Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study

A reader sends along this table from the Graduate Record Exam from ETS giving average scores by intended field of study in grad school. He includes an estimate of IQ from one of the popular conversion tables, although he didn't tell me which one.

One problem I saw was that the mean score for the Quantitative section is so much higher than for the Verbal section, and the standard deviation is also larger for Quant, that the combined scores were biased in favor of highly quantitative fields. So, I added three more columns on the right that show difference fro the mean in standard deviations and just take the average for verbal and quantitative compared to their separate means. That seems fair, since there's no evidence that verbal intelligence correlates lower with general intelligence, and it may well be the best surrogate for the g factor. So, that's how I sorted it, which moves philosophy up into second place behind physics.

That reminds me of how I wrote a review of a book by David Stove in 1999 making gentle fun of philosophy (well, maybe not that gentle: I referred to the "uselessness of philosophy"). I received a number of superbly articulate and intensely argued emails telling me I didn't know what I was talking about. You'll notice I've drawn in my horns on this topic ever since!

This table may not be fair to business students since perhaps the better ones tend to take the GMAT to apply to MBA schools.

Graduate Record Examination Scores
Mean	465	584
Standard Deviation	117	149
	Verbal	Quant	Sum	IQ	Verbal SD	Quant SD	Avg. SD
Physics & astronomy	533	736	1269	133	0.58	1.02	0.80
Philosophy	590	638	1228	129	1.07	0.36	0.72
Mathematical Sciences	502	733	1235	130	0.32	1.00	0.66
Materials Engineering	494	727	1221	129	0.25	0.96	0.60
Economics	503	706	1209	128	0.32	0.82	0.57
Chemical Engineering	485	726	1211	128	0.17	0.95	0.56
Other Engineering	493	714	1207	128	0.24	0.87	0.56
Mechanical Engineering	469	724	1193	126	0.03	0.94	0.49
Other Humanities & Art	563	599	1162	124	0.84	0.10	0.47
Physical Sciences	486	697	1183	125	0.18	0.76	0.47
Engineering	468	719	1187	126	0.03	0.91	0.47
Electrical Eng	459	726	1185	126	(0.05)	0.95	0.45
Banking & finance	467	711	1178	125	0.02	0.85	0.43
Chemistry	486	680	1166	124	0.18	0.64	0.41
Computer & Infor Sci	466	701	1167	124	0.01	0.79	0.40
Civil Engineering	457	700	1157	124	(0.07)	0.78	0.36
Religion & Theory	541	589	1130	121	0.65	0.03	0.34
Industrial Engineering	440	707	1147	123	(0.21)	0.83	0.31
Earth, Atmos & Mar. Sci	495	636	1131	121	0.26	0.35	0.30
English language & lit	560	553	1113	120	0.81	(0.21)	0.30
Humanities & arts	545	566	1111	120	0.68	(0.12)	0.28
Arts-History, theory, crit	539	572	1111	120	0.63	(0.08)	0.28
Biological Sciences	491	631	1122	121	0.22	0.32	0.27
Political Science	524	588	1112	120	0.50	0.03	0.27
Foreign languages & lit	531	574	1105	119	0.56	(0.07)	0.25
Anthropology & Archeology	533	569	1102	119	0.58	(0.10)	0.24
History	542	557	1099	119	0.66	(0.18)	0.24
Library & Archival Sciences	536	542	1078	117	0.61	(0.28)	0.16
Architecture	475	610	1085	118	0.09	0.17	0.13
Natural Sciences -Other	474	598	1072	117	0.08	0.09	0.09
Secondary	485	578	1063	116	0.17	(0.04)	0.07
Social Sciences	487	565	1052	115	0.19	(0.13)	0.03
Agriculture	458	592	1050	115	(0.06)	0.05	0.00
Arts-Performance & studio	488	553	1041	114	0.20	(0.21)	-0.01
Life Sciences	462	581	1043	114	(0.03)	(0.02)	-0.02
Sociology	488	545	1033	114	0.20	(0.26)	-0.03
Other business	444	599	1043	114	(0.18)	0.10	-0.04
Business	442	592	1034	114	(0.20)	0.05	-0.07
Psychology	472	545	1017	113	0.06	(0.26)	-0.10
Higher	464	548	1012	112	(0.01)	(0.24)	-0.13
Communications	470	533	1003	111	0.04	(0.34)	-0.15
Curriculum & Instruction	459	546	1005	111	(0.05)	(0.26)	-0.15
Health & medical sciences	447	552	999	111	(0.15)	(0.21)	-0.18
Other social Science	465	527	992	110	0.00	(0.38)	-0.19
Business admin & mgmt.	438	561	999	111	(0.23)	(0.15)	-0.19
Education	449	534	983	110	(0.14)	(0.34)	-0.24
Accounting	408	585	993	110	(0.49)	0.01	-0.24
Evaluation & Research	450	530	980	109	(0.13)	(0.36)	-0.25
Public Administration	453	515	968	109	(0.10)	(0.46)	-0.28
Other Education	439	532	971	109	(0.22)	(0.35)	-0.29
Elementary	442	526	968	108	(0.20)	(0.39)	-0.29
Administration	426	522	948	107	(0.33)	(0.42)	-0.37
Home Economics	435	501	936	106	(0.26)	(0.56)	-0.41
Special	431	502	933	106	(0.29)	(0.55)	-0.42
Student Counseling	427	500	927	105	(0.32)	(0.56)	-0.44
Early Childhood	418	497	915	104	(0.40)	(0.58)	-0.49
Social Work	428	466	894	103	(0.32)	(0.79)	-0.55

***Permalink/Comments***

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

What's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?

The famous sunk cost fallacy is a particularly popular justification for throwing good money and blood after bad in a war like Iraq. But the U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam during Watergate and its aftermath is a clear example of of the lesser known converse to the sunk cost fallacy.

In 1974, it was clear that South Vietnam's survival hadn't been worth the sunk cost we had expended during 1961-1973. Yet, sunk costs are sunk. What we needed to think about were marginal costs. The events of 1972, in which American airpower (finally made effective by the mass use of laser-guided smart bombs) and South Vietnamese manpower had turned back a massive North Vietnamese mechanized invasion (which, in itself, showed that we had finally largely defeated the indigenous guerilla movement) at the cost of only 300 Americans killed in action for all of 1972 would seem to show that the marginal cost to America of giving South Vietnam a fair shot at surviving the next North Vietnamese offensive. Yet, being sick of Vietnam, we failed to focus on the affordable marginal cost and got hung up emotionally on the catastrophic sunk cost.

The NVA tried a tentative offensive in December 1974, following the Democrats midterm election triumphs, found that the US wouldn't provide air support, so launched a massive offensive in March 1975. The South Vietnamese collapsed about as quickly as France in 1940.

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

A job Americans just won't do!

It dawns on Matthew Yglesias that if border enforcement succeeded in driving up wages for the unskilled, some jobs wouldn't be economical to do anymore. But, he doesn't go far enough:

An early scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" takes place in the office of an English colonial administrator in India. To stay cool, he had a big fan over his head flapped by a servant via a string attached to the sitting servant's toe. That's pretty awesome! If wages weren't so damn high here in America, I could have my own Untouchable toe-fanning servant too, instead of having to use my boring, totally unawesome electric fan. I could impress all my friends. (Well, maybe not the friends I already have, but if I had enough servants, I could assign some of them to get me new friends who would be impressed.)

Think of all the other hundreds of millions of jobs that could be created in America if wages fell to 19th Century Indian levels!

Of course, I couldn't actually afford to pay my toe-fanning flunky the full cost of what it would take for him and his family to live in America, but I believe the externalities of my servant's cost of living should be borne by the public at large, not by me. Thus, my worker's kids should get free schooling, the whole family should get free health care at the emergency room, his tenement should get fire and police protection, he should drive without car insurance, etc. Why shouldn't I cost shift my conveniences on to everybody else?

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

Law School Affirmative Action

Gail Herriot writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Affirmative Action Backfires
Have racial preferences reduced the number of black lawyers?

BY GAIL HERIOT
Sunday, August 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

No one claims the findings in Mr. Sander's study, "A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools," are the last word on the subject. Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.

Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you--or anyone else--to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.

Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for these data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens--university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders--have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.

If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know. ...

As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.

Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.

The reason is simple: While some students will outperform their entering academic credentials, just as some students will underperform theirs, most students will perform in the range that their academic credentials predict. As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.

Supporters of race-based admissions argue that, despite the likelihood of poor grades, minority students are still better off accepting the benefit of a preference and graduating from a more prestigious school. But Mr. Sander's research suggests that just the opposite may be true--that law students, no matter what their race, may learn less, not more, when they enroll in schools for which they are not academically prepared. Students who could have performed well at less competitive schools may end up lost and demoralized. As a result, they may fail the bar.

Specifically, Mr. Sander found that when black and white students with similar academic credentials compete against each other at the same school, they earn about the same grades. Similarly, when black and white students with similar grades from the same tier law school take the bar examination, they pass at about the same rate.

Yet, paradoxically, black students as a whole have dramatically lower bar passage rates than white students with similar credentials. Something is wrong.

The Sander study argued that the most plausible explanation is that, as a result of affirmative action, black and white students with similar credentials are not attending the same schools. The white students are more likely to be attending a school that takes things a little more slowly and spends more time on matters that are covered on the bar exam. They are learning, while their minority peers are struggling at more elite schools.

Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.

Mr. Sander has his critics--some thoughtful, some just strident--but so far none has offered a plausible alternative explanation for the data. Of course, Mr. Sander doesn't need to be proven 100% correct for his research to be devastating news for affirmative-action supporters.

Suppose the consequences of race-based admissions turn out to be a wash--neither increasing nor decreasing the number of minority attorneys. In that case, few people would think it worth the costs, not least among them the human costs that result from the failure of the supposed beneficiaries to graduate and pass the bar.

Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The rest are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?

A friend of mine wasted a decade of his life going to law school and working as a hospital orderly while flunking the bar exam nine or ten times before giving up. If he'd become a salesman out of college, he might have been making six figures by then.

For blacks, the 43% of black law students who never pass the bar exam represent a well-above average group who could have used their 20s to do something more productive.

Speaking of academic affirmative action, a reader writes regarding Barack Obama's fluctuating personality:

I would be willing to bet a small amount of money that Obama's book was an outgrowth of his college and grad school admissions essays rather than a reflection of reality and hence of cognitive issues. However, I also agree that if you do not take into consideration the fascinating warping of reality that the college admissions process engenders, he might seem like a basket case.

That makes a lot of sense. That reminds me of an earlier reader's comment on Obama's book:

Everyone who gets into Harvard Law School has to have The Rap.

They have to have the story of teen angst, commitment to healing the world, good deeds, and preferably a healthy dose of some sort of conflict in the real world that gave them some special insight into human nature that makes them unique and diverse. Not TOO conflicted, however, since a felony conviction will prevent you from becoming a lawyer.

In my class, a year after Obama arrived, there was The Photojournalist from Nicaragua, who saw human suffering and experienced Life and Death first hand. There was also The Fly Fisherman, a guy who graduated from college and fly fished across the USA for a couple years, hitchhiking, living in the wilds, experiencing Water and the Land closehand and coming to a more true and full appreciation of Man and Nature.

Obama's autobiography is a book-length Harvard Law School Rap. It has the manufactured conflict, the manufactured struggling, the manufactured multiculturalism with a smidgen of Tragic Mulatto and Man Torn Between Two Cultures, etc. Of course no one in the admissions office ever challenges any individual's Rap since no one has the time, energy or enthusiasm. Think of it the same way you think of a fifty word High Concept movie pitch, like those studio scenes at the beginning of The Player.

Having expanded his Rap with more local color to make his book, all he has done is dig himself a deeper hole of deceit. Harvard won't fact-check student admission essays, but reporters will.

Let's try to re-engineer the getting into the Ivy League process from Obama's point of view. He wants to get into all these fancy colleges with affirmative action programs, such as Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law School. But is he really authentically African-American enough to get a boost from the Admissions Committee?

Although everybody talks about diversity in general all the time, the only kind of diversity that really interests white people are blacks. Look at the faltering Presidential campaign of Bill Richardson. He's a governor, he has a resume a lot like the first George W. Bush's, and he's 3/4ths Mexican (the other 1/4th is upper crust WASP) and grew up in Mexico City for the first 13 years of his life. And nobody in the media cares because he's not black like Obama.

If Obama was growing up today, he'd figure out that although the elite colleges talk about diversity as if they mean they're lifting up out of the ghettoes the great-great-grandchildren of the slaves, the truth is that they've pretty much given up on urban African-American males who aren't athletes, as -- as Harvard's Jamaican and Jewish Lani Guinier (who herself looks like the late Gilda Radner's half-sister) has documented. Ivy Leagues blacks are increasingly West Indian or African or European or mixed race or all of the above. For example, when Princeton decided to boost their African-American studies reputation, they expensively raided Harvard for philosopher Anthony Appiah, who is the grandson of the famous 1940s British Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps. But, hey, he's sorta black (via his Ghanian prince father), so that's good enough!

But back then, Obama might well have worried that he wasn't really "black" enough to impress the admissions committees. First, his Mom was white. Second, his Dad wasn't the descendent of slaves, he was the son of a prosperous Kenyan landowner. Third, his Dad abandoned him as an infant and he was brought up by white relatives and a little bit by an Indonesian guy. (Now, you might think that Indonesia is really diverse, but, trust me, nobody in America cares about Indonesia at all.) Fourth, he was a preppie from paradise. Hawaii is one place where the one-drop rule of determining race doesn't apply, so -- horrors! -- Honolulu Obama might actually think of himself more as being mixed than as being black!

So, you could imagine the thoughts going through his head when sat down to write his Columbia and Harvard Law application essays.

On the other hand, he really did walk the black activist walk, moving to Chicago for a few years to try to organize inner city blacks to get more goodies out of the government. And he has spent 20 years sitting in a pew at a leftist Afrocentrist church listening to the Rev. Wright stick it to whitey in his sermons. I've never seen much evidence that Obama, who spent his early 20s reading Nietzsche, believes in all that "I am the redeemer and the life" business. He's pretty upfront about his having to join a church because blacks don't trust ambitious atheists. And, he genuinely seems to get a major charge out of the racial exclusiveness and solidarity that he finds at his racialist church.

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

Did Obama undergo Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

A reader has sent me a theory about why Sen. Barack Obama's personality seems so different today than when he wrote his first autobiography in 1995. While highly speculative, his idea sounds not implausible.

Since I don't watch television news, I'd never seen Barack Obama on video until after I read his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Thus, I developed a rather different perspective on Obama's personality than the multitudes whose opinion was molded by seeing him on TV. Rather than seeing him as "comfortable in his own skin" (a phrase common among those who know him from TV), his memoir showed a supremely uncomfortable 33-year-old who was "a literary artist of considerable power in plumbing his deep reservoirs of self-pity and resentment, an unfunny Evelyn Waugh. ...Obama has a depressive’s fine eye for the disillusioning detail. ... The book’s chief weakness is that its main character—Obama himself—is a bit of a drip, a humor-impaired Holden Caulfield whose preppie angst is fueled by racial regret. (Obama has a knack for irony, but of a strangely humorless flavor.)"

Now, Waugh was an infinitely more interesting person than the man who was Prime Minister three times during Waugh's early career from 1925-37, yet who is barely remember today. (Can you name that Tory PM? Waugh is now mentioned about 3.5 times more on the Internet than that Prime Minister.) Waugh was a man of near genius, but I've never heard of anyone ever considering him as a potential Prime Minister. The idea seems ludicrous. And that's about the same impression I took away from Obama's first memoir -- a talented and highly interesting man, but not at all what you'd look for in a President.

Lots of people who hadn't read Obama's autobiography were outraged by my article about his book. They'd seen him on TV, where he looked very Presidential, so his book couldn't possibly be like I said it was.

Kevin Drum of the liberal Washington Monthly, however, plowed all the way through Obama's first book and reported back similarly, although Drum was less sympathetical and more distrustful than I was, but we seemed to be in agreement that twelve years ago Obama hadn't portrayed himself as the kind of emotionally stable individual you'd want in the White House. Drum wrote:

Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a "fist in my stomach," for example, and he "still burned with the memory" a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian. Is he describing his real feelings? Is he simply making the beginning writer's mistake of thinking that the way to convey emotion is to use lots of adjectives? Or is something else going on?...

There's just something very peculiar about the book. I can't put my finger entirely on what it is, but for all the overwrought language that Obama employs on page after page, there's very little insight into what he believes and what really makes him tick. It was almost as if Obama was admitting to his moodiness and angst less as a way of letting us know who he is than as a way of guarding against having to really tell us. By the time I was done, I felt like I knew less about him than before.

But, clearly, Obama isn't today the person portrayed in his first book. For one thing, he now has a mild sense of humor. Perhaps he never was who he claimed in 1995 to be -- we now know his depiction of his Hawaiian days was quite distorted.

Or, perhaps he has changed. One possibility is that he goes through moderate hypomanic and depressive cycles. This is quite common among high achievers. The secret to winning your place in history is often to have an up cycle coincide by luck with a time when intense action is needed.

But, another possibility is that he's done something to improve himself. A reader writes:

You should catch the Daily Show at 11. Not so much what Obama has to say, but just watching how comfortable he is in his own skin. I thought about you when Stewart showed him the headline, "Angry Obama the Pothead Is Not How They Remember Him In Hawaii", his reaction was deep and genuine laughter, with no sign of self-consciousness or defensiveness.

From use of a throwaway use of the phrase, "push back against the habits of thought", I think I know why "Angry Obama" seems so mellow, he's gone through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy I'd guess) and I think his shrink did the trick.

Habits of thought is a buzzword that you'll hear from CBT and Positive Psychology terms just as (to put it in California terms) someone talking about Thetans is probably a Scientologist. …

As for "habits of thought", here's how the CBT folks use the term, "But Dr. Seligman believes that explanatory style can be changed. In a recent study of depressed patients he found that cognitive therapy - a technique that identifies and corrects erroneous habits of thought -changed the style of the patients from pessimistic to optimistic, and that the change persisted one year after therapy ended."

A google of "habits of thought" and "Obama" shows he used the expression in his second book, The Audacity of Hope:

"each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws - the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip."

It seems to me that between book 1 and book 2, Barry had his head worked on and it took. In this interview, he comes across as a good guy.

CBT isn't Freudian witchdoctoring. It has a good track record of helping people with moderate emotional problems get themselves out of the ruts they're stuck in. The Wikipedia article on it says:

A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a psychotherapy based on modifying cognitions, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors, with the aim of influencing disturbed emotions. The general approach developed out of behavior modification, Cognitive Therapy and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and has become widely used to treat neurosis psychopathology, including mood disorders and anxiety disorders. The particular therapeutic techniques vary according to the particular kind of client or issue, but commonly include keeping a diary of significant events and associated feelings, thoughts and behaviors; questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of behaving and reacting. Relaxation and distraction techniques are also commonly included. CBT is widely accepted as an evidence and empirically based, cost-effective psychotherapy for many disorders and psychological problems. It is sometimes used with groups of people as well as individuals, and the techniques are also commonly adapted for self-help manuals and, increasingly, for self-help software packages.

If Obama has been helped by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or something else, he should tell the public. His endorsement could do a lot of good by encouraging others to try it.

If he had therapy, the most likely point was in the 18 months following his defeat by Bobby Rush when he challenged the Congressman in the 2000 primary. Obama's Harvard credentials had played well in the Hyde Park district he represented in the Illinois legislature, but more typical blacks in Rush's South Side district found Obama stuck up and unlikable. In his latest book, in the next sentence after mentioning "habits of thought," Obama goes on:

In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It's a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think -- endemic, too, in the American character -- and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear. Lyndon Johnson, who knew much about both politics and restlessness, once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.

In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly -- the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you'd planned. A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed ...

Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time at home, and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.

Sounds like Obama was doing some emotional therapy -- either self-directed or with a counselor. From a Google search, it doesn't seem like anyone has ever raised the topic of whether Obama has had therapy, but it hardly seems unlikely in someone so introspective.

We have a destructive prejudice in America against politicians admitting to getting any help for emotional problems, even though roughly half of all Presidents appear to have had one kind of mental problem or another (e.g., Lincoln and depression).

Indeed, perhaps Obama's beautiful but disturbing first book chronicling his obsession with his father was written under the influence of some quasi-Freudian therapist who demanded that he obsess at vast length over his parents, while his more bland but reassuring second book is the outcome of a quick, practical course of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or something similar. This is 100% speculation, of course, but it would help answer the basic question about why Obama's self presentation of his personality changed so much from age 33 to age 42.

Obama goes on:

And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate.

Obviously, the BS meter here is running about 9.5 on a 1 to 10 scale: Obama talks about how he had come to realize one of his flaws was "restlessness," how he had learned to accept his limits and the satisfactions of his limited life ... and then almost immediately he decides to run for the U.S. Senate! And then for the Presidency! And when he's term limited out of the White House after eight years, he'll convert to Catholicism and run for Pope (unless there's an opening in the Galactic Overlord job).

But there's nothing unique among politicians about Obama's overweening ambition. They're all like that. Fifteen years ago in The United States of Ambition, Alan Ehrenhalt asked about our political leaders: Who chooses these people? His answer was: They choose themselves.

And we like that. As Gen. Patton said, Americans love a winner. We pay lip service to having our heroes lead a balanced life, but we mostly just want them to win, damn the consequences. I've seen a million movies in which the hero is striving so hard that his wife complains that he's missing all his son's Little League games. So, then, there's a montage of him playing catch with his son and cheering him on when he hits a homer in Little League, and then our hero goes back out and wins the really big prize and gets a standing ovation.

Same with Obama -- he inserts a montage in his book about spending more time at home watching his daughters grow while exercising and appreciating how the earth rotates around the sun ... and then he's off on the Road to the White House! We love that kind of hypocrisy in our heroes.

So, if Obama had help getting his head screwed on right after his depressing pratfall in 2000, he shouldn't keep it a secret. Telling us about it could help a lot of people who need help.

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

Monkey misery

Not from Across Difficult Country: Although it sounds like it's from Carter van Carter's website, this is from the BBC:

Monkey misery for Kenyan women villagers
By Juliet Njeri BBC News, Nachu, central Kenya

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

Earlier this month, local MP Paul Muite urged the Kenyan Wildlife Service to help contain their aggressive behaviour.

But Mr Muite caused laughter when he told parliament that the monkeys had taken to harassing and mocking women in a village. But this is exactly what the women in the village of Nachu, just south-west of Kikuyu, are complaining about.

They estimate there are close to 300 monkeys invading the farms at dawn. They eat the village's maize, potatoes, beans and other crops. And because women are primarily responsible for the farms, they have borne the brunt of the problem, as they try to guard their crops.

They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from their farms.

Nachu's women have tried wearing their husbands' clothes in an attempt to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed, they say.

"When we come to chase the monkeys away, we are dressed in trousers and hats, so that we look like men," resident Lucy Njeri told the BBC News website. "But the monkeys can tell the difference and they don't run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops."

In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually explicit gestures at the women, they claim. "The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Mrs Njeri.

The Kenyan Wildlife Service told the BBC that it was not unusual for monkeys to harass women and be less afraid of them than men, but they had not heard of monkeys in Kenya making sexually explicit gestures as a form of communication to humans.

The predominantly farming community is now having to receive famine relief food.

Thank God for famine relief! Otherwise, these women's husbands would have to get off their duffs and scare away the damn monkeys. And that just wouldn't be culturally appropriate.

Considering how frequently Bono, Bishop Mugabe, Bob Geldof, Tony Blair, Angelina Jolie, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs and other worthies get together to bask in their collective celebrityhood discuss how to alleviate Africa's poverty problem, you might think that somebody, somewhere would have mentioned in the press the Sailer Solution: African men should start working as hard as African women already work. But it never seems to come up. (My wife suggests that Oprah, who has funded a school for girls in South Africa, might eventually spills the beans.)

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

Vietnam

There has been a lot of talk this week about what would happened if the U.S had helped South Vietnam resist the North Vietnamese offensive of December 1974 with airstrikes. The Spring 1972 North Vietnamese offensive had been defeated by a combination of South Vietnamese soldiers and American air power, with few American deaths (only 300 were killed in Vietnam in the entire year of 1972). In the wake of Watergate, however, the now-dominant Democratic Congress didn't want to help any more, and South Vietnam quickly collapsed, along with anti-Communist governments in neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Today, with American air power so unchallenged, it seems strange that the Democrats didn't want to allow air support of the South Vietnamese. After all, a couple of decades later, a Democrat President got involved in an internal dispute of negligible significance to America, and bombed Yugoslavia into ceding control of its internationally-recognized Kosovo province, at minimal cost in lost aircraft. The number of planes lost to enemy fire in both Iraq wars has also been tiny.

But, the American advantage in air war was much less overwhelming in the 1970s. We lost 3,322 fixed-wing aircraft in Vietnam, perhaps the majority of that number to enemy fire. During Operation Linebacker I in the middle of 1972 that helped defeat the North Vietnamese armored invasion, 104 US planes were lost in combat. Airmen who survived being shot down often became prisoners (in effect, hostages). Years of negotiations had been required to get the POWs back in early 1973, so there would have been reluctance to follow a policy that would have created new POWs.

So, providing air support was nowhere near as painless as it seems now.

There then followed a half decade of Soviet advances around the world, in contrast to the stability of the strategic balance that had endured during most of the Vietnam War. I'm a big believer in the truism that people love a winner and hate a loser, and losing in Vietnam made the U.S. look like a ... loser.

Fortunately, the Soviets wasted their treasure on useless new Third World allies like Ethiopia, while letting a puppet state that really mattered -- Poland -- go to hell.

Luckily, the Communist dictatorship of united Vietnam proved relatively non-insane, and Vietnam today is a pro-capitalist dictatorship, which the U.S. would have found perfectly acceptable back then. But the Hanoi regime was dedicated to communism and wouldn't give it up no matter how many Tennessee Valley Authority-style dams LBJ offered to build for them. So, war seems to have been completely pointless on both sides. Of course, from the point of view of the Communist Party members, while they may not be communist anymore, their party still hold a complete monopoly on political power. (Interestingly, the Vietnamese dictatorship, unlike, say, the Chinese or Burmese dictatorships, is almost never criticized abroad these days.)

On the other hand, the batting average of East Asian communist countries at being non-insane is quite bad. If Vietnam, Laos, and (possibly) Mongolia behaved less horribly than expected, Cambodia, China, and North Korea were even crazier than imagined. The most obvious analogy for American leaders in the 1960s for Vietnam was Korea, where we had lost 33,000 men to keep the northern communist regime from overrunning the southern capitalist regime.

Whether the Korean War was worth the cost is seldom discussed these days. (Of course, almost nobody ever talks about the Korean War at all.) Today, 57 years after the start of the Korean war, young South Koreans are about half a foot taller than their cousins in North Korea. Ironically, fighting to a draw may have proved the best outcome for the U.S. in the Cold War, because the emerging economic chasm between the two Koreas provided a salutary lesson in the superiority of capitalism over communism.

Why the Vietnamese War proceeded so differently from Korean War is another topic of little interest today. I suspect one important difference was that Korea was a peninsula, so that after the war, the U.S. could adequately defend against another North Korean invasion across the border, which is only 238 km long. In contrast, South Vietnam had long borders with the hapless neutral countries of Laos and Cambodia, which North Vietnam abused as staging grounds.

Second, Korea had been colonized by the Japanese, whom America defeated, not by white men. In Vietnam, America's racial and political ties to the French former colonial masters were detrimental.

Third, North Korea relied upon regular army units for its invasion, which the U.S defeated at Inchon and North Vietnam had to be bailed out by a million Chinese communist regulars. In contrast, the Hanoi regime artfully mixed irregular and regular forces. When the Viet Cong went on the offensive in 1968, they were largely wiped, but the use of irregular tactics normally annoyed and frustrated the Americans. After most American troops were withdrawn, Hanoi shifted to regular warfare (including tanks) for its 1972 and 1974-75 offensives. Presumably, Hanoi learned from communist mistakes in the Korean War.

This Cold War history, however, has mostly academic relevance to today's struggle with Islamic extremists. The Soviet Union was a vast country with a vast military, and erratic but sometimes impressive technological capabilities. Its communist ideology could win converts among the elites of foreign countries on its own.

In contrast, Islam has virtually no appeal to anyone above the lowest orders of society if they weren't born into a Muslim family. There is no single Islamic superpower to provide direction to the squabbling Muslim states, and most of these governments are more or less averse to the extremists. Even taken together, all the Muslim states in the world have only a small fraction of America's military might. For example, there is no Muslim aircraft carrier. Technologically, Pakistan is 50 years behind America in the development of nuclear weapons, and the rest lag even farther.

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

The Decline of Skull & Bones

My informant (who is not a member of the Yale secret society, but has reliable inside info) writes:

First, you observe that 5 of the last 10 major party candidates were bonespersons. Four of those five, however, were Bushes. It is more likely that Bones has benefited from the Bush dynasty than that the Bush dynasty has benefited from Bones. In fact, George H.W. Bush has complained that Bones was if anything a liability for him as a politician, and I would tend to believe him. As for Kerry, Bones membership may have conferred some modest benefit, but his rise to prominence in the early 1970s was largely his own doing. His also had helpful family connections and a talent for marrying rich women. I doubt that Bones was much of a factor in his career – although it probably didn’t have as much of a downside for him, as a Democrat, as it may have had for the Bushes.

Finally, on the current influence of the society, it has very little. The admission of women in the early 1990s was disastrous for the Skull & Bones and undermined the cohesion required to make secret organizations work. The relatively high degree of loyalty which the society once inspired depended on members’ ability trust one another, which in turn was based on members being encouraged to divulge their every secret.

Tom Wolfe wrote in his famous 1976 article "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening:"

At Yale the students on the outside wondered for 80 years what went on inside the fabled secret senior societies, such as Skull and Bones. On Thursday nights one would see the secretsociety members walking silently and single file, in black flannel suits, white shirts, and black knit ties with gold pins on them, toward their great Greek Revival temples on the campus, buildings whose mystery was doubled by the fact that they had no windows. What in the name of God or Mammon went on in those 30-odd Thursday nights during the senior years of these happy few?

What went on was... lemon sessions!-a regularly scheduled series of lemon sessions, just like the ones that occurred informally in girls' finishing schools. In the girls' schools these lemon sessions tended to take place at random in nights when a dozen or so girls might end up in someone's dormitory room. One girl would become "it," and the others would light into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect... her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality.

Likewise, in the secret societies: They held lemon sessions for boys. …And Thursday night after Thursday night the awful truths would out, as he who was It stood up before them and answered the most horrible questions. … But out of the fire and the heap of ashes would come a better man, a brother, of good blood and good bone, for the American race guerrière. And what was more... they loved it. No matter how dreary the soap opera, the star was Me.

My informant continues:

"Well, no guy is going to reveal the most shameful details of his life to any girl, even if she is a fellow bonesperson, nor is any girl going to reveal hers to any guy. As I understand it, the society’s current institutional self-understanding is not that of an exclusive brotherhood; instead, the society emphasizes the light-hearted fun they have together and how nice it is that such different people can share something in common. Thin is as the current Bones ideology is, it’s probably the only way to keep everyone together with offending each other.

Which brings us to the other threat (besides coeducation) to the society’s cohesiveness, namely, multiculturalism. About half the “taps” these days come from the ethnic organizations on campus (the Af-Am house, the Hispanic fraternity, &c). Each ethnic group tries to ensure that next tap comes from the same ethnic group. Their primary loyalty is thus to their ethnic group and not to Bones. In fact, after the “The Skulls” movie came out, the Hispanic members of the society starting to call themselves “skulls” (after the movie) rather than “bonesmen.” Needless to say, when society members get their cues about the society from pop culture rather than the society itself, the society can’t claim to have much influence over its members.

Finally, Bones is perpetually short of money and it has proven to be increasingly difficult to get alumni(ae) to donate anything. Bonespersons/”skulls” simply don’t have much loyalty to the institution.

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

An iSteve.com public service: improving Apache-Skull & Bones understanding

With all the stereotypes and prejudice in this world that divide groups of people, it's crucial to help clear up misunderstandings causing enmity amongst them. If the Israelis and Palestinians just understood the facts, I'm sure they'd all have a big laugh over it and get along fine from now on. Hmmhmmh ... well, maybe that's not the best example ...

Okay, let me find a better instance of a misconception rather than reality dividing two sets of people ... All right, I've got one: the long-lasting but surprisingly seldom mentioned in the media rift between the Apache Nation and the secretive Skull & Bones Society of Yale. So, I shall do my part to heal it.

The President's grandfather, future Senator Prescott Bush, boasted than when training at Fort Sill in 1918, he had dug up the skull of Apache leader Geronimo and given it to the Skull & Bones society to display in their windowless redoubt on the Yale campus known as "The Tomb."

The Yale Herald reported in 2003:

Apache tribal leader Ned Anderson was informed of the alleged theft in 1986. As an ancestor of Geronimo, Anderson petitioned the Federal Bureau of Investigations to force the return of the skull. Noting that Apaches have a "great fear and respect for death," Anderson said that he hoped to honor Geronimo's express wish to be laid to rest in "Arizona acorn country."

Unwilling to remove himself from the case entirely and yield all his evidence to the FBI, Anderson withdrew his request for action. Instead, he arranged to meet with George H. W. Bush's, DC '48, brother Jonathan in New York City. Anderson recounts that Bush sounded "very encouraging" during their initial meeting. Eleven days later, Bush presented the display case. Anderson refused to accept the skull because it appeared to belong to a small child. Bush acknowledged this fact but claimed that it was the only relevant artifact in the society's possession.

He urged Anderson to accept the display and sign a document verifying that the society was not in possession of Geronimo's skull. Anderson refused.

By the way,

"Robbins, herself a member of Scroll and Key [boring! -- I like the name of another Yale secret society a lot better -- The Book and Snake], attests to the centrality of ritualized stealing in many of the societies at Yale. Each class attempts to outdo its predecessor in the acquisition of valuables. In addition to Geronimo's skull, the Bonesmen's tomb is rumored to contain the skull of Pancho Villa and Adolf Hitler's silverware.

Anyway, the Apaches have been sore ever since that the Bonesmen tried to pawn off a kid's skull on them instead of giving them back Geronimo's real skull. But, now a reader has sent in some inside information that may clear the good name of Skull & Bones as a whole (although not necessarily the Bush family).

But, a reader writes:

Oh, dear, it's says at the bottom of the email to check with the sender before posting any of it. Okay, well, I'll write off for permission. In the meantime I'll post this fragment anyway, just to show you I'm still alive.

Update: The reader writes:

"On Geronimo’s skull, my impression is that even the members themselves don’t know whether it’s genuine. My source always thought it was some child’s skull, not the skull of Geronimo, and that the issue had already been settled with Apache leaders. Recent reports that the skull might actually be genuine were news to my source."

In other words, Apaches, it appears that the Bonesmen were trying to play it straight with you in 1986 -- that kid's skull is, presumably, what Prescott Bush had told their predecessors was Geronimo's head. So, it looks like the President's grandfather either dug up the wrong head by accident, or intentionally pulled their leg. Was Prescott incompetent or insincere? You be the judge! (Funny how this dispute comes up over and over with the Bush Dynasty -- maybe it's hereditary?)

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

The inside history of intra-conservative immigration battles

The inside history of intra-conservative immigration battles: In the cover story of the July 30 American Conservative, John O'Sullivan offers an extremely lucid recounting of conservative battles over immigration going back to his decision (with Bill Buckley's concurrence) to print Peter Brimelow's massive 1992 article on immigration:

Getting Immigration Right
By John O’Sullivan
It took 15 years, but conservative intellectuals finally deserted the Beltway establishment’s open-borders consensus.

WSJistas have long jibed about O'Sullivan and Brimelow being English immigrants, so John concludes his article:

Until the battle recommences, however, if any indignant xenophobe is thinking of writing an exposé of this conspiracy of English immigrants to impose an “un-American” system of immigration law on the American people, Steve Sailer has already come up with the perfect title: “The Protocols of the Elders of Albion.”

I don't remember writing that, but John, my old editor at UPI, says that was my summary of the 2000 thriller "The Skulls," a flop of a film about a Skull & Bones-style exclusive club at a college much like Yale. I must say I've become far less dismisive of conspiracy theories about the Skull & Bones society since the 2004 election, which matched two Bonesmen in Bush and Kerry. Skull & Bones only taps 15 promising young bucks per year, yet, five of the last ten major party Presidential candidates were Bonesmen. What are the odds of that?

Also, it appears likely that the rumor is true that during WWI, the President's grandfather, past Bonesman and future Senator Prescott Bush, dug up the skull of Geronimo and loyally gave it to the Skull & Bones society, and that it remains in the windowless, fortress-like Skull & Bones headquarters on the Yale campus, despite efforts by Apache tribesmen to get their famous leader's noggin back. I think that might explain a lot about the last seven years, although I'm not precisely sure what.

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

I told you so about Karl Rove

From my new VDARE.com column "Rove Means Never Having to Say You're Republican," I review my six years of pointing out the widely acclaimed "Genius's" flagrant incompetence:

Even merely as a short-term political manipulator, Rove completely botched the immigration issue. And it's not as if our criticism of the electoral logic of the Bush-Rove dream of increasing Mexican immigration was only recently validated. Instead, Bush and Rove advanced their desire for more Mexicans in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007. And each time Congressional Republicans rejected it as bad for the country and bad for the GOP.

As I wrote back on September 10, 2001 (!!!) in the wake of strong Congressional resistance to the Administration's immigration mania:

"So why did Karl Rove and the rest of the Bush braintrust misread the political situation? Why did the White House fail to anticipate Congressional Republicans' concerns that amnesty would undermine the GOP? The Bush team appears to have been the victims of residing in an echo chamber with a mainstream media corps that—for reasons of innumeracy, fashion, self-interest, self-image and fear—failed to challenge the Bush advisers' sloppy thinking about immigration." [Analysis: Why Bush blundered on immigrants By Steve Sailer, United Press International September 10, 2001]

Luckily for Rove and Bush—there’s no other way to put it—3,000 Americans were murdered the next day. So the massive public humiliation of having Republicans in Congress decisively crush their dreams of a Hispanicized polity that would elect future generations of the Bush dynasty was postponed for six long, wasted years.

Rove's immigration strategy, along with the assumption in the press that it was a political masterstroke, was always based on the interaction of political correctness, smugness, and sheer laziness.

David Frum wrote recently in the New York Times:

"In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters." [Building a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule, August 14, 2007]

The real problem for the GOP is less Hispanic voters than Hispanic leaders—92 percent of all elected Hispanic politicians are Democrats.

The reason for the 92% Democrats is obvious if you stop and think about it (which apparently nobody does): since most Hispanic citizens vote Democratic, most Hispanic-majority districts in the country are Democratic. And those are the ones in which Hispanics are most probable to get elected. So, it makes all the sense in the world for politically ambitious young Hispanics to join the party that's more likely to get them elected to office: the Democrats.

So, what Bush and Rove have been doing by not enforcing the immigration laws is helping create a new Democratic Latino elite that will plague the GOP for decades.

As politics, Rove's immigration ploy was negligent at the levels of simple logic and numeracy. [More]

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

"The Simpsons Movie:"

The Man Called Thursday argues that the show's peak was the second through fourth seasons way back in the early 1990s, which was when Matt Groening lost interest and control shifted to the Harvard Mafia (as my former neighbor, a screenwriter on the meat and potatoes sit-com "Married With Children," called them with fear and loathing in her voice). I can't disagree, although the show's consistency held up well through the end up the decade. Were the Simpsons' 1990s the greatest decade any television show ever enjoyed? I'd say so, but lots of people would vote for more recent hour long drama on cable, such as The Sopranos. The funny thing is that drama doesn't hold up as well as comedy. Stations paid a lot of money in the late 1980s for the hour long dramas thirtysomething and Miami Vice, and never got their money back. Meanwhile, "I Love Lucy" is still playing somewhere right now.

The Simpsons Movie concentrated too hard on telling what we already knew -- the Simpsons may be dysfunctional, but when they pull together, they can triumph. I would have like to learn knew things. For example, we get to meet Nelson "Ha-Ha!" Muntz's mom. Why couldn't the backstory of other characters be covered?

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