, and covered with low scrubby trees about 15 feet tall. Looking out the back window of a hotel room on a beautiful beach in Cozumel, I had a hard time shaking the feeling that I was an astronaut in some Twilight Zone episode who had landed on a planet where the beach was wonderful, but the rest of the planet was just a cheap backdrop slapped together in some alien movie studio. And yet the Mayans built extraordinary urban centers like Chichen Itza and Tikal on this unpromising landscape, while North American Indians, blessed with a temperate climate and rich soils, rarely created cities.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
From my upcoming review in The American Conservative:
James Bond is the most popular English fictional character since Sherlock Holmes, the hero of 23 movies raking in four billion dollars at the global box office. The essence of his screen appeal has been the paradox embodied in the medieval word "gentleman:" an individual of refined manners, educated in the arts of conversation, dress, and cuisine, whose profession is violence.
The English gentleman was the outcome of a project lasting a millennium and a half to mold the anarchic barbarian chieftains who conquered Dark Ages Europe into the upholders of civilization. Like the Japanese samurai, they were gentled by learning aristocratic culture, without, of course, demeaning themselves so low as to have to get a job that didn't involve killing people.
Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale introduced a rather grim Bond. The charming but deadly gentleman Bond who had such an impact on popular culture was largely invented in 1962 by the director of "Dr. No," Terence Young. A public school boy, Cambridge grad, twice-wounded WWII officer, wit, bon vivant, and ladies' man, Young had everything except directing talent. He ended his career helming the seldom-seen epics "Inchon" for the Rev. Moon and "Long Days" for Col. Gaddafi.
What he did excel at, however, was teaching a young Scottish proletarian, a former milkman and coffin polisher named Sean Connery, how to act like Terence Young.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Mel Gibson's upcoming movie about the collapse of Mayan civilization in pre-Columbian times, with an all-Mayan cast speaking Mayan, looks from the previews like nothing in Hollywood history. (Here's a review of an unfinished version.) Perhaps it was inspired by the Eskimo movie "Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner"? (Here's my review of that 2002 film made by Inuits.)
As usual, my concern with Mel's movies is that his great theme -- pain -- is one where a little goes a long way with me. I suspect he became interested in Pre-Columbian Indian civilizations because pain was such a central theme in their cultures too.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Polygamy: Gary Becker vs. Nicholas Wade: A common theme here at iSteve is how intellectually Aspergery so many economists are. The thinking of a lot of famous economists seems to be vaguely autistic in the sense that they seem disconnected from so many obvious facts about human nature. Here, for example, is Gary Becker, who, oddly enough, won his Nobel for is work on family life, making a case for polygamy:
"While the ferocious opposition to polygamy seemed strange even in the 1970's when I first wrote about this practice, it is much stranger now in light of developments during the past couple of decades. These developments include a successful movement to legalize contracts between gays that allow them to live as married couples, even though there is ongoing emotional debate about whether such couples can legally be considered "married". ... If modern women are at least as capable as men in deciding whom to marry, why does polygyny continue to be dubbed a "barbarous" practice?
In other words, Becker just doesn't get it about why people don't like polygamy, even though the real reason is easily expressed in economics terminology: Monogamy is a cartel formed by males to reduce male vs. male competition for wives to more of a matter of quality than of quantity. The ability of a culture's males to cooperate with each other is correlated with the overall quality of life in that culture. But Becker doesn't seem familiar with that common argument.
Here it's expressed by the NYT's genetic reporter Nicholas Wade in his book Before the Dawn:
"The novel arrangement of pairing off males and females creates a whole new set of social calculations. Most males in the society now have a chance to reproduce since they possess socially endorsed access to at least one female. So each male has a much greater incentive to invest in cooperative activities, such as hunting or defense, that may benefit the society as a whole.
The pair bond takes much of the edge out of male-to-male aggression. It also requires that men trust one another more, and can have some confidence that those who go hunting won't be cuckolded by those to stay to defend the women."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
A reader writes:
As you know, I'm on the board of a new charter school in XXX, so this is an issue close to my heart.
High-performing charter schools are frequently accused of achieving their success by taking only the cream of the public-school student crop. But in NYC at least, that's not an option: students are assigned by lottery. There is a degree of self-selection, since you don't get *into* the lottery unless you apply. But there's no qualification for entry other than city residence; from that pool of applicants, the actual enrolled students are chosen strictly at random. The school I'm involved with is 25% special ed, and most of the school is reading well below grade level. I don't think that's the cream of the crop.
There's a bunch of charter schools that have achieved remarkable results with underperforming student populations. So: how do they do it? My own view is that the lion's share of success is due to three factors:
- Disciplined environment. High-performing charter schools take discipline seriously. As a consequence, they don't have the cultures of disorder and even violence (property crime, stabbings, even rapes) that you read about in some regular urban public schools. It's kind of obvious that an atmosphere of chaos makes pedagogy difficult if not impossible. This is a relatively low bar to clear in that what it takes to impose discipline isn't that complicated - it just requires willpower and a relatively free hand.
- Longer school day and year. At our school, the day starts early, ends late, there are classes many Saturday mornings, there's a shorter summer, and there are fewer holidays. That adds up to roughly 50% more class time than at regular public schools. It also means less time for the kids to be getting into one kind of trouble or another. Again, it's kind of obvious that more time in class should get better academic results, particularly if you're dealing with students who start out behind.
- Committed, competent staff. High-performing charter schools have the flexibility to hire and fire pretty much at will, so they can get rid of time-servers and incompetents, and they have school cultures that get teachers to put out a lot of extra (largely uncompensated) efforts. Again, we're talking about clearing a low bar: getting rid of worthless teachers is easier than hiring superstars, and may result in a comparable benefit in terms of better instruction.
On top of all this, each charter layers its own "special sauce" - one school has an "east Asian" theme, and teaches all the kids Chinese and karate; another has a music theme, and has all the kids in an orchestra; another has a purportedly afro-centric curriculum; another teaches Latin; the head-of-school at the school I'm involved in is big on civics and debate - but the particularities of the special sauce don't seem to matter much in terms of outcomes; the sauce is really there to create a sense of identity and mission for the school, which makes it easier to get staff and students to put out more effort for the sake of the team with which they identify.
At bottom, what I think accounts for the success of these schools are all very simple things and are, generally, more a matter of ending really bad practices than of implementing really extraordinary ones.
I *hope* that this is most of what it takes, because if great teachers are essential to producing decent students from underperforming populations, then there's no way to scale the success of these schools, and they are much less interesting (see below). An open question in my own mind is to what degree the deterioration in the quality of education across the board in America is simply due to feminism: highly intelligent women now have many more economically- and socially-rewarding work alternatives to teaching, which in turn must have meant a dramatic decline in average teacher quality.
There are very good questions to ask about the results that these schools deliver, but I don't think the question of whether they are selecting for better students is a key one.
Here are the two that I have been focused on:
- How lasting are the effects? If you have a longer school day and year, you can spend a lot more time teaching to the test, and not have that devour *all* classroom instruction time (which over time is self-defeating), as is happening under the pressure of NCLB at some regular public schools. That will clearly deliver better test results.
Will it result in longer-term gains? More generally, students who may succeed in the highly structured and supportive environment of a high-performing charter school may not function so well once that structure and support are withdrawn, as is the case when students graduate to high school (unless they go to a similarly highly-structured and supportive charter school for high school) or to college and/or the workforce. Charter schools have probably gotten big enough as a phenomenon that we can study the high school, college and early workforce performance (GPA, dropout rate, employment rate, average income, income trajectory, etc) and compare it to similar populations educated in mainstream urban public schools. I would expect the comparison to be positive; the question is *how* positive, how big the return is once you look out 10-15 years.
- How scalable is the model? To the extent that charter schools depend for their success on excellent teachers, the model is not very scalable at all, because there is no plausible mechanism for massively increasing the supply of quality teachers. (The supply could be modestly increased by better pay and working conditions, which charters can provide - high-performing charters tend to pay a better annual salary than the regular public schools, albeit on a per-hour basis they are generally paying *less* because of the longer work day and year); even more important is the freedom from the ed-school cartel and restrictive union rules that productive people tend to chafe against.) To the extent that charters can succeed with average-but-competent teachers, scalability is more plausible, but you still have to ask the question whether charters can succeed without outstanding principals/heads-of-school. You don't need as many of those, but I'm more confident that you can't build a high-performing charter without one. Even if we have (or can obtain) an adequate supply of really outstanding people to run these schools, can the model be scaled financially? Charters frequently brag about doing more with less - achieving great results while getting less public money than the regular public schools. But anecdotally I can tell you that many of the high-performing charters I'm familiar with get significant resources from the private sector, from foundations and/or from sugar daddies with a charitable impulse.
Someone needs to do a study of how significant those resources are, to determine whether the charter model is financially scalable.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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